Entrepreneurship. Rhonda Abrams

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      Huge corporations regularly jettison customers, product lines, or even entire divisions that don’t meet certain revenue levels—often in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Or, as companies expand, they develop increasingly bureaucratic procedures that alienate many of their long-time customers. Yet that doesn’t mean those customers or product lines couldn’t be profitable for smaller, hungrier companies.

      For example, when the first supermarkets opened in the ’30s and ’40s, these stores, relatively small by today’s standards, bought out local grocers, bakeries, and butcher shops, often shutting down neighborhood stores. The trend toward consolidation continued throughout the ’50s and ’60s, and as more and more people moved to the suburbs, increasingly large supermarkets sprang up there to serve them. The dawn of the “superstore” in the ’70s and ’80s led to the rise of big discount stores, such as Walmart and Target, and some of these stores eventually carried groceries as well, eliminating more neighborhood grocers. This consolidation of supermarkets, which continues today, has created opportunity for more specialty grocery stores, both large, such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, and small, such as bakeries, butcher shops, and farmers markets—many of the types of stores that supermarkets put out of business decades before.

      Other innovative food suppliers that deliver directly to homes continue to change the food shopping and buying landscape. These include community supported agriculture (CSAs) and fresh-food meal kits that provide pre-measured portions of all the ingredients customers need to assemble a recipe of their choosing. In 2015, US consumers spent more than $1 billion dollars on meal kits alone.

Apply technology in non-technology industries and markets

      New technologies often create whole new industries, leading to an explosion of new businesses. Whenever a technology or device is invented—let’s say television, the computer, or the Internet—the first, often huge, business opportunities come from making and selling those specific technologies. The second wave comes from making and selling peripheral products or support services for those technologies.

      But there’s a third wave of very real business opportunities—when entrepreneurs begin to make, sell, and implement those new technologies in processes and equipment for specific industries. For example, the first wave of “cloud”-based applications (applications based in the Internet) was designed for the general corporate market (such as Salesforce CRM, an Internet-based customer relationship application) or for the general consumer market (such as Google Docs). Then, entrepreneurs seized on these new technologies to develop cloud-based solutions for specific industries, creating many new successful businesses.

       See pages 38–39

Traditional to entrepreneurial

      Virtually any skill that has historically been harnessed to fulfill a traditional job can be turned into an entrepreneurial venture. Here are some examples of how traditional jobs and skills can be applied to entrepreneurial goals.

TRADITIONAL JOB/HOBBY	ENTREPRENEURIAL APPLICATION
Skilled cook/baker	Open a restaurant, bakery, catering company; start a line of specialty food products
Associate in law firm	Set up a legal practice; develop software for the legal industry in an area you see as lacking
Fashion salesperson or apparel buyer	Start a clothing design or manufacturing company; create a website to sell apparel
Engineer in large manufacturing company	Found a start-up based on a new idea in your field; become a consultant to manufacturing companies
Sports enthusiast	Develop new equipment for your sport; open an online sporting goods store; offer personal training services; start a sports camp
Animal lover	Establish a chain of doggie daycare facilities; develop a new line of pet food products

The Successful Business Concept

      The basis of all business is meeting needs and wants. You can devise a wonderful new product, or create a fantastic new service, but if it doesn’t address some real and, ideally, important need or desire, people won’t buy it and inevitably, your business will fail. Even Thomas Edison recognized this fact when he said, “Anything that won’t sell, I don’t want to invent.”

      Of course, great companies have been built on what seems to be totally new ideas—things that people didn’t know they needed or wanted until someone created them. No one knew that it would be absolutely critical to walk around with 10,000 songs available at all times until the invention of the iPod, right? Yet, there had been MP3 players before that, and Sony Walkmans even earlier. Indeed, the desire for music is as old as humankind. What the iPod represented was a substantially improved, enjoyable, and intuitive way to meet a longstanding need and wish for music-on-demand.

      Some entrepreneurial businesses turn out to be far more successful than others. What sets those apart? What do highly successful companies do—or seize on—that gives them greater growth?

      A company is more than its concept. Success also depends on a concept’s execution—management, marketing, financial management, and many other operational considerations. Increasingly, however, a company’s values and corporate culture contribute to its long-term viability and its appeal to customers and employees alike.

       Better, faster, cheaper

       In business, “better, faster, cheaper” is the mantra for how to differentiate your product or service from other similar products or services. (In the high-tech industry, it’s often “smaller, faster, cheaper” because more-compact size is highly desirable in components.)

       The beauty of this mantra is its simplicity: People indeed always look for a better, cheaper product. And “faster” can apply to how the product works or performs, or how a customer gets it, or how quickly you get it to market.

       Remember this phrase as you assess the viability of a business opportunity. In other words, ask yourself: Will your product be better, faster, or cheaper than the competition’s?

Factors of a successful business concept

      As you develop your business concept, keep in mind that successful businesses incorporate at least one of the following factors that are basic to a successful business concept.

      ■ Innovation. The most exciting, and often most risky, entrepreneurial companies are innovative companies. They bring something to the market that either is new or significantly alters and improves on an existing offering. It can mean developing and deploying new technology. But more often, it involves building on an existing product or service, or improving on it, or finding a new use for it. For example, search engines existed long before СКАЧАТЬ