Primary Business Activities - 4 of 4
I don’t post often, so if you have questions, contact me and ask.
There are 4 primary business activities that every entrepreneur must focus on in order to succeed. Only 4. While there are over 60 departments in every business, they only lead to busy work. Instead, focus on the business problem your client’s are trying solve. They, like you, feel their time is valuable, and thus want to make sure it’s producing a revenue stream.
If you’re not improving your product and protecting it, soon, you won’t have a product, or at least a relevant one.
Isn’t this Product Management?
This is not Product Management. Product Management is solely concerned with the current product, it’s manufacturing, and maintenance, and it’s retirement. Research and Development is in building a whole new infrastructure to support the new product, development, manufacturing, customer support, and so on. What does it take to roll out version 2 of a product built using a whole new language, manufacturing facility, or AI solution.
Remember that life cycle I described in part 3, that life cycle applies to everything about your business. Software, Hardware, Services, and so on all become obsolete within life cycles. Microsoft publishes a new operating system, languages, database server, web server and so forth on a yearly basis. Other companies follow suit to take advantage of the enhancements that are made.
The same is true in the medical field, manufacturing - now that 3D printers are here, communications, air traffic controls, farming, automobiles ... You name the field, and then looking over the past 20 years how research has changed it. Enhanced it. Made it more productive with less effort.
You may think that finance should be #4, but you’d be very wrong, and you’re company would implode well before you succeeded at securing the financing needed to keep the company afloat. Along with being very frustrated when you learn that most financiers refuse to finance salaries. Instead, they finance marketing efforts, which in turn are supposed to fuel your sales efforts, which pay your salaries. Oh, and did I mention that Financier’s also request that your existing salaries be frozen during the time of their funding? Whoops, that 0$ a year salary you started with ... ya, you’re stuck with it for the next 2 years. So, enough about financing, I’ll save this for another blog.
Corporate Counter Intelligence
How do you know when other companies are stealing your ideas? You monitor them. That’s right, companies police each other, and file lawsuits called copy right infringements or patent right infringements. It’s your work, protect it.
Coca Cola’s formula is so protected, that it’s not even patented. That’s right, if you figure out how to make Coca Cola and attempt to patent it, they will buy you out. Get your spectrometer out and figure out what it’s make of, cause there’s 100′s of Thousands of dollars waiting for you. (Speaking of Financing with almost no strings.) “ But! Why don’t they patent it?” It’s because, once the formula is known, then every mom and pop shop can produce a 1 off of Coke.
Have you ever heard your favorite song, story, movie, or book remixed? Probably, that’s because that’s allowed under copy right law. People are allowed to take other’s works, re-work them, tweak them, and publish them as an original work. Trust me, it pisses a lot of people off, but that’s how our system works. And, it’s a necessary and an important part of innovation. Without this right to rework something, anyone who improved upon the electric light bulb would have to pay Edison for the right to produce their light bulb.
Speaking of Edison’s light bulb and innovation - he started out by testing 100′s of different metals until he stumbled across carbon filaments, in a vacuum. Think about how this invention would later affect vacuum tubes, computers, electronics, and today's OLED monitors .. which by the way using Zinc Oxide as a light emitting source, with almost no heat dissipation.
So, protect your inventions zealously. Unless you’re going to use open source, then make sure that the GPL license you use, insures that corporations can test, but not use in production the products they are producing with your products. Every instance of your product should be paid for either in totality or via subscription.
New Features and Enhancements
As mentioned, the environment and playing field change almost daily. What ever you are using to product your product or service will change in a year. One day you’re traveling to client’s to maintain their computers, the next you’re doing it all remotely. One day you’re listening to CD’s, the next day MP3, and the next a new format that provides better compression and higher fidelity. We’ve gone from Cathode Ray Tubes monitors to OLED monitors, and tomorrow, it may be holograms in glass.
Why do they write new books about the same topic? It’s not to write about the topic all over again. It’s to describe how the topic has been affected by the advances of technology. NASA is developing WARP drive. How will space travel affect everything and everyone? What new social norms, political norms, and historical aspects will be documented that affect how your product was reshaped and molded during that time.
Is there a university working on something that may affect your product?
There’s your product, and then there’s how you produce your product.
So you’re product is handmade woven thread, in the way back machine. Then the loom is upgraded and automated with cogs, gears and a little electricity. Now the work of 20 people is reduced to 1. Plus, instead of producing 100 yards of material a week, you can generate 100 yards of material in an hour.
I could have talked about current technology, but what’s the difference between a loom being automated vs automating how programs are written by AI? It’s not that the automation has taken place, it’s how the automation is changing the landscape, the business environment, political environment, and social environment.
Tesla is changing the way cars are made. Pretty soon, we will see the automation of car product look like that seen in Minority Report. A website will be used to allow customers to choose the accessories they want / need, then have it built as easily as ordering a pizza.
My suggestion is to dream about how the future can evolve, and plan your product's evolution around it.
