Because, the moment you chose to start a small business, Sarah, you unwittingly chose to play a significantly larger game than any game you had ever played before.
So in the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want – forget about everything but your customer!
Your Strategic Objective is a very clear statement of what your business has to ultimately do for you to achieve your Primary Aim.
They see the pattern, understand the order, experience the vision. Peter Drucker.
Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon and an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, once said about his company: “In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope.” The commodity is cosmetics; the product, hope.
The question you need to keep asking yourself is: How can I give my customer the results he wants systematically rather than personally? Put another way: How can I create a business whose results are systems-dependent rather than people-dependent? Systems-dependent rather than expert-dependent.
Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.
Drastic change creates an estrangement from the self, and generates a need for a new birth of a new identity. And it perhaps depends on the way this need is satisfied whether the process of change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions. Eric Hoffer The Temper of Our Time E.
Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained in a single bound; it must be achieved each day. Rollo May.
The game has to be real. You have to mean it. The game is a measure of you.
You might say that, while going to work on the business, people begin to realize that it is a powerful metaphor for going to work on their lives.
To The Entrepreneur, the business is the product.
The Entrepreneurial Perspective adopts a wider, more expansive scale. It views the business as a network of seamlessly integrated components, each contributing to some larger pattern that comes together in such a way as to produce a specifically planned result, a systematic way of doing business.
Your arrows do not carry,’ observed the Master, ‘because they do not reach far enough spiritually.’ Eugen Herrigel Zen and the Art of Archery.
How does one come to the point in his or her life when he or she is not only ready but eager and willing – however terrifying the prospect might be – to self-execute such a leap of faith without any guarantees that it will do any good?
I believe it’s true that the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is the difference between living fully and just existing. The difference between the two is living intentionally and living by accident.
The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.
What’s the difference? The commodity is the thing your customer actually walks out with in his hand. The product is what your customer feels as he walks out of your business. What he feels about your business, not what he feels about the commodity.
Systems theory looks at the world in terms of the interrelatedness of all phenomena, and in this framework an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of its parts is called a system. Fritjof Capra The Turning Point.
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business – you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic! “And, besides, that’s not the purpose of going into business. “The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business – you have a job.