Alex Pooley's Blog

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It’s been over a year since I left full time work and I’ve had the privilege of seeing business from many perspectives. I am beginning to form the conclusion that business is all about turning unpredictable circumstances in to predictable ones.

Let’s say that you sell puppies in a shopping center. You know that you will average x number of people walking in the store each day, of which you can predict y% will purchase. Though you will experience cycles, you know that some breeds will outsell others. You also have a known margin on your puppies, and you also have
predictable monthly revenue, costs, and hence profits.

The biggest hurdle facing anyone starting a business is to discover these “knowns”. You don’t know what you haven’t seen, and you will never see what you never try. And don’t assume! Measure! Test! You know what they say right.. “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me”

The biggest personal challenge is to get your feet wet. Once you’re in though, don’t hesitate or you will eventually freeze to death. Make sure that before you hop in, you set a soft budget of money and time. Spend as little money and time as possible but kick as hard as possible in every direction you can. Build channels and test.

My first mistake was to not budget my time. My second mistake was to not budget any money. You need money, and you need time. Without money, it takes too much time. Without time, you won’t make any money! ;)

My definition of business: predictable channels from your customers to a sale.

Good luck!

Business 2.0 recently published an articled entitled “How To Succeed In 2007″. I would like to take a moment to describe why articles like this are self indulgent tripe, and why it’s an example of your potential to succeed.

The problem with the Business 2.0 article is that much of the “advice” being handed fails statistics 101 sampling. What stuck out for me when reading through these postings is that not a single article includes references to statistics. Rather than providing hard evidence, they simply go on their “experience”. It’s like asking Andre Agassi if he thinks tennis is a difficult game to play. You can read more on the black swan theory on Edge.

Here’s some examples from the article:

• “An excellent personnel policy leads to more customer loyalty and therefore, one would probably surmise, higher sales.”
• “If you give users the tools to spread and share their interests with others, they will use them to promote what is important to them.”
• “The image of success is important, but even more important is the ability to focus on solutions instead of on problems.”

Science is falsifiable, it is not provable. Despite this, you only ever see advice from “top N successful business people”, even though it’s equally (more?) useful to get the top 50 failed business people to offer their advice on what not to do.

Anyway, the good news is that this “evidence” is your potential success! This is because many of these people just got lucky, if you don’t believe this then you must also believe that they were somehow able to ensure they were born in a first world country over a third world desert. Sure, they all probably put in a lot of work, but there are many others that have done the same. How much control do you think they really had over their future when they were starting out? Assuming they were lucky, you can get lucky too, but you have to put yourself in that position first.