Making Your First Million.pdf - Association of Net Entrepreneurs and ...

Making Your First Million
Chapter 21 - How Do I Keep
Expanding?
By now the entrepreneurial spirit will be well-developed and burning strongly in you and
you'll be reveling in this new life of wealth and comfort and ease. And you'll be thinking
expansion. But don't forget where you've come from. You can be a rooster one day, and a
feather duster the next. If you forget the early lessons of childhood you could pay a heavy
price. The ant and the grasshopper. Pride comes before a fall. Hold hands walking across
the street and be nice to your mother. These all have value regardless of your bank
balance but they are crucially important here.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Expansion. Every business has a life cycle, or to be more
accurate, its products have a life cycle. Pretty much a bell curve for each product. Slow
start, solid middle, slow decline. If you're a one product company your fortunes will trace
the curve of that product. The trick to growing your company is to tack bell curves
sequentially on to each other. Once a product or service has peaked add another and
another. Add more outlets and more customers to boost your volumes. When you start
running out of products or you start getting diminishing returns for your efforts start
culling the bottom 30%. Products, customers, staff. To fine tune your business you'll need
to constantly cull the bottom 30%. Be ruthless about it. Your company's future is at stake.
Keep doing what you're doing right and cease doing what you're doing wrong. Advertise
heavily and track your response. Don't fall into apathy about this. Just because you know
everything about your company's goods and services doesn't mean the public do. The
chairman of Coca-Cola was once asked why he persisted with advertising when Coke
was clearly the market leader.
"Well", said the boss "We're on this train heading for Atlanta. And we're holding a
cruising speed of 80 miles an hour. What do you suppose would happen if we
disconnected the engine?" Advertising is the engine that drives your business. Feed that
engine.
I read an interesting survey supporting this in Time magazine in 1992 which tracked the
top 20 products sold through Coles supermarkets as recorded on their barcode readouts.
They ran:
1. 375 ml can Coke,
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