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

Making Your First Million
Chapter 11 - What Else Can I Sell?
The key to profits is to find something which you can acquire cheaply and sell at a higher
price. Generally, the more popular the product is, the more competition, and hence the
lower the profit margin. What you have to do is carve out some territory where you'll get
some bottom line profit. Unlike Pat and Mick who bought watermelons for a dollar and
sold them for a dollar, complaining if business got any better they'd have to get a bigger
truck, you're going to have to find something you can sell that enough people want to buy
to ensure you get a profit. This is not easy, and is the reason why most businesses fail.
One of the best strategies, as with the dolls house furniture, is to acquire the rights to
something and create the market for it. Why fight your competitors selling me-too
products on price? The only winner is the customer, which is okay for them but you have
to eat. Find a product or service that you have the unique and sole rights to and set about
creating demand for it. Advertise. Promote. Push. The higher the profit margin the more
you can afford to promote. Remember, advertising is the engine of your ship. Without it,
it will wallow.
The best product is the one that costs little or nothing, is in unlimited supply, can be sold
for a high price, is unique to you, and is in great demand, or has the potential for demand
to be created. In my case, over the years, this has included the Apple software I wrote,
blank diskettes, dot-matrix printers, modems and networking cables. Sadly, nothing lasts,
and my unique position was overtaken by competitors on all counts. Nothing lasts in
business. You can attempt to protect your market as in the case of newsagents and the
Wool Corporation but market forces will break any protective cartel. You can offer
unique products such as artworks, but fashions change and even prolific marketers like
Pro Hart and Ken Done suffer downturns in popularity. The only security is to keep
moving, changing with each tide.
Fortunately, the tide of change is strongly positive for those who are able to anticipate
and ride with it. New technologies bring new solutions to problems. Why is it that
Australia's richest men, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, are in publishing? Why are
they both strongly chasing down electronic entertainment like Star TV and the Internet?
Why did Russian émigré Jews, Jack and Harry Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis Mayer,
Adolf Zukor et al get into the movies? It's because these products met the criteria I've
mentioned: cheap to produce (at that time), unique to them, unlimited supply, can be sold
for a high price, enormous demand can be created. The demand can be created by the
product itself, ensuring an explosion of future sales for a minimal outlay.
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