Member Article

Hurt your business to help it

The evolution of an idea is an exciting, erratic, frustrating and wonderful thing. Every startup has looked back on their original concept 12 months later and wondered at how different their business looked to how they originally pictured it. How could you have known that chunk of your idea would be so in demand? Why couldn’t you see the turns your consumers would force you to take? But that’s part of the thrill of being in the game. Learning how to win, every time.

Our visions need to be adaptable if they are to grow. We learn “on the job” and a maverick will always win over mogul who refuses to allow for wiggle room. But what happens when you have to reboot completely? There are only so many “rebrands” and changes that can be put into place before you start to look a little silly.

Example - A coffee shop I used to frequent once found itself inundated with offers for it’s unusual artwork and interiors. We all know of that one quirky coffee place with barrel chairs and eye-catching art, but the mistake the owner made was to see cash signs in her eyes when the enquiries came in and she immediately started selling off her stock. She hadn’t thought about the fact that replacing it would not only take away from her existing atmosphere, but also use up a lot of time and resources. It’s like someone coming up to you in the rain and offering you three times the value of your umbrella. Yes, you may walk away with cash in your pocket, but it’s going to be damn uncomfortable and you’ll pay for it in the long run.

Fast forward, and you have a woman surrounded with “sold” signs on all of her wall art and furniture, money in the bank from their new owners, but no time to breathe. She ended up severely damaging her reputation by revoking some sales or holding on to pieces too long (she had sold her customers seating!), causing understandable arguments with clients.

This is a tangible example of a very real problem that we entrepreneurs face as our start-ups evolve. We find opportunities where there were none before, and it’s hard to turn down the capacity for a higher turnover. But at what cost? My coffee shop owner had fantastic taste and great contacts for talented and quirky interior designers within her network. This was an asset to be utilized, not something that should have slowed her down!

The answer, for her, was to outsource. She contacted the suppliers of her artwork and furniture and simply asked them to supply duplicates of their pieces, which she sold in an “eBay shop” and took 20%. With a 30 day sale time and structured deadlines, she could simply hand over a business card to clients enquiring after her fantastic interiors. She ended up making around £1000 per month (no small win for a start-up coffee shop!) and greatly strengthened her network of contacts and business relationships, as well as her reputation within the community of supporting local artists and businesses.

All this from something that she never envisioned happening! A side-project as it were. But it wouldn’t have fit into her main business plan.

Translated into an e-commerce setting, these nuggets of opportunity can present themselves in many ways, but we can’t simply set up a side-shop. When my business, PeoplePerHour became a wide net of talented freelancers, the technical skills began to drown. The B2B aspect started to become diluted, and it was making my clients go elsewhere. I needed a more specialized platform. Did I need to add a new “page” or specific area on my existing website? Or pull the trigger and start afresh?

I decided to launch SuperTasker, which offers a solution to digital tasks specifically. PeoplePerHour facilitates any talented freelancer from the proof-readers and ghost writers to social media experts. By launching SuperTasker, I was pulling the plug on a portion of my first business, completely cannibalizing my own idea. But if I hadn’t done it, someone else would have done. In essence, I realised that I had seen a niche… a need for a more specialised platform… and if I didn’t fill it then someone else would. Why let someone else steal your idea for lack of time to develop it? Sometimes, you just need to start afresh and use your experience to grow your empire. Slice off the surplus and structure it into a brand new business.

You may run into issues if you have investors attached to your first business, you may find some difficulties in making cuts or changes to staff and how things are run. It may all seem like a massive headache for something that you’re already ‘kind of’ achieving, but it’s this sort of professional dismissiveness that will leave you behind the curve.

So the best way to keep ahead is to cut in front of yourself, be your own competition and keep evolving. Even if that does mean hurting yourself to build something stronger overall.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by VP .