SMALLERS
Methods and Ideas
that Helped‘Incapable’ Me
Create a Successful Small Business
Ahctam
Copyright © 2022 Ahctam All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Author: Ahctam
Translator: Dylan Michael Crotts
Cover Design: Takeshi Zoda
Have you ever read something titled like this: “Plain Old Housewife Makes Big Bucks With New Business!” and had the following experience?
“Hmm. If a regular old housewife can do it, there’s no way I can’t. Let’s roll up my sleeves and give it a shot!”
You close the book and look at the profile section on the back cover. The author graduated from a prestigious university, was a former employee of a massive global enterprise, and is shown dressed in a luxurious suit, of course with a gorgeous smile.
Where is the plain old housewife!?
Your shoulders droop and you think to yourself:
“I guess it’s just not for incapable people like me…”
In this book, I’d like to start off by introducing myself so that you won’t feel like you’ve been betrayed… or maybe even bullied!
I was 35 years old when I started my business. Until then, I had never even had so much as my own business card. I had zero experience with starting a business. Maybe 10 years before I could have applied for an inexperienced part-time job, but I couldn’t afford to do that at the time.
Because I was already unemployed.
I had zero track record, contacts, or experience. To top it all off, I live in such a rural area that the nearest bookstore is an hour’s drive away, and I often feel annoyed by the smoke from the controlled burning going on in the fields around us when I go on walks with my son.
I’ve never been good at talking to people, and I dropped out of highschool. My body is frail and I was hospitalized 3 times by the time I was 20. I only ever chose jobs where I didn’t need to talk to people, and moved from job to job, working in warehouses, production lines, and kitchens. I was married and had a three year old son. What on Earth was I going to do moving forward?
I started a business.
Why did I make such a clearly reckless choice? There are 2 reasons.
The first reason is, with a background like mine you can’t get a job at a good company.
I mean, think about it. What are the odds that an unemployed, middle-aged man with no good work experience can become a full-time employee in a huge downtown office? About 10%? That is far too optimistic a number. Without a doubt, it’s around 0%. In that case, the chances of making my own business and succeeding have to be way higher, right?
Now, the second reason.
I wanted freedom.
I wanted freedom! Ever since I was young, I thought to myself: “Screw working in an office! I’ll live a free life without ever working overtime!”
I wonder how that worked out…
Like an old man who got scammed by a too-good-to-be-true investing opportunity during the market bubble, I now live in the countryside, bating my breath. At this rate, I could feel negative thoughts and regrets like, “Why didn’t I just get a job when I was younger?” get stronger and myself get more miserable as years pass by.
That’s why I started a business!
Again, objectively speaking, I was an “incapable person” whose academic, physical, and communication skills were pretty much at rock bottom. After starting my business, as you’d expect, things soon came to a standstill. Within a month, things weren’t going as I had expected in the slightest. Just like in school, sports, work, everything up until now, I failed to achieve anything.
You may ask “Why don’t you plan ahead?”
If I were able to plan ahead, I wouldn’t even be in this situation! I just thought things would work out…
Two months after starting the business, I was down to my last $100.
Things didn’t work out.
I couldn’t pay my son’s daycare fees because I had no money in my account, and one day he came home from daycare with a letter of demand in hand. Later, I looked at the face of my son as he slept, not even slightly aware of anything going on. I had no way to pay next month’s rent. In order to earn even a little extra money, I took on jobs with wages so low even students wouldn’t consider them. I worked so hard that I had no time to sleep, and the payoff was laughably small. My back was aching from being on the computer too much, my eyes were bloodshot, and my right hand had developed tendonitis and it hurt like hell to even hold a mouse. Obviously, it would have been much easier to just work a part-time job.
I thought about giving up.
There’s no way my business would work out after all.
That’s when it happened.
Nobody taught me anything, I didn’t read any books. I explored and changed my services and my workstyle. My product didn’t change. I just started selling the same thing in a different way. I didn’t even think it would work. Everything I’d done by that point hadn’t worked, so I just winged it, thinking, “It won’t work anyway.”
Two years passed.
I was breaking $100,000 a year in earnings.
Me?
I didn’t attend any seminars, I didn’t even learn any new skills. Yet I was down to working about an hour per day.
Maybe I was just lucky? Maybe after some time, things will go back to normal?
Three years passed. Four years passed.
There were no signs of a slowdown in profits anywhere. On the contrary, I was increasingly earning more at a steady pace. Could this be, perhaps… success? For those of us who have been unsuccessful for so long, it takes time before we recognize ourselves as successful. That’s because the thought “I’ll just end up failing in the end, anyway” never goes away. As I watched my bank account balance grow, I didn’t feel any joy, I didn’t exclaim “I did it!” I had a stronger and more curious feeling of, “Why didn’t things work out sooner?”
Because I hadn’t changed a single thing.
That’s right. “Changing yourself” is an idea for ‘capable’ people. They’re capable, so they can change themselves. I had always thought that ‘incapable’ people couldn’t change themselves, and that’s why we fail. Yet I’m still the same lazy, socially awkward, incapable person, with the same mild stutter. Why am I successful despite this? I began to look back on my past and summarize what I had done, one thing at a time, to understand why someone like myself was able to succeed. I have worked with people who are entrepreneurs in many different fields. Time and time again I have seen people far better than me fail, one after another. There are several patterns to success, and they differ from person to person. Or so I thought at the time.
However, as I recalled the difficult phases I had encountered and the things I had done in the past, it became clear and palpable to me how an incapable person could succeed without changing his or her personality. How we can make our business work without changing who we are. If I had known this from the start, I wouldn’t have had such an awful time and could have been more successful from the get go.
This is not a book about an investment technique for stocks or cryptocurrencies. It’s not about increasing your wealth with easy methods. This is real business. Selling things and services. Doing business. Helping incapable people start businesses, cross paths with capable people, make money, and get their lives back on track. This book is a compilation of ideas and methods that I have learned from my own personal experiences. I hope that it will provide some hints for people who aspire to obtain more freedom in their life.
Have I piqued your interest a little?
Well then, let’s get started.
I wonder what kind of world you see before you. I’m sure a lot of you reading this feel like the world you knew as a child is long gone. Is the world you see and the world the person next to you sees the same?
Before you start a business, you must set your fighting spirit ablaze. Because even if your heart is filled with love and peace, once you take a step out of the office, wolves are on the prowl and they enjoy killing for sport.
What kind of a world do we live in? If your perception is too far off from reality, you’ll waste a lot of time and effort. The world is very simple. The basic nature of human relationships hasn’t changed since the Stone Age. That is: silver-tongued ‘capable’ people rake in land and property, cheat their opponents, and expand their wealth.
How similar is the “bullying” that weaker children in schools encounter to what the weak nations of the world are subjected to! The middle-ranked countries play games to see which of the powerful countries win, the powerful countries test each other's strength, and finally a hegemonic system is decided and formed. Did you never see a similar situation back when you were in school? What happens between children and what happens around the world is fundamentally the same. We’re all the same humans, so it’s only natural. But as adults, the world we see is much more deceitful and complicated, so it can be harder to see.
It’s not uncommon for charitable organizations that appear to be full of love and smiles to actually be criminal organizations committing human trafficking.
Offering a poisoned cup at a reconciliation banquet.
Propagating false information about competitors.
Stealing information and then killing the victim.
We must not forget that business is an extension of these human activities. At least, I’d like for you to keep in mind that there are a number of people who think so.
In business, to be deceived is to “die.”
Even I myself always thought that art and culture has more value than business. But one day, I realized something. If we are deceived by lies or oppressed by sheer force, even art and culture can disappear from the world.
I don’t even need to bring up the numerous tribes and civilizations that disappeared from this world to know that naive and easily trusting people literally die off.
No matter how noble people are, or how wonderful their culture is, they need only lose a war to disappear forever. The culture is abandoned, survivors are enslaved, and wealth is seized.
Never forget! The business world is no different.
You might think that if you provide an honest service, your business will perform well. Why, then, do honest stores go under and yet investment banks that cheat customers and sell them worthless products make huge profits? Survival does not equal fairness or honesty. Of course you don’t have to copy ‘capable’ people in this world to get through to them. You don’t need to be the kind of person who would abandon colleagues with whom you have worked together for years without feeling a thing. However, you do need to know and recognize risks.
The presence of ravenous beasts that appear in the savannah.
The poisonous apples that lure you in with vivid colors.
You must know them properly.
You can lose everything because of just one malicious person.
Once you start a business, an endless world of freedom awaits you. You can wake up any time you want, go wherever you want, sell products to whoever you want. Something I felt soon after starting my business is that: ‘capability’ has almost nothing to do with business success.
If capable and incapable people have to compete within the same company, under the same set of rules, it’s plain as day which will win. It’s tough for incapable people to win.
Over these few years, I’ve seen many entrepreneurs start businesses up close and personal, and what separates those who succeed from those who fail is not smarts, background, connections, or financial resources. To put it another way, there was no business that was certain to succeed or certain to fail. Competence isn’t a major factor, even when the person believes so.
Even CEOs of leading companies who step down due to deteriorating business performance immediately after being hailed as management professionals and gleefully showing off their personal lives to the media mistake the reason for their success as coming from their own abilities. That’s why they don’t even understand why they failed. Sometimes, even after daring to restructure a company at the cost of the jobs of tens of thousands of people, they are still unable to understand what they’re doing. Competence, connections, and background are of no use in the great scheme of things. Let’s think about this the other way around.
It means that people can be successful if they follow certain steps without going against the flow of the world, even without special abilities, connections, or a solid background.
The reason I started my own business was because I lost my job. Whatever the reason, that in itself isn’t unusual.
I didn’t have any work experience in the field I wanted to get into, I had no connections, and of course, I had no income. On the contrary, I had debt. Despite the fact I couldn’t even find a new job, I was just taking daily walks with my son. If you had been in my shoes, what would you have done?
I decided to start a business.
For some reason, I thought: “Maybe if I give it my best shot, it’ll work out.” Maybe I had been watching some kind of TV show about that kind of thing. Whenever we hear a success story about someone like Edison or Ford (or maybe Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg nowadays), we seem to always be shaken, moved, and empowered!
“Alright! I’ll give it a shot, too!!!”
But at the exact moment you clench your fists, you have taken a sure step towards a new kind of failure. The success stories of these historical greats is one of those vivid, poisonous apples.
Don’t forget it. There may be some parts to these stories that serve as hints to capable people with incredible endurance and inhuman persistence. However, for incapable people like myself, they are a dangerous trap.
Even in the wild Savannah, it’s not always the strongest fighters that survive.
So in what order exactly should you start a business? Let’s approach the process little by little in a practical way.
What do you want to sell? Whether you’ve already decided or are still making considerations, first think about what you want to sell. For that purpose, I want you to start by creating a list of what you can do. You may think this is easy, but I want you to be very careful while doing so.
The reason why is that in most cases, this first step is where people make big mistakes. If you make a mistake here, your business will surely fail. In fact, most people in the world end up living unhappily because of this mistake.
I’m sure when you thought of listing what you can do, you thought the following.
“Let’s list the things I like to do!”
We all want to do what we like to do. We want to work on what we like, achieve self-fulfillment, and live a fulfilling life. It’s an unquestionable notion that has found its way into our minds and been heard repeatedly from all forms of media and education since our childhoods.
Be careful. This is the second kind of poison.
If you were Picasso or Einstein, of course you could just do what you like. If you were captain of the varsity football team in highschool, or you’re a capable person who isn’t even slightly intimidated by what others may say, just go ahead and keep on doing whatever you like.
However, I wasn’t any of that. I’m not good at speaking with people, and I dropped out of highschool. I’m so frail that if I work late for a single night, I catch a cold and end up bedridden. So then what should a person as incapable as me make a list of?
What you can do. Right now.
Don’t sit in any seminars, don’t go to any trade schools, don’t get any qualifications. Make what you can already do right now into a business.
How can a person who has never been able to acquire any advanced skills in his or her life become a lover of learning just by changing his or her way of thinking? You don’t have any special skills whatsoever? No expertise, no education, no connections, nothing to put you one step ahead of your peers?
Who did you compare yourself with to make you think such a thing? Not being able to write programs compared to Mark Zuckerberg? Not having strong beliefs compared to Steve Jobs?
You are unknowingly making a mistake in what or who you are comparing yourself to.
From a young age, we are repeatedly exposed to success stories of great men and women, and sometimes even to fabricated lies, and almost all of us have developed the habit of believing that we are incapable of doing anything compared to them.
First, let’s get rid of that habit!
Human genes are nearly the same as those of apes. There’s certainly no reason why humans should be so different from one another!
We’re just starting a small business here, so I want you to take it easy on yourself. Alright, now let’s make that list of all the things you can do right now.
What is the basic structure of a business?
It means the “have-nots” pay money to buy what you “have”. You might think this is obvious, but it’s extremely important. If your customer already has what you have, no matter how much you plan, your business won’t succeed. You have your list of things you can do right now in hand.
Selling those things is your business model.
It doesn’t matter what you want to do or what you don’t want to do. Because you can’t sell what you don’t have.
For example, you may think that anyone can walk. Anyone can carry luggage. Anyone can drive a car. Those things could never be a business. However, for someone who for whatever reason can’t walk, it’s an activity that is worth paying for.
Different people are willing to pay money for different things.
If you are in the business of walking or driving for someone, then the key to your business is finding the people who can’t or don’t want to do these activities. If you could find a facility where people who can’t walk often gather, and provide them with access to a wheelchair-accessible van, that would be enough to start a great business.
There is no special skill difference between you as a private cab driver, working daily while being teased by drunks, and you as a ‘nursing care cab operator’, who continuously increases sales figures by expanding to new facilities and is appreciated by your customers.
Because the thing you can do hasn’t changed.
In other words, it’s not you that needs to change, but how you do things.
That’s why you don’t need to spend time improving your skills or learning new things. Combine the things you can do now to create a business. Don’t blame yourself or the environment in which you were raised for any failures you may have experienced up until now. It was just a matter of doing things a little bit the wrong way.
If you have experience from working part-time jobs etc up until now, those are all things you can do.
The big issue isn’t what to sell. It’s where and who you sell it to. As long as you don’t mess that up, it can be said that almost any business will be successful. To put it another way, if you do mess that up, you won’t be able to sell any products or services no matter how wonderful they may be.
Next, let’s make one more list. A list of what’s popular right now. Then, let’s match items from your “popular now” list and “what you can do now” list, one by one. We don’t have time to think about what may be popular in 3 or 10 years from now. We’re not a huge corporation, and some of us can’t even afford next month’s rent, so let’s focus on first keeping bread on the table.
You have to find a demand that’s lurking somewhere out there in the world.
The philosophy of monopolizing profits with a business model that has never been done before, going public, and changing the world is certainly great, but it does nothing for you if you need to make cash right now.
Find something with a big demand, go with the flow, and take advantage of it.
Let’s pretend right now that bicycles are all the rage. Instead of selling bike equipment or accessories, think about renting bicycles out for a monthly fee. Demand, in other words, stems from inconvenience or dissatisfaction.
Suppose a city with many office buildings has a problem: many people want to commute to work by bicycle, but they cannot find a place to park their bicycles. If there is no bicycle parking, how about the idea of a mobile bicycle parking lot? In the morning, you drive a specialized truck next to office buildings, collect bicycles for parking, and then return them in the evening as people are leaving work. Wouldn't it be profitable even if you just keep the trucks parked in a parking lot during that time? You can expand your business in ways such as partnering with cab companies on rainy days, etc.
“But of course I can't just park on the street to collect bikes. It's not legal." If you immediately thought this, I hope you are aware of the danger that you are steeped in. This is the thought process of an obedient employee. It’s a major barrier when doing business.
This isn’t a big business conference room. The ‘gray area’ line should be drawn and complied with after you’ve made your money. Take for example people taking on business models such as Airbnb and Uber, which by all accounts seem to have a lot of troubles involved. They focus on expanding the number of users, and then later demand changes in foreign laws. The closer you are to the gray area, the less competition you face from large companies.
It’s true that studying, getting a job, and competing for a position in a company is so intense that it can knock others off their feet. However, the field of creating a business is a completely different world, where sometimes the gracious way of doing things doesn’t work. Once you take off the brakes of common sense, let your imagination run wild!
While going through your two lists, you may have run into a business idea that made you think: “This is awesome! I could make a ton of money with this!” Be careful, as it’s dangerous to fall in love too much with your own ideas. Even if you share your idea with friends and they love it, take that with a grain of salt, because if you do fail, you’ll be the one to suffer and you likely won’t receive any sympathy.
Nobody starts a business just to lose money. 100% of people start with the absolute confidence that they’ll do great and make tons of money. But as I’m sure you know, the chance of a business failing is enormous. The majority of businesses fail within a few years.
I wonder which side they would take if you asked the same friends who liked your idea to bet all of their money on whether the business will succeed or fail.
As I’m sure you’ve learned before, the reality is that success isn’t easily obtained. So, without really thinking about anything, let’s mechanically replace one service or product with another. If you liked the idea of the flat-rate monthly rental service mentioned earlier, now think about replacing bicycles with something else. Bicycles are pretty bulky after all, so maybe something small. How about renting plates and utensils to restaurants? Renting clothes or accessories? Something lightweight, with cheap shipping costs, and a low cost per item to cut down on losses… How about neckties? If you go and check online, you’ll find that there is already a service that offers unlimited tie rentals for a fixed monthly fee.
The more you search around, the more you’ll find that all of your business ideas already exist in some form.
In the current day and age, where it’s so easy to start your own business, there are practically 0 ideas that are entirely new. So, what do we do?
We just copy them.
Gather together only the best aspects of similar services, and make your idea even better. Also, try to look specifically at businesses that have more than 3 years of history, and examine the details of their structure and their profits.
Gather this information while comparing it from service to service. If a business has been running for three years, that means the terms of service have likely been rewritten every time there was a problem, and common questions are featured in a FAQ.
How lucky you are! You can learn in an instant what took a company years of experience and trouble. Don’t hesitate. Let’s take a close look at many, many companies.
In particular, the Terms of Use are often helpful. Read many of the terms and conditions of various companies in your industry. They are often filled with information about problems they may have experienced and ways to avoid legal liability. Since you don't have the time or the money to consult an expert or lawyer at first, you can avoid problems and dangers proactively by simply posting similar content on your site.
And nobody is going to bat an eye at the service you just began, so you certainly won’t run into any major problems. If your service has grown to a size where it catches the attention of tons of people, that means it’s profitable, and you can afford to spend good money on legal teams to fix it at that time.
Your business idea is starting to come together. However, as I mentioned before, deciding what to sell isn’t the biggest hurdle.
“Who do I sell to, and where?” This is everything.
If you turn a spigot at the park, you can get tap water for free. Naturally, this tap water would never end up on the table of a luxurious, high-end restaurant. If you were to take it to the middle of a desert, though? It would have unimaginable value.
Such unrealistic things happen on the internet on a daily basis.
How can you find people who really need a product?
By the way, the business I started was making homepages. I never learned how to do it in school and I can’t even use photoshop. I still can’t use Illustrator. Naturally, I’ve never worked at a homepage making company. I had just made a few websites before because people I knew asked me to.
Moreover, I know that small-scale website production is a job that is so obsolete now that even an elementary school student can manage it, and that no matter how hard I work, it’s not profitable. There are many services that allow you to create a website for free. I don't even know anyone in an advertising agency to lend me a hand.
But two years after starting my business, I was earning $100k a year.
I still don't understand any advanced details or skills, but once you get to this point, you just outsource the rest to someone who can do it, so the time you spend actually working is about an hour a day. I continue to get more and more customers. I don’t even do anything to acquire them.
How did I do it?
How did someone like me, who is not good at talking to people, has no skills, and can’t really do much, build a business while living in the middle of nowhere?
When you created your lists and from them decided on the product you wanted to sell, you may have immediately punched some numbers into a calculator and then gloated to yourself.
“This will make a lot of money! No matter how you calculate it, there’s no way not to profit.”
Unfortunately, in reality, almost everyone is faced with a response much worse than they expected when starting out.
So they buy more ads.
They lower their prices.
They increase their working hours.
Eventually they end up back at square one, thinking: “It’d be less stressful and easier to just find a job.” That’s how social order, centered on large corporations, is maintained.
Why is the world so overflowing with success stories? That’s because people who failed don’t write a blog or book about it. Not many people want to talk about how they failed or mistakes they made. If people did write a blog when they failed, I’m sure that we’d find nearly all success stories buried beneath a mountain of failure stories.
When I first started my business, I also thought that if I made a company, and put out ads, the work and customers would just come to me. I even sent out 500 direct mail advertisements that I had made. For example, I thought if I focus on a specific type of business, such as dental clinics, I should be able to get customers easy-peasy.
Right away, I thought of a homepage creation service specializing in dental clinics. $980 flat with no management fees. I looked up dental clinic pages all over the country, and found ones that hadn’t been updated in a while, or ones that I thought I could improve. I found 500 of them. If even 1% of them, just 5 clinics hire me, I’ll make $4900. “That’s amazing!” I thought, and sent out the direct mails full of excitement.
A week went by, and then ten days. During that time, I got a single phone call. They asked me if I could provide sample photos of treatments, but of course I couldn’t. That was the only response I received from anyone.
All I achieved was losing money on printing and mailing fees. I spent time and money, and all I did was create more trash in the world. To make things worse, if I’d just worked a part-time job during the half a month or so it took me to prepare everything, I could have at least earned enough to cover some living expenses.
I wasn’t even making minimum wage.
In fact, calculated hourly, I was way in the red.
This was the first time I realized how the world saw my business. Who would trust a business that may or may not have a physical location, is not even a year old, and has zero experience, to handle their website?
Even though I knew I could make a homepage, I didn’t have anything to show to prove it to customers. The trust of a company or ten years of experience is not something that is easily obtained, no matter how hard you try.
Plus, I didn’t have any more money to send out direct mails. So should I try to go and make sales in person? No way, cut me some slack. While it’s not impossible for me, I’d never worked in sales before, and I don’t even have a suit. Anyhow, when you’re this deep in the countryside, there are so few businesses around you can count them. My options were limited.
Inevitably, I was forced to think of ways to attract customers without spending money or approaching businesses directly.
The only option I had left was getting someone other than myself to make sales. There are services available for this kind of thing, but I didn’t have the money to hire anyone.
No money to hire someone, but unable to do it myself.
Truly a textbook case of an ‘incapable person’.
Why on Earth did I start a business?
The situation is pathetic and helpless, but it’s reality.
You can’t change your personality so easily. Even if I were to take seminars and practice smiling to be a good salesman, I’d just end up looking unnatural and fake. However, a "nice person" who has a calm personality and is not pushy, or who is incapable of kicking someone off his or her feet, or who is too willing to make concessions during important negotiations is an ‘incapable’ person in the business world.
No matter how much you were taught at school about becoming a “good person”, in reality you’ll end up robbed, cheated, and sold garbage. School really is terrifying, isn’t it!
After accepting the cruel reality of the world, accept yourself as an incapable person. You’re fine that way. Are you a ‘capable’ person? If you were, you likely wouldn’t have read this far. Everyone spends each day of their life thinking “I’ve got to do something about my situation.” For incapable people to succeed at business, there is one key thing that can’t be avoided.
The next thing is the most important point included in this book. You may need a lot of courage to accomplish this. You may think: “You’ve gotta be kidding me!” But it’s something absolutely necessary if you want to succeed.
Are you ready? I’m going to say it.
It’s…
Partnering up with a ‘capable’ person. Select capable people as partners, such as those in growing industries and successful companies.
Bow your head neatly to a 45 degree angle and ask that dazzling person with a perfect smile, who also used to be captain of the football team, to become your business partner.
Never work with a shrinking industry or company, or with someone who is just like you. It’s easier to talk with someone who is like you, and it’s likely more comfortable being around them. However, in business, this only creates negative synergy. Don’t pair up with someone like yourself. Money has a tendency to flow towards capable people.
This is a truth that can not be denied, which has been constant for thousands of years. It’s ingrained in human society. Some wealthy people seriously worship money as the visualization of luck and energy. Of course, no single person or company can win in perpetuity. But when they run into difficulties, they can just partner with another capable person.
You will never succeed alone. That’s reality. Accept it.
Don't think that you, with no experience, no track record, and no connections, are going to sell something on your own. By admitting your own helplessness, you are one step closer to success!
Find someone to make sales for you. Someone who is already successful and great at what they do. Successful people already have access to lists of clients, know-how, trust, and all the elements that make it easy to attract money.
Of course, being a partner does not mean being on equal footing.
We keep our heads down on terms that are to the best of our ability for the other party. We put up with our lower take-home pay until our track record, experience, and funds reach a sufficient level. The more sales we make, the more profitable it will be for our partners, so propose your own structure.
You may be thinking there’s no way a wealthy person would be interested in something that only brings a meager amount of income. However, ‘capable’ people understand more than anyone else that great wealth is built upon the accumulation of single dollar bills.
You may not be able to imagine it now, but if it’s a no-risk, profitable business, you can always find someone who will lend you their ear. In fact, my idea at the time was…
If my partner sells my $980 product, I’ll give them $500. My partner makes more than I do. At that time, if I could make even a bit of cash, I could manage to survive. This way, someone was sure to accept my proposal.
But who?
How can I, not only with no connections, but hardly any friends, find a partner? I continued to think alone in the eat-in corner of a deserted supermarket.
Then I came to a conclusion.
First off: who needs your product, and in what situation? Where will they purchase it?
To get a clear idea, first imagine a customer of yours actually using the product. Then look for the person who is closest to that customer and who is trusted by the customer.
To put things simpler, let’s imagine you want to sell jam. Of course in this scenario, it’s delicious, good-quality jam. You have a huge inventory. First, imagine someone using the product. A scene of someone spreading the jam on some bread and eating it. Let's imagine replacing that someone with some people you know.
Then, rewind the scene and trace the action back to the moment of buying the product.
If you imagine a housewife, you will probably see her buying the product at a supermarket.
A man living alone might have bought it at a convenience store, or a young woman might have bought it at a bakery. Maybe they bought it from an online store.
Supermarkets and online shops are likely willing to buy your product, with no track record etc., at discounted prices while offering you considerable disadvantages. In this scenario, our company is still small, too, so a small bakery might be just the thing among the retailers I just came up with.
Let’s assume that the customer bought it from a small bakery in town. Next, we plan to ask the baker to place our jam in their bakery. Should we go to each local bakery one by one? That would be too inefficient. Should we make a list of bakeries and send out a mass mailing of DMs? If we sent out 1,000 copies, we’d run out of money. Also, if we end up with too many clients, we’d have to spend a lot of time communicating with them and managing inventory.
Though, it appears that there’s no doubt we have future customers who visit this particular bakery. So who are the bakery’s own trusted partners, the suppliers from whom they buy goods and ingredients? When you think of it that way, you’ll find that the bakery isn’t the one we need to partner with. Rather, we need to partner with whatever vendor the bakery trusts. As a plus, that vendor also sells products to a number of other bakeries. Having a list of bakeries that already trust us sounds like a dream come true, doesn’t it!?
However, everyone who wants to sell a product goes to this same vendor, so we, as the new challenger, have to shift our perspective slightly.
We will search for a vendor who hasn’t handled food products until now. Find out about what sort of items are bakery-specific, such as plastic bags for bread, slicers, molds, etc., and reach out to a company that provides them. For example, when visiting for maintenance or routine inspections of an oven that bakes bread, have the inspector gently hand over a leaflet about your jam.
The bakery owner might be interested when they’re casually told, “I’ve got an acquaintance out in the countryside who makes homemade jam.” We don’t need the inspector to sell the jam, only to introduce the existence of the jam. Through this, we can get our jam leaflets delivered to the hands of bakery owners free of charge.
The jam isn’t being compared to any other brands, because our partner doesn't carry any, and the introduction comes from a trusted partner of the bakery whom the owner has known for years. It’s easier for them to decide to give it a try and place an order. Your jam will be chosen thanks to the years of effort your partner made to build up trust.
Every time your product sells, you pay your partner. Your partner will simply continue to perform the same business as before, with no burden and no forced sales. Only new streams of revenue have been opened up.
All you have to do is wait.
To make the scenario simple, I used jam to explain the idea this time. When working with an apparel store, I would give out advertisements for a hair salon that fits its style, and for a product that alleviates chills, I would give out information together with a supplement that warms the body. Just by imagining user behavior in this way, you should be able to find any number of places that are relevant to what you want to sell.
Besides, what if this wasn't about jam, but rather insurance, credit cards, digital content, or financial products? What if the sales were made via an online site instead of an actual store?
What if there were a thousand partners instead of one?
The possibilities open up endlessly.
I’d like to mention 2 key ideas here.
Just the thought of doing a cold sales pitch might make a shy person hesitant to start a business. It’s really difficult for companies with no experience to set up new deals. Even if you invest in advertising, you’ll just end up dismayed by the poor response rate.
Look for someone who can help you! Just a few companies, or in some cases just a single individual is enough.
However, never ask them to “help you” when contacting a potential partner. Never give a lengthy explanation of your plight to get the attention of a capable person. They instinctively avoid that sort of thing. The way you need to talk to them is as follows.
“Would you like to earn some money with me? Don’t you want to earn more? I have an offer for you, to generate profits with next to no effort.”
I’d like you to reach out to them in this way. I’m sure you will be amazed at the difference in their reaction, learn about the truth of human nature, and begin to hear the first sounds of the cogs of business begin to turn.
I began searching for a partner with the way of thinking we just covered. When is the most common time for a company to set up a website? In the eat-in corner of the supermarket, I thought, and the idea I came up with at that time would lead to a big leap forward for me.
“When they create their company.”
From then, I threw out the entire list of dental offices I had made, and began to gather a list of agents and law firms that would handle incorporation processes. But soon my personality would cause me to stop. If I had some communication skills, I could have just called up everyone on the list, but calling them out of the blue was still impossible for me. Just imagining myself as the person in those sales calls that barges into every home made my heart pound and I broke out in a cold sweat. I didn’t want to be spoken to coldly and shunned like some sort of pest.
It’s not that I’m picky or spoiled. Well, getting to this point and saying such a thing may come off as such, but I just absolutely didn’t want to do it. Even more so if I’m calling a company, as they’ll be getting many other sales calls, so just getting connected to a manager would be a slog. But it has to be done. So, I decided to have them read a bare minimum explanation in a flier, then just call them to confirm it after all was said and done. I’d enclose a letter as well as a flier. This time, I wouldn’t send them out randomly either. I carefully selected my targets in advance.
I just needed to explain, “Every time a deal is made, you will get paid. You just have to wait.” Then call them up when my direct mail arrives. It’s not an impossible job.
Just ask them if they’re interested in a chance to earn more money. If they tell me they’re not interested, I just hang up the phone.
I knew from my previous experience that sending out DMs and simply waiting wasn’t good enough. Because there are tons of similar services all doing the same thing.
Plus, if I’m just waiting, that means the ball is in their court.
If the company reaches out to you from their end, it means the person calling is likely assertive. Assertive people have no problems making calls here and there. Someone who compares services, looks for something even slightly better, and then makes a decision.
It’s the same with love, isn’t it!? Many people complain that they can’t find their ideal partner that meets their expectations. The problem is that since they’re often just waiting, they only ever get approached by people who don’t meet their criteria. Only people who reach out themselves can find their ideal partner.
I had hardly any funds left.
I could only send so many DMs.
So I thought thoroughly about the content of my DMs to ensure that they would be read, and the results were phenomenal.
Many people think that direct mail is a waste of resources, has a poor response rate, is outdated, and is a nuisance to most people. Even the first DMs I sent felt like I had spent money to just send garbage to a bunch of people.
No matter how good yours is, there’s a high probability it ends up in the trash. If it’s inside of an envelope, there’s an even higher chance of it going straight into the trash without ever being looked at. We all do the same thing when we receive them, so you have to be very creative when trying to get a stranger to read them.
Furthermore, we have to put our letter and the advertising flier in there at the same time.
How can we do this without them being thrown out right away? Our predecessors have tried many things: deliberately making important sections invisible, hand-writing address labels, adding bells, pencils, and so on.
The correct answer probably depends on the recipient's business as well. If they are in an industry where fliers are sent out daily, handwritten text would be more noticeable, or colorful ads might be better.
But no matter how you look at it, a clear envelope is advantageous. If contents are always visible rather than hidden, there’s a better chance they are at least looked at.
After much consideration, I decided to send a letter-size clear envelope through the mail. On one side was an advertising flier explaining the service to be distributed to actual customers, and on the other side was a letter for partners. A letter can be as simple as some text typed up in a Word document, but with a clear envelope, it can be read directly without being opened.
As a sort of attention-grabber, include something that will benefit the recipient in a large, prominent way.
For example:
“Exclusively for ___ incorporation agents. Simply enclose a flier for $500.”
Then just write up a clean, concise, and simple explanation regarding your service and a self-introduction. Just focus on the important details, as too long a letter puts people off from reading it.
Conclude by saying that you will call them to discuss the details. By stating that you will call them, they will keep the DM if they’re even slightly interested. If they are interested, they will keep the DM, and if you call them and mention the DM, you will immediately know if they are interested or not. If they have the DM in their hands, they will understand your explanation immediately, no matter how poorly explained.
If you just send a DM, the majority of them will get thrown away. Whenever you check your mail, how many of the envelopes do you actually open up and thoroughly check? Even if you’re interested in something, you’re probably not likely to go out of your way to call and inquire about it. I never have. How about if the same day the DM arrived, you received a phone call? You’d be much more likely to at least listen to what they had to say, right?
Call? Telemarket?
That’s a task that introverted me can’t bear. But I’m not trying to sell some luxury product, and I’m not calling in order to directly make a sale. I’m just introducing a side job that will help my partner earn some extra income. If all goes well, everything will be over within the day.
Let’s try to be courageous and brave, at least for a day. That day may just change your life.
Things would be different if I had the funds to send out thousands of DMs, but I was strained for cash at that time. If things didn’t work this time, my business would end in failure. So, I began to make my calls with great vigor, but as I expected, I was shooed away like a bug. It didn't go well. But I kept calling. Sometimes they would listen to me. I changed the way I spoke, changed the words I used. Eventually, I began to realize that if I proceeded with my conversation in a certain order, I would have a better chance of getting things settled.
Firstly, the important thing was the advertising side of the DM. The design should be created with one tone of colors such as blue, red, and yellow, that really stand out, when possible. Never mix too many colors. The reason for the prominent colors in one tone is to make people immediately remember the flier when they get your call.
Nobody will remember the name of your company or service, and there is no reason to even state your name first. You should start the call with the expectation that nobody has even remembered your service.
You take a deep breath in front of the phone and finally get up the courage to call a stranger you’ve never met. You say, "Hi, this is ___ from ___ Company, I sent you a letter the other day, did you read it?"
The caller immediately hangs up after a brief, "No, we’re not interested.”
A one-time opportunity just ended in an instant.
What if it had been a bright red flier? What if the words visible on the front weren’t a company name, but the sentence “$500 per flier sent”?
You call and say “Hello, I sent you the red flier about making $500 per flier sent.”
“Yes, we received that. What was your company called again?” If they say anything close to that, it means you have their attention and their interest. They’re already prepared to be your partner.
Don’t write that you want them to introduce customers to your service, just “by including fliers” etc. Make the first hurdle as low as possible. Then, all you have to do is explain the rest throughout the conversation.
If they say they never got your flier, someone else may have thrown it out, or maybe they just don’t remember it. Don’t give up, and try to refresh their memory with something like:
“Would you be interested in a partnership, where I pay $500 per deal made just for enclosing my flier in your mail to your customers?” You should decide on the specifics of this line in advance and adjust it accordingly.
For your potential partner, they’re mostly interested in the income, they don’t really care about your business. Don’t start out with a line like “We are website designers.” One time when I opened with a line like this, the person on the other end was eating their lunch, and got furious at me. I tried saving it by saying “No, this isn’t a sales call, it’s about a special…” But the person on the other end already saw me as just another salesman. They hung up and that was that. It was over before it began.
You need to tell them the most important thing right out of the gate. Also, if the receptionist picks up first or you find it hard to get to the point right away, try leading with something like “I saw your website and I would like to ask you something regarding your services.” It’s not like you’re lying, because you did see their website and call them. You’re likely to get a completely different reaction with this approach. They’ll likely respond to you politely, thanking you for inquiring about their service. Because there are practically zero companies that will hang up on a customer calling to ask questions.
“With the service you offer, you must have a lot of customers who ____. If you were to include my flier in mail to your customers, I’m willing to pay $500 per deal made. I think you should have gotten it today, or it may arrive tomorrow. It’s a red flier.”
You can fumble it, you can sound like a child, just get your point across. If you can get them to look at your flier, you don’t even need to explain in detail. If they’re interested, you likely just have to answer some questions.
Now of course, if you have a business card from a big company, you don’t need to go through all this trouble. If you are an employee of a large company, you may not be able to imagine that the person in charge somewhere won't meet you or even listen to you. You've probably never experienced being turned away with disdain before you've even given them your company name.
This is what trips up a lot of people who have left a large company to create their own.
That’s because no matter how good their business model, product idea, or technological capabilities are, they will experience for the first time how difficult it is to start from the actual starting line.
On the other hand, I had never even had a business card and was dreading every minute of the work. For me, being ignored, shut down, yelled at… it wasn’t much different from the rest of my life. Being ignored when trying to talk to strangers wasn’t anything special. In fact, it was practically just my regular daily life! I had nothing to lose. No matter how much bigger and better the other person may seem, no matter how low the chance of being noticed feels, just start by contacting them.
For those of you who just can’t make the calls yourself, allow me to let you in on the secret of the most powerful sales tool I’ve used. Hold the phone in one hand and a beer in the other. Get drunk! Nobody can see you, and you’re not an employee somewhere, so you can do your job however you want. Get it all over with, red-faced and loud, in one fell swoop!
That’s what I did, and made calls nonstop as if I were a different person. As a result, I got 8 partners out of the 100 I DM’d. That was the only time I ever really made any direct mails or phone calls. Each of my 8 new partners would pass out 500 advertisement fliers each. For me, the cost of 100 letters bought me 4,000 chances.
It was the moment hope appeared before me. Me, who had never been taken seriously by anyone before.
Why had I struggled so much before? At the time, I felt once again that human beings are so interesting. Because if people have something to gain, they’ll lend you their ear, even if you haven’t earned their trust at all!
I felt like I could have gotten even more partners, but at the time, I couldn’t send out any more DMs. Not because I didn’t have the money for them, either. From the following week, I received orders for more than I could possibly produce, and my daily routine changed drastically to one of constant working and producing.
Of course, getting a partner and signing a contract with an actual customer through a partner’s referral are two different stories. If the flier that ends up in the hands of the customer doesn’t properly describe the quality of the service or product, it won’t lead to an order being made. Even though you’re getting referred by your partner, your small company still doesn’t have any track record or trust built up.
Despite this, just after starting a business, everyone wants to earn monthly profit as quickly as possible. They set their prices so that they can make a profit without thinking about the convenience of their customers. If they can only make 1 product per month, maybe they set a price around $4000. If they can make 2 per month, $2000. Something like that.
A price that has absolutely nothing to do with the customer’s desires or needs. So there is a gap between the customer’s demand and the market price, and your product will sell less and less.
It’s fine to start out in the red.
Unless you’re starting your business from a freelancing position, where you’ve gathered clients and have a nice portfolio, it’s not possible to just start out profitable.
Moreover, in a case where no one is buying your product, no matter how much money you spend on ads, you won’t find a significant change in response. The only thing that will be widely known is the fact that your company has no track record and no trust.
If you’re going to start spending on advertising from the start, you’d be better off just giving out your products for free first.
In exchange, you ask them to cooperate by providing “customer testimonials” and allowing you to publish them. This is often called ‘free monitoring’.
When interacting with your first customer, you’re sure to make a lot of mistakes because you’re not yet used to the whole process, and you’ll end up unable to deliver something that matches the cost. If they were to write about their dissatisfaction on social media, your business may just end there.
It’s the same as going to a restaurant that just opened and finding it mediocre. You’re not going to go again. Let’s say they really could make good food, but it just so happened that they had kitchen trouble, or new staff still weren’t used to their work and made some mistakes. The fact is that the whole neighborhood will soon be of the mind that the restaurant just simply isn’t good.
So don’t you think it would be much better to invite a small number of customers, and have them try out the restaurant for free? It becomes a good opportunity for the staff to polish up their customer service skills, and if there are any problems, you can be informed of them by customers themselves. If the food is good, they’ll likely come again and bring their friends, too. When you think long-term, it doesn’t even need to be said which approach is more beneficial.
In this situation, you wouldn’t ask them to “try it, it’s free” because it sounds like you’re looking down on them. It’s better to ask humbly and with a low profile with an approach more like: “Would you please join us for a taste test? We appreciate you taking the time, so it’s completely free of charge.”
It doesn’t matter if it’s a taste test, a free sample, free monitoring, etc. It’s just important that you offer your service and get people to try it. Because that will form the foundation for and become your track record.
For the low cost of a few products, you can earn experience and trust.
If you can’t make ends meet no matter how hard you try at first, you can just pick up a night shift at a part-time job. If you still haven’t quit your job, you can continue working until you’ve got to the point of earning your first customers. If you quit at that point, you’ll avoid half of the stress and worry.
It doesn’t matter how little you’re earning. You finally started getting some work. At first, accept anything that comes your way. Cut back on your sleeping hours and sell as much as you can for tiny profits if you need to. When you try to get your hands on big profits right from the start, you end up with large investments, purchases, loans, etc., which can lead to irreversible failure.
Experiencing many small failures will eventually lead to large profits.
Sharpen your skills, acquire knowledge, and determine what type of clientele is your main target. Let’s get familiar with the kind of failure we may face when we make a mistake. Don’t get caught up lamenting that you won't make any money at all if you continue at this rate, and continue to persevere, remembering that you are intentionally selling at a low price.
No matter the job, humans become more proficient at it the longer they keep at it.
If someone works a register at a supermarket for half a year, no matter how incapable they were at the start, they will become surprisingly fast and accurate. They learn how to scan certain hard-to-scan products, which items need to be punched in manually, and how to tell certain similar products apart. After 6 months, they have acquired a lot of wisdom.
Only as they gain knowledge and experience will they be able to determine what type of cash register equipment is appropriate for their store.
Immediately after starting your business, you’re no different than a brand new part-time clerk. If you, as a newcomer, rely on your intuition to advertise or buy expensive equipment, the probability of failure is much higher. In fact, it would be a miracle if you succeeded.
The reason you initially take on inefficient jobs and work until late at night at a low price is to set up your own ‘training’ period.
When starting a new business, everyone wants to be as efficient as possible right from the start. But if there were ever a business that was efficient, low-cost, and immediately profitable, giant companies would enter the market and take it over in an instant. Even if someone’s pioneer idea is a very good one, a larger company will drop big money on it and take it all in a flash.
If a business looks like an inefficient pain in the neck, it likely has a higher barrier, preventing easy entry. On the other hand, businesses that look easy and efficient are easy for anyone to copy, which means whoever has the most funds and resources will win.
The key to running a successful small business is abandoning efficiency at the start. If you are torn between two ideas, choose the “more annoying” one.
If you want to start your own fashion brand, don’t mass-produce t-shirts. Make order-made products. Large companies will not enter businesses where they cannot take advantage of economies of scale. This is because there are many irregular orders, and manualization and mass production are difficult.
Of course, you won’t have to maintain this rough lifestyle until the moment you die. If you’re taking on as many jobs as you can, your track record will naturally grow. As you persistently and desperately continue to sell at low prices, you will come to realize one important fact. Even if your first job is something tailor-made for a client, the second time you do a similar job, you can do it much faster. Of course. You’ve already prepared what you need, and you have the completed product on hand from the first time around to refer to. The more experience you have, the more similar jobs you will get. The more similar jobs you get, the more you end up with jobs you can finish more quickly the second time around.
Eventually, after a certain amount of years or months, you’ll reach the point where most of your work can be finished quickly. When you’ve reached that point, take a break and catch a breath. Take a look at what you now have. You have a wide variety of achievements and products delivered, you have a portfolio.
These are the templates for your own personal work that will later generate enormous profits.
The real goal of the ‘training’ period immediately after starting your business is to collect these templates. Handle as many difficult jobs from customers as you can while providing satisfactory service at a low price. Pretty much until you’re absolutely sick of doing so.
The longer this period lasts, the more your future profits will grow exponentially. If there is a way to make huge profits without going through this period, then numerous people will be right behind you with the intention of taking you down. The easier an idea is, the easier it is to copy. If you get copied, you lose out on profits in an instant.
What others can't easily copy is your ‘training’ experience in your industry, in your area, and with your low-cost sales. That’s why that experience will later become a money-making weapon.
By the way, there are two things you have to look out for during this training period if possible.
1. Don’t rent a building (store).
2. Don’t hire anyone.
If you do business online, take advantage of services such as a rental office or P.O. Box addresses. Even if you live in the countryside, you can start your business with a big city address. Of course, depending on the type of business, it may be necessary for you to have your own store or space. But let’s consider that as a mistake for now when it comes to your business model. You can get a location once you’re making sales. If you absolutely must have an office or store, use your home. Turn your home into your office, your office into your home.
You must avoid hiring people from the start, no matter what. There is no advantage in hiring an employee from the beginning, even if the business is contracted on a piece-rate basis in the name of partnership. Let's try to make the business run without any extra employees. Push yourself to the limit as much as possible.
I’ll say it again: everyone is new at first.
If someone keeps at a job, they will work faster, become more proficient, and become more efficient. If you're a first-year rookie, it's natural to make trivial mistakes and lack knowledge. If you are new to a field of work, it will take many times longer than usual.
However, many people who rent an office and hire employees end up taking on a huge challenge in their first year. Because if they don’t win big, they can’t keep up with their expenses. That’s how they’ve planned their business, and that’s how they fail.
The reason why many businesses fail within a year is not that the business itself is difficult, but because they are newcomers in their first year as business owners, so they make mistake after mistake, and before they know it, it’s already too late to recover.
For a large number of people who failed during their first year, had they not rented an office or hired employees, they may have been able to actually experience their second year. Even though the second year is when it’s finally time to end your training period and set out to strike gold.
Yeah, the first year is hard for anyone. Things don’t work out easily. On top of that, you take on work at low prices and create a training period for yourself. But by lowering your prices, it feels easier to get customers, and in fact they do come to you.
In this day and age, where things can be compared online instantly, your price itself holds value as an advertising tool. That’s because customers put in the effort of searching for cheaper products and services. You can even experiment with this by making your prices ridiculously low. No matter how little your product stands out, customers will find it. Sometimes the human desire to buy something for cheap is a stronger tool than a search engine.
In fact, I, too, was so elated when a large order came in through a partner's introduction that I soared with joy and began to create the website right away. I would wake up in the morning and go straight to my computer. Then I’d work all day until I slept. Every single day. I got orders one after the other, so many you wouldn’t believe it.
That made me happy. It was fine if I wasn’t making that much. I was just grateful to have work. If you’re someone who has experienced the terror of having no work at all, I’m sure you understand this feeling well. I don’t want to feel that level of despair ever again! Even if I’m not rolling around in dollar bills, I’m lucky just to have work.
However, things don’t go so easily. Despite my excitement, my body is probably weaker than most anyone else's. After a year, my eyes were bloodshot and bright red from staring at my monitor, and my mouse hand was swollen from tendonitis. My unexplained back pain grew stronger by the day, and eventually I couldn’t even sit down in my chair.
I closed my eyes and faced up towards the ceiling. At this rate, I’ll end up in the hospital. But if I outsource the work, I’ll end up losing money. Who set my prices so low!? Why did they set them so low!?
That’s when I realized. Wait… can’t I just change the price?
I’d been so busy that I had completely forgotten that changing the price was even an option. For me, I hadn’t consciously decided to collect work templates and put myself through a training period. I wasn’t working systematically, aware of my plan all along. If I’d been able to calculate that far ahead, I would have succeeded long ago when I was still young. I was more so in the dark, anxiously and blindly continuing to produce one order after another. I would pay my rent, pay for daycare, yell at my noisy kids when the phone rang, and then get yelled at by customers. That was all I did every day. But it was my cluelessness that allowed me to experience and understand the value of this training period.
I took a new look at my services and fees. It was obvious that the “no management fee” sales pitch was holding me back. From the customer’s perspective, the less maintenance costs the better, and there were few companies that offered such a thing. Big companies don’t do that sort of business, so it was easy for people to order from me.
That being said, having more customers means having more people contacting you for even the smallest problems. For me, that included problems with their email, broken computers, internet connection issues, and other things totally unrelated to my work. When I was busy, all I could do was turn them away and say “That’s outside the scope of my business.”
If I’m going to manage the service, I need to get paid for it so that I can manage it properly. Otherwise, it’s difficult for the business to survive. Also, earning off of one-time jobs is unstable. Remember, I’m sick and my business is still on thin ice at this point in time.
For a business to survive, it absolutely needs fixed revenue.
No matter what type of business, it must always generate a "fixed income" or it will not last long. Instead of just selling cleaning supplies, set up a monthly contract with an attached cleaning service. Copy machines, cars, computers, florists, or any other type of business you can think of, should be structured to generate fixed income rather than relying on the sale of all of their products.
For example, suppose you run a workshop and store that sells accessories. Sales have been declining year after year, pushed down by competitor online stores with cheap imported goods. If you are good at talking to people and have the skills to make jewelry, consider opening an accessory-making class.
How should you price it? When I looked up similar stores online, I found two accessory-making classes.
With my business, I started out with Class A’s pricing structure. But you have to choose the structure of Class B. From the start, always. Customers have to pay for materials separately, and it’s priced per month, so even if people don’t show up sometimes, it doesn't affect your income.
It’s like the difference between a dentist and a sports gym. Even if you make an appointment at the dentist’s office and the dentist reserves that time and day for you, you don’t actually get charged anything unless you go and get treated. On the other hand, you pay a monthly fee to go to a sports gym. You pay the full price even if you didn’t go to the gym a single time that month.
People don’t always follow their plans. Nowadays, all services, from movie and music streaming services to software subscription fees, are charged on a monthly basis, and there are blank spaces where people don’t utilize them all over.
No matter how small the scale of your business, it’s the same concept. Those blank spaces are the ‘golden time’ for making money. Even if you are concerned about your customers, kind to them, and include the cost of materials in a one-time-only payment system, your business will eventually suffer.
This is very important when deciding your pricing.
The results are the complete opposite: either you lose money by preparing time and space for customers who don't show up, or you can make a profit by doing nothing.
When you make a business, it’s not the same as being an employee. You don’t always get paid based on the amount of work you do. When you first start out, no matter how much you work you’ll likely end up in the red. However, once your small business starts to take off you can create a structure that earns you money passively without you lifting a finger.
Besides, having a fixed income stabilizes our business and allows us to give a bullish estimate to customers when a one-off request comes in. We already have our own steady income flow, so we aren’t desperate for orders to come in. We can decide: “Well, if I can make this much off of it, I guess I’m willing to do it.” Along the way, people will eventually accept your pricing, and you’ll see an even greater increase in profits.
There’s one more important thing to consider when deciding on your price. Small businesses are characterized by having a limited number of customers. We’re not selling to tens of thousands of people. That means that your price doesn’t need to be appealing to every single person who looks at it.
For example, you may think everyone has experienced moving somewhere during their lifetime. The reality though is that not everyone has moved before. Professional movers understand that well. When you ask movers for an estimate, they’ll likely ask you “Have you ever moved before?” If you say it’s your first time, you’ll get an expensive estimate. If you say you’ve experienced it many times, the dates and times are up to the movers, and you ask for a lower price because you’re fine with slower shipping, it should eventually come down to less than half price compared to the situation where you tell them it’s your first time…
After all, that’s what price is all about. In some parts of Asia, rent goes up as businesses thrive. In India, every time you go shopping you haggle. In the United States, get-rich-quick lawsuits abound. Good or bad, that’s just how the real world is.
There are many products cheaper than yours. But not all people simply buy whatever has the lowest price. When it’s a pain to search around, or people don’t know how to do something, or want something right away, then they choose the thing they first come across. In most cases, a few dozen customers may be enough for you at first.
In fact, just 1 out of every 100 million of the world’s population. You don’t need ads put up in baseball stadiums or plastered across social media. All you have to do is deliver your service to 1 out of every 100 million customers out there in the world.
Your partners will do the searching for you.
You just wait. If just 80 people sign up for your $100/month service, you’re making $96,000 per year. It’s not always just about taking more and more orders. All you need to do is find a customer who is willing to buy something at your set price. Is it really that hard when you think about it?
Even if you show your product to 100 people and 99 of them turn you down saying “I know something better and cheaper,” you still get 1 person to buy your product. That’s more than plenty.
With this new view, I switched from a no-management-fees system to the exact opposite. A $100/month website creation and management service with no initial cost. I wasn’t capable of making any amazing designs, so I never planned on charging high prices to begin with. My only choice was to offer something reasonable within the range of what could be called a low price.
Even still, it was a price that I would have personally found expensive before. I had no idea if any customers would be interested. Either way, I changed my services around. As a result, my life changed dramatically.
Sometimes an e-commerce site that is practically void of orders can start selling just by changing a line of language on the page.
I’d like for you to retrace your steps around the last time you bought something and look at your actions. Why did you buy the jam you bought, and not the one beside it? Why did you choose one insurance plan over the other?
There are so many factors: exterior design, price, materials, brand image, and the attitude of sales staff. No matter how small a purchase is, you can’t predict what you’ll get until it’s practically in your hand. So of course it’s literally impossible to predict what other people will do or buy.
In the first place, consumer choice is determined after a comparison with other products, so if the competition changes, we have no choice but to change as well. Your services and products will also continue to change.
Never spend a lot of time on writing a business plan. I have seen many entrepreneurs with well-developed business plans and book-thick business plans fail. There were many among them who were ‘capable’ people. All of them were well-educated and had worked at decent companies. They were itching to start their business with dozens of pages of business plans, as if a bright future was guaranteed to be waiting for them.
The first half of a year goes by. That’s when they first run head-on into the whole “things aren’t going as planned” situation. They stick to their plan. The next six months go by, and now their business is run into the ground. ‘Capable’ people are often so in love with their plans, they take too long to realize their failures. Sometimes they reflect and admit to themselves they made a mistake early on after their company is dead and they’re picking up hours at a part-time job.
Whereas ‘incapable’ people don’t have such expectations for their plans. They’ve repeated too many mistakes and failures throughout their life. Getting turned down by the girl they like, not getting the big job they want, not holding down any one job for a long time. We have grown accustomed to uneasy days. There’s no way something will go well. We can’t even imagine things going well. But… let’s give it a shot anyway.
The truth is, that’s the shortcut to success.
Constantly be in doubt about whether or not you’re doing things right, become uneasy, and keep on changing. While you’re constantly changing, sometimes you get a different response than normal. Don’t let that response slip away, and then connect it to the next one.
People with a lot of experience fishing understand this. If you "do your best" to catch fish at the same point all day, with the same bait, the same hook, and you don't bend your "beliefs" all morning long, and in the end you don't catch any fish for a whole day, can you call that making an "effort"? By changing your fishing spot, bait, and hook around, you eventually get a hit. Sometimes you can catch tons of fish just by changing spots.
Try changing your target audience, your selling points, even changing the picture of yourself that you feature on your fliers or homepage. Eventually, the response will suddenly change and you’ll get a hit.
When I changed my service, I was really worried about whether customers would come or not. In reality, I didn’t get any response whatsoever immediately after making the change. Had I failed once again? Was the only option left for me to start all over again, to be so busy with daily jobs that I destroy my body once again?
I looked over the pricing for my new service. In exchange for the new management fee, customers could request revisions for pages as often as they like for no extra charge. But for a production company, “no limits” is too risky a promise. So all urgent requests and time-consuming work were included as options that customers had to pay for.
Maybe the options are the problem? In order to clarify the fee, I intentionally set an optional price for each more detailed category of job, but some customers may feel that they will be charged extra no matter what they do. So I removed the word “option,” and some inquiries started coming in.
However, it still wasn’t as big of a response as I wanted. Once again, recalling the questions I often got from customers, I remembered that many were concerned about the minimum contract period. When the internet first began to make its way to Japan, there was a problem with unscrupulous companies that forced customers to sign up for expensive website production fees on a five-year credit card loan, and my service was unfortunately impacted by the distrust left behind because of them.
So I wrote at the very top of my page, in big letters, that the shortest contract was a 12-month plan. If they weren’t happy after the first year, they could cancel the plan at any time.
Furthermore, I increased the number of plans. In order to make my $100 monthly plan look cheap, I took those “options” from before and included them into a premium plan that allowed for revisions, at any time, for $300 per month.
To my customers who often had sudden requests, I would say: “ For urgent revisions on the same day, you will need to enter the premium plan.” Having this served as a sort of safety net to prevent myself from taking on too much work. The cheaper, $100 plan is limited and customers are aware of that. Customers choose between the plans themselves, so those in the cheaper plan are more willing to put up with some inconvenience.
As I was making the aforementioned changes, I started to get more and more orders. If just 1% of the 4,000 people that received fliers signed a contract, that’s 40 people. That’s $4,000 per month.
Once the new service began to take off, my life changed. I went from days of making no extra money despite how much I worked, to days of getting paid more the more I worked.
On top of that, since I was getting paid every month, I could afford to take the time to answer any questions politely, and my customers became happy.
Even though I was making the exact same thing as before, it felt so much easier and I felt so much better. I started feeling like my work had a purpose, and I even started to think that work was fun. Me! I had once hated work, and had neither the strength nor will for it.
I took a walk with my son for the first time in a while. There were onion fields as far as the eye could see, and the ocean stretched out beyond them. I remember as if it were only yesterday how I had felt while looking at the countryside, which I had disliked so much until then.
“Those painful days will never come again. At last, I am one step away from the daily grind and money troubles!”
Now, from this point on, we will mainly be talking about what happens after your business actually starts to stabilize. Even if you’re not interested in this part for now, please keep this knowledge somewhere within your mind. One day, I think it’s sure to help you.
Compared to the difficulties of starting a business and the period that follows immediately after, you may feel that the business problems you are now facing at this point are small. However, your business needs to continue moving forward. Small mistakes and inefficient business practices will eventually bring about large failures. Before your number of customers increases, streamline the entire operation to the limit once and for all while you’re still at this point.
You think it’s already streamlined enough? Business is not only about the service provider. Everyone has experienced at least once spending most of the day dealing with a single customer complaint, and ending up exhausted both physically and mentally.
The nature of that customer is the most important thing that will determine your success.
Have you ever been to a store with a long line of customers and felt that the customer service was one-sided and inflexible? You may think even with a tyrannical level of customer service, that store is popular and so customers will come. You may think it’s an easy business.
But in fact, the most important thing that’s happening here is “customer selection.”
They don’t try to attract overly-demanding customers, and focus only on those that go with the flow.
Unfortunately, a small shop can’t increase its sales by copying the customer service of a 5-star hotel. It’s not possible, and will just make business even tougher. Remember that 5-star hotels narrow down their clientele in advance by setting high prices. Only wealthy people tend to stay in 5-star hotels, but a small shop caters to a wide variety of people, from the wealthy to school children.
The more customer demands you try to meet, the more complicated your service will become. This leads to inefficient business, and you’ll lose profits because of it. There is no end to customer demands, and obviously every individual is different.
“It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too salty, it has no flavor, it’s too spicy, it’s too sweet….”
If you try to address all of these complaints, there’s no doubt that your product will fail.
That’s why you need to create a certain sort of clear “rule system” that says to customers “This is how my business runs.” Then you just focus on customers who match your system.
You don’t need to match your business to your customers, but find customers that match your business.
Let’s think about a made-to-order service. Even if the work is ostensibly made-to-order, the actual work itself is a type of pattern order in which your templates are slightly modified.
What do you think? It may take only a tenth of the time to adjust an already existing template than to create everything from scratch. In other words, your profits go up tenfold.
If you properly set up your training period we discussed earlier, you’ve got plenty of templates on hand. The product you end up with after making adjustments can again be saved as a new template, making your work even more efficient.
Now is the time for all of your effort to start generating money!
A template isn’t just a visual reference. Many lawyers operate by narrowing down their areas of expertise from the start. They specialize in registration, litigation, corporate counsel, divorce, etc… That’s because it’s more efficient. Once they have experienced a case, it will remain with them as a template. To solve a difficult case that they face for the first time, they will have to do that much more research and preparation, which is extremely time consuming.
But what if you, at your business, get the exact same order again? In some situations, you might just rewrite the client’s name and address and be done with it, because the materials you used before are still available. You already endured a rigorous apprenticeship. From now on, you can just do business with customers who fit the templates you have on hand.
Streamline your operations and maximize your profits all in one go!
Incidentally, what would happen if someone started a business and immediately sought to streamline it? In addition to having very few templates on hand, they would be forced to turn down tedious and time-consuming tasks in order to pull a profit from the get-go. They’d be stuck in a vicious cycle of repeating a small range of jobs and using the few templates they had to make rent payments on time. They’d soon end up stuck in a rut.
As soon as I started getting back on track, I too reviewed my business process from order to production and streamlined it as much as I could. Even though I hadn’t planned for it to be so, I was left with many templates on hand.
There is one other thing I always wondered about. There are “quick jobs”, and then there are “slog jobs” that seem to go nowhere even if you spend a lot of time on them, despite the fact you handle them the same way. Is there no way to narrow your work down to only the quick jobs? In my case, I was handling website development, so when I recalled the difference between my quick jobs and slog jobs, it was mostly a difference in the intricacy of the design and details.
Different people have very different requirements and tastes in design. Some want the same quality as top companies, while others are fine with anything as long as the website displays. Some customers weren’t satisfied with the result, although I had worked really hard on it. Others were sincerely grateful, even though I finished everything in a day. It was obvious to me that it was better to focus on attracting the latter customers as much as possible.
Therefore, I decided it was better to propose a design idea before getting them to sign a contract. It was better to just not sign a contract with a customer who is too particular about the design or whose design tastes didn’t match my own from the start. It’s sometimes possible for me to finish 5 quick jobs before I can get through a single slog. With certain customers, I find they are never completely satisfied and it ends up wasting time for both parties. Even if I force myself to keep responding to their requests and finally complete the site, it will take a lot of time again just to create one image banner when they need it later on. It’s too high a risk to continue doing business with such a customer, since I will have to continue to manage the site on a monthly basis.
The correct choice is to turn them down at the start.
If they want an extremely high quality product, they can just pay the money to have a famous designer or large company make it.
The more of a habit ‘incapable’ people have of accepting other people’s demands, the more vulnerable they are to pushback. We have to defend ourselves with “rules” or we won’t be able to maintain a business for long.
During my training period I made a number of terrible mistakes. I made promises lightly when I signed a contract and then begged on my knees to walk away from it by the end. I have worked on something to practically the point of completion only to be suddenly canceled on and receive no payment.
For my customers as well, it was a big plus to be able to check the design before signing a contract. On my part, the process was surprisingly smooth, since I only had to propose a design that was slightly adjusted from a template. The only time it turned into work was when customers had already approved the design, and with the design already decided and approved by the customer most jobs finished within a day.
No matter what type of service you provide, setting up these rules firmly and attracting only customers who fit your rules will make a big difference in your sales.
Thriving businesses don’t have their own rules because they are thriving, but rather they are thriving because they follow their own rules.
In Japan, we’re taught that “customers are gods.” However, to enforce your own business rules, you sometimes have to refuse customers’ requests. Actually, to be more accurate… it might be all of the time rather than sometimes. What sort of structure is needed to turn an incapable person, who is always the weaker one in relationships, into the stubborn owner of a thriving business?
One thing is to have your rules written out for everyone to see. If you put yourself on an equal playing field with your customers, it’s easier for them to take control of negotiations. We, the service providers, must take the initiative and hold the power.
For example, we should clearly state that not every customer can order unconditionally. Just as only students who pass an exam can enter a university. Cafes turn down customers who plan on studying there for hours on end. Tax attorneys set limits on scale and number of employees when working with companies. We need to make some rules as well.
When you start your own business, you may be surprised at how many people come to you with off-topic questions, or complain about details of your service even though you have posted plenty of important explanatory statements on the front page of your website. Customers will confuse you for your competitors and most of them will not take the time to read your descriptions much more often than you may expect. Even if everything is laid out plainly in front of them, they won’t know everything about your service. The customer isn’t always right, they’re in fact a know-nothing student.
There’s a notion that weak-willed people like me have an easy time giving in and accepting something. But if you want to stay in business for a long time, you must never be at the mercy of your customers.
Make sure your customers know what you can’t do.
If you don’t let them know from the start, you’ll end up getting more and more requests that are outside your expertise. Eventually, that will all add up and become a huge burden. When you can’t handle the burden and suddenly turn down their offers, it will ruin the business relationship.
That’s your fault for not letting them know from the start. It’s not the customer’s fault. It’s your service. If you’d told them from the start that you couldn’t do it, they couldn’t have demanded anything more from you.
I made that same mistake more than I’d like to admit. I told a customer that I would assist them in setting up their email, and they ended up sending me their entire computer by mail. It’s not uncommon for me to be in the middle of a project when suddenly the number of pages a client needs increases, or they suddenly need an entirely different system. Even customers can’t always envision the completed product beforehand, so it’s not like they’re trying to bully you. If you tell your customer that you can make an extra page for free, however, they’ll think that’s just the way you work. Then they’ll end up asking for another page, and then another.
Even if you want to provide extra support for free out of the goodness of your heart, you should decide on a limit for yourself. If you have a customer that constantly tries to go beyond your boundaries and rules, simply nullify the contract without hesitation.
Fortunately, it’s easy for small businesses to diversify their income. If you’re earning $100 a month from 100 different companies, it’s not going to have a big impact on you if you lose one of them. Just like in an investment portfolio, you can choose your customers with your lifestyle and personality in mind and diversify.
The closer you get to a comfortable ‘portfolio’, the more streamlined your work becomes. You can just work every day with people you like in a fun and rewarding way. Then without any special effort on your part, sales will naturally double or triple, just as the ebbing tide rises.
Collecting payments is a particularly important aspect of building a small business.
If you’re working with a large company, it’s unlikely that a payment will get delayed. The payment is sure to be in your account at the planned date and time. No matter how much they complain that you’re not up to snuff, or boss you around with instructions, or demand a lower price, it’s large companies that are indeed dependable when it comes to money and payments.
When you’re dealing with freelancers, whose faces you’ve never seen before, or with small companies you’ve never even heard of, you are repeatedly confronted with situations where payments are overdue. Many times the customers are seemingly unconcerned.
In particular, services with no initial cost will have trouble dealing with customers who try to back out without paying the monthly fee. What’s worse is that demanding payment by phone, sending out demand letters, and in some cases calculating late fees are time-wasting and stressful tasks.
Sometimes small companies also think they can get away with simply running away from a deal. In my case, because I included the provision of a server as a part of my service, I was able to use that for leverage. I was able to demand payment at the risk of shutting down their server within the week, also shutting down their mail system. I hadn’t planned for this sort of thing, but it ended up being a lifeline for me and a way to ensure payments came in. If they can’t keep in contact with their customers, it causes them trouble, so they pay on time.
Even if you have the perfect contract, ensuring payments come in is a difficult task for beginners. Even if you send a legally valid demand letter, if the other party runs away, there’s not much you can do. That’s why it’s necessary to create some sort of system within your service that prevents people not paying or running off.
Some examples being:
Just by being careful with preventative measures like these, you can get rid of a lot of stress and worries you really don’t need. It’s the same as making it impossible for customers at a restaurant to skip the bill by installing a ticket machine that sells meal vouchers. They pay before they eat.
There’s always a way to deal with these issues, regardless of the service. If someone complains that they have many customers who fail to pay their bills, it’s not the customers’ fault; they have designed their service incorrectly.
After being in business for a few years, you’ll have new concerns other than finding customers. The state-of-the-art equipment or shiny storefront you set up when first getting started will eventually get old and beaten up. Modern people love new things.
Almost as if old things are evil, they dislike technology and aesthetics deemed old or out of fashion. No matter how new a service may seem at first, if the contents of the service remain completely unchanged, the sense of value of the service will gradually diminish in relation to the price.
Branding is what compensates for that. Even if the restaurant is old, a famous steakhouse with a solid line of business will remain loved for a long time.
For example, let’s picture that there are two hamburgers for sale. One is a regular burger you can get anywhere and costs $7. The other is a $10 burger that is made by a luxury steakhouse, and they only offer 50 per day. Even if the ingredients and the taste of the burgers were the exact same, the majority of customers would want to try the luxury steakhouse’s burger.
That’s because by selling a limited number per day, they give it the image of scarcity while also providing more bang for your buck through offering a product from a luxury restaurant at a price that’s affordable for most anyone. However, both of these are pure assumptions made by the customer.
It’s quite strange. Despite having a higher price, customers see it as having more value. If the customer is satisfied and the profit margin is high, there’s no reason not to do it.
If your product or service lacks any special features, creating an image of scarcity and value will contribute to making it more profitable. One concrete way to do this is by launching a separate service that is significantly more expensive than the existing one.
For example, a cheap service that creates home pages will be our regular old burger joint you can find anywhere. We can set up, as our luxury steakhouse, a consulting service that specializes in analyzing customer traffic. The consulting fee could be set at whatever, even $10,000, but it’s not actually necessary to get any orders.
In other words, you can present your service in the following way: “My company usually provides consulting services for $10,000 per session, but we offer cheap website development to just 1 company per month.”
Then, strangely enough, the website development service which didn’t seem special before turns into a rare, limited-edition service that is also affordable. Even if all you really want to sell are cheap home pages and you don’t even care about the luxury service.
In this way, by preparing a separate service and branding it as a luxury service, your pre-existing service will come across as more scarce or money-saving without you even making any changes to it. Sometimes, you don’t need to make a big investment renovating a storefront. You don’t need to revamp something. A simple website renovation may be all you need to see dramatic results.
Imagine yourself having made it this far successfully! You’re likely able to live well off enough and are on the verge of becoming a successful person in both name and reality.
What’s more, you now have time to think about other things. There’s no need to worry about your business suddenly collapsing. For the time being, it’s a great success. Only people who have started a business at least once know firsthand how difficult it is to get from zero to this point. If you had the ability to get to this point, it won’t be too difficult to add another zero to your income, either.
Begin thinking of a new business that is even more profitable. Although, that doesn’t mean you need to restart the entire difficult process from zero again. Rather than entering a completely new field, you can just add something on to your existing business.
If you run a restaurant, you could try selling your products online in microwaveable, retort packs. If you sell a product for personal use, perhaps you could try to organize a new type of contract and sell it to corporations. There are tons of options. Even if you’re selling the same product, you can develop new services just by altering how you sell it.
Like when a real estate company starts a home renovation business, or a baker opens up their own cafe. The rate of success is often much higher than if they were to begin from scratch. Besides, in business you can never predict what will succeed.
If you start a new service and it’s much more profitable, don’t hesitate to stop your existing service. This is also the very point where people who turn their passion for something into a job often fail. When they like a certain job too much, they can’t easily change their business or product.
The actions and following results of two major companies around the time when digital cameras appeared, and film began its apparent decline, are well known. Kodak, which decided to stick with film, collapsed. Fujifilm achieved further success by shifting their business. Moreover, even though Kodak had developed digital camera technology at a very early stage, it did not start commercializing it, perhaps because it considered it to be a conflict of interest with its film business.
What you want to do might not always match with what’s going on in the world.
We should just assume that the success stories that abound in the world are merely cases where things did match up. Your first priority should be to keep an eye on global trends, and the number 1 rule is to never go against that trend. Whether it’s a massive business or a small business, there is nothing more dangerous than chronic tunnel vision.
Continually sow new seeds. Do so even if you’re skeptical. Do so even if you’re afraid it won’t work out and you lack confidence. Leave behind your assumptions and predictions, because oftentimes even things you are confident about will fail and things you don’t believe in will succeed.
Staying in business is the most important thing. You can fix mistakes and errors as you go.
You don’t need to scale up your business, just keep multiple sources of income. Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket. Expanding the scale of a low-margin business may temporarily increase profits. However, as I’m sure you know, a slight change in the global business environment can lead to catastrophic losses in an instant.
Now, after paying rent and expenses, you’ve got plenty of profit left over. Once your business has grown to this point, you may want to hire some employees.
However, keep in mind that the more other people are involved, the more troubles and worries a company must face.
If possible, you’d like to take things easy and do it all yourself, but if the scale becomes too large, that’s not always doable. So then, what kind of person should you hire?
It goes without saying, but you’d normally want a ‘capable’ person. Someone who is smart, flexible, and makes few mistakes. But, the more skilled a person is, the more picky they are about where they work. They know they can work just about anywhere. They also know full well that they want and deserve high wages.
Somewhere in the world, even now, there are probably countless situations where part-time housewives, who are far more capable than the store manager, are working according to the manager's incorrect instructions, resulting in a decrease in sales. In the end, it’s up to you to make the most of your employees’ abilities.
What kind of person would come to work for you? If you really want a ‘capable’ person, you will have to constantly be considerate of them, enliven the workplace atmosphere for them, make them comfortable, and curry favor with them.
That’s hard to maintain. In that case, it’d be much easier to just run the business alone.
Hiring someone means making a fundamental change in the company’s structure. Even if you feel like you’ve got your small business set up nicely, the addition of a single employee can make things surprisingly unstable.
Still to this day, I can’t get used to the idea of having people work under me. I wonder what goes on in the mind of the president of a company who holds 100% of the shares as he forms a huddle with his employees and says “Let’s make the world a better place together!” Are they being hypocrites on purpose? Or do they believe themselves to be a special person and that their employees deserve to be overworked? I still cannot understand the logic behind working late into the night and sacrificing my own family time, as an employee, to “make the world a better place” as the president does.
At the very least, I could understand if the president were to say something like “Thank you for working for such low wages.” At least they’re being thankful, but no successful business owner thinks that way.
At the end of the day, ‘incapable’ people are too kind.
Too good of people. Kindness is weakness. At least in the world of business. That’s why I had failed so much before.
If there is one major pitfall in hiring an employee, it’s our own personality. In some cases, employees are always in the same space with us, sometimes longer than our family. We can’t help but feel compassion for them, and end up treating them as our ‘weak and incapable’ self. Therefore, we tend to be lenient with employees, and this ambiguous attitude leads to major mistakes. What’s worse, if an ‘incapable’ person is the president, there will sometimes be people who attempt to steal away all of the other employees and start their own business independently. So what kind of organization should we create?
Here, too, the only way is to create rules and systems, and make thorough manuals for all operations. Instead of hiring competent people, improving their skills, and delegating full authority to them, the goal is to create a system that achieves the same results regardless of who does the work. Also, you need to clearly separate the work that only you can do from the work that can be delegated to others.
We’re not aiming to go public with our company. We just want to keep our small business stable and secure. Create manuals and guides for the work process, so that even if your employees change, it doesn’t inconvenience your customers. You need to make it so that you can quickly recover from even a fatal mistake made by one of your employees. Be patient and continue to reinforce and improve your manual. Find ways to reduce errors, and eventually create manuals that allow employees to self-check for errors and correct them on their own when necessary.
If you do so, when the operations manual is finally completed, you will find that you personally have next to no tasks that need doing. The change will be incomparable to when you streamline your business operations with templates.
No matter what kind of employee enters the picture, your business will run fine on its own, and you will no longer find yourself dependent on your employees any more than you need to be.
You will be free from work.
What will you be doing at that time, I wonder?
All of the things you had always wanted to do since long ago.
Isn’t now precisely the time to start doing just that?
When did humans start to work? Was it work when our ancestors, long ago, spent their days foraging for fruits and nuts? If they weren’t working, then what would we call those actions, that time?
What is the difference between what we now call works of art, and the songs and shouts they would let out as they circled around a fresh kill from a hunt and celebrated wildly while sharing the meat amongst themselves?
We’re taught in school that the introduction of agriculture saved humans from the fear of starvation. As a result of the following stability, culture and art developed. But the opposite may be true. Did people not first feel the fear of starvation from the moment they had obtained enough food to store, even when foraging and hunting? Surely the state of searching for food is nothing to fear, because it’s a natural part of life for living creatures.
In modern times, where we now must earn money rather than forage for food, nothing has changed. Everyone thinks that working at a company is a natural part of life, and are terrified of losing their job. Has it suddenly become so difficult to run your own business? Even a decade ago, there were many self-employed people who made a living.
Of course, any human being would be confused and fearful if thrown out into the wild with no knowledge of how to find food. But if you had the knowledge and skills to obtain food yourself? No matter where you went, you would have plenty. The Earth itself would be one giant pantry. There would be no groundless anxiety, no meaningless work or labor. Only the fertile time and dynamic life that once nurtured entire civilizations.
True freedom.
You don’t need to get filthy rich through investing to become free.
If you can make a successful small business with one of your ideas, you can live a free life, regardless of what kind of person you are.
In closing, I’d like to say I would be thrilled if you could keep this book in mind and use it as a reference for even a small part of your business ventures in the future. I sincerely thank you for using your precious time to read all the way through!
Ahctam
Japanese living in Japan. After dropping out of high school, he later obtained a high school diploma and graduated from a bottom-of-the-barrel university, later quitting a toxic company job after just 1 month. After spending a decade without a steady job, started a small business at the age of 35. He almost immediately ran out of capital, but continued to work desperately. Achieved a $100,000 annual income using unique ideas and methods after gradually getting the hang of business. Later, while watching one failed entrepreneur after another up close, he decided that his know-how may help others and published “SMALLERS” on Kindle in Japan in 2018.
info@ahctam.com