Pipe vs platform, control chokepoints, don’t diversify.

           Where do I start with this post?  I definitely think my businessfail.com idea would be a good one.  I was thinking of whether it would be text or maybe doing a youtube channel for it would be better and I’m not sure so I’ll have to think further on that.  What I’m thinking I would do though when I start it up is to have it just be a weekly post or something.  With that post I’d just do the best fails/things learned from those fails as some weeks may have many to post.

            Last night I made my first call for my ad posting business idea.  It wasn’t really nerve wracking.  I did say to myself that my goal would be 5 calls.  I only made one.  That was all I needed to easily blow through my hour session of working on my business.  The call was a total disaster ha ha…sigh.  Tis ok though cause I have permission to suck at first.

            I looked up the company name and called.  The company name has the person’s name in it.  So when I called she answered, “Hello.”  I said, “Hi my name is Brock.  Is this Barbara?”  She said, “Yes”.  Again the lady’s name is in the business name.  I said, “Are you the business owner?”  It was one of those moments where you know you shouldn’t say what you’re about to say, but for whatever reason, mine being anxiousness/nervousness, you uncontrollably blurt out what you didn’t want to say anyways.  From there on the conversation lasted about 5 seconds longer.  I got halfway through my second sentence.  She cut me off.  I asked a question and she just hung up on me.

            Lesson learned is that I had to change my wording up a little bit to get even quicker to the point and not really ask for permission to at least get two words in. 

            Later that night I was reading my “Winning through Intimidation” book and it talks extensively about operating from a position of power and authority and that there are several ways to do this with many jobs/businesses that don’t normally command power/respect.  I’ll do a post on the notes I took from the book once I’m finished with it.

            I also read a summary of a biography of John D. Rockefeller recently.  He focused on a couple things.  Hiring geniuses to do the heavy lifting.  Another thing I gleamed from that summary was that he controlled checkpoints in the shipping industry so that he forced his competitors to do his will else he’d crush them and then buy them out.  One other thing I got from the summary was that Billionaires don’t really diversify.  They stick to just one or two revenue streams, but become masters at that one revenue stream, whereas the average millionaire has multiple streams of income from different industries.  The middle class focuses on credentialing up via degrees/job titles.  The poor just expect people to take care of them.

            Another thing I read just yesterday was a Harvard Business Review Blog that chronicled the institutionalizing of failure into PBS, the public broadcasting station.  They made it mandatory for their employees to purposely take risks and fail and make mistakes and see what worked and then move on from those things.  Start to finish has created a powerhouse of a company and change in traffic from their audience in a drastically positive way.

            Another thing I came across was a Wired magazine article talking about how there are two business models now.  One is a pipeline type, i.e. producers produce and ram product/services down consumers throats.  The other type is the platform type.  Platform would be the internet broadly, or more specifically things like youtube and twitter and facebook where producers can produce value and then consumers can then consume that value.

So I started thinking, “How do I position myself for the collapse that is coming?  What business do I need to start that will control in Rockefeller chokepoint fashion, that I could start/take over via my commanding position via proper intimidation, and that is a platform?”

One idea I had was to buy up an app building business like Appsmoment.com or something like that where it is cutting edge, platform based, can grow in capital appreciation, but also have monthly cashflow revenues.  I also thought of education sites like udemy.com or kahnacademy.com.  Buying up those types of companies and then merging them together.  Anywho there will definitely be more on this later as I do more introspection, but I wanted to put it all on paper before I couldn’t articulate it what I wanted to do.  Feel free to drop some bomb ideas in the comment section below on how to achieve business greatness.