The #1 Secret to Business Success

A certain type of "spare change"

If I wanted to oversimplify business, the secret to success is this:

Find out where lots of money is being moved back and forth. Stand in the middle. Pick up the spare change that gets dropped.

If you wanted to stack the deck in your favor, you’d pick an industry that has a lot of action and find a way to be a small fish in a big ocean. Typically these industries are BORING in the sense that you don’t get the fame or adoration. You just get the money.

For example - I’d rather be Ronaldo’s agent than Ronaldo. If you didn’t know, Ronaldo did a deal worth about $200 million a year. Say his agent gets 4% - which is on the low end - then the agent makes $8 million a year off just that one deal. And his agent can eat in public without a single person asking for his autograph.

Most of these agents represent more than one client and often - aside from the outliers like Ronaldo - most athletes, movie stars and musical artists end up making far less money than the agents who represent them.

Which would you choose?

I’m not saying you should be an agent - I’m just making the point that when faced with two options:

1. Develop a skill that is so rare and hard to obtain that you could make millions, though the odds are way against you ever succeeding or…

2. Find a way to be there when money is being discussed and figuring out how to add value (which is much easier to figure out and has a higher rate of success)…

You should go with the second option. There is no “starving agent” but there is a starving artist.

In business, much of your success comes down to niche selection. You want to be in a huge niche with a lot of money moving around where there are pockets of customers being overlooked because the companies in these niches are so big that a “million here and there” isn’t worth their time.

It’s A Dog World

Our dog Bella. I want to be her when I grow up.

An example - my 11 year old daughter wants to start a dog treat business. Here’s what I like about it - the dog industry is gigantic. People irrationally spend large amounts of money on their dogs. Now she has massive competition - but she can go where they aren’t.

She can start with her neighbors. She can go to the dog park (her idea!). She’s a cute little kid, so that’s an advantage over a big, faceless corporation. She can bring the product to market fast - make the treats right in the kitchen - and she can easily and cheaply (a walk to the park) get in front of potential customers.

She can tweak and optimize her product along the way and slowly but surely expand her reach from neighbors and dog parks to other local events and centers of influence (like the kids at school).

THIS is the surest path to business success - and it helps her develop skills that are highly transferable to other business opportunities.

Transferable Skills

To go back to the sports example - many athletes end up broke even though they may have made millions in their careers. That’s because what they learned on the field doesn’t easily transfer over to other professional careers.

Yet target marketing is largely the same whether you’re cold approaching dog owners in the park or your cold calling businesses to help them better advertise.

Once you learn the magic of product iteration you can take it with you in whatever area of business you want to go in. Tweaking a treat formula based from market place feedback is very similar to adjusting a user interface for an auto webinar software (ours is coming soon!).

When I got started in business I went to where the money was. In 2007, the rage was article marketing (as I write this, the rage is now AI). People wanted to know any and everything about article marketing. Big niche. I was nobody. So I found an edge - I could teach people how to write a specific kind of article fast. And I sold the product dirt cheap - $4.

This taught me the core of how to build a product, how to sell a product, and it gave positive feedback - people loved my approach. When I got the green light from my market that I was doing something right, I just kept doing more of that.

And I traded up. Once you have a base skill, it’s easy to build on it. Article writing with a few adjustments becomes email copywriting - which pays better. Small, cheap info products became bigger info products - I could just combine three ideas into one instead of sell each idea separately. Simple.

Event Arbitrage

I’m getting married in 9 days from writing this. If my soon to be wife and I were to do a normal photoshoot, it’d probably be about $2,000. But if it’s for a wedding - $14,000. (Or more!).

If I were a photographer, I’d only specialize in the type of events that people just expect and accept that you’re going to pay higher prices - and then I’d figure out a specific type of wedding that I could quickly position myself at delivering the best experience for. Then tailor all my marketing at that particular group.

Business is hard enough when everything is going in your favor. You have to be militant about stacking the deck in your favor as much as possible going in. It’s like card counting at Vegas. You’re playing a game where the odds are against you, so you better find your advantages where you can.

Then, once you get a pile of money and develop some easily transferable skills, maybe then you can attempt your speculative passion project. Or maybe you’ll get passionate about the idea of business itself - because if you do it right, you truly do offer people the better end of the deal and impact others in a magical and beautiful way… regardless of what it is your selling.

Because business done right is service. And service is the key to happiness.