Steve Huey’s Blog

What standard do you set for your company? To be better than your competition? What about the three people in a garage? Ask Craig Newmark!  He blew away multiple Billion dollar industries with a free or almost free product.  I bet no web company – Ebay, Amazon, Yahoo thought that anyone would come along and snipe them out of a market.  Craig did with a staff of less than 30 people.

You must cannibalize yourself before others do.  Do you have a weak spot that can be exploited?  If so it will be.  I am not advocating selling you high end product for zero dollars.  What I am suggesting is that you must make sure that your point of differentiation provides real value.  Newspapers classified ads created real value for a hundred or more years but when confronted with new technology they stuck their collective heads in the sand and hoped it was a fad.  Their real value (providing reach in a local community) was eliminated and became a commodity.

Trends that will kill your business move slowly until they don’t.

 Define for me the qualities of a place where you would like to work.

Here are mine:

• Where we can have fun, 
• Where we work as a team, 
• Where hard work is rewarded, 
• Where we can make a difference, 
• Where we are challenged and can grow.

Add more value than you take!

That is it – the secret to all living.  If you can create more value you will get more value.  Think about it – if you give more love you will be loved.  If you are friendly more often – more often people will be friendly to you.

In business you should seek to add value to your clients and partners – if you create a lot of value you can charge a lot of money (capture a lot of value) for your services.  If you run a business that has pricing pressure and you can barely pay your bills then you are not creating value.  EBay created value by creating the world’s largest garage sale.  Sears created value by bringing goods to the American farm families and captured much value fifty years ago only to be replaced by Wal-Mart who created economies of scale value.  Microsoft created value by placing software infrastructure in the hands of programmers and later by placing productivity software in the hands of “Office” workers.

Create more value than you consume and your life, and that of your business endeavor will be easy!