ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP || Be Brave Enough to Disrupt Your Business or Prepare to Lose to The Competition
Most people are afraid of change.
Entrepreneurs tend to lean towards being a bit more risk loving, or even better, have learned how to take more calculated risks. If you're running your own business, you need to be at the very least open to change. Why? Because if you aren't constantly thinking and testing ways of how you can do better, the competition will overtake you, and you'll be one of many substitutes available in the market.
This is why you must be brave enough to be your own disrupter.
I recently finished reading Bob Iger's Ride of a Lifetime, which details his years leading up to and at the helm of Disney. The fact a company as big as Disney realized that they had to be their own disrupter or run the risk of getting left behind is inspiring. With the rapid evolution of technology, the company knew they had to find a way to distribute their content instead of relying on just television channels; content would move from large screens to small screens that fit in the palm of your hand, and so they first made a deal to distribute ABC's content on the Apple iPod in its early days, and then several years later, launch the Disney Channel and gained majority ownership of the Hulu streaming service.
If they had stayed comfortable with their dominance in animated films on movie screens and tv shows on television channels, there would be no Disney+ today. If the company didn't buy Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilms (creator of the Star Wars legacy) and leverage the content IP and technology prowess of their acquired assets, it wouldn't have achieved the magnitude of growth had it stayed with its own animation studio.
When you find initial success with your business, you tend to want to keep that and stay in that comfortable position; after all, why fix something if it's not broken? If you don't break it yourself, someone else will come along and break it for you.
If you aren’t constantly looking at how your business can evolve with the market and trends, then your business will run out of fuel without innovation.
I recently shared with my staff an honest reflection of where I think our marketing agency stands. We had accurately predicted the trends that would be adopted this year and started to prepare for it last year; the market has now grown, and we are profiting off of foresight and preparations, but our competitors also see the money and are close to our tracks, launching similar me-too products. This means we need to think of new ways to innovate; what could we do that makes us stand out from the rest of our competitors? To lead instead of follow?
One of many things that could kill a business is complacency, and if you allow yourself and your team to get too comfortable with newfound success in the business, then you're bound to be the hare in the race between the turtle and the hare. Letting some initial success get to you and being overconfident is how you will eventually lose the game.
Don't be afraid to look for holes in your business, weed out staff who do not align with your vision of where your company wants to be, and go for the long shot because they often aren't that long.
Do you have the courage to be your own disrupter?
