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Page 30 GO IT ALONE!
and entities on the other side of the country or even around the world. What does this mean? First, it means that you must assume that if you are a success, others have noticed what you are doing and will copy you. One leading inventor said that “the most difficult thing is simply knowing that something can be done.” Once this individual saw that something could be done, he knew that with enough effort he could eventually figure out how it was done. The knowledge that it had been done already told him that the particular problem in question could be solved. All businesspeople should take this to mean that competitors can—and are work-ing—to reverse-engineer whatever they are doing. Successful go-it-alone businesspeople are constantly in an experimental mode: - Just as you want to design your business with the flexibility to shift your product mix, you also want to be constantly operating live tests of potential improvements in your core business. For me, this means that at any one moment I am conducting somewhere between 5 and 10 different tests of how services are marketed on the Web.
You can, in part, measure whether you are living up to this goal by the time you devote to the process. My rule of thumb is that at least 1 hour a day should be devoted to creating and administering tests of new business initiatives. An important point here is that an experimental attitude encompasses both ongoing curiosity and a willingness to constantly reconsider your business assumptions. Inder Guglani, the founder of Emoonlighter.com, now Guru.com, says that his firm tests, learns, and then constantly evaluates. His point is that the world has become such a dynamic place that “what
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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.
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