Ten Eclipse-Inspired Reminders to Use in Your Business
Just when you may have thought the eclipse was an excuse to have a few hours off, take a second look at how the event in its totality brought home some important reminders for anyone running a business.Want a FREE PDF copy of this blog post?
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- Humans are curious
On August 21, 2017, millions of people stopped what they were doing to look at the sky. Way back in the day, humans had to experience the eclipse without receiving a weeks long primer from the 24-hour news cycle. This year everyone knew what to do. They purchased the correct solar viewing glasses, found a spot to relax and let their minds be overtaken by the cosmic spectacle.
When building and running your business, remember this curiosity factor. If you do something original, or even the same, create a unique edge to it that will drive interested people to your website or storefront. Looky-loos slowing down on the freeway to gawk at an accident may be annoying when you are trying to get home. But this aspect of human nature can propel you to the top of your industry if you use the behavior correctly.
Action: make the uniqueness of your product or service for your ideal customer
- Shared experiences are emboldening
In an era when the collective is fading fast, and niches are rising up to create riches for those who know how to serve them, a shared experience is a rare and valued moment. While the Super Bowl or World Cup can still drive millions of people to watch the same screen at the same time, few other events have that kind of drawing power. The eclipse pulled people out of their homes to go to parks, science museums, conservatories, and even news station parking lots to watch a rare event together.
Creating a community around your business is one of the fastest ways to increase interest and build your brand. People who enjoy your product or service may band together to discuss or share their experience with it. They may want to be connected to other users in an ongoing way. You can establish and facilitate these groups and effectively maintain your brands’ followers through social media. A few excited, rabid fans will be more valuable for a longer period of time than thousands of indifferent followers on a social media platform.
Action: create a niche community in social media or at your website that serves your customers’ interest in your product or service
- Image sharing is domination
People are becoming increasingly more focused on visual imagery. Photo and video sharing services are rising fast on social media. Everyone with mobile phones in their hands is also carrying a camera. The ability to show an experience to millions at a time provides people with their daily approbation, a sense of belonging and even superiority. While some may lament the ‘drive for likes’ that dominates the average social media user’s day, others can recognize how the activity is part of our human sense of survival of the fittest.
If your product or service can be incorporated into a person’s day, it will likely find its way into social media photos and videos. People will feel compelled to join the sharing if they see you or someone they know doing it first.
Action: if you use social media, incorporate the images of your product or service, preferably in use, into your photo and video feeds.
- Cheap products can be reused
One of the hottest products to purchase in the last few weeks was solar eclipse glasses. In a time where everything is digital and quality means expensive, these pieces of cardboard selling for less than $2 each were specifically designed to prevent retinal damage from the sun’s rays. For such a cheap product, the glasses sounded awfully official, with designations such as ISO and CE certified (whatever that means), and assorted numbers associated to the solar filters. The product sold out everywhere. How could the product be so inexpensive? My guess is overseas sourcing, that is the materials and labor to make them came from inexpensive labor markets.
Solar eclipse glasses were a reminder that physical products have a place and can be made to deliver on their promise. If you are creating a product for your business, imagine how you can source the right combination of materials and scientific and manufacturing guarantees to make it valuable to your average consumer.
Action: when creating a product, look at sourcing for the long-term using the certified inexpensive materials that provide a valuable benefit.
- Destination travel is a party
To be in the direct path of ‘totality’ for the eclipse, millions traveled to a band of cities across the United States. They packed cars and RVs with beer, wine and snacks and set off with family and friends to pick a spot where they could sit for three hours and watch cosmic forces in action. This was a vacation with a purpose and everyone who made the trip needed an array of goods to support their viewing party.
If you have a business that supports travel, especially specific purpose destination travel, you have an opportunity to capitalize on the moment by tying your product or service to the travel reason. Think about how your product or service is essential to the travel reason, and how you can best serve customers who are looking for exactly the value you deliver to make their trip perfect.
Action: determine whether your product or service has a travel angle that can showcase your value to vacationers.
- People want explanations
Preparing to watch the eclipse generated thousands of questions from millions of people. Many still do not believe they received a solid response, especially in the partial eclipse areas where the sky did not go dark. Eclipse Day put organizations such as NASA and the American Astronomical society, as well as all of the new media at the forefront of providing information. Some delivered, many did not.
If you have a product or service built around delivering information to customers, you are in a field already providing value. People are constantly searching for more information about pretty much every thing they can think of. Search drives a huge portion of activity on the Internet, and the aggregation of information is a major factor in business success.
Action: think about the information your business can provide in your industry or field of interest. You may have a built in market of people who are looking for exactly the value you deliver.
- Scheduled events can work
In the on-demand, replay world, people are used to picking up on an event whenever they are ready to experience it. But when an event is scheduled for only a specific time, and there is no replay, people will flock to it for the chance to be a part of it. Despite a post-industrial, digital bent towards loose commitments, a scheduled event can take precedence, if it has the perceived value a person seeks (like a shared experience or a great photo opportunity).
In your business, you may be able to schedule exciting events that make customers drop all other activities to be part of the fun. Whether these are digital moments or ‘pop-ups’ in the physical world, the sense of timing tied to scheduled events is what makes it important in the first place.
Action: develop a must attend event for your customers that cannot be recorded or replayed.
- Lost productivity can strengthen teams
A few economists enjoyed predicting how much money businesses would lose during the eclipse hours. The number was of course in the millions. But what were employees doing while they stared out the window, probably chatting with their colleagues, maybe even introducing themselves to people they did not know. Fretting about losing may prompt you to miss out on what you are gaining, a whole new level of camaraderie in your team.
If your business needed a team boost, the eclipse viewing was an inexpensive (hand out glasses for all) way to leverage a global event for your own benefit. The viewing did not last all day, so anything that needed to be done could have happened at some point. But with those few free hours, you had a chance to change the dynamic of your team, possibly forever.
Action: the next time a collective event threatens to distract your employees, use the opportunity to encourage conversation and interaction with colleagues. A stealth team-building event may have a lot more lasting value than playing building games.
- Science is fun
Accepting the idea of an impending total eclipse of the sun meant you had to believe what the scientists were telling you. Few people have the equipment to measure the rotation of the earth, moon and sun. Most people rise every day expecting the sun to be able to send all its rays to the earth. For the few hours when it cannot, science has your attention.
If you have a business with a science connection, think about the need humans have to embrace science when it affects them directly. A total blackout of the sun hits home with every human and animal (and probably plant) on earth. Your business may not be as dramatic, but if you are selling a product or providing a service that helps people, consider how the science involved may spark additional interest in the value you are seeking to provide.
Action: use science facts to support the value your product or service purports to deliver.
- A reoccurring theme has reoccurring value (welcome back, Bonnie Tyler)
If you are a 80s music fan you probably enjoyed the resurrection of Bonnie Tyler on Eclipse Day. The 80s pop star’s hit song “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” enjoyed a YouTube surge, and she was all over the news seen still performing the song for the occasion. (The song was written by Jim Steinman). Besides the wonderful pop culture optics the news reports provided, the story was a reminder of how a product tied to a reoccurring theme can enjoy multiple rebirths.
If your business or service is not obviously tied to events or practices, like weddings, birthdays and eclipses, try and figure out if you have a theme. You have the ability to re-launch your product over and over again, if you can tie it to another ‘happening’ out in the world. The value of an ever-regenerating product cannot be measured. Each new launch brings new publicity, promotional opportunities and revenue.
Action: find the reoccurring nature of your product or service that can be used to re-launch, boost or promote your business again and again.
Remember…
A successful entrepreneur pays attention to how events in the world may affect a business enterprise. If you were one of the millions in the path of the total eclipse of the sun on Monday August 21, 2017, you may have been caught up in the spectacle and missed the business lessons magnified by the event. Hopefully these ten reminders will help you think about where to place your attention the next time a mass collective event takes place.
Want to discuss the content of this blog or other ideas? Send me an email to: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
Entrepreneurs, What Does Jack Ma’s One Million Jobs Plan Have To Do With Your Economic Future? Time To Go Global?
Imagine you open your specialty store on a quiet street in a peaceful town like Boise, Idaho, and from the first day your customer base equals seven billion people. That’s billion with a “B.” Why? Because you sell on Alibaba and being on the platform means you automatically have the ability to access the entire world population. This is the stated intention of Alibaba CEO Jack Ma.Want a FREE PDF copy of this blog post?
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With rising consumer demand for high quality products from China’s middle class, Ma has a vision that small business entrepreneurs in the U.S. can use the Alibaba platform to create online storefronts, and those small businesses will employ at least a million people, just as the process works in China (estimated 12 million entrepreneurs, employing 30+ million people in China). At Ma’s own conference, Gateway ’17 held in Detroit in June 2017, he repeated his intention to support one million U.S. jobs by helping American entrepreneurs reach the Chinese market. China represents one-fifth of the world’s people. And Alibaba’s reach through the Internet covers the whole world. For anyone looking to start a business in the 21st century, within our known worlds there is no greater potential market than…everyone on earth.
The whole idea may seem far-fetched to you as a small-business owner in small-town USA, but it should be standard practice for those entrepreneurs opening businesses right now. Understanding this reality will put you ahead of others who are considering becoming an entrepreneur, but limiting their market to only one country.
How will this form of online entrepreneurship work?
To start online with a global market, technically, you the entrepreneur would set-up your account on Alibaba (or any other similar site by the way), and use marketing and promotional techniques to attract interest in your product or service. If you are currently in a job destined to go overseas, or to a robot, your best chance to bounce back and continue to earn a living, may lie in your knowledge, hobby or personal skill, which you can sell as a product or service to the global marketplace.
The average consumer does not want to be average. People are constantly looking for specific products aimed at their particular tastes. Recently I was shopping for a slim shoulder bag that would fit my laptop. My specification requirements included specific shades of red or green (the colors of my company readyentrepreneur.com) that I also wanted to carry around. To find this bag, I was not going to go to a shopping mall and walk aimlessly through every store. I went online to Amazon.com. After entering a few search terms, I looked at various options and selected the one meeting my criteria – color, number of pockets, fits laptop, and also good reviews. Later, when I attended a conference carrying the bag, everyone commented on how much they liked it, and no one had heard of the manufacturer. That’s the opportunity that exists for every small business. The Internet is the infrastructure of the 21st century, playing the role taken by roads and railroads in the last century. But in contrast to the physical transportation infrastructure, cost and access to the Internet is inexpensive, and available to almost everyone. Setting up your business should always include the concession that you are global.
The Alibaba platform was originally designed as a business-to-business e-commerce site, think Amazon (as they do) for entrepreneurs looking for other entrepreneurs to provide products and services. Today additional companies under the Alibaba umbrella provide consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales, and the entire behemoth is on its way to $400 billion in market cap value. By the way, this is a company projecting $1 trillion in revenue in the next three years. The growing consumer demand for deepening niches of products is the rising curve accelerating small businesses into global companies.
Why will this work?
Availability of support services
The Internet has made access to business services possible for anyone in the world. The business infrastructure is readily available to anyone who wants to use the software. The work of managing consumers, suppliers, finances, logistics and technology is performed by many competitive Internet companies, and new ones arrive every day. In contrast to last century manufacturers, in the Internet age, a company can focus only on creating a product or service, and outsource the manufacturing, delivery and record-keeping to other systems, again at a reasonable price.
No market specific requirements
If you have a product or service, even if you think it’s unique to your market, you do not have to change your item and create different versions. In fact, maintaining its culturally-specific uniqueness will likely be a selling point. The world is waiting for products suiting their personalities, interests and desires. If you have the idea you can market it everywhere. Although there are many cultures were conformity is still implemented, sometimes violently, this is not the express wish of the world’s rising youth, liberated women and mobile workers. Think of the Filipina nurse who has worked in Saudi Arabia or New Zealand. Or the Barbadian restaurant manager who works on a cruise ship serving customers from ten countries traveling to twenty others. These global workers, spread their knowledge and experiences at home and abroad. And that movement is only expanding, not diminishing, as countries continue to build for a rising middle class, and expanding incomes promotes the demand for more professionals and service workers, including foreigners. Even if you think the market will not understand your product or service, you lose nothing if you at least offer your idea to the world and see what happens. You lose completely, by not attempting to go global.
No trade barriers
You have no free trade barriers in this scenario. Free trade agreements, and non-agreements, tend to focus on commodity items a country is trying to protect such as wheat, coal, oil and automobiles. But if you are making a unique item of clothing, or specific learning materials, or household decorations, or technology software, you are unlikely to face online barriers to trade. Meaning the economic value of cross-border trade may continue to grow, even if the government puts up trade barriers for other products. As people see traditional job opportunities continue to fade away, as is inevitable, those who are anti-globalization will be superseded by those who are desperate to make a living by running their own business. Individuals who are building businesses, will know they have global reach.
Expanded opportunity to make money
Individuals rarely turn down an opportunity to make money, even in the face of government policy or their neighbor’s disdain. In a world where old jobs are gone, education is expensive, and marginalized people are increasingly frustrated with their world, people will begin to search for new opportunities. If the technology is available, and the market is demanding your product or service, why would you leave money on the table? As a small business entrepreneur, you are positioned for global growth, and have an opportunity to embrace, not reject, the opportunity.
The issue is not the logistics of using Alibaba or any other e-commerce platform, it’s only about ensuring you are actually in the game. Ignoring the global market means you will miss out on revenue available in locations you may have never heard of. But if you are at least aware that these platforms are available, you will be able to see where the market is going, and take advantage of the movement.
Okay so what does Jack’s one-million jobs mean to you?
Influence legislative agenda
If the vision of a million Alibaba entrepreneurs comes to fruition, they will influence the augmentation of a global, free trade, self-supporting, entrepreneurial, technology-driven and controlled, individually-minded world. If you are resistant to any of these realities, your best defense is preparation.
Encouraging people to become self-supporting entrepreneurs is usually in most government’s portfolios. The more legislators focus on the opportunities Ma is evangelizing, the more realistic the global marketplace will become for small business entrepreneurs. If an influential percentage of the population can continue to earn money without the need of government assistance or the repatriation of a factory from another country, the government is relieved from its mandate to be concerned or involved in these people’s lives. The more Jack Ma and people like him can simplify the online tools used by entrepreneurs, the more people will jump online and their dependents will be removed from the government’s umbrella.
Promote free trade
Online marketplaces are the definition of global free trade. This is a case where technology will drive human interaction, not government. Free trade automatically exists online and there is no government ability to end this reality. Even if legislators pulled the plug on the Internet, clever technologists would figure out how to directly deliver the connection services. Global free trade is a fact of economic life, and online entrepreneurs do not need a trade treaty to work with people all over the world.
Further impact of technology
The ongoing ability of technology to drive our activities, and help us make money, becomes even more ubiquitous in a world where the average entrepreneur has to think of the online presence as a branch of the business, not only a function of the business’s administration, like the accounting department. Although earning a living income online increases a person’s dependency on Internet technology, the benefits outweigh the risks as the number of people utilizing online services increases exponentially.
Redirect competition
A global online marketplace for small business also changes the nature of competition. With everyone operating in a niche, there are no competitors. You will design your company to be unique from the beginning, and you will target a market others are ignoring. In my everyday life, as likely in yours, I can think of dozens of products I wish I had which could make my life easier and more efficient. If I can find these products on the Internet, as with my slim laptop bag, I will buy it. Do you want your products or services to be available to those who are looking for it? If so, you must begin researching the options available to you. If you are afraid of globalization, an individual self-interest driving the economy, a million online global storefronts could be your worst nightmare, until you are looking for a specific item to buy at an inexpensive price. At that point, you are likely to imagine you did not know how you could have lived without the service for so long.
For more information about becoming an entrepreneur, visit my website, https://www.readyentrepreneur.com.
For a future world vision of the impact of Jack’s idea, see the version of this blog created for my Life Online book series at http://www.claneworld.com.
Want to discuss these ideas? Send me an email: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
