How To Be Successful By Working Smart

Success seems elusive to most of us. This is a code that few actually crack, but why?

The majority of people work hard and seem to never achieve their financial and professional goals. We have heard that working hard is sufficient, but is it? Is it enough to just work hard?

Is there another piece of this puzzle that we have been missing? Let’s dive into the subject and see.

If You Are Thinking About Starting A Business

First, ask yourself these questions:

Where is the money?

What has the largest return on investment potential?

What has the largest potential customer base?

Does this idea evolve into passive income at some point?

We will take a closer look at each of these points throughout this article.

Work Hard Or Work Smart

Working hard is certainly a very important part of the formula. Someone that does not work hard is not likely to ever be successful at much of anything, but most of us can attest to the fact that working hard, by itself, is not enough. We all know, or should know, that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. But it may take more than that. The missing piece of this puzzle is “working smart”. What exactly does that mean?

Here are some examples of this idea

I sometimes see people standing on the street corner selling candy apples. And I think to myself, they drove to the store and bought the ingredients, went home and made the candy apples, made their way to the street corner and stood there all day in the blistering sun making, perhaps $1.00 gross profit per apple. If they manage, somehow, to sell 30 apples that day, they made a $30.00 gross profit. If you subtract the cost of gas, electricity, other production costs, etc, they probably made a net profit of $20.00 for 10 hours of total work. That’s $2.00 an hour, wouldn’t it have been smarter to get a job at McDonald’s and make $18 an hour?

If someone has $20,000 to invest in a business and they choose to buy an ice cream truck and work very hard to start an ice cream truck business with that $20,000, putting in 10 hour days peddling ice cream cones to a small customer base for a $1.00 profit per cone. Some would say, that’s a good business. But, what if someone else takes that same $20,000 and invested it in an Internet business with a wide appeal to a large potential customer base. Initially, the person starting the Internet business would work just as hard as the person starting the ice cream truck business and invest the same amount of money, but after the Internet business is up and running, perhaps that person will only be working a few hours a day and make 1000X or 10,000X the income, not to mention profit. Which is a smarter investment?

When people tell me that they want to start a business, the first question I always ask is; “where is the money”? No matter what business you start, you’re going to be working very hard in the beginning and, in most cases, investing a lot of money. So, why not invest your time and money in something that has unlimited return on investment potential. Why invest that time and money in something that has such little potential to pay off? 

Let’s Take A Closer Look

Where is the money

There are so many possible business ideas out there. But which ones will actually be profitable? That is the first and most important question to ask when thinking about starting a business. There’s no point in starting a business that is not going to be profitable or has limited profit potential. If you’re going to make the investment of time and money, you might as well “go big”. How do you do that? It involves a variety of things.

• Research your idea to see if other people are making a lot of money doing it.

• Look at your idea from as many angles as possible, and try to find a fresh angle that no one else is doing.

• Ask yourself; “is this going to meet a big need or a little need of the potential client base”. It’s potentially more profitable to go for meeting the big needs rather than trying to make a lot of money meeting the little needs. And, FYI, if your business idea isn’t solving a problem or meeting a need, it may not be a potentially profitable idea.

• Is everyone already doing it? Is the market saturated? If it is, that may not be a dealbreaker, but it will require a lot more creativity.

What has the largest return on investment potential

If you’re investing time and money, how do you get the biggest bang for the buck? To a great extent, this comes from choosing the right business to start in the first place. As mentioned in the scenarios above, choosing to invest your time and money starting a business that has very little potential to make money, is just not a reasonable thing to do. If you’re going to do it, do it in a way that will be the most profitable. How do you do this? Ask some of these questions:

• How much will I have to invest financially and is there potential to 100X or 1000X this investment?

• If you think that there is the potential to do that, how is that going to happen? Is it because you’re going to sell a high dollar thing to a few people or low dollar thing to a lot of people?

• Do I have the capital to fund this project long enough to reach that goal?

• Can I afford to lose my investment of the idea flops?

• Do I have the stick-to-itiveness to see this through?

What has the largest potential customer base

Why start a business that only has 1000 possible customers, unless you’re going to be charging them $1 million each. When starting a business, you have to ask yourself, how many people are going to want this? In the above example of an ice cream truck, you might get 30 to 50 customers a day, if you’re lucky. But in the example of an Internet business, you could get 3,000 to 5,000 customers a day, or more. Big difference. So, what now?

• Generally speaking, more customers is better than less customers. There are some business models where that is not true, but that is a rarity.

• For most business models, you’re going to want to sell your product or service to as many people as you possibly can in order to maximize profit.

• To maximize the potential number of customers, you have to be offering something that almost everyone wants or needs. Offering a very small niche specialized product or service limits the potential number of customers and makes it very difficult to be profitable. Again, there are some brands that go that route successfully.

• So, ask yourself, “is the service or product that I am wanting to sell something that everyone in the world needs or wants”? If the answer is no, take a pause and think about it a little bit more. See if this is the right idea for you.

Does this idea evolve into passive income at some point

You don’t want to saddle yourself with a business that never evolves into passive income. You never want to trade time for money long-term.

There are only so many hours in the day and you only have so many years to work so it doesn’t make sense to trade time for money indefinitely. You always want to look at business ideas that can evolve into passive income; where you are making money whether you’re working or not.

This only makes sense. In fact, personally, I would not start any business that did not evolve into passive income. If you’re going to invest the time and money to start a business, why do you want to continue to work that hard forever? The smart thing to do is to invest the effort and money upfront with the plan that the effort decreases while the income increases over time. 

This is a very valuable perspective to consider when wanting to start a business. All of the things discussed above are critical in the early development stages of your new business. Think about these ideas and apply them to your business idea and hopefully it will make you more profitable and help you get to the place where you are making money without working. Here’s to good entrepreneurship. Cheers.