November 5th, 2006
Blackinbusiness in paradise
A few years back I had the good fortune to attend an advance executive program, at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of management. The fast paced program lasted 30 days and we met 7 days a week. 40 percent of the class was international and the levels of attenders were mostly VP, COO’s and CEO’s. A delightful and over achieving group, and a Dream Team of professors from Kellogg’s MBA program made the program even more special.
One lecture was on strategies for growth and spoke of mistakes companies made and also the things that companies do well. A consistant theme was to focus on one area and ensure that you became an expert in that area, verses doing several things half assed. For example, take Kentucky Fried Chicken, they focus on doing one thing well and thats chicken. A great fighter knocks people out!
Shortley after this program, my family and I traveled to the Carribean Island of St. John, which is part of the American Virgin Islands. As you reach the Island from St. Thomas, you arrive by ferryboat. The ferryboat company is a black owned. There ferries travel and connect all the U.S and British Virgin Islands. The company also does boat tours for hotels which appears to represent a significant revenue. When we arrived in St. John, we caught a shuttle to the Avis store to pick up our rental car. We discovered that the same black business owner also owned the Avis franchise.
I spoke with management, which consisted of the owner’s daughters. The owner had several of his children working in his business franchise. They were very proud of their father, a self-made man, black islander, employing the same strategy referred to as genius when talking about Honda and their manufacturing of the small motors, used in everything from lawn mowers, to motorcycles, to cars. This black in business core competency is tranportational. From ferries, to rental cars, to hotel shuttles and even school buses. This man did not attend Harvard School of Business, University of Chicago, Stanford or Kellogg, but perfected a strategy that students of these top rated universities are trying to learn. Obviously a great business man, but as Dennis Kimbrough would ask, what makes the ”great great”. The 10 rules for Black Business success, is one having pride in your history and sound strategy is also another one. Together lets find more! I look forward to your comments.
November 8th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Excellent post. Understanding this principle has probably been the single most important key to any attainable measure of success that I have gained thus far. Upon beginning your journey as an entrepreneur, it is very easy to become so filled with creative energy, passion, and excitement for taking something that was nothing more than a notion or idea in your head, and creating a functioning business out of it, that you begin to actually fall in love with this feeling of excitement and creativity. Your creative juices are flowing, and before you know it, you have another idea for a new business, and another, and another, and so it goes. You are enthralled with the sense of achievement and adventure that comes from creating something new and the thought of making your own money, so naturally you want to work on all these great ideas at the same time so that they can all come to fruition as soon as possible. Then the burnout hits, you are working on everything at once, and all of the business are going nowhere fast. They are all great ideas, but you just can’t seem to generate enough capital from any of them to live comfortably, and you don’t have the time or resources to work on any of them individually as much as you need to in order to really spark success, and you definitely don’t have the money to bring on hired help. What do you do? Well, at this point for most people, you either sink or continue to swim. Some people never learn the lesson, but they are mentally tough and will never quit, so they swim forever…but they swim in circles, always trying to do everything at once, being jack’s of all trades, but masters of none. Other people are just excited by the novelty of being an entrepreneur, but when the times get too hard, they sink. They say they gave it their best, but it just “didn’t work”. They go back to normal lives, and are content and happy to have someone else sign their paycheck every week and have a glass ceiling put on the measure of success and profit that they have access to. There is a select group of people though, a small group, that get the lesson. They too have the where with all to swim and keep swimming, but they realize, either from their own experience or from the wise words of others, that the only way they will make it anywhere is if they swim in ONE DIRECTION AT A TIME. They swim at a steady, consistent pace, and they make it to land. They achieve success, and once they do, they put a team in place to keep the solid foundation that they have built running operating smoothly, and they take another swim. My most valuable lesson so far has been to focus on what will generate the best return in the shortest amount of time, and once you have created a structure that will run smoothly without you having to be around EVERY single day for it to operate, move on to creating your next successful business, and keep using that formula. The one exception that I have found is, like the article above, if you have several business that you want to start that are all within the same industry and could help propel each other to success even quicker, then that is a time where working on multiple businesses at once could be effective, but you still need a solid infrastructure and team in place so that you are not over-extended.
November 8th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Thomas, you said it all and have lived it all, soon I want to blog about you and your success as a young black man in business.Please tell our friends from Howard about this blog. I would love to hear from more of the interns
JD