Finding Business Ideas by Brian O'Kane

Author:Brian O'Kane [O’Kane, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978 1 84621 046 4
Publisher: Oak Tree Press

WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS?

Sell time, sell product or disrupt?

Effectively, lots of small businesses do no more than sell their owner’s time and skill – for example, a plumber sells his / her time, even if they don’t charge by the hour, because when they are not working, they don’t get paid. Accountants, consultants, tradespeople – anyone with a saleable skill – does the same. This kind of business is easy to get into – provided that you have the necessary skill and experience in an area that people are willing to pay for – but its growth is limited to the number of hours’ work that you, or your staff, can deliver.

Moving to a situation where you sell a ‘product’ usually involves greater financial commitment and a bigger, better-resourced organisation, since the product has to be made before it can be sold. So you need raw materials, manufacturing processes, factories and warehouses, etc – or you buy in finished products in bulk from someone else who makes them. Either way, there’s more outlay and risk – but potentially better reward.

The really enormous rewards come in businesses based on ‘disruptive technologies’, ones that completely change the way that people do things in a particular area. For example, look at the impact that fax, email and mobile phones have had on communications: when post and landline phones were the only ways of communicating with people, communications were slow and / or expensive over long distances and people had difficulty changing arrangements at short notice; now, email removes distance as a barrier, while Skype / VOIP phones remove cost as a barrier, while mobile phones remove the need to be at a specific location in order to receive and take calls. And, fewer and fewer people post letters, except where some kind of physical document needs to be sent – for example, a contract or a birthday card. Fax, email and mobile phones have disrupted the conventional ways of doing things. The risk and rewards here are much, much higher – for every one successful disruptive technology, there are thousands that fail. And it’s not always the pioneers who reap the rewards – usually, it’s the people who come behind them, who avoid the mistakes and enter the market after it has been educated to understand, to use and to value the new technology.

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