“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to always be right by having no ideas at all.” Says Edward De Bono
(Mr. Edward De Bono is regarded by many as the leading authority in the field of creative thinking, innovation and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.)
Do you realize that all champions in no matter what field are always only a tiny bit more right (successful) than the runner-ups?
But that tiny bit is making them VERY successful! In fact, people or teams who are not even winning 50% of the time in almost all championships!
So how does it relate to pursuing one’s goals in business and in life? Are you afraid of embracing new ideas for your practice just because you have been ‘burnt’ a few times? Doing nothing looks ‘safe’ but only apparently so!
The worst thing to do is nothing!
The same principles apply to those business owners who absolutely positively want only high paying clients or patients.
They want to cater to the cream de la cream.
Nothing directly wrong with it, as long as it is not compulsive.
It is on an average much better to get a great number of clients in a lower price range than looking for the few who can pay for the exclusive product or service.
However that does not mean a business owner has to give up his idea of working with the exclusive clientele, which he usually finds more interesting, more challenging, more professional, and perhaps more profitable.
I am sure all of the above is true and nothing wrong with pursuing this clientele.
But there is another idea — new to some of you, and thus it has not been embraced by many, as Mr. Edward De Bono said.
The idea is to pursue the lower class clientele, make a great living at it and from that large pool of clientele cultivate more of the high class clientele than any other approaches might have ever given you.
Sure, the average business owner who is set up exclusively for the higher clientele might need a change of operating bases. He might even need to start a complete second business.
Who said life is easy? Nobody wants it easy otherwise we would not have people climbing mountains where the chance of crash and die is high, or do car-racing where racers die all the time. What about policemen risking their lives and business people going for broke all the time?
No, it is not the easy route which people are looking for, but the exciting route.
In any case this route of being open to new ideas, such as the one I have just suggested for people who depend on a few high paying clients, always have lesser failures than not pursuing new ideas.
And let’s face it, in the business world if one does not come up with new ideas, new business models, totally new and additional business altogether, then one can expect disaster anyhow.
Oh yes, if you look around, you will hardly ever see one type of business staying the same for the entire working career of a person.
Definitely not in this time and age where new business models come so fast that most of us can not even keep up with them.
By the way, here are a few examples about marketing to a lower class of clientele:
Jaguar, Mercedes, BMW, all of them have added $35,000 cars to capture this market and to nourish those people into their upper class service.
At the same time Toyota created a totally different high-class company called Lexus.
Do you think that part of their success was the conversion or up-selling of some of their Toyota clients?
Check it out, you will be surprised!
There are many ways to go to Rome and many ways to skin a cat. New ideas are the forefront of all progress ever happened on this planet.
Do not be a sheep, which is a ‘follower’ by definition. Be a leader — someone who has new ideas and goes about executing them against any and all risks.
New ideas and the persistence to execute those ideas creates all the new life on this planet.
Have a happy creating!
Helmut G. Flasch
CEO
Flasch Business Expansion
Category: Business Improvements.
