There is this famous story that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, once told a group of startups the following:
It is a story about European beer breweries around the turn of the 20th century.
At that time, electricity has just been invented. This was this massive enabling technology. Breweries could now brew vastly more quantities of beer than you could before electricity.
The first breweries to adopt it built their own power generators. It worked fine for a few years but it was super capital intensive.
Then the utilities companies came along and the next generation of breweries just rented the power from the utilities companies.
They beat the first generation of breweries because whoever makes your electricity has no impact on how your beer tastes.
Jeff’s argument to all of these startups was focus on what makes your beer taste better, that is – you should focus on the attributes of your product that your customers are going to care about.
Simple, yet when I met more and more business owners, a lot of times the importance of such is overlooked, especially by small business owners like myself. Too often, contrary to what we hope for, we are dragged by the happenings around us, and we are “reacting” to the environment and day-to-day events. They could be trivial but they are things that filled up our daily schedule — and over time, dictate our destiny.
To avoid the above, we need to be purposeful in everything we do. Does this make our beer taste better. And keep going.
God, I am willing to do whatever it takes. Try me.
Ryan