Doing It Against The Odds

 A series of "Evidence"

     If you have considered starting your own business, jewelry of other wise, no doubt somebody  has informed you that four out of five small businesses will end in failure within their first five years. That's a staggering failure rate! If that were the whole story no one in their right mind should ever want to own their own business! We should accept it and move on. But wait a minute, It's not the whole story! What about that 1 in 5 gal. Well the odds are pretty great that she was a 4 out of 5'er at lease once and pretty high she was a 4 out of 5'er twice. What happens is each time she tries is she learns more about what works and what doesn't work. There's another thing that happens. I got my first bank loan, in my name, no cosigner, when I was twelve years old! I bought two pregnant sows, Raised the pigs, kept two more sows, bread them, raised the pigs and sold the rest. By the time I was sixteen I had a dozen sows and  semi truck worth of bacon and pork chops.   I sold out of the hog production business! Had I failed as a hog producer? I was a solid 4 out of 5'er. I just lost interest in farming.
     I watched a family owned liquor store set up a barbeque grill, out their back door. It didn't take long for a  barbeque catering and wine tasting company to spin off. They basically became their own best customer. I watched their Bingo Parlor transform into the catering business. Yup they would have qualifies as 4 out of 5'ers. So I'm going to tell you what they never do. If you've tried and failed, ponder a while and try again. The odds are changing in your favor. One of the things we need to do is stop believing the "sort of" information people keep giving us,
    I spoke to the plant superintendent of  rather large electronics company a few years ago. He said that in his industry people are  only accurate about half of the time. I was pretty shocked with his 55% figure. He went on to say that anyone in his industry anyone that was accurate 85% of the time would be considered genius level. I started thinking, There is no way I could be wrong 15% of the time and still be in business. You won't be able to either. Here's how to get your accuracy rate up. Most people fire back answers at questions like they have a machine gun, professionals at automatic fire, fire in short bursts. We are going to add a pause and a question from us between their question and our answer. Goes something like this. Your kid in the back seat of the car says, "Dad, Are greyhounds yellow? Instead of your usual fast all knowing answer of "No" you respond with "Why? Your son says"'cause if that's not a Greyhound, then it's a schoolbus coming directly at us."  Pause, clarify the question.
    I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Very few people, just a couple of close employees and imediate family members, know this about me. I'm really two people! There's the amazing can do anything at the jewelers bench guy, according to the standing behind the counter talking to a customer me. And there's the "Holly buckets of grease Batman, What have you gotten me into this time? How cheap am I going to have to do this little bit of wonderment?" guy, when I'm seated at the bench. I swear my IQ goes up ten points when I sit at the jewelers bench.
   This week I'll blog some more on this making it-doing it stuff. I'm pretty solidly in like with destination marketing,  selling directly to my own retail customers and a synergistic approach to being artist-designer-craftsman. Hope you enjoy