STARTING a business in this period of recession would only mean an invitation to death, but need not be so if you follow Will King’s advice. He believes that if you can create a business that survives in a downturn, it will prosper when the good times return. After all the “ability to booktrap in the early days is a critical part of starting any business,” he says.
Using redundancy as his springboard, Will started his uber-cool brand King of Shaves in the eye of the last recession—Gillette and Schick-Wilkinson Sword, two businesses with a combined market capital of a sum of $ 62 billion. These are competitors that most would view as impossible to compete with. The author believes that successful entrepreneurs, that is, people who are able to shape their lives and those of others for the better, value the power of kindness and collaboration. Since they may be competitive and know that not everyone is going to be like them, but overall if you’re going to transform your life and determine your own success, you have to get close to people, treat them as friends and embrace the notion that “what’s given out, is gotten back”, according to the author. He presents his ideas and shares some of the best of them.
Never one to follow market conventions, he shows how to ‘zag’ while his competitors ‘zig’ by repeated use of the acronym SPACE, where S stands for satisfaction of success, P for passion and persistence, A for attitude of action, C for coincidence and commonsense and E for enthuse, exceed, enjoy! This SPACE philosophy of his is a powerful code for disrupting the market and being successful. The satisfaction of success should not be through having cars, yachts, houses, etc. but should mean having the courage to take the step from doing nothing to doing something and asking questions like, ‘Can it be better?’ or ‘Should it be changed?’ Often the answer is ‘no’. It would just be change for change’s sake, but sometimes this relentless questioning – “Are we good enough? or “Is it good enough?’ – can pay huge dividends because out of the questioning arise unexpectedly creative solutions.
Some of this invaluable advice includes coming up with a truly original, never-seen-before product that turns into an outstanding commercial success. This is probably one of the toughest things to do. Why your competitors products are expensive, make yours affordable. When their products are ugly, make yours stylish. When they spend millions on attracting people to buy their products, you should try to build “genuine satisfaction into the DNA of your brand”. He advises: Embrace new ideas and new pockets of knowledge and information on a daily basis. You can find a location for your business by using Google Streetmaps or a web service like Twitter to make people aware of your service or expertise. His final word is that you should meet people, talk about strategy, share experiences for “it can make a real difference.”
(Hachette, Headline Publishing Group, 338 Euston Road, London-NW1 3BH; www.hachette.co.uk)
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