In the last video I discussed
product market fit, and the whole question here (in this
series of videos) is about reinventing my own business.
So when you're reinventing
a business, you need to really understand what your product is.
Because if you don't understand what your product is,
you don't necessarily know how it can be used.
My very favorite example of this is that
I met a gentleman who at one point realized that pasta makers
were the same actual machine as an embossing machine.
Only with blades is it.
He went out and he purchased
pasta makers, removed the blades from the pasta makers,
and then resold the resulting machine as an embossing machine.
In order for him to make that leap,
he needs to understand machine. Stop calling
it a pasta maker, and instead think of it in terms
of just the raw qualities of what it does and then brainstorm.
"What are different places
that set of raw qualities could come in handy?" Because pasta making is
one, and it turns out that embossing is another.
So if we're talking about one person
business or at least currently one person business, the question is,
what are the raw materials that I'm bringing to the table?
What is the universe of possible skills and abilities
and things that I have to be able to bring to the world?
I just spent several years as an executive coach, really loved it,
but it doesn't scale the way that I want to scale. The amount
of prospecting time that I spend relative to the amount of time
actually coaching, not a great ratio.
So what are my skills?
Let's run through them really quickly.
My most obvious knowledge base is that I understand business very
intimately, how it works and how to link strategy to operations.
So I'm good at both the big picture thinking and also turning the big
picture into the specific tactical details.
I am fundamentally someone who develops other people as a coach.
I did this even as an operating manager.
In my various operational roles.
I always prided myself
that the members of my team would get a promotion after working
with me because I would help them develop.
I would help them develop themselves
and also how to promote themselves within an organization so they could
get enough visibility that they would get promoted.
I've been with almost a dozen startups over many years,
so I also understand the entrepreneurial growth process.
I understand things like what
systems to set up and how you identify the systems, etc. etc.
So entrepreneurship is a pretty strong skill set right there.
Then of course, there's personal productivity.
I ran the Get-it-Done Guy podcast for twelve years.
The first 100 episodes were easy. The last 400 and some odd episodes.
I really had to start delving pretty deeply into learning how people do
what they do, the common mistakes, etc. I have a strong personal productivity back there's.
Communication skills.
I have done stuff in all different forms of media.
I've done video, I've done audio,
I've done radio, I've done podcast, so prerecorded spontaneous,
a lot of live presenting so very strong communication skills.
Then there's the skill set that most people don't know about me,
which is that I am a master trainer of neuro linguistic programming.
NLP is related to cognitive science.
It's a series of models for how people communicate.
So I'm very good at understanding what are the relationships between
how people think and how they communicate.
This obviously, when I'm doing personal development work with people,
helps me both uncover their limiting beliefs and thought
patterns that need to be changed or expanded or amplified.
But it also helps me actually lead them through processes to do that.
And the last area I'll call life and career planning.
I did a TEDx talk
(the video got destroyed, so unfortunately,
it's not on the website) but I did a TEDx
talk called Living an Extraordinary Life.
It was about the results of an experiment that I did
in which I was very, very deliberate about understanding
what beliefs I have and had what was driving me in my career. Then
going out and finding other people and finding out what beliefs drive
them, looking at the results that we had and playing around
with different ways of framing your life.
And then there's my style.
I'm very creative.
I'm very expressive.
I tend to be very analytical.
I've clearly got that thing going.
I'm not warm touchy-feely,
although I am fun and I care a lot. I tend to come up with really
creative ways of expressing myself, designing courses
and transformational experiences for people.
So, for example,
after my book on Personal Productivity was
published, I co wrote a musical about zombies and personal
productivity, two things that always go together.
And that musical was a way of teaching several
of the techniques that appeared in my book.
So I've got that.
I've got strong creativity, strong communication skills.
I'm opinionated.
I do learn from experience, however, and I learn from data so I can be
convinced as long as you can get past my opinionation
So that's what I'm bringing
to the market, and I don't know what it all adds up to.
I have asked people who know me
from the outside, and I've gotten a wide range of suggestions.
For example, I should help people with their careers.
I should really help people
accelerate how they show up and how they advance their careers.
Or I should do communication skills,
training platform skills, how to be charismatic, on stage,
how to come across well on camera things like that.
I could also do something about entrepreneurship.
I could either do classes for entrepreneurs or create
an accelerator or an incubator or something like that.
Or maybe I should do marketing because marketing is really
at the intersection of psychology and business and communication.
So it's a nice blending of several of the skills that I've done before.
And I recently had somebody suggest that I could be a product
evangelist, which is true when I find products
that I like, I can't stop talking about them.
I can write about them. I can tie them into everything
from personal productivity to corporate strategy.
So that's a possibility, too.
With such a wide range of options,
I could just pick one and just go for it and double down.
But what I'm going to do is go back
to the entrepreneurship research and say, how is it that really
successful entrepreneurs would approach this situation?
And we'll be discussing that in the next video.
Thanks for joining me.