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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity podcast. We try each day to bring you one to two market and business insight episodes, plus additionally an interview, typically with a business leader. Today's discussion is 13 key business points and we hope you enjoy this. This comes a little bit out of a book that we're working on, some webinars and speeches we're giving and hopefully you find this interesting, entertain, entertaining and somewhat useful. Going to talk through 13 different business points and we'll see what you think. We'll try and do this relatively rapidly, but not so rapidly that's not listenable. The first concept in building a business is if you're going to build a business, you better be customer obsessed and really trying to make sure things work great for your customer. When you're doing things great, you're really taking care of a customer, really taking care of a specific listener, a specific reader. Whatever you do for business, you have to be customer obsessed and really great about taking care of your people and your customers. You know, a great example of this is I work with a podcast producer, Chanel Bunger, who is as customer obsessed and taking care of customers in a great way as they come. The same thing with the entire team at Executive Podcast Solutions and Jeremy McCor's team. But that customer centric activity that taking care of customers is so, so important in any business that you're in. Second is any business that you're in. I'm not a believer in the solopreneur concept. You have to build teams and you've got to build strong teams. You can't go very far by yourself. You could do certain things. I see all these people online that talk about they're this crazy successful solo solopreneur and they might be. My experience is you need some core team and to build a team if you want to do great things. So building teams is the number two concept for the day. The third concept we'll call niches. Niches is the third concept. And the concept here is it is much easier to build a business around specific niches than a broad general market. I've built most of my businesses in the business to business world around specific areas and niches. Whenever I'm building something more broadly, such as around business, generally much, much harder to be really successful. But if you could build around niches, specific niches, you're far better. I love that concept of building everything that we do around niches. When I stick to it and I'm disciplined, we do really well. When I Don't stick to it. Not so well. Fourth, any business you're building, anything you're doing that you want to do great, there's no way around bringing a certain amount of passion and drive to it. So you better be intent on bringing passion and drive. If you don't have the passion drive, cultivate it, try and find it. Very. I very often find people that are highly successful that weren't seriously driven and passionate about what doing at some point. I mean, they have to love it, but they got to love building the business. Doesn't mean they're passionate about whatever it is they're doing, but they got to love wanting to build the business and do great things. That's fourth. Fifth concept is we use this concept often, which is to double down around your best people, double down around your best customers, double down on your best profit and service lines. It's not constantly the new, new, new thing. It's rather looking at constantly doubling down on what's working and recognizing in your business what's going great and what's working and what's not. So we call that doubling down. That's five of the concepts so far. Customer obsessed, building around niches, building great teams, bringing passion to drive, and doubling down on what's working. Great customers, great employees, great service lines, whatever it is that's working. Here are several more points that we'll make in today's discussion. The sixth point we call the Greekest role, and this is named after a great, great lawyer that worked with me early in his career. And the moral story here is that great lawyer left working with me at some point, and then I was somewhat high and dry for a period of time. And this is a great lawyer, a great person. And, but, but the lesson I learned from is you can't be over reliant on, on one great customer, one great person, one great anything. The real goal is conjunction, is to keep that person and grow more great people. But that was a stark reminder to me early in my career. You cannot be too reliant on any one person. That's what we call the Greekest role. Another rule that we talk about, we'll call the Gordon Rule. This is number seven of these talking points today. The Gordon rule is in a tough economy, people will take jobs for less money than they're worth. And the mistake you can make as an employer is to pay them less than they're worth. Because what happens is if you pay them less than they're worth, they're so thankful to have the job. But then In a very short period of time start looking for the next job even though they were having a very hard time finding a job to begin with. We call it the Gordon Rule. Named after again, a brilliant person we hired paid her less than she was worth and then she went on and found another job. We call that Gordon Rule and, and, and never dull. But we think that just is a really res. A really interesting learning experience for me. Just like the Greek is. Rule was you can't be too reliant on one great employee. The Gordon rule was you can't underpay people even if they'll take a lower pay because they won't stay at that pay. Those are seven issues so far. The eighth thing is constantly looking for product market fit. Whatever you're doing, making sure that a customer really wants it. Whatever you're doing that they really want it. That's product market fit. The nice concept is there are so many people in business, particularly on Twitter and other places, that talk about this concept of burning the boats. Burning the boats means you ditch whatever you're doing, go all in on your startup. I'm a huge believer in hedging the bets. I. I had somebody the other day talk about starting a staffing business. They're now pretty successful in it. But the two guys that started it still maintain part of the part time things that they do where they make some money, their synergies, they keep themselves interesting. I just love this concept and I am not generally a fan of burning the boats. I love this concept of building bridges of synergies, of straddling and hedging. Until of course you see that things are really going great and you go into them full time. So I think that's number eight so far. Number nine is the business plan. I vary between too short a business plan and too long a business plan. The right thing is somewhere in between. Great clarity, a few pages that really explains here's what we're trying to do in this area this year. I love that kind of business plan. I have struggled. What I've. I've struggled myself when I've not done enough planning up front. The flip side is I've seen other people struggle when they've got paralyzed by building really long business plans that are in a lot of ways really almost useless. They're. They're pretty to look at but not useful. The right business plan is typically somewhere in between. Simple, short, but a real business plan. Three to five pages. Think, think like that versus no business plan or the 100 page business plan. Which I find to be quite useless. The next concept that we'll, we'll talk about is that no, no, no new ideas concept. And this is the concept. In every part of a business, there are spots where you've got to really focus on execution. And I know everybody likes to say, oh, no, there are no bad ideas, but there are times of year in whatever business you're doing that it's really execution time and time to get things done, not time to bring up new ideas and grow new ideas. That's the concept of no new ideas. I think we're on right now the 10th business concept so far. I'm going to go to number 11. And this is the concept of intentionality. In whatever you're doing, you have to be intentional about what you're trying to do in very specific. The more specific about what you're trying to do, the better off you are. And a little bit goes to business planning, but also goes to having clarity of what is your ideal customer, who you're trying to work with, what are you trying to grow. This intentionality is really, really important. The 12th concept that we talk about often, and we talk about this in the concept of often employees is this concept of many of us have employees that operate at the A minus B plus level. We call them 90 percenters, people that do 90% of everything well. And my own view of the world is, you better, you know, love those people. You know, don't pick on the 5 to 10%. They do poorly. Don't pay attention to that unless it's going to kill their career, unless it's really damaging, unless they really have places to go. But just love and embrace that, that, that percentage they do really, really well and appreciate them for that. It is so hard to find people that are that good, that reliable, that consistent. So, so my message on this is just love your 90 percenters. That's, that's our message on, on this concept. The, the next topic we'll talk about is, is, is the constant need to sort of reevaluate, stay the course, pivot, or abandon what you're doing and decide which one are you doing? Are you staying the course? Are you going to pivot? Are you going to abandon it? What is your plan? What do you want to do? Again, this is our concept for today. 13 key points on business. We hope you like this. We hope you enjoy it. I'd love your feedback. Again, if you're the first person to text me that you listen to this fully and you text 773-766-5322 you gotta say in the text 13 business points so I know which podcast you're talking about. We'll send you a fifty dollar Amazon gift certificate. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business. The Becker Private Equity Podcast. Also do us a favor, go online, go to Amazon, pre order our new book Building Great Businesses. Create Momentum, Overcome Setbacks and Scale with Confidence. Thank you for listening to the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast.