The old road map to business success is dead. It’s a bold statement but the truth, and here’s why.
The narrative of ‘go to school, pick a career, go to university, get a job, buy a house, and retire’ doesn’t match up to what the current generation of millennial entrepreneurs in the world hustling to build companies and forging success are doing.
Right now, people are still picking a career that will ultimately define their lifestyles. This means spending 3 to 6 years in a university course that provides a qualification. In the end – it’s just a piece of paper masked with fancy writing, inked with your name on it.
Business courses in tertiary education are heavy in theory and history – they struggle to provide the roadmap to get you a single sale in business. In the end, it’s the sale that makes the profit, and the profit that makes success.
A glance at statistics tells a grim story. I’ve used Australia as an example to paint the picture:
Full-time employment rates in Australia for graduates straight out of university were 68% last year, the lowest number since Graduate Careers Australia began recording the figures in 1982.
Put this into perspective: that’s nearly 70,000 educated people without a job four months after graduation. As bad as that looks, it is worse: this doesn’t include all the people who continue to study at higher levels in fear that they won’t get a job right away.
The Scenario? People are studying harder than ever before, and are fully aware of the employment difficulties after graduation. Sounds like a roadmap to disaster instead of success.
Many of today’s employers don’t believe in the old educational system. Never again will a degree be the sole reason for your employment. They want industry experience, which many of the courses don’t offer. With more people graduating than ever before, your degree’s value has fallen drastically.
Employers now fear hiring someone out of university is an investment rather than a purchase, as graduates aren’t really ready to hire from day one.
Then there’s student debt.
2015 graduates were the most indebted class of all time, with an average loan debt of $35,000 in Australia. That’s $35,000 with no guarantee of a job – a $35,000 gamble at the roulette table. The cost of education is only rising, and the chances of employment are falling. Sound like a broken model?
Now that we’ve identified the problem – what’s the solution?
There’s a new road map people are using in business to skip the trodden university track, and to give them a true shot at success. Many of the wise minds using this road map are now millionaires, and have followed the trend of people who dropped out of university to build their empires – and their empires can be built from a laptop.
Here are five steps to follow for the new Roadmap to Success in Business:
- Have a big idea
- Analyze the competition
- Generate a ‘single biggest supporter’
- Test your idea
- Outsource
If business courses taught this proven model, everyone would actually be enjoying the world while working from their laptops on beaches, or next to a pool in Las Vegas.
But let’s dig deeper for you. How do you actually make this new age roadmap work for you?
As with all great start-ups, you need a big idea. It can be a product or service that you can provide to others, with the goal of improving their lives. In the age of technology, many are turning to apps, information products and gadgets that boost on-the-go-productivity.
Think about yourself: what would you like?
To know how much your product will cost you to launch in the marketplace, a quick search for options in Alibaba is where to start. http://www.alibaba.com
Now find out if there are any competitors in the market. Search the Internet – Google, Facebook and Amazon are great places to start.
They’ll define what you’re up against. In other words, know your enemy. Read comments people have made beneath the products – this showcases two vital pieces of information: what they do well, and what they are failing to do. Base your idea around these pointers.
If there are no competitors, there is no point pursuing the idea. Very few people come out on top with a completely novel idea, and when they do they’re generally named Mark Zuckerberg.
Want to know how to make sales? Here’s a helpful hint: know your customer. To understand your customer, you need to build an avatar of your ‘single biggest supporter’
- what do they like
- what do they need
- what do they fear
- what keeps them up at night?
Once you build one supporter, you can find thousands more just like them. They are generally the people disappointed with the current offerings in the market, waiting for you to provide them with the product/service they’ve needed since day one.
They are dictated by emotions, while you are dictated by sales.
Go the extra mile with your ‘single biggest supporter’ and give them a name – find a ‘mock’ photo of them. Pin that picture up on your wall, because the only person that really matters in your business will be this ‘single biggest supporter’ – if you’re pleasing them, you’re making sales and moving to success.
Nothing is happening until you test out your idea.
Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up a business without even knowing if it will succeed. University students spend $35,000 on average before they know if they’ll get the job they desire. To test an idea, you only need to spend a few hundred dollars, if that. It simply involves a mock marketing campaign on social media that leads your supporter to a ‘buy now’ page. When they click the button, a message will appear saying ‘in production, please leave your email and we’ll get back to you when it’s complete’.
By tallying the clicks during your mock campaign, you’ll be able to total how many sales you’ll have when you actually release the product.
30 clicks for a $100 product will equal $3,000 the moment you confirm your idea.
200 clicks? Well, there’s no limit. And if there are no clicks, you’ve only wasted a few hundred dollars compared to the thousands on the other road maps, and you’ve also learned some vital business techniques in the process.
On your resume it counts as industry experience.
The greatest part about this road map is that once you’ve set up the business, you can make it run on automation. People click, they buy, and then they get their product, information or service. All you need to do is outsource the tasks of the business to other people while you reap the rewards and do what you want to do. Hire a personal assistant, a web designer and a shipping schedule through websites such as upwork. HYPERLINK “http://www.upwork.com” www.upwork.com for prices that will be covered by your clicks.
Your employees can be from anywhere in the world, and they offer their services at a discounted rate. But remember, you’ll only be spending money on these people once you’ve discovered your big idea can actually become a success.
Globalization wasn’t part of the old road map.
With this new age road map, the tangibles of time and money are in your power. University is an institution that must be respected, but in terms of business courses it lacks the fundamentals to be a success, while it builds debts that accrue interest over time. Testing your ideas may cost you small amounts, but if they fail you also learn what works and what doesn’t in the real world.
It’s theory that forms part of your personal success story.
