If you watch business shows on TV either Shark’s Tank or Dragon’s Den you will have seen Robert Herjavec sitting on chair 5 and offering good advice and sometimes offering money. Mr. Herjavec was written a book called Driven – How to Succeed in Business and in Life published by HarperCollins Publishers, Toronto, 2010.

Chapter 8 Having One Good Idea is Never Enough

Many people assume one good idea is all they need to achieve success. It is never as simple as that. On the TV shows, Mr. Herjavec has seen all kinds of ideas and every pitcher we encountered honestly believed that he or she had created the better mousetrap. There will be many reasons why people do not buy and that is an important criteria of business – you must sell something.

Six Rules for Driven Entrepreneurs

• Your idea need not be totally originally – it should be distinctive and deliver unique benefits.
• Ideas that can be easily duplicated by others may have no value.
• If it is not patentable, the opportunities for success are limited
• The odds are against you
• Prepare yourself for the unexpected and unanticipated
• Unless you can not wait to get started on building your business each day when you wake up, reconsider your goal.

The 8 Biggest Myth about Running Your Own Business

• The product is so great it will sell itself. Nothing gets sold until the person with the need and ability to buy it learns about it
• The best way to get rich quick is to start your own business
• If you make a profit in your first year, consider yourself lucky
• If you believe you will be able to convince your bank to be my business partner. Starting a new venture represents a risk. Banks do not like risks. They want to be updated but are not your business partner.
• I will build my business with discounts to early customers and be able to catch up on pricing later on. Once you offer a discount, it is very difficult to boost the price to the necessary level without losing money, customers or both.
• I will match or beat my competitors prices and still make money. Unless your know both your own and competitors margins, this is a losing proposition.
• My employees will be my friends. You can be friendly but not be friends with them.
• I will have more free time when I am the boss. Most business owners worker longer because they enjoy it.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, often times the companies doing the buying of the medium sized business (exit strategy) are the dividend paying companies. In a dividend paying company maintaining the sales is a large challenge and start ups can be bought and then all the operational channels can be used to enhanced the product. It is the dividend paying companies looking at the smaller companies and deciding which ones can be tweaked enough to become an offering by them. How well are they doing it? How much does it cost them to buy market share?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.