INSIDE TECH

WHEN CLARITY MEETS OPPORTUNITY, SUCCESS WILL FOLLOW

Opportunity is abundant in today’s real estate market, but at no time has it been more important that you have the clarity to avoid a $200,000 mistake to make the $1,000,000 profit. On June 20^th – 22^nd in Los Angeles, Bill Gatten and Bruce Norris will be teaching us all about today’s California Market and what tools are needed to help us create success. So, what do I mean by clarity? The key components of Clarity are; understanding the environment of opportunity, envisioning the details of a successful outcome, anticipating problems that may arise, creating a usable plan to follow, building a team that can support your needs, and a willingness to succeed versus all obstacles that may stand in your way.

Starting at a young age, my life has been spent living one entrepreneurial dream after the next, starting with selling bottled water from the springs of Floyd, VA at the age of 12 (like most kids my age sell lemonade). Having no “Clarity” of understanding the environment of this opportunity, I eventually bored of the idea. After graduating college, I started my first company selling online shopping carts when the base price for shopping carts was $10,000. I went to several seminars on how to write a business plan, how to market your business, how to network, etc., which led to the beginning steps of setting up my business. First, it became obvious that establishing a merchant account for accepting credit card payments was needed. At the time there were few options and most were from your normal agents charging 30 cents per transaction while pocketing 20 of it. While educating myself, I began to realize that there is a large network of sales people who were mapped across the US and also realized that e-commerce was their next frontier. This was my first “ah ha” moment, all of a sudden I realized that I had found my national distribution channel, now I just needed to show my product and get it in the right hands. Soon after, I approached a regional manager of one of the largest national companies and he was blown away so much, that he became an investor on the spot. Wow! Things were going great, and I’ll be a millionaire within my first month of business...or so I thought.

With our investment in hand, I made one of many mistakes because I did not “Anticipate problems that may arise” when we bought Windows NT4 servers to run our whole operation. We thought that because the tech magazines were filled with articles on how NT4 would replace Linux as the operating system of choice, made it a good choice. Here I lacked the “Clarity in building my team” to support me in areas that I was weak in at the time. (As a side note, magazine articles for most corner store junkies are nothing more than advertisements for companies using PR firms to promote their goods. The content is often based on how many dollars are thrown at execs to push their subsidized opinions down our throats.) Needless to say, I was on my way with servers running and product ready for distribution.

We started by having a party to celebrate our success before the first sale was made. After all, I had a distribution channel in place and a system that was better than most online shopping carts around, and there were very few competitors, And I am talking about the halcyon days of the e-commerce boom.

What did I forget?

I forgot that we might actually have customers and our server platform had not been fully tested. Simply put, I didn't have “Clarity in envisioning the details of a successful outcome”. The first month we had 20 new customers and 100 sales reps signed up to sell our product nationally. The first problem was now here; we had customers!!! What happened, you may ask? The server (NT4) crashed and crashed and crashed…

I had no back up plan; I had forgotten to form the “Clarity in creating a usable plan to follow.” Needless to say the accounts went as fast as they came and our business was done as quickly as it had started. Everyone lost faith in the operation and my main technical engineer flipped out with the emotional strain. I shorted the remaining investment and turned my focus to web design so I could recover from the economic strain brought on by this ordeal. Needless to say I was missing the “Willingness to succeed versus all obstacles that may stand in your way.” There were other competitors who had clarity and went on to great success, such as what is now the Yahoo Store (which sold for $40 million).

These were hard lessons which brought me to the understanding that the “When clarity meets opportunity, success will follow”.