Several years ago I was talking with one of my mentors about how his company got started. The company was W.R. Grace, a Fortune 500 company. The founder wanted to get into the shipping business. After looking around he decided he wanted to get into the banana shipping business. It was large enough market and didn’t seem to have a dominant player targeting that market.
What he did to go after that business was very smart.
He hired the leading a banana expert.
Why?
He wanted to build custom ships to overcome the problems with shipping bananas.
What were some of those problems?
- Too many of the bananas would spoil by the time they got to their destination killing their profits.
- Bananas would sometimes arrive too ripe and sometimes would be too green and those wouldn’t sell well.
- There also were challenges with bugs, spiders, and rats infesting the bananas in transit, not something a consumer wants to find when they take their bananas home from the store..
So what did they learn from the banana expert?
- At what stage to pick the bananas so they would ripen perfectly on the journey to the market
- How to hang the bananas to minimize bruising
- How to improve the airflow around the bananas on the trip to the market to help them ripen in a predictable manner
The result
They went from 0% market share to 60% market share in just a few years, generating millions of dollars in profits.
Putting this lesson into practice
After learning this lesson, while I was VP of Acquisitions for a telecom company we got word from our salespeople a new kind of phone was needed.
The problem that needed solving before cellphones came along was retailers like hardware stores and auto supply stores wanted to have a free phone available for customers to call home. But when they put a regular phone on the counter for their customers to use, some customers would dial their friends or family long-distance running up huge phone bills for the store owner. What they wanted was a phone that could provide free local calls but charge the caller for long-distance calls but not require coins.
While I had designed 50 plus products and services by this time I’d never designed a telephone itself. We looked around and found a company that had some programmers and a hardware designer with telephone design experience and decided to acquire the company for the talent.
I led the team to develop two variations of the desired phone. Once we completed the design and outsourced the manufacturing, we were able to sell them through Amway’s sales force. We had done about $12 million the previous year and within a year we exploded to more than $100 million in sales primarily from these two new phones and the services we provided for the phone.
Finding experts will make you money and save you time.
Action Items
- What are your biggest challenges?
- Which of those challenges would greatly benefit from having an expert help you solve?
- Find an expert that can solve your problem by
- Check out authors
- Find consulting specialists
- Find companies dealing with that subject area
- Grow your own expertise
- Grow the expertise of one of your employees
- Get them to solve your problem
- Implement the solution
- Enjoy the benefits of solving this problem
Visit https://coachingsmallbusiness.com/services/ if you would like help finding a mentor.