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July 2008: The Main Thing |
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The Main Thing
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
by Jim Mathis
It sounds easy, but keeping the main thing the main thing is hard to keep in practice. The late Peter Drucker said that the two primary activities of any business enterprise are innovation and marketing. That means getting new ideas and telling people about them. Everything else is just putting those two things into use. Manufacturing, production, human resources, accounting—all those things must be subordinate to innovation and marketing. If you do not innovate, there is nothing to sell. If you don’t market, no one will hear about your innovations.
A number of years ago I owned a photofinishing business. I had the distinct advantage of having never worked in photofinishing before, so I was not shackled by the way everybody else did things. As a result, we were very innovative. We just figured things out for ourselves, and they happened to be better than the older traditional systems. Somehow, word leaked out and we became successful.
More recently, in another business, we started out being innovative and having good marketing skills, but eventually the pressures of day-to-day operations snuffed out our creativity and the business stagnated. We forgot Drucker’s admonishes about the importance of innovation and marketing.
I am now involved in a new venture, and the importance of innovation and marketing are once again on the table. What can we do or what product can we design that is better than what is currently available, and then how do we let potential customers know about it?
Everybody thinks they have a better idea; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in business. But making sure your idea really is better and then communicating that to cynical customers is an ongoing challenge. That, in short, is your job as a business person. Everything else in your business should be designed to help you with that challenge.
Another name for innovation and marketing might be creativity. Creative businesses are successful businesses—and remember, you don’t need “creative types” on your staff to be creative. Everybody is creative.
The take away? We must be creative, we must innovate—new ideas, new products, and new ways of doing things. And our marketing must be creative as well. Letting people know about our creativity may take the most creativity of all.
Jim Mathis is professional photographer with a studio in Corporate Woods specializing in executive, commercial, and theatrical portraits. He is also a musician and writer. Visit www.MathisPhoto.net.
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