2010/06/05

Simple Often Wins - [chrisbrogan.com]

Posted: 04 Jun 2010 07:21 PM PDT

If you run a hotel, the business is this: fill beds with happy guests. Everything is geared around that. We can add “at a reasonable operating margin” to pretty much every business, including the hotel business. Restaurants: serve as many meals as possible per hour. TV: get as many viewers per show, and charge ad rates accordingly.

Business is simple. We make it complicated for some unknown reason.

At a speech today, a really smart question came from a man named Tim with an amazing beard (this has nothing to do with the question). He asked me about how we benchmark all this social media stuff, in a world of marketers who need to show their leadership benchmarking. If Julien and I are preaching standing out from everyone in Trust Agents, then how will one benchmark?

My first answer: “No one ever won a race looking sideways.” My second answer, “Experiment and show new results. You can’t benchmark for new stuff, because it hasn’t been done before. That’s the point.”

But it’s moments like those, when I think about how big companies run, when I think about how complex people seem to want to make their jobs (or that bosses seem to be asking for), that I wonder where it will end.

Most business can be done simply. There may or may not be grace and complexity to the execution, but the business is simple.

I was talking to Julien about my almost-ready-to-announce business, and he said, “Oh, so like membership sites?” And it was a lot easier to say “yes” than to try and go into the details. It’s media and education, but sure, it’s also easy to say membership sites.

How simple is your business? Do you view it simply? Can you see the benefit?

Photo credit Pink Polka