Greetings, Blessings, Peace, and Love, to Everyone!
I have the opportunity to research two inspirational
businessmen. As I have read about them,
I have become inspired and overwhelmed in Aww!
I am almost at the end of a journey and these entrepreneurs have given
me inspiration, as well as some ideas that I would like to utilize when I go
into business for myself. So if you are
an entrepreneur or business professional when you click on the links to these
two individuals you should take mental notes.
The information you learn could catapult your business acumen or how you
want to teach your children about financial stability.
The first gentleman, I would like to chat about is Ingeniero (Engineer). This is what he is
called by friends and employees. To the
rest of the world, this businessman is known as Carlos Slim. He is a man of Lebanese descent, born in Mexico. He began his business-like endeavors at the
age of 10, by buying savings bonds. He
attended his first board meeting of a mining company, which he was interested
in while in his teens. Throughout his
life he has been able to cash in on businesses which have gone bankrupt or they
were American subsidiaries in Mexico that wanted to sell and he had the means
to buy the companies and own them.
I'll call him, Señor
Slim. His, Grupo Carso, is what you can
actually call a conglomerate. If you
live in Mexico, when making a purchase at Sanborns, a major retail outlet in
Mexico, or their restaurants, you are contributing to the Slim empire. He owns Inbursa, Mexican banks; Volaris, an
airline; the Mexican branch of Sears; five hotels; a bottling company; a
cigarette manufacture; construction and insurance companies; a mining company;
real estate and the list goes on. Slim
went shopping for Sak’s stock and while doing this evaluated the value of the
building that it’s housed in. He found
out that the price of the stock was less than the real estate value; so within
a years’ time he had acquired 25 million shares of stock in the company.
Incredible.
Like every businessman (or woman), he is criticized but I
totally admire his business sense and going to action on what he wants. Everyone has critics, but I admire the
business instinct of this man.
He also has an equivalent of Live Nation, Grupo CIE(Corporación Interamericana de Entretenimiento). But he acquired much of this through his
Telemex and America Movil , telecommunications company. A key component that Senor Slim conveys to a business
model plan is VOLUME. Señor
Telmex’s telecom business is the most prestigious in the world and this is
because of VOLUME. His concept was to go
to the customer, not wait for them to come to you, thus placing low-cost
telephones in discount and convenience stores.
Slim believes that Telemax was the first to pair calling cards with cell
phones. I believe that utilizing volume,
in a business model plan, is key because you are able to work with a vast
amount of consumers giving them an inexpensive cost, but I also believe that it
has to be a good quality product.
Carlos Slim in the Soumaya Museum named after his deceased wife who past away in 1999.
The second gentleman I would like to share with you is Steve Blank. He is more so on the educator
side of business. He has also helped
some startups in Silicon Valley, such as Zilog, Ardent, and Convergent
Technologies, among others.
He believes that startups should ditch the business plan and
have a business model, essentially when it comes to business plan
competitions. Blank thinks that the
business plan is for large, already established, businesses; when they want to
execute an extension in a product line.
He believes the business model should be a loop or repeatable, as well
as scalable. Here is the structure of
Blanks business model:
1.
What did you initially think your initial
business model was? (initial business model hypotheses)
2.
What did you build/do? (built first product,
talked to users, etc.)
3.
What did you learn outside the building? (parts
of our feature set/business model were wrong)
4.
Then what did you do? (iterated product, changed
business model, etc.)
5.
Repeat steps 1-4.
Now, you have to realize these steps are to be used by
competitors in a business model competition, rather than a business plan
competition, which are nowadays sponsored by many business schools. You gotta think, can something like this work
in a business (plan) model? Will these
steps take the place of the executive summary, the financials and the marketing
plan? I think that it’s a bit extreme
but if you are not trying to conform to what the venture capitalists want Blank
may be on to something here.
Blank, addresses the product and what the entrepreneur is
learning along the way which is similar to the way I am learning to construct a
business plan. You build on the plan
like Legos. All of the pieces fit each
other, no matter how you place them. But, you have to have something with
balance, cohesiveness, and symmetry. That is the type of plan I’m learning to
build. And it is a bit similar to Steve
Blank and Carlos Slim. Build. Repeat. Build. Repeat.
These two men have similar ways of doing business. Slim
builds UP a business and goes on to do the same thing with another business.
Build. Repeat. Build. Repeat. It looks
like its working for him, as he is one of the richest men in the world with an
empire valued at 81.6 billion as of September, 2014.
They both make me wanna go out an buy a box of LEGOS right
now. I can definitely say that my new
motto is : Build. Develop. Repeat. Build. Develop. Repeat….
