0:000Most entrepreneurs focus on the wrong things and it makes them feel very good. That's why they do it. Think about this, when I had my own bar, my bar was in one street with several other bars and it was a C location. That means that the A location is the place where the people go to first, B is second and C is third. So when the city of Breda, where my bar was, got full of people, first the A locations fill up, then B, then C.
0:340So I was like, but we are the third location people come to and then I have this competition of the rest of the street as well. So there are a lot of bars and I was like, okay, I want more customers, so I am in competition with these other bars. So I was thinking, okay, what can I do to win from them? So I started this competitive drive in myself and I was like, Okay, let's win from them. But what happens, feel that and they are like, okay, game on, and they start to see me and handle me as competition as well.
1:130So we did that for several months and what we noticed is we all were losing. So one day I was winning, but the next day another ball was winning. So, yeah, at the end of the day we both didn't win, we were losing because we were fighting. And then suddenly I was thinking about this and I was like, okay, but to be competitive against the other boss was my main focus at that moment. It became my focus point.
1:460Okay, I want to win from them. But then I started to think and I was like, Okay, but what was the goal? The goal was to get more customers, more guests in my bar. And then suddenly it hit me and I was like, okay, but if we are sharing the same amount of people in the street every weekend, then we are never going to win. Because when I start to fight, the other bars are starting to fight even harder.
2:160So I start to fight even harder and that's not working. So at that moment I was like, okay, what can we do? What's the real solution? Okay, bring more people to the whole street. And at that moment I stopped fighting and I went to the other bar owners and I said, okay, let's work together, because if we start to work together, we can attract more people to whole street and we all can win.
2:450And immediately after we stopped fighting, there were more people coming to the street, because we start working together, we make it a party of the street, we thought of things we can do entertainment for the whole street, We made sure the street was nicer to come to. We were talking about each other more nicely, so if I am a more nice person, people want to come to me probably earlier than when I am this competitive guy. And the same was for the rest of the bars as well. So it was amazing. So the whole street got more people to it, say from like 1,000 people to a whole street to 3,000 people to a whole street, and suddenly we all won.
3:380And that's amazing because the mistake we made was, okay, we start to fight to each other and that was the focus. It became the main focus. Okay, I want to win for my neighbor. I want to put them down so I can win. But suddenly we thought, and that can still be a strategy that's necessary, But if you play the zero sum game, if you play the positive sum game, it's a different theory, different mindset, and it almost always almost always works better.
4:150Not always, almost always. So at that moment we were like, now we are going to work together. We. But the main thing is. I wanted to have more customers.
4:300I wanted to have more guests and that was the first problem I want to address. And when you build a solution for something, For a problem you had, the solution can become a problem if you are focusing on the solution all the time, because if the solution is not working, maybe the solution isn't the problem. Maybe the solution became the problem. So you have to go back. In the end I had my own bar to give people a great time.
5:060And if I was just focusing on that, it was much more easy to do the right thing. Because if I want to give people a great time, I will never focus on putting the competition out of business. It doesn't matter. When I give people the greatest time on a Friday night, they will come back to me. So it messes up your mind if you start to focusing on the wrong things.
5:340You just have to focus on the right thing. You have a business, you're an entrepreneur and you want to sell your solution, your product or service. Or combined to a customer because that customer has a problem and you just want to solve it. And all the rest you think about is noise. Even marketing is noise.
6:000You always have to go back to the drawing board and think about, Okay, I just want this solution to be great for my customers? What's in the way? And everything that's in the way can be a wrong focus point. Sometimes you find a problem that needs to be solved to give the solution to the right amount of people and to the people. And at that moment, maybe you have a legitimate solution you need to focus on as well.
6:380That can be the case, but you always have to think about it maybe after six months, maybe every quarter, maybe every year to think about, okay, is this solution still necessary or is this solution becoming a problem and is it not helping my main business? That's the always the right thing to ask yourself to look in the mirror and ask yourself, is this thing I'm doing bringing my goal closer? So your goal is to help X people, how many people X with your solutions. Okay, is this what I'm doing making my goal coming closer to me or is it standing in the way? That's a legitimate question to ask yourself a lot of times, because otherwise you build a business around a lot of services, which are not even necessary because you just want to, in my case, to give people a good time.
7:410That's it. And of course, after that business needs cash flow, so I want to keep them giving a good time, so I need healthy cash flow to do that. That's it. Nothing more and nothing less.
