FIR 108: Business Hack #1 - How To Use What You Don't Know As YOUR Competitive Weapon

Financial Investing Radio

How can you use what you don't know as your competitive business weapon? How long will it take me to discover what I don't know to improve my business? In this episode, we'll address the question how to use what you don't know as your competitive weapon in business.

Hi Everybody, this is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so we are talking about using what we don't know as a competitive weapon.

You know, I was looking at something on this from one site, and they're saying, hey, if you wanted to know what you don't know, then go ask somebody. They'll tell you, right, your friends, your family, lots of people will tell you what you don't know, right? For sure.

I was looking at a site recently called mix.com. It's one of those sites that sort of minds the internet, right? So you say, Hey, I'm interested in these topics. And then we'll go off and search for things and put it in front of you. So Alright, if you don't know about a particular topic, it will go hunt for those things. That's certainly a way to discover what you don't know.

Harvard Business Review, they said some about this. He said, Hey, no matter the scale, discovering your gaps is essential for innovators and entrepreneurs and business people. I agree with that. It does require us to discover those hidden areas. In fact, you know, what I find? The older I get, the less hidden that is right? The older you get, it seems like I discover more and more what I don't know. Well, one of the techniques around this is using something like StrengthsFinder. Have you ever tried that? That's a website, right? Where you can go grab a book, and, and it will tell you, hey, here's your skills in these areas. But over here, you pretty much don't know what's going on. All right.

Let's look at another approach, though. This is an interesting pieces came from Game-Changer.net. And what they were talking about is to discover what you do what you don't know, you don't know, here's here's a couple things, right. One of the things was, what you know, is what sits in your traditional industry, what you don't know is where you have an opportunity to optimize. And what you don't know that you don't know is where you find new market opportunities where innovation occurs. I actually really agree with that. Boy, when I've been running my small to medium businesses over the years, it's those discovery moments, when we find out, oh, we didn't know that this was important to the customer. We didn't know that this new technology could help us this way, or whatever it was, that opened the doors of opportunities. For us.

It seems like that the mindset of innovation is really characterized by some deliberate attempts by us to question what we know and what we don't know, and have the willingness to explore it. I find it interesting that the organizations that tend not to move forward are those that tend to quit asking that question, rather, they keep forcing their hand on, I'm just gonna stay in this one area that I do know, and not look for a way to improve on it, or to be exposed to what some of the gaps are. Here's a list of 10 things that came from Game Changer ready, said, Look, if you want to know what you don't know, they said, Hey, have a diverse set of people around you. All right, that makes sense. Here's another says, Listen to what other people are talking about. Ask a lot of great questions, take every opportunity to observe from new perspectives, and so forth. All of those certainly makes sense.

The one that caught my eye was right near the bottom of their list where they said, experiment, new knowledge arises when you try stuff. I agree with that. That makes sense. You know, I think that the shortest path to innovating and building our business is through experimentation. But I also think there's a problem with that. The problem has been for me, running small businesses has been that it takes time to iterate through multiple experiments and it becomes costly and a high risk proposition to the business to the point that you could ultimately run out of capital and cash before you find that vein of value, right where the vein of value is that ultimately serves your customer.

The best This is where I have found AI to provide a solution. It's like, if you take your business numbers and you run it through AI, it reduces the shoot in the dark model of experimentation. I'm not gonna say it takes, you know, gets rid of it entirely. But it reduces, it reduces it enough to preserve capital and actually give more opportunities to keep iterating. Now, you and I recognize that your business is your livelihood. And so why would you continue to make all these costly experiments without the insights from AI on your business numbers. So for me discovering what we don't know, and what we don't know that we don't know, our keys to effectively competing in business.

But I want to be able to do this with fewer iterations based on high probability scenarios that are identified by AI. When I do that shortcuts, my path to building my business faster. And so that's a critical time saving cost saving, as well as a service saving meaning think of the value and the benefits that can be getting into my customer base sooner by taking advantage or leveraging that. The question is, how long will that take one site to particular same effect. This is from Forbes article, they were saying, hey, it takes two to three years for a business to become profitable. Others say seven to 10 years.

And obviously, there are some overnight successes overnight, you know, air quotes here like Facebook, right? or Instagram. Certainly they didn't take as long to do something like that. But those are the outliers, right? That's the exception more than it is the norm. One particular article called why building a business takes time. This was by Forbes right? They pointed out that Sam Walton, he started Walmart in 1945. It took him seven years before building his second store. All right now, what it turns out to me, or what occurs to me is, you know, you must be in a rush in the short term, right as we're building our business, but we have to expect that it could take a longer term to achieve the kind of success that we're looking for. And in fact, it's been quoted that the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar said hasten slowly. Well, I have to say this, it's not your fault, right?

That scaling your business goes more slowly than you'd like. There are many forces as we know, that act on us as business owners, there's competitors, there's external market conditions, there's employee challenges, product vision issues, right there. Those are big challenges as issues where our customers are changing their mind and their demands. There's new technologies, there's a lot of factors that force upon us. And what we have to figure out is how can we balance all those and iterate to keep finding the vein of value into our customer base. Now, I think while the explosive growth of Facebook and Instagram are a rarity, waiting for decades, though, like Sam Walton, I also think for me, that's a dismal prospect also. So striking the balance of reducing the risk, while decreasing the time and effort to scale your business. By applying AI to get insights on your business. That's the balance that I have found. That helps to reduce that shoot in the dark and help me to find that vein of value.

It's called iterate intelligently.

All right, everybody. That's it for now. Thank you for joining and until next time, expose what you don't know through AI to scale your business.

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