do is spend like crazy on letterhead, websites and business cards. It all feels great because it’s much more comfortable to spend money than it is to make money. It’s always easier to be a buyer than a seller. In reality, you may as well simply donate your hard-earned cash to other businesses. None of this is any use until you know where you customers will come from. As long as you don’t throw all your money away early by starting out in an unsustainable spending spree, you’ll have the opportunity to try a couple of different markets and a couple of different approaches. Sometimes ideas take some time to develop a market, which is why setting up your business in a sustainable way, with minimal overheads, is the best way to ensure you’ll make it through the initial phase of market development. Most small businesses go to the wall in the first 12 months because, rather than finding a customer, they focus on setting up their infrastructure. What they fail to realise is this: websites are useless unless you have customers who want to visit them, letterhead is useless unless you have someone to invoice and office space is useless until you have a stream of paying customers. You don’t need money to make money: you need customers to make money.
And you don’t need money to get customers; you need a product, skill or service for which customers are willing to pay. Your role as a small-business operator is to connect all of this together; figure out what people want, and how to give it to them for a price they are willing to pay. This is an excerpt of the recently published Australian book “The Profit Principle”, authored by Peter Fritz and Jeanne-Vida Douglas, and reprinted here with the approval of the authors, and the publisher John Wiley & Sons Australia Ltd. About the Authors: Peter Fritz was born in Transylvania in 1943 during the Second World War. In 1963 he immigrated to Australia and began working as a cleaner and studied English. More than 40 years later, Peter has had a hugely successful career as an entrepreneur, is on numerous boards and advisory committees, is a recipient of the Order of Australia and cofounder of TCG GROUP, a $1.25 billion business empire. He has gathered his experiences in business into a book so as to hand his expertise down to his children in a form that they would be able to read and understand. Peter co-authored the book with Jeanne-Vida Douglas, a multiaward winning business journalist with a decade’s experience covering the information technology sector. Jeanne-Vida was looking for a way to gather together the very best stories she came across in her work into a single edition. At the time Jeanne-Vida was juggling her own small business as a freelance journalist and business writer with the demands of two small children, and was keen to encourage others to find ways to turn their skills into microenterprises. The Profit Principle is available from all good bookshops and online at www.theprofitprinciple.com.au.
Win a copy of “The Profit Principle” 5 easy steps: 1. Create a Facebook page if you don’t already have one. 2. Search for New Rural Industries Australia’s page on Facebook. 3. Post your most creative photo on the New Rural Industries Australia Facebook page of a product or service that you are involved in with the new rural industries. The photo can be from any point of the supply chain – simply ensure that you clearly identify what it is, and, if you like, your business name and product name. 4. Tell your colleagues, friends and family to go to the NRIA Facebook page and choose the photo they LIKE the best. 5. The photo with the most LIKES by 10 March 2011 wins a copy of The Profit Principle and will be acknowledged on NRIA’s Facebook page, website, and on Twitter, as the most LIKED new rural industries product as of March 2011.