President's Message Spring 2019

Don’t be the Paint Can

My painting challenges begin with shaking the bulky can. I’m then balancing on one foot, steadying the can with the other, and slowly easing up the countersunk lid – around and around – with the opener tool. Hoping that the can doesn’t topple, I’m wishing for a bigger drop cloth. After freeing the lid is the tricky task of filling the paint tray without spilling on the drop cloth, or worse – the floor. With the tray finally full, painting begins. Meanwhile paint dripping down the side of the can has solidly affixed it to the drop cloth. What a mess.

As Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix and recent guest speaker at the USF Muma College of Business Thought Leader Series explained, paint cans haven’t been redesigned in more than 40 years. They remain a universal pain point that’s ripe for innovation. According to Randolph, looking for pain is the first step in innovating. He says big ideas aren’t popping out of thin air, they are buried within piles of bad ideas, waiting to be unearthed. We must look everywhere and start with pain points.

Marc Randolph’s message was inspiring; I thank USF for hosting him. As Randolph explained, innovation is borne from solving problems. He described successful entrepreneurs as people who can quickly vet lots of ideas, are willing to take risks and silence their inner critic with plenty of self-confidence. Did you know that Netflix accumulated losses of $50 million and today is valued at nearly $10 billion?

Randolph says that innovation is everywhere and anywhere, in little towns and big cities. As CPAs, we know the time-value of money. A self-described perfectionist, it didn’t take Randolph long to realize that perfectly polishing a bad business plan for six months is never as good as quick-testing a succession of bad ideas, until the one good idea is confirmed. Randolph's advice to entrepreneurs comes down to a few simple concepts. Can these work for you?

• Have tolerance for risk, do something. “If you really want to start something, stop putting it off and go out and do it!”

• “Too many people have disruptive ideas in their head and a hundred reasons not to start. Let’s just try it, see what happens. Almost every big innovation starts that way.”

• “Large, stable companies have a hard time getting started, taking risks.” The same is true of people when they get too comfortable.

• “You’ll learn more in one minute of doing it than you will in six months of writing a business plan. Perfection costs time that you don’t have – speed vets out bad ideas fast.”

• “Anyone can do this. It’s not about having good ideas. It is building a system for quickly testing lots of ideas. Try hundreds of ideas.”

Perhaps Randolph’s most important point was this: Don’t be the paint can. If you are unwilling to disrupt yourself, you are leaving it wide open for someone else to disrupt for you.