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MARCH 11, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Mind Y
ur Business
Rabbi Issamar Ginzberg: “Solve Pain Points in the Marketplace” By Yitzchok Saftlas
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his column features business insights from a recent “Mind Your Business with Yitzchok Saftlas” radio show. The weekly “Mind Your Business” show – broadcasting since 2015 – features interviews with Fortune 500 executives, business leaders and marketing gurus. Prominent guests include: John Sculley, former CEO of Apple and Pepsi; Dick Schulze, founder and Chairman Emeritus of Best Buy; Beth Comstock, former Vice Chair of GE; among over 400+ senior-level executives and business celebrities. Yitzchok Saftlas, President of Bottom Line Marketing Group, hosts the weekly “Mind Your Business” show, which airs at 10pm every Sunday night on 710 WOR and throughout America on the iHeartRadio Network.
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n a recent 710 WOR “Mind Your Business” broadcast, Yitzchok Saftlas (YS) spoke with guest Rabbi Issamar Ginzberg (IG), a well-known business strategist.
*** YS: Let’s jump in with a particular challenge that has crossed your desk along with the solution that you brought to the table. IG: The goal when you start a business is not to make money. I know that sounds shocking – even in this period where coronavirus is concerned. Maybe your goal is to keep your clients happy or to generate new business. And then once these things pass, and they will pass, hopefully sooner rather than later, then at that point, your goal is to take advantage of the work you’ve done until now and to try to make money. For example, instead of ordering a container from China and waiting for three months for it to arrive, if you ordered a smaller amount of goods and have it shipped by air –
which will eat into your profit – ultimately, you’d be able to sell goods at cost or slightly more than cost, which would certainly be good. And instead of losing business – instead of risking a large amount of money for something that may end up not working out – what you end up doing first is that you have some amount of goods that you can sell further, develop a loyal client base, and then once you have the base, the next step is to figure out, OK, how do I make money off these clients? Do I now order a container from China? Do I source from someplace else? But especially if you’re starting and trying to build a brand and so on and so forth, instead of trying to make money, try to find customers and eventually figure out how to make money as the next step as opposed to from the get-go. There are many times when someone approaches us here at Bottom Line, and they have what we’ll call a seed that they could plant in the ground. It’s a great concept, but it’s a raw concept. It needs to be fleshed out. It needs to be thought through and it needs to be chal-
lenged as well. What happens when someone approaches you with an idea that they’ve thought of for perhaps months or years. What’s the approach that you take? First of all, everyone thinks, as it should be, that their idea is the greatest thing since sliced bread, if not the wheel. You want to validate their idea that it’s a good one, assuming it actually isn’t the worst you’ve ever heard. But you want to gently guide them to a version of their idea that can actually work. Sometimes the idea itself, as is, can work, as any famous entrepreneur can attest to from their initial idea to their initial startup to how they pivoted over the years, how they got to a level of success. But it took a lot of work. It wasn’t just the initial idea – boom and we’re done. It was actually massaging that idea, finessing that idea, and making that idea into something viable. So, when someone comes to me with an idea, first thing I want to know after I hear the idea is why they want to do this idea. Do they want to because they think it’s a good, profitable idea or if they had tons of money would they do this
idea because they think it’s something that people will find value in and they want to do it? The point is, if you had tons of money and you thought this was a good idea, would you be developing this idea even if it wouldn’t make you a penny just to make society a better place? When someone comes with an idea, what you’re really trying to first figure out is where’s this idea coming from. Do they think it’s a trillion-dollar idea or do they think it’s an idea that’s going to change the world and hopefully they are also going to make money doing it? Of course, we’re going to say the obvious: that a company exists and has to generate revenue to be financially viable. True. But really, a company exists to solve a pain point in the marketplace. The company exists in order to provide some type of service or product that doesn’t exist. Or maybe your product or service can be done in a way that provides a better level of service than the previous one. But if you just say, I’m launching this because it’s going to make a ton of money, and then you don’t follow all the mile markers properly and wind up putting out a second-rate product or cutting
