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CHAPTER 1
The Venn
My first Forbes story led me to realize that what I had written about was my discovery of a personal Venn Diagram.
The Venn Diagram is a great way to describe my path in life. What may seem to some as convoluted and/or unrelated sets of information, is not to me. Those who are born entrepreneurs can probably relate to this concept quite well. Our lives are a series of business endeavors: some so successful that they can spawn overconfidence, and some that result in failure and lessons learned.
The process can be repeated much like the directions say on the label on a shampoo bottle, but rather than "lather, rinse, repeat" it might be "start-up, success, sell; start-up, fail; repeat."
In the best-case scenario, the entrepreneur graduates from the "fail" piece of the equation and is able to start a cycle of "start-up, success, sell, repeat."
Sometimes failures can occur with what was a very successful business. This is typically caused by late-term decisions that are execution centered. In these cases, the equation might show "success, fail, success, sell" or something to that end. One must really examine the Venn to see where their mid-term "fail" has happened and fix it for their next venture.
I have created a specific path that illustrates this type of process — the Linear Retrospective Venn Logic diagram. In the LRVL diagram (figure 1), one uses the information from each attempted venture, whether it be a success or a failure, and naturally moves forward without heavy analyzation of their past experiences, just a list of information that may or may not transfer to the next effort to allow for a personal progression.
This is not an optimal way to start and/or operate which will ensure significant, long lasting achievements. Success can be gained, and may be sustained for a period of time, but reliable outcomes are much less likely than if you use your past experiences as a guide.
However, results can be improved by using a traditional Venn Diagram. By using a Venn Diagram, you can group your past experiences: what worked, and what did not work. Then, using a relational diagram of successes, you can avoid practices that result in failure.
You can create a personally rewarding and sustainable company if you rely on your own Venn Diagram based on the successes and challenges you have experienced. But first, you must go through some introspection. Let's start by understanding what a Venn Diagram is and how it is created.
The Venn Diagram
This diagram represents the relationship of data between sets of data. It represents mathematical, logical or unrelated sets of information pictorially. Generally, these data sets are represented within circles inside an enclosed rectangle. This is known as "the universal set."
Common elements of the sets in the circles are represented by and within the areas that overlap. (see figure 2 ).
My Venn Diagram figure represents my life and thinking, which has not been a straight line. No, like I have said: I am different. Your experiences will be different from mine, and therefore, your Venn may not look anything like mine. This is okay.
If you look at mega-entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Mark Cuban, you will find highly driven and focused individuals who are very different from one another. All of these men have had incredible results that are rightly celebrated, but if you look closely at a Venn Diagram for each, you will also find some of the things that didn't go well for each of them. Those are the experiences that helped them learn and improve along their way.
In the Venn circles of my life, areas of seemingly non-related data, overlap. These overlaps show me focused areas where I've succeeded and failed, and why. Looking at my completed Venn shows me a logical path forward based on my strengths and weaknesses.
My experiences reflect my personal Venn. In this book I share my successes and the failures and challenges I've faced along my way. In the hopes that these occurrences will help you in your personal quest, I've summarized my Venn Lessons Learned at the end of each major experience.
My story is one of constant motion, change, and transformation. I bore easily and am always looking for the next challenge, but I don't just drop a project and move on. I like to finish things and tie a nice bow, leaving a clean and proper finale to each chapter in my story.
That sounds easy, but I can assure you that it is very far from simple. Sometimes things end abruptly without the perfect, happy ending. This can be okay, but I have not always realized that until long after the fireworks have ended. Sometimes circumstances can be out of the control of the entrepreneur, and the sooner that reality is recognized and understood, the quicker he or she c move on.
Looking for my Venn Effect has been the result of a life-long adventure, and I believe that I may be only at the mid-point of my quest.
More About The Venn
The Venn Diagram is a tool created by John Venn around 1880. Mr. Venn wrote a paper entitled "On the Diagrammatic and Mechanical Representation of Propositions and Reasonings" for the Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science, about the specific, yet different, ways to represent items or sets of items using diagrams.
In his theory, using these types of diagrams in a logic expression could help to identify similar ideas and qualities between available data sets, allowing identification of a common subset of information. In a Venn Diagram, one might take three different objects or experiences and place each with its own particular traits – or data points — within a circle.
After objects or experiences and their traits have been placed in different circles, the data that are shared are shown in an overlapping area of the diagram. For example: a Venn Diagram can show that, say a dog, is similar to an alligator or giraffe because they all have four legs and teeth. And dissimilar because the dog has fur, and so on.
The Venn Diagram is a simple tool that can be used to deduce otherwise hidden connections between objects or experiences which seem to be dissimilar. Essentially, it is a relationship diagram. This tool can be valuable in business to aid in the rational determination of similarities that can be acted on to further a goal.
These relationship diagrams can be used to assist entrepreneurs, both new and seasoned, to better understand what works, and what doesn't, in an idea or in a business. Often the entrepreneur can get stuck in high-level failure without realizing it, due to lofty or potentially worthless target goals, basically missing the forest for the trees. It is important in any business, at any stage, to look very critically at the available information and then adjust the target goals using the data presented.
Throughout my lifetime as an entrepreneur, I have continuously fine-tuned my efforts to account for my past mistakes. Most of the time those around me may not even perceive the changes, but much like providing a course correction on a large vessel, small adjustments make for a more pleasurable journey.
Through all my lessons and growth, I have been able to create my own personal Venn Purpose.
This is what I call: The Venn Effect.
CHAPTER 2
Do What You Love
My Venn Begins
I stared in awe as we approached the beautiful old square rigger. It was a humid evening just outside of Savannah, Georgia. The day had been full of new experiences, interesting meetings and some research, with this being our first chance to board the vessel we would use as transportation and a research platform.
Anchored off the fittingly-named Devil's Elbow Island, the old ship was a mighty sight. Its sails stowed for anchor, it was rocking in perfect rhythm with the small swells in the protected waters of the May River near Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
The view took me back to a few years prior to when I was reading Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The sight of the ship transported my young, impressionable mind to thinking I might just meet pirates of yore on board. Sure, a far-fetched idea but a cool thought none-the-less.
The ship looked as if it were transported from a distant time, or possibly straight off the set of a Hollywood movie. I was suddenly jolted from this youthful fantasy by the bump produced by the wake from a small runabout hitting on our equally small transport boat, and I realized that we were about to tie off and board the relic.
This was the real deal. My adventure was about to begin. What I was about to experience was going to be life-altering for me, and I knew it.
The First Circle
I was born in an age quite unlike today. This was the post-Great Depression, World War II age of my parents and grandparents. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the business world was very different. It was the era made famous to today's generations by the television series "Mad Men."
During my upbringing, the formula for success was that you graduated from high school, and then took a job at a big company, joined the military or continued to college. All of these choices could provide a life with a prospect of stability, and even some benefits like a pension at the end of your career.
You were expected to work 40 hours a week while getting two weeks off each year for vacation. If you stuck with your company and advanced, this vacation benefit could grow to four or possibly even five weeks by retirement. At the end of your career you might be given a small party and if you were lucky, a gold watch ... maybe even a retirement check.
I never fit this profile. I could not see myself working for someone else. It wasn't me. I liked to call the shots too much, even when I was a kid. I wanted to do something where I could create, grow and build something of value. Something for which I had a passion and allowed me to do big things.
A Shocking Reality
I was told that I was a "different" child. My mother often took issue with my accidentally causing the power in our house to drop out due to my "tinkering" with the electrical system when I was ten years old. To me it was not "tinkering," but experimentation.
I recall her screaming my name at the top of her lungs "Billy, what have you done this time?" She always called me "Billy."
"You know you're not supposed to play with the electricity — it could shock you!"
My mother was master of the obvious.
I learned at an early age that an electrical fuse could be replaced, or an electric circuit breaker reset, and exactly what I needed to do to accomplish these tasks, hopefully without hearing my mother's screams, or feeling that all-too-familiar jolt of electrical current pulse through my body when I encountered something that I should not have touched.
Experimentation taught me a lot. Like how to terrorize my big sister by "tapping" her telephone. I figured out how to make calls on her phone line with only a transistor radio earphone and an old tape recorder microphone connected into the wall jack in my bedroom. I would experiment (or as my mother would say — tinker) with everything.
As my age grew, so did my "tinkering." I built a lab in a shed in our back yard, away from my mother's supervision, but not out of hearing range. You name it, I disassembled, reconfigured or repurposed it. Nothing was safe. I really mean nothing.
My experiments led to discoveries and lessons. If I didn't learn from the first jolt or small uncontrolled reaction (code word for explosion), I would repeat the punishment until I either broke something or got it right. I destroyed more than my share of electrical components and put out more lab fires in my youth than others do in a lifetime.
Those actions, along with the unintentional culpability of my mother — she was naive to the chemicals she allowed me to purchase and experiment with — permitted me to grow as a scientist and engineer. But it was also those early encounters with unsupervised independence that caused me to develop bold and sometimes unusual thinking.
A Salesman of Sorts
My first brush with entrepreneurship was by accident. I was ten or eleven years old, living in Las Vegas, Nevada. We had moved to Las Vegas from Los Angeles a few years earlier due to my father's work. He was an Air Force officer, so like any military family, we moved to wherever the government decided they needed him.
My mother had come home from a visit to my grandmother's house in Southern California with a huge box of plums. Hundreds of them.
I hate plums.
She told me that if I didn't want the plums, I should take them around our neighborhood and sell them. So, I did.
I put the box of hideous plums into my little red wagon. This wagon was my only form of cargo transportation with a payload capacity of any usable size. This wagon would log many miles before I was old enough to drive. I went door to door with my first two employees (my younger brother and our neighborhood friend Brenda), asking the person who answered the door to buy our "beautiful, Southern California-grown plums" for one penny each. We went to 50 or 60 houses in our neighborhood and at the end of our sales route had an empty wagon and pounds of pennies.
It was during this, my first official sales and marketing job, that I learned an early lesson. You can offer a fair price for a good product, and you're still going to run into cheapskates – or people who want a better deal. Even though I priced these plums at a penny a piece, I still encountered buyers who wanted a better deal. It was a bit painful to give up fifteen plums for a dime. Five cents was a lot of cash to kids at that time!
So, to get the correct price for your goods, establish a floor price and an asking price right up front: the floor price is the absolute minimum price where you cover all your costs and make a fair profit, and the asking price is where you start negotiations. The ask should not be so high as to look like you are gouging or too low, indicating a problem with the merchandise.
I enjoyed the fruits of my labors from my first sales experiment with a movie the next weekend.
This started my journey. I was hooked. The idea of having my own spending money to do with as I pleased was an enticing prospect. I needed more of the green stuff – money.
I took my newly obtained expertise in door-to-door sales and went around our subdivision offering the services of my brand-new company, TAB Yard Services, named because we liked the soft drink "TaB" which was popular at the time. It also provided the added benefit of a professional logo and a recognized name. I had some of my own tools and hired my brother to help me with the jobs.
TAB Yard Services would cut, edge and trim a yard (by hand) for $1.25, and if you signed up for full-time service, we would maintain your yard every week for a set price. Note that sign-up was only a verbal "show up and do this each week" type of contract – not a legal one. By the end of our first summer, I pretty much owned the subdivision when it came to this service and had made a decent amount of money.
But more than money, I learned some valuable lessons. One of my customers, an older gentleman, held me to the highest of standards. He sternly let me know that if I was going to service his yard, it was going to be perfect. I was just naive enough to think he was not serious about the perfect part. I was wrong he wanted every blade of grass to be exactly the same length. Mr. Perfect would inspect the entire job after we thought we were done, and inform me that I would not be paid until his standards were met.
This experience taught me that my expectations for results must align with my customer's desires (or demands). It also reinforced to me that you must properly price any job or product. What this gentleman wanted was not a $1.25 job, but a gold-plated $5.00 job. I lost money every time I serviced his yard, not always in direct cash, but rather, lost opportunity to sell my services to others. I have taken this lesson with me ever since.
If you provide a product or service of value, set a higher price than it costs to provide the product. If you have a service worth $5.00, is profitable at $5.00 and for which you feel properly compensated at $5.00, then charge $5.00. You lose both cash and opportunity with every $5.00 job you sell for $1.25. I could have cut five or six yards for the time it took to service the yard of Mr. Perfect to his standards. Therefore, I had a loss of at least $6.25 in potential sales each time I serviced his yard.
My being an entrepreneur was very unusual during the early 1970s. My vocation made me very different from my peers. While my friends were out playing and having fun, I was doing sales or performing services. I don't remember a time when I wasn't pounding the pavement, thinking up ideas or looking for a new opportunity.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Venn Effect"
by .
Copyright © 2018 W. K. (Bill) Rader.
Excerpted by permission of Prodigy Gold Books.
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