Some further thoughts on this topic that in my view are very pertinent to the subject.
There is a great deal of this success that depends on your own outlook and view of yourself. This is before you even get to making something unique and marketing it.
If during your formative years and due to circumstances of your environment growing up, you do not believe you have self worth worthy of being paid big bucks for whatever it is you do, then in my view success will remain evasive in terms of how much you command in the value of your item.
Value is an intangible yes we pay with tangible money but how much is an intangible. This by default means its in your mind.
Marketing can influence how much others percieve an items intangible to be worth by gaining access to your mind through various means of communication.
But at some point it comes down to you being able to believe in the value yourself. This does not have anything to do with anyone else but how you percieve things and how you percieve your own outputs worth.
There is much psychology at play in this equation and it is very much the same as in the case of sports.
Take any top performing sports team, or even singular athlete such as say a golfer. There is good reason these entities hire on full time psychologists. The value issue related to the item you sell has also to do with the feeling of winning or loosing.
So securing a less than desirable price in the midst of seeing others that have leaves you feeling you lost and they won or they win continuously. Yet your items could very well be the same.
I dont believe in luck at all. You make your luck by creating and seizing opportunity. To do so requires more than pure sweat equity and labor.
The comfort level you have with risk plays into this equation. Seizing opportunity often means taking risks. But the taking of the risk can lead to a path of success.
We then look at that person and say they had a lucky break. I say nonsense. Some will say you need to be in the right place right time. I say you put yourself in those places if you want to be succesful just as you can put yourself in situations where you can go to jail do not pass go and get a life sentence. Its not about luck or timing.
If you care to read this story and boy this is going to be a ramble then you will see my first hand experience with it and i have many many examples like this i could site.
In 1998 as Managing director of a company i purchased a patent for technology so revolutionary i myself did not fully understand at the time. Now logic would say you never do this. But i was not intent at the time in using the technology rather i saw it as building blocks.
The device at the heart of the patent was a people counter. Note this was taking place in South Africa, far away from the hi tech hub of silicon valley or route 128.
I knew nothing of people counting at the time nor did i know anything about the market for people counting. The key to the technology was the incredible accuracy of the device and the distance over which it worked along with the volume it could cope with.
The device was not at all anywhere near market ready although it had been installed in a single location on trial and used in a census application on the railways.
To try cut this story short, i never saw the local market as even remotely being of substance in the future use of this technology.
In my view the place to market this product was the USA.
Now, consider this. If today we launched a new vehicle in the USA, we would have dozens of others to do comparisons and benchmarks to. But this was not the case for this device.
Logic would say you do a ton of research go talk to all the player etc etc etc .
I decided to take a booth at the largest international convention for shopping centers in the world that takes place annually in Las Vegas. This is what i mean by putting yourself in a posistion to have opportunity come along. It was a huge cost by comparison to our budgets and bear in mind the ratio of a US dollar expense to a SA company operating in rands.
Now when we pitched this product as a system to the execs of this industry, you have to believe it was equivalent to someone coming from outer mongolia with the latest patriot missile and trying to sell it to the US dept of defense. No where were we known for technology. Stealing it yes, gold yes, diamonds yes but development of something like this in South Africa you would be right to be skeptical.
Again in the intrest of getting to the point, after that exhibition i ended up with a meeting with the Executive VP of Operations for a very large group. At the meeting i offered to do a field trial in the most arduous of places under the worst conditions possible and for the first time in the industry i offered to have real time video recorded and matched to every count for them to view afrerwards. This trial took place in open air out at the Block at Orange in california. The passages their exceeded our max by 2. The trial was to take place in the week leading up to Christmas where shopping center traffic was at its peak. My guys had never done outdoor counting let alone covered twice the distance and whats more run the whole schebang off batteries.
This exhibition took place end of may, we met with the execs in July and in August began redevelopment of the basic unit we had purchased and had new stainless steel housings with new electronics all ready to go for shipment mid Nov. Pallets of equipment were shipped to california by air at huge cost and engineers were sent to deploy the goods once we had heard that all had arrived. Only one guy stayed behind to do the test video and post processing of the results.
In January the following year we had our meeting at the site with the guys from corporate HQ. They were shown the report with the results and were shown the video and were shown the report from their existing system at the time. There was no contest.
Next question was how much. Sorry it took a bit of background to get to this point.
Now when i purchased the patent our intent at the time was to sell the devices at a price of $1000. Where did this price come from. Well myself and my partner (deceased
..) sat together and said what would we pay in US $$. And so $1000 became the starting price.
When we went into the meeting the price i had in mind and had agreed with the rest of my guys, was $2500 per point.
At the time they asked whats the price i decided to throw out $4500 per point. Now consider this. The existing system was purchsed at a price of around $350 per point and i had the existing installer a Canadian company sitting with me as a future distributor for North America.
Consider that they had also just the year prior to our meeting completed a portfolio wide roll out of the prior systems and still had all this capital expenditure on their books. All this pointing to a come back in 3 to 5 years answer.
But we closed a deal to install the unit in a brand new mall at that meeting and got to do so in every one of their new properties. We had not even closed a deal back in our home turf yet in fact their deal helped us do exactly that with one of the largest life insurance company property owners in South Africa.
We took this product worldwide. end of story.
Now what did it take. Yes we had a unique product. But there are many unique products that dont make it.
What i had was devine belief that we would prevail. I had taken the risk of putting us in the right place to be able to meet the Canadians who were at the show looking for new products.
We had seized the opportunity to invest some our own money in doing a trial that could potentially blow up in our face given the time we had to test. Thereby taking further risk. It was not luck that it worked my guys put in hours beyond belief to make it so.
We made a point to make sure we communicated the value with the best means possible the worst possible circumstances and documentary proof beyond a shadow of a doubt.
And i was that full of belief that i put the price up when i realized they saw the value and i saw their faces.
None of it had to do with cost. But we had targeted the most appropriate largest audience for our products in the world.
Furthermore i derisked the purchase for the execs by offering a 100% money back gaurantee on the entire deal. Thats the belief i had in my guys and the techology and neither let me down. We changed the price of systems of this kind for the entire industry. But we brought integrity to the data being used for the first time in history.
The system was later installed at Desert Passage shopping center and required to undergo and audit by an independent high level auditing firm (name left out). The results were needed in a court of law for reasons not relevant to the system but management of the center. The auditors could not believe what they were experiencing. We passed with flying colors.
So what was the difference between us and the incumbent system.
We offered a value they could not possibly provide. But this value was totally intangible.