Do you have what it takes to be successful?
This time around I’m going to applaud some successful business
models and business people. I’ll also
share with you some of the reasons for their respective successes.
One thing for sure every success has at least, to some varying
degree, one or both of these elements – Devine guidance and/or plain dumb
luck. But that is just part of the
story.
Company #1 is the single most successful story of a business
in my lifetime – Apple.
Let me first say, I am not an Apple fan. Admittedly I own an IPod and have ITunes on
my computers, but that’s where my love affair with Apple products ends. Notice I said with Apple products and not the
company.
Apple as a company has my undying respect. Any company that can run its stock up from $2
to nearly $675 per share in just around 30 years sincerely WOWs me. For the companies first 18 years as a
publicly traded stock it rarely got above $30 a share. It seemed like nearly every year during the first
15 years the company existed someone was talking about its demise. I’m not saying Apple has done everything
right, but the very few wrongs and misses they have had were, like most
companies, in their formative years and they managed to recover beyond what
anyone could have imagined.
What attributes to Apples success? I would have to say first and foremost its
illustrious and imaginative former leader Steve Jobs. Jobs was shear genius. He hired people that were his equal or
smarter than him. He listened. He learned.
He observed trends and got in ahead of the curve. He watched for and seized opportunities. He developed solid, well designed, innovative,
and useful products exclusive to his software, cornering both the hardware and
software development of the Apple line. Of
course, what I mentioned in the last sentence also gave him total price
control.
First Apple established a niche market with a computer and
software that became a graphic artist’s best friend. Then it established strong branding. This was followed by new product development and
the rest of the company’s success is now, as they say, history.
KUDOs to Apple.
The next company I’m about to gush over has so many
interests and sidebar operations I don’t know where they all exist. Owner of television stations, a television
network, films, television shows, themed amusement parks, and it all started
with a dream and a mouse. It’s the ‘House
that Mouse Built’ – Disney.
Walt Disney had a cartoon/fairytale idea and turned it into
a mega-reality. The Disney business
model may have led to the Steve Jobs business model because there are so many
similarities. Listening and learning,
like Jobs, Disney hired the smartest “Imaginers” he could find. In the early days of television he chose to
market to the youngest generation, children.
He appealed to the families, and was one of the early pioneers in bringing
color to, what was then, black and white television.
The Disney brand and Disney collectables are worth billions
and billions of bucks and to think this empire all started with a black and
white cartoon mouse. Thank God for the
genius of Walt Disney.
This last business is a family owned and operated film
franchise that has made billions of $$ due to near perfect branding, smart
business decisions, taking on varying degrees of risks, but most of all knowing
one very basic and cardinal rule – “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
Albert “Cubby” Broccoli also knew if it was broke to fix it
fast and always protect the franchise which in his case was “Bond, James Bond.”
In the early days, and it took a while, for Broccoli and
Harry Saltzman to get the rights for the Ian Fleming James Bond stories. Together, and for around $1,000,000 Broccoli
and Saltzman brought Flemings spy character to life on the big screen with Dr.
No. Who knew in 1962 that 50 years later
the Bond formula films would still be alive and well, long after Saltzman sold
his rights to Broccoli and long after Cubby Broccoli died?
Broccoli taught his daughter and ex son-in-law well. Don’t mess with the formula. The formula is fairly simple. Make a film that gets the audience to the
edge of the seat before the opening titles, use exotic and great locations, have
a bevy of beauties for both bad and good, sex sells, the title song should be
sung by a strong and current recording artist, there must be obligatory car
chases, Bond must always be in danger until the bad guy is dead, a big finish
action scene is a pre-requisite, explosions must be big and frequent along with
shoot ‘em up action, the James Bond theme and variances of the theme song must
be used throughout in the background, sell product placement ads in the films, and
even though bruised and injured in the end our hero must live to fight another
day.
Make no mistake about it, the Bond business is big business
to the tune of billions for many others besides the Broccoli family. There have been spin-off cottage industries
and mostly because of strong and very intense “BRANDING.” There have been toys, model cars, lunch
buckets, after shave, clothing lines, trench coats, ties, watches, champagne,
trading cards, books, magazines, BMW cars, 7-up, tickets to locations where
Bond films where shot all have been sold because of the Bond brand.
Every time a license is issued to a product in the name of
Bond, the Broccoli family can afford to eat Beluga Caviar. So now you know that champagne and caviar go
with Broccoli.
The stories of Jobs, Disney, and the Broccoli family all
have very common threads. They were
willing to take a chance, were good listeners, were willing to learn from both
success and failure, understood the value of a strong brand, understood what to
fix and what not to fix, knew how to hire skilled and quality co-workers, and
knew to think big and dream even bigger.
You really have to respect that kind of drive and the
success which results from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment