You Are Only as Good as You are Relevant!

Relevant: having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand.

In business, sometimes an entrepreneur is too far ahead of the game, thus, not being relevant, or too far behind the game, with the same disastrous effect.

As an example: my father, George, was quite the entrepreneur. He started, the year before I was born, a pharmaceutical company, which did perform very well financially. Unfortunately George, heady from his pharmaceutical success, quickly saw another venue and way to pitch another product apart from drugs- which was an athletic supply company; comparable to Nike and Adidas.

Where George went astray was; though the drug company took off like gang busters; he misdirected his profits and used those proceeds to start the athletic supply company, which, was 20 years, easily, ahead of its time. Alas, it was a belly-up undertaking.

What can we learn from George? What if George had taken some of his cash flow and rolled out a test market first, evaluated how that performed- and then and only then, decided to invest more cash?

Always figure out how relevant you are and do so by a test market, without investing EVERYTHING YOU HAVE into a new, unproven idea.

All the failed actors in Hollywood would probably pale in comparison to all the failed entrepreneurs, had they only understood and executed this strategy!

So, how relevant are you? Test the market just like you'd stick your big toe into the swimming pool to see what's going on.