“I'm an ambitious person. I never consider myself in competition with anyone, and I'm not saying that from an arrogant standpoint, it's just that my journey started so, so long ago, and I'm still on it and I won't stand still” – Idris Elba
In my last post I wrote about how my first entrepreneurial experience started, how I found myself as a bar manager with no experience whatsoever and managed to pull through anyways. That post was mainly focused on the importance of reaching critical mass.
What I didn’t write about however is the struggle, how I dealt with it, and most importantly how I dealt with our recent sujet du jour competition.
A Little Walk Down Memory Lane
You start like Marty McFly on a new time machine, everything is new to you. But you learn, you read every book on management you can get your hands on, you surround yourself with people with a lot more experience in the field than you do. You listen to their tips but you take everything with a grain of Himalayan salt.
You learn to make cocktails, you learn some flair tending, but you don’t know how you feel about that so you ignore that skill. You diversify your repertoire. Hell you even become a DJ, you start to play in the biggest clubs in town. You build your reputation.
And for a while, it goes well. Better than well, you make more money and social recognition than you expected. Though you never let that get to your head, you still feel great nevertheless, after all you just want to make people happy. But then you start to get comfortable.
All of the sudden, new money comes to town and the competition has just opened a much better looking business on the very same street. Is this even legal?
It doesn’t matter, legal, illegal, who cares? The question is how do we go from here?
You pass by the new bar, you take glimpses with the corner of your eyes. Strobe lights, fog machine, they even have a V.I.P room! Man, that’s cool!
You get scared for a second, what is this going to mean for my business? The doubts are starting to settle, and for a second you entertain the thought of giving up.
Giving up? Fuck that! Never let fear dictate your outcome.
Of course that’s easier on paper than felt in the gut. Not even two weeks in and you’re losing half your costumers. Now the doubts are collecting hay and building nests.
You decide to swing by to compare, they have fancy leather chairs, they have the biggest selection of beers in town. Even their counter smells like sandalwood.
So what do you do?
You continue doing what you’re doing because there is no other choice, either that or give up.
After all, you get better in life by beating obstacles, not by wishing other people to suck more.
So you take a deep breath and start to analyze, you take a step back to see all the elements of the game, The Quarterback Effect you call it.
You realize that your university is a top destination for exchange students, and you find out that there are literally hundreds of them coming every semester. You realize that it’s a college town, so there are enough clients for everyone. You switch strategies.
Before you know it, you’re getting calls from the university because they just want to know how come every semester at the first day of orientation every student is getting a envelope with their name printed on it. An envelope containing an invitation to your welcome party.
And a few other things they couldn’t figure out, but that I will keep secret for obvious reasons.
Got lucky? Maybe. Or maybe I tried several different strategies and failed miserably but then one day one of them worked. Either way, sometimes one shot is all you need.
“Because sending an email to a hundred people and one would answer would give you a shot matters. Because of that opportunity, I beg you, I beg you to take a shot!” – Gary Vaynerchuk
The truth is, the competition was bigger than me, richer than me, had way more experience. So I had to step up my game if I wanted to stay in business, knowing that even if I did, there were no guarantees.
I could’ve just blamed it on the unfair caprices of life and I would’ve walked out with a completely acceptable justification to bullshit myself with.
But I didn’t. What I couldn’t see back then, is that if you give up for fear of failure then you’ve lost before the game has even began.
Luckily, I made the right choice.
Déjà Vu All Over Again
After that you know the rest, it’s like the movies. I surmounted the obstacles, climbed the hill, and lived happily ever after with an adversity-free business and a dog that plays hockey and speaks seven different languages.
Except that life doesn’t really work that way.
Before long, more serious competition came to town, and then more, and then more… And then, the Leviathan.
An extremely rich dude had bought three bars and a nightclub, more money than God.
We had his face in the fucking buses. He wanted the town to know that he owns the night and that he did. His message was simple: I am the best.
That’s the message he was paying the big bucks to convey.
You might think that this strategy is ridicule, but believe me, it works. Just take a look at Donald Trump’s use of language if you wanna know the real secret to his success. At least one of them.
In fact, there is a reason why there are many best-selling finance books that owe their success to having the word “Millionaire” on the cover.
They say that perception is everything. But I wasn’t going to compete there. I wasn’t even gonna try.
For me the human experience is everything.
So there I was, faced with a massive competition once again. Only this time I had the previous experience to learn from, I’ve already had a few wins in the bag, and my confidence account was increasing.
But I had to step my game up once again, I started caring about the clients experience more than ever. So I took a look at the best-selling drinks.
Rum and Coke? What’s the best Rum and Coke in the world? The Cuban ‘Preparado’: Some good rum, some brown sugar, some drops of concentrated lemon juice, three coffee beans and garnish with orange peel and a couple drops of Angustura bitters.
What’s that? Like three seconds more? But it’s worth it, it’s really worth it. People tend to respond to you if you genuinely treat them in a pleasant and gratifying manner.
And the same attitude I adopted in every other aspect. If wasn’t capital or labor intensive, then it’s worth a shot. Any improvement was always worth a shot.
You test and you try, and you keep what works. That’s the way we all improve in life.
So that’s how I started to compete, by giving people a new experience altogether. And as it turns out, women are much more perceptive and they read in the context much more than men. It's like they knew somehow that I wanted to give them a new experience, because you won’t believe how many times I’ve been told the following words:
“Surprise me!”
I had to invent a whole lot of new cocktails. However it always turns out that nothing was really new. Whatever drink you would think of, somebody else has already invented it.
Trust me, I Googled.
Like this cocktail in the picture below, it turns out that not only it exists, but it has a kick-ass name too: Death by Chocolate.
That’s how I dealt with these situations, by betting on my strengths and not concentrating on the vicissitudes of fate and the long list of things that I couldn’t control.
I later moved on different things, because I believe that every man should re-invent himself every few years, but the lessons learned I kept with me.
Competition can make you elevate yourself if you can beat the fear.
Competition is a part of life, if something is valuable then you have to expect that other people would be interested in it too.
That girl that you like, that guy that you love, if he or she are amazing, you wouldn’t possibly expect to be the only person on the face of the planet that showed some interest in them.
But what happened when you met them? You stepped up your game and became a better person, didn’t you?