AUGUST 202119away here was to focus on the 80:20 rule of assessing 20% of the business efforts that yield 80% of the revenue and focus more on this, rather than spread bandwidth. In simple terms, reiterating the importance of quality over quantity, with a twist of adding the multiplier of efforts of quantity on the quality work we do. Build Value not Valuations While I would need to fact check, but the element of building profitability over perception was a larger inter-est prior to 2020 as well. What 2020 enabled us to recog-nise is how we would run businesses in a world where we have to work on purely the reserves we have. Imagine a scenario where runway doesn't seem like an intimidating word, and build a venture in bite sizes to begin with to see how far you can go in order to be sustainable. This tip is a suggestion I try and provide as many founders as I can in order to ensure they end up building businesses that help them yield returns, rather than chase valua-tions which over the course of flawed business models, find themselves crumbling. Follow your (Customers) Gut If you or your someone in your team is not spending at least once a week listening to your customer, then you might need to believe me when I say that this customer might be someone who is listening to them. What remained constant over the course of the pan-demic was that the amount of time we could spend with a consumer increased significantly. Their behaviours have transformed as well and in order to capitalise on it, ventures whom we have seen outshine others have inno-vated far superior than the others. Innovation is a fancier term to customer feedback and customer input. Spend time with your customer, they're a stakeholder who is the truest when they aren't happy, and the best marketer when they are. Marry don't just flirt Call it a pivot or a new business arm but create means of earning subscription based revenue in your venture. Think of a media portal you consume your daily news and updates from. There is a reason you might prefer one over the other, and then overtime you pay a fee to read what you can over a simple search on the web. Cre-ate that hook, it doesn't matter if the price is small but to get subscribers in any way is a win because come a day where the reserve funds are needed, you can count on a loyal customer base to help you sustain and grow. Acknowledge Failure This one is quite self-explanatory and is best paired with the last point. All of us had a business set back some-where within our venture. Reflect and learn. Don't be rigid and let go off the heavy cargo, by using the method below. Data is the Best-friend we might not deserve but the best-friend we need As a team to our portfolio, one of the biggest areas of concentration for us is dissecting the data, and leverag-ing from it. There is a pattern in both work that gives bad results and work that gives good results. Focus on the patterns, learn from the data.
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