We all know, or read about, entrepreneurs with the “Midas touch.” We marvel at how they can turn ideas into what can only be described as “gold mines” — solid, multimillion-dollar companies — almost as easily, we believe, as we check items off a grocery list. We console ourselves that they know a secret we don’t.
One of these entrepreneurs is Mark Swanson, the CEO of Telovations Inc., an IP communications company that was co-founded by Swanson in 2006 and is his fifth consecutive start-up company to reach the multimillion-dollar mark in annual revenue. When asked to reveal one of the “secrets” to his success, he advises: Have a system in place that enables you to recognize big trends and then find a niche in it. This “system” isn’t as mysterious as one may assume. It turns out, that Midas touch comes from aligning these trends with emerging technologies.
Smart Business discussed with Swanson how technology decisions impact the overall success of business initiatives.
Is there a common denominator that you see in your previous successful companies?
One common denominator to the success of my businesses would be aligning technology to a market niche. It sounds simple, but a lot of business professionals miss this one; they get enthralled with cool technologies and not ones that solve real problems or have an actual business impact. As a business leader, you should regularly meet with customers as well as scan reading lists to identify trends in your industry. Spend time not only on the macro trends but on what technologies are being developed that could solve emerging problems versus fad technologies. Once you find the right technology, focus energy on getting that ‘product-market fit’ and eliminate ‘chore’ tasks so you can do ‘core’ tasks better.
How do you determine what is ‘core’ to your business versus what is just a ‘chore’?
This is not as simple as going through a checklist of items and marking them as ‘chore’ or ‘core.’ It takes a deeper analysis. Some things, at face value, look like ‘chores,’ when they really fall under the ‘core’ category. Picking unique value propositions that are core to your business and picking technologies to deliver on that is a key to success.
A great example of this was when, at Telovations’ inception in 2006, we launched our hosted business phone system. Most competitors were offering this service over the public Internet as they deemed ‘network’ as not core. We decided to build our own network and make it part of our offering. Because quality and privacy was ‘core’ to our business model, we chose technologies that provided us the control we needed to be able to guarantee high levels of quality and reliability. Many peers in the telecom industry initially thought of this as a ‘chore,’ as if we were unnecessarily reinventing the wheel, since they could use the existing public Internet. We saw it differently and it has turned out to be one of our best differentiators and a driver for success.
