Lightening strikes, Microchips, and Dan Sullivan

My law firm has finally gone into the 21st Century.

We were hit with lightning recently. The strike turned the voicemail card on our analog phone system from original to extra crispy, if you catch my drift.

Cost to replace the card, plus service to the system? $750 to $1,250.

We had been pitched replacement analog phone systems two years earlier at $10,000.00 plus.

This year, we were pitched a digital system at $7,500.00.

Both analog and digital were feature rich.

My brilliant law partner did some research, as we had to do something.

What did she find?

Digital phone system, retaining one analog line for fax and security system.

Total acquisition cost?

Try 685 bucks.

Yep.

685 bucks.

Is my partner that smart?

Well, yeah, she is, but that isn't what caused the costs to plummet.

It was microchips.

No, not a snack item from Jenny Craig(r).

The brainy stuff in computers.

Dan Sullivan was right. Dan is a mentor to entrepreneurs around the world. He and his wife, Babs Smith, founded Strategic Coach a number of years ago.
If anyone has insight into microchips - he is the man!

Dan pointed out several years ago, that the microchip revolution was a fourth "Great Cross Over" as he puts it.

A great cross over is a breakthrough in communication and transfer of information. Dan says the first was speech, then writing, and the printing press was the the third.

Dan also points to an interesting effect of the microchip - one that a member of the team credited with the development of the chip has opined on: "Speed doubles/price drops by half every five years."

The guys who pitched us systems that would have taken four to five figures viewed what they were doing as selling a commodity.

Well, they lost.

How could they have gotten our business - or in the case of one company - sold to us again after making the original sale ten years ago?

By creating unique value - doing something for us that we could not have gotten anywhere else.

You see, we are entrepreneurial lawyers. If someone could come in - take the technology and show us how to leverage time and create extra value for clients, we would stay with them forever.

The sad thing is that the guy we bought our first system from knows more than most people in his industry have forgotten. He has ways to take that knowledge and create solutions that companies would gladly pay for, and probably pay him more than his profit on the $10,000 system - the one we just bought.

For $685.

His unique ability, however, stayed in his head, when he could have sold it to us.

For more than

$685.

Some Thoughts on Unique Ability, Delegation, and Dog Poop

Thursday morning, Medusa, my daughter's Rottweiler-Yorkie mix, experienced what can only be described as DOG-HELL.

The cat next door, an animal who to Medusa represents the embodiment of evil on earth, ran through the back yard at the very moment the dog began to poop.

The dilemma of how to engage her enemy while dealing with a present urgency was emotionally, and functionally, gut-wrenching for her.

Of course, this scene naturally made me think of - well - the challenges entrepreneurs face.

All of us with entrepreneurial DNA have a passion for something, a unique process that will create value, and we will benefit from a sense of having made things better, and a profit to boot.

Medusa had opportunity run right in front of her. Unfortunately, dealing with the crap of her operations meant that opportunity quite literally passed her by.

Now, to be fair, Medusa did not have a choice.

You and I do.

We can make sure we stay fresh by at least once a week taking a 24 hour period, midnight to midnight, disconnected from our work. And when we take "vacations," we have to be faithful, and not sneak away for clandestine trysts with "Blackberry."

Then we stay rejuvenated, ready to identify opportunity and create value.

But don't forget to concentrate days devoted to working on the business, acquiring and building capabilities, and to deal with the messes of life.

Finally, concentrate time on the Unique Abilities(R) I alluded to above. Everything else delegate, or outsource wherever possible. You and I have an advantage over Medusa. We can delegate the things we find to be poop to people who are ready, willing and enthusiastic about taking it on.

You can find some great insight on how to do the above in two great books - Unique Ability: Creating the Life You Want, by Catherine Nomura and Julia Waller, and The Time Breakthrough, by Dan Sullivan. You can find them at private.strategiccoach.com.

And as to Medusa? Well, outsourcing the byproduct of her success is - er - just not a doable.