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Within (TUNEF), your beliefs shape your identity and pierce into your meaning-and-purpose, or your whys. That purpose drives you into action, which in itself can be extremely difficult and discomforting. Both pain and passion accompany this journey. Once you feel the positive
results of your effort—feedback, sales, success stories, stray dogs saved, etc.—more passion is generated, which advances the entire motivation cycle. I’m
Daily UNSCRIPTED pursuits are challenging and fraught with discomfort—expect passion to abandon you during the grind but return once the feedback loop fires.
Core drivers for action and fundamental life shifts are 1) IDENTITY 2) MEANING/PURPOSE (why) and 3) PASSION via the feedback loop.
If you’re still coming up empty, try this: Imagine winning a billion dollars. After winning the fortune, what specifically would you do? I’m not talking about “travel the world” or “buy a fleet of exotic cars”—I’m talking about AFTER you’ve done all that. AFTER you’ve bought everything and seen everything—what would be next? Writing? Philanthropy? Making movies? Whatever it is, it’s a clue into what gives your life meaning or purpose.
VALUE CHALLENGE: PERHAPS YOUR PURPOSE IS THIS SIMPLE? If you haven’t pinned your purpose, try this experiment. I call it the value challenge: Start by simply smiling at a complete stranger—and not just any forced smile. Smile as if that person was the first
person you saw after being stranded on an island for years. Do this as many times as needed until you get a return smile. Then observe how you feel. Pretty cool, eh? Congratulations, you just added value in someone’s life. Continue the value challenge by helping one person in the next thirty days. Add value to just one life, and do so by virtue of your own creation, ingenuity, and hard work. Also, you must do this by learning a new skill, or something unfamiliar to you. DO NOT STOP UNTIL ACCOMPLISHED.
Your value challenge could be as simple as buying an old dresser down at the Goodwill, stripping it down, refinishing, and reselling it on Craigslist. Or you could write a short story and sell it on Amazon for ninety-nine cents. Whatever you do, the key is to create value for someone else AND do it by a new process (or skill) that you must learn on the fly. Again, like the spirited smiling, pay attention to how you feel the moment you accomplish the value challenge. You should feel good, maybe even a rush of excitement. This same ...
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And once you feel it, there’s no...
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The value loop confirms with your first sale, your first customer, or your first “your product rocks!” testimonial. Now imagine if you didn’t provide value to just one person, but thousands…
a productocracy pulls money to the value creators, businesses who grow organically through peer recommendations and repeat customers, compelled by a distinguished product/service not readily offered elsewhere.
The short-and-sweet definition? Your product contagiously sells itself.
Ultimately, a productocracy is what separates average, survive-the-month, zero-growth businesses who are ad dependent from ones who grow exponentially through an expansion loop, or network effects.
One satisfied customer creates more satisfied customers, accelerating growth. One plus one equals three. A productocracy is like a raging inferno, whereas advertising is the gas, an optional accelerant, not a necessity. A productocracy is also the key to attracting value-vouchers, as discussed in the money/value dichotomy. With a productocracy, all excuses and drama become meaningless.
the pull in the push-pull polarity is a productocracy where products or services have gravity. Customers come to you. Each time the product/service is used, its gravity strengthens. The essence of a pull is word of mouth, social proof, and satisfied users.
Which side of the fence your company sits on is determined by one thing only: the market’s reaction to your product.
Few make buying decisions based on advertising. Instead, buying decisions are made through social media, personal recommendations, and peer reviews.
A productocracy is entrepreneurship’s grease fire: exploding growth, filling wallets, and keeping spouses happy. Within the UNSCRIPTED Entrepreneurial Framework, a Fastlane productocracy intersects with the right beliefs and a strong purpose. Engineering your productocracy isn’t as simple as a great product or doing something different from the market. While these help, a productocracy goes beyond your product. A productocracy has five core Commandments called CENTS. They are: The Commandment of Control The Commandment of Entry The Commandment of Need The Commandment of Time The Commandment of
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Enter the Commandment of Control. To ensure you’re on the top side of the food chain, the Commandment of Control requires that your entire operation, from product development, to marketing, to distribution, to other operational components, be within your sphere of influence, or diversified from influence.
Behind the Commandment of Control is a simple question, which reveals your food-chain positioning: is there one person or entity that can instantly kill your business with one decision? Are you fishing in a pond controlled by someone else? And what happens to your business when that pond is taken away?
Diversification from influence means your product pulls from multiple channels; not just Amazon, but other channels including your website. Leveraging one channel as your business model is a risky walk of the tight-rope.
The CONTROL Commandment is not about absolutism but about risk mitigation and probability. You can violate CONTROL, defy the odds, and still succeed.
Which brings us to the final element of control… Your brand. If you’re taking risks and spending precious time to build a business, for the love of God, make sure your investment goes toward your brand and not someone else’s.
In order to influence your outcomes and mitigate risk within an UNSCRIPTED pursuit, you need control. It makes the difference between an “OK” return and an explosive, “holy shit” return.
The Commandment of Entry identifies poor opportunities and crowded markets that should be avoided. The Entry
As entry barriers to any business or start-up process weaken or become “easified,” so does the strength or the potential of the opportunity. Simply put, the easier the opportunity, the worse it
is. Conversely, the harder something is to solve, the greater the opportunity.
Entrepreneurship is about problem-solving, creating convenience, satisfying desires, and becoming valuable.
The magnitude of the problem solved is the magnitude of the money you can make.
In the end, easification flags are liabilities while difficulties are assets. Difficulty reflects the depth of the problem and the value magnitude. But more importantly, difficult entry barriers represents a natural moat which keeps easified entrepreneurs OUT of your space.
The process-principle determines if your product stands a chance at standing out. It’s insight into the gravity of the problem you’re solving. It also forecasts the strength of entry barriers once the market validates your product.
If you insist on violating entry, know that two Es (executional excellence) conquer one E (entry). Executional excellence is simply being better than everyone else. It means you’ve put 10,000 hours into your craft while everyone else has put in one hundred and quit. Your excellence rises like cream, where you stand out and can’t be ignored.
You see, once again, we’re back to the process-principle. Executional excellence is all about the process, the daily rituals and sacrifices, and the commitment. It is your process that matters, not the goals.
expect the expected: Any venture crowded with opportunists and easified entrepreneurs will require executional excellence for victory. And that means, prepare to do what others will not.
The Commandment of Need is our most important CENTS Commandment for a productocracy because it defines our opportunity.
The Commandment of Need states that if you own a controlled and entry-barred enterprise that provides relative value, satisfying needs or wants, you will win growth, profits, and possibly, passive income for life.
Value is always relative based on market economics.
Anytime someone gives you money, that person has said, “Congratulations, you’ve won the value competition.” You see, everything you buy is subject to a value competition: a weighted evaluation with respect to your preferences. This evaluation ultimately determines who wins your money and who does not.
The value skew identifies the winner in the value competition.
Underneath the value competition and a winning value skew is a collection of value attributes, the value array, which inherently characterizes all market offers. Just as you have attributes—height, weight, hair and eye color—each marketplace offer also possesses identical traits. These attributes and their corresponding value arrays are different for everyone.
The value array and its attributes are the measuring stick delineating YES, I want to buy this, or NO, I’ll look elsewhere. You NEVER know which attribute is the lynchpin that causes someone to buy or not to buy.
offer in the mind of your potential customer. Your Price Professionalism Price Ambiguity Compelling Story (About Us) Ease of Ordering Label/Packaging Design Website Design Affiliations or Associations Cleanliness Customer Service Guarantee Crisp, Clean Photos Refund Policy Public Reviews Included/Excluded Ingredient Celebrity Endorsements Ambiance Comfort Product Features Security Payment Options Shipping Speed or Cost User Interface Bribed Reviews Employee Photos Website Recently Updated
ENGINEERING VALUE SKEW To dominate markets and win sales, engineer a value skew. It starts by identifying the value array and its attributes. Here’s how: First, examine both your product and its industry with the goal to identify every value attribute, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Remember, you don’t know what’s important to your customer, so brainstorming every one is the best practice. The first attribute group is its primary attributes: your product itself, deconstructed down to its core components. Is there any one component or ingredient that you can improve?
The second attribute group is its secondary attributes, which consist of the product’s marketing and delivery to the
customer. This would be your website’s design, order processing, photos, company story, customer service, shipping, refund policy, telephone (or lack thereof), sales copy, reviews, social media posts—anything that could make or break a sale is an attribute.
Wherever you can skew value within a product’s pool of attributes, you stand out and cast a bigger market tent. The bigger the skew, the more attractive your company becomes to the consumer.
As an entrepreneur, you must always ask, why do you exist in the marketplace? What value are you skewing? And who will yearn for your company should you close up shop? Or would your sudden market absence be met with eerie silence?
The best opportunities rarely come from joining the crowd, but serving it.
The big irony of passive income is it’s anything but passive. Every single entrepreneur I know who enjoys passive income today exercised an extraordinary and committed process yesterday. Passivity? LOL. It played no role.
