More and Less

(0:00 – 0:17)
J.C. Penney was one of the greatest business people of all time. He left us with a couple pretty amazing nuggets of wisdom. And the first one he said was, if I had to do it all over again, I had $55 in the beginning.

(0:17 – 0:34)
I put $50 in inventory and $5 into a wooden sign. If I had to do it over again, I would have put $5 in inventory and $50 into a much bigger, fancier wooden sign. And I would have put signs all over the town.

(0:35 – 1:08)
So what he’s really saying there with the first nugget is, he had a bunch of inventory, but as people were walking and driving by the store, they never saw his little sign. And if he had someone at the cash register, he couldn’t be out there by the door, trying to sway people to come in because they physically couldn’t see him. And what was driving him nuts is that 9 out of 10 people that were walking and driving by on their horse and buggies or in their automobiles, they would not even physically see him.

(1:09 – 1:55)
So what is the lesson? He says, if I really had to do it again, I would have had 10% of the inventory and I would have multiplied my marketing efforts by tenfold. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you’re putting 99% of your energy into your product and 1% into your marketing? Have you ever thought that maybe that whole thing could be backwards? Do you know that most great companies, they actually do the marketing before they make the product. Most great companies, they will actually physically build a sales funnel and they’ll sell a product, sometimes 10 to 1,000 units, before they’ve even made the product.