Or ‘The Slow And Steady System’.

All the words are important.

The Problem Statement

You have a product, and it costs you USD X per unit to produce. You check the market, and the market price is say X+40%. To enter the market, you want to reduce the price, say something like X+35%. But there are inherent problems there, of course, ranging from the psychological (if it’s cheap, it must be worthless) to the economical (your competitor lowers the price  just enough so that you can’t survive for long). But look at this from another angle.

You have a product/service costing USD X. You keep the price on the very low side, i.e. USD X+15% and because you are offering it much below the competition, you get a lot of customers (IF you market it right, which is another post in itself, easy). Those large number of customers will be happy to get a product that is normally available at USD X+40%,  at a cheaper price. And more and more people will want to buy the product/service.  Pretty soon the large number of customers use up most of your resources – including the all-too-important customer service –  and this sucks pretty much all the inspiration out of you to keep at providing a top level service/product. So, how do you keep the number of customers low, yet just high enough to be comfortably in the green.

You filter customers.

This idea is of course not new. The really good product/service providers almost always choose their customers. Most of the companies do this by offering a product at a higher price. It is better to have 10 customers paying you USD 100 than 100 customers paying you USD 10, so the saying goes. It is a saying, so it must have some value, which it does. But again, look at it from another angle.

With 100 customers paying you 10 dollars, you get 100 customers who already trust you to pay you for your product/service. And another saying tells you that it is much, much cheaper and easier to sell to existing customers than to find new ones.

The solution is something that I think I have found.

Limit the number of customers – more like a club. Of course, this again is not a new concept and some of the big weights in the new business order have already suggested to follow a membership model rather than just a customer model (Seth Godin, for example).

I call it a system because it helps in getting the right attitude about business; a system is a set of processes that start long before the product/service reaches the eventual customer (member, in this case).

Let us take an example of an actual club to drive this point home. The Lahore Gymkhana charges about PKR 700,000 for new members. Compare that with The Royal Palm club (also in Lahore) that charges, I think, PKR 1,200,000 approximately. Whereas the Royal Palm does not make you wait that long, the Lahore Gymkhana, with its seemingly ‘cheap’ membership fees, has a waiting period of – now wait for it – a waiting period of 18 years. Yes, eighteen. So, if you want to become a member of the Lahore Gymkhana, you pay 700,000 in advance to start using the service after almost two decades. I think that is the SAS System at work. They are comfortable with the amount of money they are making currently (as it is a club, their concept of a ‘profit’ is automatically different than a for-profit business). So they limit/choose the members with even a more strict approach. With the money they make, they spend on improving their service to their existing customers, who end up spending more and more within the club (E.g. The discounted departmental store/bakery, the new and improved golf course, the swanky gym, all developments that took place within the last 7 years or so).

So what are the implications of this SAS system?

The implications are not entirely huge, but they are not as subtle either. Consider this: I am starting a small enterprise, selling blog hosting. I want it to be the best product in the market but I don’t want to price it that expensive; I want myself to be able to afford it and use it. At the same time, I don’t want it to come off as worthless, which it is not, and neither I want to be not-inspired to follow up with outclass service, which I am not. So I limit the number of customers per year that the business will take in. And I mention it to the customers, that you are part of, say a total of 50 or 60 customers that will be ‘allowed’ to be a member for the year 2009.

It is slow, but not in a bad way. It is slow so that it gives you, as the product/service provider to give it your all, and tweak and improve. It gives you as the provider to actually ‘filter’ clients, and it gives the clients a good, cheap deal to work with. As the slow bit makes you take in clients in small groups, you ‘can’ give it a premium price, but that will reduce the number of people who can benefit from your product and most importantly, it will make it harder for you to search for the premium customer. The customer stays comfortable with the product/service, you stay comfortable with the bottom line that keeps you afloat and the business going; slow and steady.

It is steady and in a good way. It gives you as the product/service provider a solid foundation to build your business on. After a certain time, the number of customers themselves will be large enough and your business will slowly grow into it rather than quickly become obese.

The only drawback – if you are too washed-up in the get-rich-quick idea of business – is that it is not, well, it is not get-rich-quick.

The SAS System is how business should work, how it should be made to work. The advantages are clear. The foremost advantage lies with the customer – and is usually the case, I am the first customer of my own enterprise, so if I like the product/service, then it is a good hint that others will too.

I will be posting here, how this little enterprise works out following the so-called SAS System.

Dear reader, I bet my everything if you can tell me what that file, linked below, is saying. Yes, I bet everything. 

 Captcha worth hearing

People tell me that text books are for schools, and for schools only. Tell me that you have not heard this one before; text books have little to offer for practical life. Well, if the books you are reading are not teaching you about the real deal, then dude(!) you are reading the wrong books. 

Such high value is placed on experience that you just can’t wait to be fifty and tell young bucks to wait till they are fifty. What the hell? Does that even make sense?

I remember while at college, I would ask businessmen if I should get a job first and then try my hand at being self-employed, and almost all of them said something in the lines of, “just jump in, get your hands dirty, lose a few nights sleep, you will learn faster”.  Heck, where were you guys when the collective ‘us’ were being told that ‘whatever you are trying to do cant be done’ ? Then I realized, many years later, that not many people ask around with the intention to actually learn.

The high, very, very high horse

It is easy to be right when you won’t listen to anyone else. The high horse is very easy to get on to, oddly. It is easy to think that whatever you have achieved is the sole result of the combination of your clever intellect, your undying passion and hard/smart work. Again, real life examples teaches that the saddle on the high horse just sucks and you will fall the moment you think you got the mare running like crazy. It also has one interesting point that you won’t find in many business and success literature; the concept of luck. 

Without exception, all people who are successful enough to be writing books about it, accept the role of luck in their successful endeavors. I still seek a successful person (successful in any field) to plainly claim that luck had nothing at all to do with his or her success. Of course, I think that if you are God-concious, you will find it impossible to believe in luck – you will have to equate luck with God’s Grace, and that will keep you off the high horse like my golf balls keep off the green. 

Real life is the best teacher, just not neccessarily yours. 

I have many mentors, most of them do not know they have taught me so much. And like so many things, I have tagged them as to what I expect to learn from them. For example, Richard Branson have not taught me how to go about doing business, but how to go about the business of business. Making sense? 

Likewise, there was a person from Australia, a certain Brendon Sinclair, that taught me about the business of web design. As with Branson, Mr. Sinclair, I am sure, does not remember who I am and where I am from and what have I done with what he has knowingly and unknowingly taught me. But I remember that before I read Brendon Sinclair’s “The web design business kit”, I used to charge PKR 12,000 for offering my web design services, and after reading that, I charged triple that amount and got paid. A very distinct lesson on perception and market testing was learnt from Brendon Sinclair, although I paid PKR 11,000 (earned through web design business ) for the business kit to supposedly learn about the web design business. (Note: I made that 11,000 back in the first client that came after I had hardly glanced over the kit).

It was with the same expectation that I have joined – only recently - Yaro Starak’s Membership Mastermind program (click here for more info). Now this is the most expensive bit of ‘investment’ for me since like, ever! It has a price tag of USD 297 per month, for three months, and that is expensive by many standards. I do not expect to make triple that amount (I expect to make much more! God willing  ).

Yaro Starak has made a nice niche for himself, through his membership sites that he has set up. According to Yaro – and simple maths – one can be making as much as USD 100,000 per year easily. Yaro has also put up his travel pictures (click here to see them for yourself) and what not to convince people like me that he has the lifestyle to suggest that he has made it when it comes to membership sites. (BEWARE: There are tons of people out there, making claims of income much bigger than Yaro’s, only if you buy their product. Yaro is no different in trying to impress people by showing his lifestyle to buy his product, but one thing that he has which others simply do not is credibility – at least as far as I am concerned – I have been following his blog for more than a year now, I guess. Besides, I did not pay him money only because he had a good sales page  ).

Out of the total 7 or so modules, I have gone through three of them – and I must say, like all of the mentors before, much of what Yaro is saying is basic common sense. But I also pretty much guarantee, it is the kind of common sense that is not so common after all. 

For more information, do check out the program. More updates on the why’s and the how’s, God willing, coming soon.

I can sit and listen to instruments harmonized for hours – a great metaphor for life, which should does  have love, passion, anger, jealousy, envy, faith, sin, ecstacy, joy, weakness, greatness, simplicity and confusion. Your character is the funnel that channels, everything else just is.

I know one thing for sure, that being mediocre is just plain stupid. I make it sound like as if people do this by choice, this being ‘just average’. I do this because really, that is what people do; they choose to be average. Like me.

Now, I have had my fair share of failures and successes. Besides, being successful is at best, a subjective measure; you may be successful although someone else may think you are a complete reject. That, at the end of the day, does not matter.

We as a nation – Pakistanis – are champions of this ‘being average’ stuff. Just take a look around. I recently had a carpenter fixing up a 20-year-old cupboard. Now, from past experiences, I know that this carpenter is to wood what Picasso was to paint; a friggin’ genius. Unfortunately, the cupboard ended up looking like a bad experiment in cubism when this carpenter was done with it. Why? It is this ‘unees-bees’ (nineteen-twenty) syndrome, of course.

We stop at 19. The required result is 20, but because we know we are at 19, we stop; ‘heck, it is close enough.’ And we are right, it is close enough – but not good enough, man. I know you can take it to 20 – why not do it?

Consistency and Pride

We are not consistent, and we don’t take pride in what we do. I feel that a lot of us do not even know that we are supposed to be consistent in our output and take pride in our work. These are simple concepts – probably that is why they are misunderstood so often (our need – as humans – to complicate things is at work here).

Being consistent: if I start an enterprise, (Case in point: PicPrintr), I can consistently suck at it or consistently deliver a great product, is that what consistency means? No. It is much simpler and personal than that. Consistency is that I actually started a new enterprise, given that I call myself an entrepreneur. It is this consitency that I find myself lacking and then telling myself to come up with.

Take Pride: It is as simple as being able to show what you have done to any number of people. Nothing more, and definitely nothing less. I assure you, this test in itself is not easy – the idea of rejection, of embarrassed smile by the people you care about, is enough to make me cringe and stop what I am trying to do. This is where simplicity takes over and you cut through the bullshit – and do what you have to do, this time taking it to 21 instead of stopping at 19, because all that is required is 20.

It took me some time to put ‘Director’ as my post for the companies/brands that I started (four in total, so far). I was ashamed to be 21 years old and a Director of a company that had the Director as the Tea Boy as well. Heh. That was when I was 21. Now I am 28. Now I have taught myself not to give a damn. Besides, now I have a tea boy, paid for , Alhumdulillah. Now I am Director if I want to be, Consultant if I feel like it, or CEO if the mood is right.  The role of the company is not to bestow upon me a flashy post, remember? It is nothing but a logical segregation in my mind of doing stuff. Stuff that I like. First, I believed that companies had to have an office with people and accountants and bank accounts. Then I realized that a company is just a ‘compartment’ in my mind to funnel my activities to help me think. Period. (Always keep it simple, people).

I have accepted ‘this’ as the best that I can do, and this is the problem. People, I sleep when I want to, I play when I want to, I earn more than most of my friends, and work when I feel like. Yes, at times, I feel that all of this is a dream that will go away in a blink of an eye. It does not help when I can see how it can go away, if God so wills. But if God gave me all of this, obviously it is His to take. But the point is, being average has nothing to do with your ‘achievements’, and this is again something that is important to understand. Being average is staying the same for an extended period of time. That is not living, that is just killing time. That, ladies and gentlemen, is mediocricity.

Throwing in a What..If here and there

What if you could travel the world, write best sellers (books, products, businesses), give a larger percentage of your earnings to charity, help people smile and be at peace, all at the same time? The thing is, had I been doing that for more than two years or so, I am sure that would have that dry taste of ‘being average’. Till then, here I come, God willing.

Hence, this is my first video where I am actually talking to the camera (hence, to myself). As I always love to quote this line by RATM,

“It has to start somewhere, it has to start some how, what better place than here, what better time than now”.

For example: A high rate of crime, such as the one in South Africa, is not the problem that threatens the state. It is a problem of course for the 2010 Football World Cup hosts, but not the problem. Similarly, Talibans never was and probably never will be the problem for Pakistan. Yet it can not be denied that there is a problem – I mean, when there is smoke, there is usually a fire too and if everyone but you are panicking, perhaps you yourself have not understood the gravity of the situation.

Yes, the problem is grave. Obama was supposed to just walk into office and roll back everything wrong that we the Pakistanis thought Americans were doing. He only increased whatever we the Pakistanis thought Americans were doing. Again, that was not the problem, this American intervention since the birth of this green-and-white country.

The problem is us.

The problem is that an exceptionally high percentage of our urban population thinks that the madrassahs are a good thing. That same population also find the westerns rhetoric that the madrassahs are preaching hatred to be part of a larger conspiracy to take over our nukes – the Islamic bomb, remember? That is till you start paying attention to what you average Maulvi-in-the-Masjid is talking about.

The problem is never the circumstances, but always one’s response to that stimuli. Our response, as individuals and as a society is that of egotistical confusion. We really, I truly believe, do not know what Islam is. We find it hard to imagine that something as deep-rooted as Islam can be so magnificently simple to understand – if only we tried to learn. (both words ‘try’ and ‘learn’ are important here. You have to take initiative, hence try and your objective should be to learn, which means, first and foremost, that you accept you probably are wrong in your current knowledge – the latter part being the hardest for many, hence the ‘egotistical confusion’).

For example, when yet-another beard tried to take over the capital of Pakistan through his women brigade, everyone seemed to jump about that ‘Oh look, the state has lost their writ in the capital,’ or something like, ‘Just look how far the Talibans have infiltrated’ and ‘its the government’s fault’ or ‘Go Musharaf Go’. That is pure bull shit.

The problem was not the a zealot has tried to do what any nutt-job would want to. The problem neither was the supposedly controversial action that the government took against the Red Mosque’s inhabitants after the inhabitants shot down a dozen or so trained army personal. The problem was and is and remains the people’s reaction. I still remember being more bewildered than usual when I found myself speechless in front of the women- and men-folk whom I met that actually considered Ghazi (one of the ring leaders in the Red Mosque drama) as a true hero. ‘ he did what any self-respecting Muslim would!’ What? What are you reading, friend? And what are you on?

Then when the terrorist-who-tried was caught and tried and then released, he came back and said, ‘Hear ye, hear ye, all is cool. Suicide bombing is justified as long as it is against Kaafirs’.

Brilliant.

And the problem is not that he said that – like I already mentioned, that is a job of any nutt-job to say nutty stuff. The problem is that most people nod their heads when he says it. Not because they think Islam sanctions it, but because they know of nothing else.

I have a task for you, dear reader – go to your nearest Mosque, say, for the Maghrib prayer, and after the prayer, ask the Maulvi as to who is a kaafir. And while asking that, don’t laugh or smirk or anything. Nod your head like a respectful slave. When the monologue is finished, ask him again, saying something like, ‘I did not understand what you just told me, sir, I am sorry, will you please teach me again because I want to learn?’ But this time, throw in a question or two – why this, or what makes you say that, or where is it mentioned in the sources. And I insist that you keep the questions as respectful and as humbly-presented as possible. Depending on what sect that Maulvi belongs to and which sect he thinks you belong to, you will get some pretty interesting answers. That will be the madrassahs talking. Step back and enjoy. And try not to meet his eyes at Isha.

The problem is not American conspiracies, Israeli intentions or Indian intelligence. I never intend to give you the impression that the above three are not present here, for sure-as-shit, they are. But that is not the problem. The problem is us. We, like a pooch trained on a whistle, point a finger every time something goes wrong. And in the words of another Maulvi – this time a relatively good one – when you point a finger at someone, three of your fingers point back at you.

]]> http://blog.momekh.com/2009/04/29/maulvi-in-the-masjid/feed/ 0 http://blog.momekh.com/2009/04/23/i-am-blaager/ http://blog.momekh.com/2009/04/23/i-am-blaager/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:28:12 +0000 Momekh http://blog.momekh.com/?p=399

Blaagar with waper. Clean sokiety. All.

But only time will tell.

Seeking out clarity, I believe, will lead to a well-defined route. Clarity will give me the much-illusive simplicity. I believe that you get what you go after, so your ‘it is not that simple’ line will not work; it is simple, as simple as you make it.

Earning money. How much? And for what?

This question has once again started to bug me. Nay, it has plauged me. But this time, the problem is different.

Remember, money is a means to an end. Remember, money is a means to an end. One more time; remember, money is a means to an end.

Clarity will come once you find out what that ‘end’ is. You can define it word per word, process per process or you can have a fair idea of what that end looks like. The clarity will help you choose your route, not your end. The end will be chosed by how you choose to live your life.

I want to earn money. Not from one source, but from many. A little from here and there makes more sense than a lot from just here, if you know what I mean.

I find the idea of earning money just for the sake of earning money a non-worthy objective. What are you earning your money for? For whom? The answer to that question is the real deal, the real reflection of your objective. An answer that ‘I am earning because you are supposed to’ takes away that very clarity that I am running after. So it has been, and is, by God’s Grace, unthinkable for me to do something and tell myself that I am doing it to earn, period. That ’something’ has to pass quite a few tests.

Clarity is therefore, quite important.

That will come when I find my passion. I have been able to wrap a business around many of my interests, by God’s Grace. My idea of earning money – business or job – is to serve some other purpose. It seems that I have to find that purpose to find the required clarity.

Are you clear on your objective?