Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Right now, I’m reading a book that says in order to really be really successful at something you have to dedicate 10,000 hours to it. Making an analogy, to really know a business to the point where no one can steal your idea, and you can model it and convert it into a project, you need to find the answers to 100 questions. This post is about the best place to find those said answers.

When you finish building the business model in Excel, like I explained in this post, you should have a long list of “possibles” of that model, some colored green, others yellow, and the rest red. The majority of the 100 questions will be about estimating these values with the best possible precision. Others have to do with the most global aspects of the local or international market or the strategy that you had not been able to fully respond to in your market study. The next step is to make a list of all of these question that you have no answer to, in order to completely “decode” the project.

When we made this list about Officenet with Andy, there were way more than 100.The way we found the answers for these question is what I would like to share with you all. The first thing we tried to do was looking for the answers through Yahoo! (Google didn’t even exist!) and we searched for “office supplies” (”office products”). What appeared was a list of all the companies in the US that had a web page and had dedicated themselves to what we wanted to do. There weren’t many and to my surprise, they weren’t the biggest either.

We started to send some mails to everyone that we could. We presented ourselves explaining that we were two young entrepreneurs that wanted to start a similar business in Argentina and asked if they could help us. Of the 20 mails that we sent, 10 were responded, all of them in a very polite manner offering their collaboration.

The next step was to send them a list with some of our questions. There wasn’t a lot because we didn’t want to scare them. We sent about 5 questions, general enough, about the business. Almost all were answered. After 2 or 3 correspondences with the questions and answers we came to a crucial moment. We asked: “Would it be a problem if we visit you?” Three of them said: “Come!”.

And there we went… The trip included a visit to a very small business in Raleigh, North Carolina; a small one in Tampa, Florida; and a medium-sized business in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; we stayed for three days in each city.

We arrived to the first and to our surprise the President of the company had an entire day-schedule blocked out to spend with us. For the first time, we got out the list of 100 questions and started to ask them one after the other. When the topic of the question came to something very specific (for example, Logistics), our host said: “Wait a minute while I get you the Head of Logistics”, to whom we began to fire our questions.

The result with the other two companies was not so different. All three dedicated an impressive amount of time to us, were very open and collaborated with us like how you would imagine. Still to this day I’m grateful to Claude Pope and Carlton Miller, the owners of two of the businesses that we continue to have a relationship with after 13 years. They are two simple and generous guys that gave us a big hand.

The interesting part is that it was no coincidence. The people from the US are usually like this with people that are generally good and present no threat to them. This was a huge realization. I had never imagined that we would return from this trip with all of our questions answered. But we did just that and much more.

I know that not anyone can go on a trip like this. But if you can get together the money, I really recommend it. A trip like this will cost you around U$S 2000 to 2500 dollars, if you are a cheap person during the adventure. The cost is not cheap but if you really want to dominate your project, this number is not impossible. But is well worth the effort, no doubt about it.

Other barrier that could be presented is the language. Andy went to a English school and I learned a little bit from everywhere, but the two of us had the luck to speak well enough and to be able to success.

The key to answering the 100 questions is to identify the correct businesses, be straight-faced and nice when contacting them, develop a relationship before the visit and be well armed with the list from the moment you arrive.