What One Of The Best Debut Albums Of All Time Can Teach Us About Business
What One Of The Best Debut Albums Of All Time Can Teach Us About Business
I love seeing excellence. It doesn’t matter if it is in sports, business, or music. I know that the principles of success don’t change across different endeavors so I pay attention when I see people getting results. For example, you don’t have to be a Guns N Roses fan to appreciate the greatness of their debut album Appetite For Destruction (1987).
Appetite For Destruction Album Cover
Every song on that album was considered a hit at the time even though “Sweet Child of O Mine” was somehow the only track that hit number one as a single. The album as a whole did hit number one and was the 7th best-selling album of all time in the United States. Rolling Stone ranked it the 8th best debut album on its Top 100 Best Debut Albums list. The album was such a success that the band rode its momentum for the next decade with some not-so-great follow-up albums.
In music, business, and life when you have big wins early it can pave the way for a much easier path going forward. If you know this going in, you can make this principle a part of your success strategy.
Where You Start Can Determine Your Early Results
There is a lot of upfront work required in business acquisition. You have to figure out what kind of enterprise is a good fit for your skills and temperament. Once you know what vertical you want to be in, then there is a ton of research and deal hunting before you put an offer in. Even then things can fall apart. It can take multiple tries to lock down an acquisition. This can be frustrating. In the beginning, I would remind myself when things got hard that financial security for my family was worth the effort.
When I had a couple deals under my belt, I realized that things went pretty smoothly after the acquisition on the deals that I did the most upfront work on. From that point on, I doubled my efforts in the early part of the acquisition process because I knew it would make things easier going forward. It seems counterintuitive but what most people consider the “busy work” of business actually can result in more free time on the back end.
Laying the early groundwork of success is a skill that I try to get better at every day.
Set The Conditions For Success
There is a very high probability that if you look at a successful business, it currently uses different systems and frameworks than it did when it started. That does not mean that the early methods were “wrong”, most of the time it means that the owner survived long enough to optimize what they are doing.
To go back to the Guns N Roses example, their 300th live show was better than their first because of all of the experience they got in between. The early success, however, gave them huge crowds and tons of exposure that made those early reps even more powerful. The same concept applies in business. If you can crush it out of the gate, you have the potential to grow much faster year over year because the early results give you the breathing room and reps to optimize. If I were to start from scratch with the knowledge I have now, I would know exactly what to do because I will always have the experience I earned.
