The Best Business Strategy | Using Value to See and Create Opportunity

What’s up everybody!? I know it’s been a little bit since my last episode, but please bear with me. I’ve been traveling a lot this past month to speaking engagements and conferences, which is great, but I’m excited to spend some time with you and get another episode out to you all. Today I want to talk about value. Not just the concept of value, but what value is in the marketplace and the economy - not only that, but how you can capitalize on it. Value is constructed from two sides - returns and risk. Applying this concept to business or investing - think of the returns as controllable factors and risk as uncontrollable factors. Controllable factors are things like management, offerings, services, revenue stream diversity, advertising/marketing, branding, and so forth. You can make management more efficient, effective. You can formulate and bring to market new products and services. You can change your advertising or marketing strategy to increase sales or brand awareness. Uncontrollable factors would be things like supply and demand, the state of the market, capital pricing, etc. No matter how hard you try, generally, you cannot control or affect these aspects. However, I use my own software company as an example in this episode and share how we used controllable factors to help offset uncontrollable factors such as these. Being that we generally cannot control the risks, we need to look at business models that allow us to increase returns while also limiting or lowering the risk (this is exactly why I got into self storage investing). Whatever your endeavor, you need to ensure that your controllable factors far outweigh your uncontrollable factors. Thanks so much for listening everyone, I really appreciate all of you. See you soon. AJ