How to destroy your company in 10 easy steps [Part 1]

Part 1: Focus on money and not product

It doesn't matter what industry you are in, what your product is, or how you sell that product, your product is what makes you money. Now, you have two choices in business when it comes to your product, you can either focus on making the best product you can, regardless of what your competition, or even the rest of the world is doing, or you can focus on wringing every last drop of revenue out of your customer base by adding support contracts, fees, and other revenue streams. 

A great example of this comes from when I was working to integrate my site to an API. I was excited to have a robust, well-documented API at the ready, but when it came time for me to connect, I was informed that in order to use the API I would need to pay an "access fee" for each endpoint I wanted to use. To be sure it was only $500 per endpoint, but I needed to access 10 endpoints. Fortunately for the company that managed the API, I was able to find another provider that offered a similar product, with free access, and I moved my software to their platform. This allowed the initial company to continue their slide into bankruptcy and irrelevancy.

I have found that these kinds of tactics tend to be used by companies with older products that are becoming less and less relevant in the marketplace. Instead of being innovative or creating additional value in their existing products, they look for ways to bleed those products to death. A great example of this was the Linux company named Caldera. Caldera, back in the late 1990's and early 2000's bought SCO Unix and then proceeded to sue customers of SCO that had switched from Sys V Unix to Linux, claiming that Linux had improperly included parts of Sys V in their source code. Of course, The SCO Group (Caldera's new name) refused to divulge what code was infringing, and made grand projections of how much they would make from the lawsuits. When the dust finally cleared, it turned out that The SCO group never really owned the copyrights they were suing over, Novell did, and promptly required The SCO Group to drop their lawsuits. Caldera, which had a decent but not amazing Linux distribution went out of business.

Just a couple of examples of how focusing only on money can help you turn a moderately profitable business into a non-existent business. The problem is that when you are focused only on money you tend to forget the people that make your product and the people that purchase your products. Simon Sinek talks about his two different experiences when visiting an Apple event versus a Microsoft event. At Microsoft, all they talked about was how they were going to beat Apple, while at the Apple event they focused on how their products could help people in their personal and professional lives. 

You can't focus on more than a couple of things at a time in business, so make sure those things are your employees, your products, and your customers. Your employees because they create, build, and sell your products. Your products because they are what you sell, and your customers because they are the ones who, hopefully, want to buy your products.

Image by Dee from Pixabay