Reflecting on my entrepreneurial journey thus far, I can’t help but think about how important the self-awareness to choose long-term gratification over instant gratification has been to how far I have come and how far I will go in the future. With that being said, I would like to go through how this choice, within the three most important factors of a business, can make or break you.
As Marcus Lemonis says, a business’s success, or death, comes down to three factors: people, product, and process. Each one takes a huge upfront investment of time, money, or both, but without all three, you can expect a short and stressful existence. I love how Marcus Lemonis breaks it down to such simple terms, but what isn’t simple is excelling in all three.
Product
Whether you provide a product or a service, there is a constant pursuit of improvement. Notice, I didn’t say a constant pursuit of perfection, as that pursuit is impossible and leads to the thinking that your product or service is for everyone, it’s not. Those who try to build for everyone, in actuality build for no one. They end up with an end result that doesn’t provide enough value to anyone, and in turn, will fail.
So where does the choice of instant gratification versus long-term gratification come into play with product? Easy, the decision to take short cuts or build it the right way, which is long, tedious, and requires massive effort and focus.
If you have seen Marcus Lemonis’s “The Profit,” you have seen countless businesses that take short cuts and they don’t even realize what is does to their product and how it looks to the customer. Customers can feel when something is done right. It shows in every detail of the product or service. They can feel the care and planning that went into every aspect. If you build it right, your customers will end up feeling like they got more value than they originally expected to get. It is in this moment of realization, that you have turned a customer into a fan, one that wants to tell the world what a great decision they made!