Episode Transcript

Michael Abernathy 0:00
Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back today and guys, welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. Real quick, guys, if you wouldn’t mind partnering with me to help get the word out. And if you know somebody that would benefit from listening to this, or from hearing this show, would you mind sharing it with them, or you guys could rate and leave a review, it’d be much appreciated. Thanks for getting the word out everybody.

Well, real quick, I want to talk about distribution versus product mindset. And when it comes to business, and when it comes to a lot of business building, entrepreneurs and business people are normally stuck in one of two mindsets, one, building a great product, or to actually be able to distribute the product to their customer. And What I found is, when you are solely product focused, you actually do not tend to succeed in business. And this is What I mean by that.

One. And before I get into this, I want to preface this, I’m not saying that you do not need an excellent product, that you do not need the best service that you possibly can have. Right? But What is often missed with product mindset, when it comes to business is the actual distribution, the product, how do you get your product into customers hands? How do you deliver it to them, because see, without the distribution, you’re not going to have sales. And without the distribution, you’re not going to generate revenue, okay. And so if you just get stuck in developing product, and developing the perfect product, you are actually never going to build a business.

And Here’s What I mean by that. Right, I was eating breakfast the other day with a friend, he took me out, he’s like, Hey, man, let’s just go hang out. So we went out for breakfast. And we’re just talking. And as we were sitting the restaurant, we sat at the bar because it was crowded, and just looking at the restaurant, and it’s like, man, they have great food. But if they weren’t able to deliver this food to the people buying from them, they’re making no money.

So think about this, think about all the amazing restaurants that closed down during COVID. Why? they had no distribution, they had no ability to put their product, their food, their amazing food, their amazing menu, whatever it is into the hands of customers. And as a result, they’re no longer in business. It was interesting, because during COVID, we actually got calls a lot to actually help build distribution models online for restaurants. And that were not prepared for COVID that had actually not developed this other chain to actually help set them up for success during COVID. The people who were not online, the restaurants that went online, or a lot of the businesses that we got phone calls were like during COVID that were not aligned all of a sudden called and we’re like, Oh no, we have no way to distribute the food, we have no way to distribute our product. Now whether they actually thought we have no distribution or not is different, right? Like, I don’t know if they actually had those thoughts, but they just know, they just knew like, oh my gosh, we don’t have any customers customers can’t buy from us because we can’t get them the food because of locked down, shut down all these other things.

And so if you’re building a business, you’ve got to know how you’re actually going to get your product into customers hands. And that’s where the transaction of money occurs, or your service into customer hands. That’s where the transaction of money occurs. And you also have to have a phenomenal product. If you do not have a phenomenal product, your business will also fail. You cannot just be like cool, I’m opening a restaurant and then you serve really crappy food and expect people to show back up and expect people to buy from you. It’s not going to happen. However, if you are having an amazing product, and then your mindset just shifts to distribution. You are talking about creating an incredible business.

Now I want you to stop and pause like think about this. Think about where Amazon’s model from the b2c side, because they have a lot of b2b stuff. But really from the b2c side, we think about What they’re thinking about. They are solely thinking about distribution, they are thinking about how do we distribute our products? How do we get our products into customer hands faster? How do we get the product shipped out faster? They are so focused on distribution, and you look at What it’s done to the business. And this is where when Andrew and I first started business, this is where we failed, we were focused on having this amazing product, we really were focused on quality. We were focused on organization, we’re focused on the actual execution of the service and how to execute the service in the best way possible. But the problem was is we didn’t focus on distribution. So we didn’t grow the way we should. And we made an early mistake and a rookie mistake in not actually building out the distribution side of the business and we didn’t understand this till much later. And it hurt us in the long term. It also added to us a lot because we also have a Harvard degree in stupidity. we’ve learned What not to do. which is great.

Anyways, as I’m wrapping up guys, the main point of this is do not forget how you’re actually going to deliver to your customers. The distribution side is so important. Anyways, I’m out of time guys so peace