“You don’t seem to realize what business you’re in. You’re not in the burger business. You’re in the real estate business.” - Harry J. Sonneborn, McDonald’s first finance chief, who famously told Ray Kroc, McDonnal’s CEO
He was explaining to Ray that McDonald’s makes more money by leasing land to it’s franchises than it does by selling hamburgers.
There are a lot of companies where their actual business model isn’t readily apparent.
Amazon for example, most people think of it as an online retailer, but that drastically undersells what they do.
What they really are is a platform ecosystem for digital infrastructure and commerce.
They have marketplace infrastructure… meaning many of the products sold on their website are not their own, they are other people listing their products on Amazon.
They have the largest and most complex logistics and fulfillment network in the world.
They are an advertising platform… 9% of their revenue comes form on site advertising sales.
They are the #1 cloud infrastructure platform in the world (AWS)
They make their own media and devices.
They have tons of different subscription products.
Amazon Prime is the most successful subscription service of all time.
…and so on.
“Who cares Chris?”
You. You care.
Or at least you should.
Too many CEOs don’t know what business they are actually in, and they similarly don’t know what their actual job is.
For example, I have a LOT of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances whose business is an “SEO Agency”.
But what is that really?
What is the value of SEO?
What do people REALLY want from it?
Most don’t care about rankings, traffic, impressions, clicks, or even leads…
…they want to make more money.
So your business isn’t an SEO Agency… it’s to be a money multiplier.
SEO is just the vehicle that you will use to multiply the money for them.
See the difference?
Once you begin to understand this, you can make better decisions n your business.
Instead of trying to make the graphs go up in AHrefs or whatever you will instead focus on getting them sales from valuable keywords and search visibility.
You can add in other traffic channels that will help SEO and conversions etc…
This applies to your role as the company owner/CEO.
Your job isn’t to do the thing… it is to make sure the thing gets done, and there are more things behind it.
That might mean doing it yourself sometimes, especially in the beginning, but it’s not the end goal.
You need to create as much leverage as possible to allow you to get as much business as possible, fulfill it as quickly and easy as possible, and use that to get even more business and keep the flywheel spinning.
This will require you to learn a lot of micro skills, but it will also mean learning that you can’t do everything yourself.
The takeaway here is that clarity of purpose is important for progress.
If you don’t know what business you are in you can’t grow your business.
If you don’t have clarity on what your job is, you can’t effectively do your job.
Dig deep and figure out what it ACTUALLY is that your business does, and what your job is, then start adjusting your priorities to those goals and watch everything change.
Till Tomorrow.
— Chris