Hopefully if you’re reading this blog, you understand how important “testing” is in business. Well, I have a new book recommendation for you. The book is titled, “Failure is Obsolete – The Ultimate Strategy to Create Recurring Success in Your Business and in Your Life” and was written by Benji Rabhan who owns multiple businesses. This is a book you can download and read in a weekend, which is what I did.
The premise of the book is to TEST before making any significant decisions in your business. The author suggests that we should consider using this approach in all ares of our lives and I have to agree. From the book…
“Testing is all about gathering data involving actual behavior in the most low-risk, low-cost way possible. So you can pre-prove that your idea has legs without going through the time and expense of carrying out the entire idea to see if it’s successful.”
When you TEST before you make any significant changes, you can save yourself a great deal of time and a hell of a lot of money. A great real life example of why you should TEST before you make significant decisions might be JC Penny. I’m sure you’ve heard that JC Penny hired Ron Johnson from Apple and decided to completely change their marketing approach. Basically, they decided to eliminate all promotions and discounts. They quickly rolled these changes out to all of their stores with hopes to improve their revenues and market share.
Since this change, JC Penny has lost $4.3 billion in revenue when compared to the year prior to the change. They are now in the process of unwinding these changes and going back to their previous model of offering discounts, promotions and coupons. Had the experts at JC Penny invested $8.00 in this little book, they might have saved themselves from this significant loss. I’m not kidding. The reason why is because they could have designed a simple test to see how this new strategy worked before rolling it out to all of their stores. In other words, they could have pre-proved this approach BEFORE moving forward.
A few weeks ago, I was watching Shark Tank with my family. One entrepreneur pitched the Sharks on investing into his new Teddy Bear business. Apparently, he had spent $400,000 designing a Teddy Bear that you could record personal voice messages on remotely. The idea was traveling parents or family members could record personal messages for their children and grandchildren. The Sharks asked him what price he needed to sell the Teddy Bears at to make his projected profits. Thankfully, he knew this answer – $60 a bear! Their next question was…”How many Teddy Bears have you sold at this price point?” His answer was 0. He had sold some Teddy Bears through Groupon at a discounted price, but none at their full retail price of $60. In other words, this guy invested $400,000 on this idea without having any idea if it would work. More than likely, this idea is not going to work and this poor fella is out big time.
Are you contemplating any significant changes in your business or personal life? If so, is there a way you can test these changes before moving forward? I’ll bet you can and you’ll see a few ideas in’ Benji’s book. I used one of the ideas in this book to test a new training program I was going to launch. In the past, I would have spent weeks creating all of the training materials. Once these materials were complete, I would then go to work marketing the new program hoping it would sell at a level to justify the time investment.
Instead, I marketed the training program on a limited basis as a simple test to see if it would sell first. This little test showed very quickly that the new training program would not sell at the level needed to move forward. My test pre-proved this idea was not a winner and I was able to cross the entire project off of my schedule. I saved well over 100 hours of my time, which is a significant savings.
In this book, you’ll see little ways to test just about everything. You can see how to test new marketing ideas, prospective new employees, web pages, lead generation advertisements, marketing funnels, and more. In fact, he even writes about why we should “test” renting a home before we buy it. You might consider “testing” a marketing campaign around this idea in your business!
