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I just read another one of those rags to riches stories about somebody’s magnificent business success.

You know the ones I’m talking about:

Person X was living in a damp cave with no running water. They came across a book, or a marketing technique, or a daily ritual. Lo and behold… they are now rich, happy, and live in a big house with several well-behaved pets and/or family members.

Lesson: Follow this approach and you can become fabulously successful.

Other common success stories talk about accomplished people who didn’t get there until relatively late in life:

Sam Walton didn’t open his first Walmart until he was 44.

Julia Child didn’t have a TV show until she was 51.

Martha Stewart didn’t spend a day in jail until she was 63 (this example may not apply).

Lesson: It’s never too late to become fabulously successful.

Still other times, the success story is about perseverance:

John Krasinski was within weeks of giving up on an acting career when he got the role in The Office.

Dr. Seuss’s first book was rejected by 27 different publishers.

Thomas Edison failed 1,000 times before finally inventing the lightbulb. (Granted, he would have figured things out sooner had his workshop not been so dark.)

Lesson: Keep trying and eventually, you, too, can be fabulously successful.

Lotteries Are Hard to Win

The problem with these stories is not that they encourage people to follow their dreams. I’m all for that. And reading about the paths successful people have taken can be inspiring.

But they are not, for the most part, repeatable. They are winning lottery tickets – not business models. 

What makes the stories so interesting and inspiring in the first place is how unusual they are.

And so we need to be careful in how we use and learn from these “one in a million” tales. Because for every one of them, by definition, there are hundreds of thousands of other people who ended up in a different place.

A better approach, I think, is to reduce the need for luck and instead, do things that improve our odds of success and give us more control over the outcome.

Four recommendations…

#1. Figure out what you are especially good at.

As I wrote recently, passion alone isn’t enough. You need to have an honest conversation with yourself about what your natural talents are.

Using those makes you really, really hard to compete with. Your clients understand it and your competitors are afraid of it.

So pay attention to where people compliment you; in what types of activities or projects others are continually trying to involve you; what you are known for in both your professional and personal life (drinking beer doesn’t count). It’s in there somewhere.

#2. Find a really small pond.

You are not looking for fame; you are looking for work.

As small professional service providers and solos, we don’t need thousands – probably not even hundreds – of clients.

The narrower your focus, the easier and more quickly you will stand out. Find the people and problems you can specialize in and ignore the rest.

#3. Look for existing demand.

If you find it unbelievable that nobody but you (and maybe one or two odd friends) seems to understand the value and importance of solving a certain problem, you are going to have a tough time selling the solution.

You might be right a thousand times over and have the data to prove it.

But unlike many huge companies that are mostly in the business of convincing people they look old, smell bad, drive the wrong car, and would see a demonstrable difference in their dating success if their teeth were whiter, we don’t have that kind of marketing horsepower.

We can’t convince people to care about a problem they don’t believe they already have.

Instead, look for known pain within your area of specialty (e.g., not enough clients, leadership infighting, difficulty fundraising, fear of cyberattack).

You still have to get hired. But drowning people are much more interested in “flotation solutions” than are those who occupy dry land. (Why am I suddenly talking like Spartacus?)

#4. Follow the money.

My clients are small professional service firms and independents. Smart, successful people who tend to make a lot of money.

Which means that paying me for what I do, while not a no-brainer, is not a tremendously difficult decision either.

They know that as long as the newsletters I do for them bring them just one new client a year, they just covered my cost and a whole lot more.

But if I tried to sell the exact same service to people in lower compensated professions, it would be much harder.

So pay attention to the kinds of people and firms you help – it’s not an afterthought. The more difficult the decision, the slower they will move and the fewer of them there will be.

Here’s the Bottom Line

Miracles are nice. They just don’t happen that often (that’s why we call them miracles).

The more your success depends on “being discovered,” “going viral” or finding the next four-leaf clover, the less likely it is to happen.

And while there’s always going to be luck involved, that’s no way to run a business.

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Extra Credit

In the style of Dr. Seuss, write a two-line poem about today’s topic.
(No AI please!)

Post your answer and read what others have said below.