Face masks have become commonplace very quickly during 2020. Some existing businesses have simply added them to their product lines. Others have popped up since the pandemic started.

Puhff Mask and Accessories started because of the founder’s personal experience with COVID-19. And the company aims to provide practical help for communities.

Puhff Mask and Accessories

Read more about the mission below in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What the Business Does

Sells face masks.

Business Niche

Providing common sense solutions.

CEO Jaheyla Jones told Small Business Trends, “Most masks aren’t packaged in antibacterial pouches, but Puhff Masks are. Moreover, this company was founded in an attempt to stop the exploitation of lack of masks and end price gouging in this market.”

How the Business Got Started

After a bout with COVID-19.

Jones recovered from COVID-19 and wanted a way to protect her community. So she stared exploring the possibility of selling face masks.

Biggest Win

Connecting with distributors.

Jones says, “The biggest win so far is partnering with Mr. Checkout, a pretty big distributor. As a wholesale company we want to do everything we get our products into the hands of the people.”

Biggest Risk

Investing in a new business during an uncertain time.

Jones explains, “Just starting the business was a risk. With all the uncertainty of the pandemic, it was a risk to invest in masks, in packaging, in marketing.”

How They’d Spend an Extra $100,000

Growing their operations and helping others.

Jones says, “I would invest it back into the company in order to later invest it back into the community.”

Fun Fact

The team has always been remote.

Jones explains, “Since this company started during the pandemic, none of the team members have actually met each other in person!”

* * * * *

Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program

Image: Puhff Mask and Accessories

This article, “Spotlight: Puhff Mask and Accessories Launched Due to a Personal Bout with COVID-19” was first published on Small Business Trends

Kedma Ough and Rashedia Mayhane spoke at the Survive and Thrive Summit about money tips and tools for your small business. Hosted and produced by Ramon Ray of Smart Hustle Media, the first two Summits were held in April and August 2020. The next one will be in this spring of 2021. It’s free, so sign up for updates and registration information.

Kedma is a small business superhero, an advocate to those navigating entrepreneurship and trying to be successful. During this challenging time, you need as many superheroes as possible who have your back since there are many new challenges we’ve never faced before. Read on to learn about money tips and tools that will help your business now and in the future. 

“Every difficult circumstance has a silver lining.” – Kedma Ough

Kedma has researched publications about how businesses thrive during and after a recession. Basically, the economy rewards the aggressive advertiser, not the business that pulls away and overthinks their next move. People are still spending money, but they are spending differently.

For instance, COVID-19 has forced people to spend money online in ways they never have before, which is making off-line businesses move more into the digital space. You need to serve your current customer base and see what you can do to support them during this time.

During and after a recession, the economy rewards the aggressive advertiser, not the business that pulls away and overthinks their next move.

Rashedia explains how much we learn when we hit rock bottom, which has happened to a lot of people over the last several months. This is the time for small business owners to really see what skills they have in-house and utilize those skills and resources. Whether you have one team member or ten, see what additional tools you can pull from your current staff that could save money from having to use vendors or outside resources.

Money Tips to Make Each Dollar Go Farther

1. Look over personal finances

Rasheida tells us how it’s hard to focus on business matters if personal matters aren’t in place or are in a stressful period.

Many business owners who have been in business for less than five years use personal money for funding, which isn’t a bad thing. But this is the time it’s ok to take a pause and reset if you need it. It’s important to just breathe and take a break from self-funding so you can make decisions with a clear mind, especially if personal finances are stressful. 

2. Consider talking to your credit card companies

It’s possible they will be able to reduce your interest rates or work out a deal if you just call and talk to them.

3. Collaborate with competitors

This might sound counterintuitive, but this is the time to pivot and think of new ways to get people to spend money. Sometimes a collaboration actually reaches more people, and there are ways to market together by still showing each business’s unique features.

The campaign for “Got Milk?” was actually put together by a bunch of dairy farmers who were technically in competition. But the campaign created a big spotlight on milk, which in turn got people talking and spending money. It was less about each specific brand and more about the product. 

4. Find funding

Head to Google and search for COVID-19 Small Business Funding (Your City). Kedma told us how there are many ways to get funding, but they aren’t highly marketed because they are more niche and specific.

So set some time aside and start doing a little research, go below the surface and see how your gender, demographic, and type of business might be able to receive other types of funding. A lot of help for small businesses is out there, so don’t throw in the towel too easily.

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Listen to more interviews from the Survive and Thrive Summit or from other top entrepreneurs.

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The post 4 Financial Tips During COVID: Make Your Money Work for You appeared first on SmartHustle.com.

Young entrepreneurs generally seem to be reluctant to consider using debt to help finance their businesses. The reasons they cite are many.  Often, they are concerned that they already have a heavy debt burden due to student loans from college.  Others tell me they watched their parents get deep into debt and don’t want to […]

The post Good Debt. Bad Debt. appeared first on Dr Jeff Cornwall.

COVID-19 has impacted our way of life and more so the way we work. Working from home has become the new normal, and we’ve literally turned our homes into an office and digitized our work. In a little over six months, we have learned how to remote work, learn to video conference as well as collaborate in the cloud. 

According to a survey by FlexJobs 51% of workers claim they have been more productive since starting to work remotely. With only 5% saying they have become less productive. 

Top Things Employees Miss About Working in an Office

Despite these perks working from home isn’t all it is cracked to be for some. In fact, employees still miss the office- particularly human contact. Among the things they miss working in the office include:

• 49%, miss seeing their colleagues 
• 44% miss personal interactions with colleagues
• 26% miss in-person meetings 
• 20% of workers say they find it difficult to “unplug” when they work from home.
• 14% miss the water cooler chats, 
• 14% the stimulation of the office environment 
• 11% feel lonely working at home 

Relationships in the Office

Relationships between colleagues are important as they help forge teamwork. With these connections lost or circumvented by technology, employees risks focusing more on their individual roles rather than the output of the entire team. This might also cause stress and negatively impact collaboration as well. 

Of the more than 4,000 surveyed, an overwhelming majority (81%) would like to see flexible work options moving forward. In fact 30% have already made requests that have been approved by their employers to continue working remotely in the post-pandemic era.

Companies also seem to be on board with 13% having been told by their employers to continue working from home. An equal number (13%) have had their request to continue remote working denied.

In fact, 65% now prefer to work remotely full time even after the pandemic. While almost a third (31%) would like to see a combination of remote working and working at the office in the future. 

Among the factors that made remote working enticing include a quieter work environment (68%), less distractions from colleagues (68%), control over the workplace (66%) and of course the comforts of homes (65%).

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, “Top Seven Things People Miss About Being in an Office During COVID-19” was first published on Small Business Trends

With every startup or business idea, there comes a dream to scale it to the moon. I am a journalist with two small startups under my belt. Being in the startup world for years, I have been on both sides of the spectrum. On one hand, I have mentored many startups due to my association with incubators and accelerators, and on the other hand, I have done extensive research into possible resources, mentors, guides, investors, and backers that I, personally can utilize for my own startups.

When you are a programmer, the reality of your idea is just behind some lines of code; but, if you are a non-technical founder like me, things become difficult. What do you do?

You collaborate with entities like a startup studio.

The recent trend of startup studios is giving non-technical founders access to resources that help them “build” their idea. These resources can be in the form of mentorship, specialized teams, and technical leadership as well.

If you have never heard of a startup studio then here is what you need to know. It is a setup that is built to enable and support other startups. It can also be called a startup factory. The three aspects that define a startup studio are:

– internally generated ideas,

– the singular goal of supporting other startups,

– and a proper infrastructure of idea enabling resources.

The question is, does it help?

Companies such as Dollar Shave Club came out of the Science startup studio in Santa Monica, California, and prove to be a good case study for what’s possible.

As a non-technical founder, collaborating with a startup studio can provide you with the following benefits:

1. It can act as your CTO/Co-Founder

Startup studios are more invested in your business than a web design agency. This is because startup studios build you from the ground up, they help you launch the idea and watch it grow. Hence, they are motivated to provide guidance, support, and resources for a longer period of time.

Startup studios also act as your co-founder and CTO to “build” your product and later also work on the growth of your startup and devise strategies for the future. The key interest of any startup studio is the success and growth of their startups, its valuations, and its future.

2. It helps to create blueprints or prototypes

In the startup world, if you are stepping in with just a passionate idea without proper resources, guidance, or backup. There is little chance that your startup will succeed.

However, with a startup studio, you can raise your success rate significantly. It is because they provide an almost foolproof blueprint on how to launch and develop your idea. With the help of a startup studio, you can build a prototype you can use to move forward with your idea, validate it, do risk analysis, or calculate possible lacks and failures.

3. It can help you validate product/market fit

When you come up with an idea, initially that is all it is. No matter how great, how innovative, or problem solving an idea is, it is just… an idea. Until you roll up your sleeves and work on it. Once you get started on bringing your idea to a reality that’s when the first pool of obstacles, failures, and problems arrive. This is the first test of your endurance and the validity of your idea.

With a startup studio, you can do just that. You can take your idea, create a prototype, launch it, and validate if it can withhold in the real world.

4. It gives you access to idea pools

Startup studios go through several businesses, ideas, potential startups on an everyday basis. Their exposure, to new ideas, technologies, and possibilities, is immense. The individuals in the studio are also tech-savvy and innovative which leads to even more solutions and ideas.

It is a high possibility that when growing your startup you will reach a dead-end, a failure, a u-turn, or crossroads. When faced with such situations, you can bounce ideas, discuss, evaluate, and analyze each opportunity or solution with the startup studio. The diverse set of mindsets will allow you to make a suitable pivot for the future of your company.

5. It lets you tap into a pool of resources

With a startup studio, you have easy access to tech-savvy, diverse minded, experienced, professionals. A startup studio has a team of designers, developers, marketers, and administrative staff for the early-stage startups they are associated with.

Having access to a pool of resources, startups can get all the help they need in launching their idea without hiring and thus, saving the expense of salaries during its prototype phase.

Conclusion

While a studio startup can be highly impactful for non-technical founders, it can be highly beneficial and enabling for technical founders as well. To run a business you need a whole team of experts and enablers, a startup can not be a one-man show. To thrive, every startup requires collaboration, loyalty, sharing of ideas, resources, and a team to lean on. So whether you are a non-techincal or a technical founder joining a venture-capital-backed studio will absolutely enable growth opportunities.

“No more romanticizing about how cool it is to be an entrepreneur. It’s a struggle to save your company’s life – and your own skin – every day of the week.”

— Spencer Fry, co-founder of CarbonMade

The post How Collaborating With a Startup Studio Can Save Non-Technical Founders appeared first on Startup Digest Blog.

The key to running a successful business is enticing customers and clients to do business with you. So whether you’re scrambling to lure customers back during a global pandemic or expanding your markets during “normal” business times, the question is, How do you do that? What are the best ways to get customers to come to your store, website, restaurant, office, etc.?

We all know the answer: it’s marketing. But marketing is not a simple process. There are various practices, tactics, and strategies that are part of an overall marketing plan—and they are constantly evolving. It can make formulating a marketing plan for your small business overwhelming.

To help simplify the process, there is one marketing method that has maintained its claim to fame. Email marketing still promises to deliver the highest ROI of all marketing channels—$42 back for every dollar you spend.

That’s not to say email as an industry, and your approach to it, isn’t evolving—it is, or it should be. As Tom Kulzer, CEO and founder of AWeber, a leading email marketing solution for small businesses, says, “The most effective [email] marketing strategies adapt, grow, and innovate.”

AWeber recently released its 2020 Small Business Marketing Email Marketing Statistics Report, featuring insights from small business owners and industry experts. These are the techniques that are working for other small business owners. See if they’ll work for you as well.

While email marketing can boast about its effective ROI, not all small businesses are using it. According to the report, 66% of businesses surveyed say they use email marketing to “promote their businesses or communicate with leads and/or customers.”

If you are not among that percentage, it’s time (past time, actually) to incorporate email into your marketing strategy. If the ROI isn’t enough to convince you, remember, email is the marketing channel most consumers say they want businesses to use to communicate with them.

Still, you likely have questions if email marketing will work for you. Take a look at some common questions the survey addresses.

How effective is email marketing?

Very. Of those surveyed, 79% say it’s “important” or “very important” to their businesses. However, while business owners acknowledge the importance of email marketing in general, only 60% think their own email marketing strategies are “effective” or “very effective,” while 26% say it’s either “ineffective” or “very ineffective.”

Effective email strategies are “personal, targeted, and crafted with the customers’ objectives and objections in mind.”

How do you measure success?

You cannot know how effective your email marketing is without defining the parameters you want to measure. The two most common measurements for small businesses are open rates and click-through rates:

• Open rates—65% of small businesses average open rates between 11% and 50%.
• Click-through rates—The study showed many small businesses need to improve their click-through rates; 77% of small businesses average email click-through rates between 0% and 10%.

Other Articles From AllBusiness.com:

• The Complete 35-Step Guide for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business
• 25 Frequently Asked Questions on Starting a Business
• 50 Questions Angel Investors Will Ask Entrepreneurs
• 17 Key Lessons for Entrepreneurs Starting A Business

How often should I send emails?

Nearly 40% of survey respondents report they send emails “at least once a week but less than daily.” More than 30% send emails “at least once a month but less than weekly.” And about 12% either send emails daily or less than once a month.

Still not sure what to do? Mark Asquith, the cofounder and CEO of Rebel Base Media, advises those who are just starting to use email marketing send an email once a week. “Rather than sending more, test what you already do. Then test frequency,” he says.

His main point is you shouldn’t be sending more emails that don’t work and less emails that do work—and the best way to determine that is to “Test, test, test!”

But, warns Ramit Sethi, the author and founder of I Will Teach You to be Rich, don’t worry that much about how often you send emails. Sethi doesn’t think frequency is the most important factor for email success; he believes content is. “Writing amazing emails that provide value is [most important],” he says. “If your emails are incredibly entertaining, informative, and engaging, you can send as many as you want.” To measure their effectiveness, Sethi says, “Watch your open rates and unsubscribe rates closely.”

Does list size matter?

Most (43%) of the participating small business owners have email lists between 0 and 500 subscribers. Slightly more than 30% have between 1,001 and 9,999 email subscribers, and less than 7% of small businesses have more than 50,000 subscribers.

Does the size of your list impact effectiveness? Yes, but don’t let that discourage you. It appears having at least as few as 500 subscribers makes a difference. Of the small businesses surveyed, 42% with more than 500 subscribers say their email marketing strategies are effective or very effective, while only 20% of businesses with 500 or less subscribers say the same.

Obviously, growing your list is important. “The bigger your list, the more conversions you can achieve,” says Kath Pay, the CEO and founder of Holistic Email Marketing. She advises small business owners to “ensure your subscribe form is above the fold, in a prominent, easy-to-access position on your website. Have this form available on every page of your site.”

Think of email marketing as one of the most powerful tools to jump-start your small business and take it to the next level. It’s effective, it’s affordable, and it works.

RELATED: 4 Little Email Marketing No-Nos That Could Land You In Big Trouble

The post Email Marketing: Still the Most Powerful Tool to Take Your Business to the Next Level appeared first on AllBusiness.com. Click for more information about Rieva Lesonsky. Copyright 2020 by AllBusiness.com. All rights reserved. The content and images contained in this RSS feed may only be used through an RSS reader and may not be reproduced on another website without the express written permission of the owner of AllBusiness.com.

I always forget what synecdoche means because it sounds so fancy. And because it sounds so fancy we should first…

The post Polish Your Point of View with Synecdoche appeared first on Copyblogger.

This guest post is authored by Guy Raz (@guyraz), the Michael Phelps of podcasting. Guy is the creator and host of many popular podcasts, including How I Built This, Wisdom from the Top, and The Rewind. Guy is also the co-creator of the acclaimed podcasts TED Radio Hour and Wow in the World, a podcast for children. He’s received the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize, the National Headliner Award, the NABJ Award… basically all the awards. 

His brand-new book is titled How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs. Past podcast guest Adam Grant has this to say about it: “[This book is] the mother of all entrepreneurship memoirs. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to start a business, grow a business, or be inspired by those who do.”

What follows is an exclusive chapter — “Go In Through the Side Door” — from How I Built This.

Enter Guy…

A funny thing happens when you start to find success with a new business. You suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a host of people who are none too happy to see you. These people have a name. They’re called competitors. And whether they’ll admit it to you or not, many of them will try to do everything within their power to legally — and sometimes not so legally — shut you out. It’s a strategy deployed by the big fish in every pond once they notice a new, young fish swimming around and getting bigger by gobbling up the scraps they previously considered too small to care about.

In 1997, as the personal computer business approached 100 million units in annual sales and the dot-com bubble began to grow in earnest, Microsoft was one of the biggest fish in a pond that was about to swamp the world. Late that summer, a Microsoft group vice president named Jeff Raikes sent a now-famous email titled “Go Huskers!” to Warren Buffett, a fellow Nebraska native, describing Microsoft’s business in an effort to get him to invest in the company. In the email, Raikes likens the sturdiness and growth potential of Microsoft’s operation to that of Coca-Cola and See’s Candies (which Buffett had owned since 1972), in no small part because Microsoft’s revolutionary flagship product — the Windows operating system — had created a “toll bridge” that every PC maker would have to cross if they expected consumers to buy their machines.

The graphical user interface that made Windows revolutionary also made it wildly popular, which had the additional effect of creating a “moat,” as Raikes described it, between Microsoft and its competitors in the marketplace — one it was able to widen considerably with a 90 percent market share in productivity software applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, etc.) that were built on top of Windows and were equally popular. This, in turn, gave Microsoft tremendous “pricing discretion,” not just for its applications software but also for the licensing fees the company charged to other computer makers for Microsoft’s operating system software.

What Raikes did not say in his email, but what Buffett surely understood from his decades of experience, was that the wider the moat and the longer the toll bridge, the more aggressively Microsoft could wield its pricing discretion in order to cement its growing advantage in the software industry. They could use it as a carrot, by lowering the licensing fee for Windows as an incentive to get their browser and applications software preloaded onto as many new PCs as possible. They could use it as a stick, by withholding volume Windows licensing discounts to punish PC makers that refused their sweetheart deal, or by offering their applications software at cost or below in order to drive competitors such as Lotus, Novell, and Corel (remember them?) out of business.

Microsoft employed each of those strategies to great effect. A year after Raikes’s email to Buffett, Microsoft would surpass General Electric as the world’s most valuable company and stay in that position for five consecutive years.

Toll bridge. Moat. Pricing discretion. These are euphemisms for the economic term barriers to entry, which is itself a kind of euphemism for all the ways existing businesses shut out competitors and make it difficult for new businesses to compete in a given industry. These barriers are not just conscious strategies deployed by old guard blue-chippers; they are also natural forces that rise and shift within a market as competitors enter and exit, grow and shrink, evolve and pivot. They can become the biggest obstacles you will face as a new business looking to grab, secure, and expand your foothold in a market, because they are the mechanism by which you will either be crushed (if your competitors see you coming) or ignored (if the market doesn’t).

This is why if, like most new businesses, you aren’t doing something completely novel or you aren’t doing it in a totally new way or new place, you should be thinking long and hard about how else you might enter your market besides knocking on the front door and asking for permission to come in. This is something that female and minority entrepreneurs have long had to contend with, whether it means breaking through glass ceilings or breaking down walls built by prejudice. All of which is to say, figuring out how to sneak in through the side door is not new ground you will have to break. A legion of resourceful geniuses have come before you. And what many of them have discovered is that the side door isn’t just less heavily guarded, it’s often bigger. Or, as Peter Thiel put it in a 2014 lecture at the Stanford Center for Professional Development titled “Competition Is for Losers,” “Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through. Go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one’s taking.”

A year earlier, in Chicago, without fully realizing it, this is precisely what Peter Rahal had begun to do with his idea for a minimalist Paleo protein bar. Peter hadn’t started out looking for a side door per se, but he knew that with RXBar he was trying to enter a very busy space. Remember, Peter had already conceded that “the market didn’t need another protein bar.” It was a conclusion that was more or less inescapable when he and his partner, Jared Smith, did their initial fact-finding tour of Whole Foods. If there was one fact they were sure to find, it was that protein bars were among the most crowded sectors in the entire food business. Long gone were the days when only one main brand existed in this segment, as Gary Erickson had found in the early 1990s when he developed Clif Bar to go up against PowerBar. Even a decade later, ample opportunity was there for someone like Lara Merriken in a way that did not exist for Peter in 2013.

Can you imagine what the shelves of that Chicago Whole Foods looked like when he and Jared walked in? How many linear feet of shelf space were choked with multiple flavors from how many different protein bar manufacturers? Can you envision Peter even being able to secure as much as a hello from a Whole Foods regional buyer the way Lara Merriken did? Especially when the buyer learned what Peter was pitching? Yet another protein bar?

Peter knew he wasn’t getting into Whole Foods through the front door. Fortunately, that was never his plan. “From the early days, the whole strategy was to make a product that is for CrossFit and for the Paleo consumer, and build it online,” he said. “We’d build a web store and sell directly to gyms. Consumers would be coming directly to us.” That meant a bar with no grains, no dairy, no peas or bean protein, and no sugar. Nothing quite like it existed.

It was just the kind of advantage that a startup could identify and exploit but a larger competitor couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see. “A lot of people look at niches, or look at a small segment, and it’s not big enough for them,” Peter explained. “But we would rather have a CrossFit customer in California than a local Chicago independent grocery store, because in the grocery store we’re among the sea of competition. Whereas in a CrossFit gym, we were by ourselves. RXBar was literally engineered and designed for that occasion. It was perfect.”

It was his side door. Those niches — CrossFit, Paleo, and direct-to-consumer — which were then on the verge of exploding and truly becoming the kind of vast gate that Peter Thiel was talking about, were the combination that unlocked opportunity for Peter Rahal and allowed RXBar the chance to take root, to stand out, and to grow, before his direct competitors could notice and stamp him out. By that point, those competitors included major multinationals like General Mills and Nestlé, which had acquired Lärabar and PowerBar, respectively, and they could have easily shut him out by erecting any number of barriers to entry into the protein bar market.

For Manoj Bhargava, the founder of 5-hour Energy, his side door into the energy drink market did not take the shape of a small niche, but rather of a small product. In early 2003, a few years removed from his retirement from a plastics business he’d turned around and made profitable, Manoj was attending a natural products trade show outside Los Angeles looking for inventions he might acquire or license in an effort to create a business that would generate an ongoing residual income stream for him in his post-plastics years.

Walking the floor of the show, he stumbled upon a new sixteen-ounce energy drink that produced long-lasting effects he’d never experienced with other energy drinks. “Well, this is amazing,” he said to himself, exhausted from a long morning of meetings and now energized enough to continue walking the trade show floor. “I could sell this,” he thought. The drink’s creators disagreed. They were “science guys with PhDs,” while he was “just a lowly business guy.” They refused to sell their invention to him or even offer him a license on their formula. When they effectively told him to hit the road, Manoj decided to hit the lab instead and to create his own version of the energy drink that had fueled him up and blown him away.

“I looked at their label and said, ‘I can do better than this. How hard can it be? I’ll figure it out,’” Manoj said. With the help of scientists from a company he’d founded for the express purpose of finding inventions just like this one, he had a comparable energy drink formula in a matter of months. It would turn out to be the easiest part of the process.

The hard part would be getting his invention into stores. “If I make another drink,” Manoj said of his thinking at the time, “I’ve got to fight for space in the cooler against Red Bull and Monster [Energy]. I’ve also got to fight Coke, Pepsi, and Budweiser for space. So you’re pretty much dead if you want to try that.”

He was dead because he would be fighting for a finite amount of space in brick-and-mortar stores, against the competition not just in his own niche but in the entire beverage industry, which is dominated by some of the biggest companies in the world. If you own a 7-Eleven, or you’re the general manager of a grocery chain like Kroger or Tesco, are you really going to turn over a Diet Coke, Mountain Dew, or Snapple rack to a new energy drink that no one has ever heard of ? Especially when, in 2003, energy drink sales had yet to really spike and there were already two major players — Red Bull and Monster Energy — in the nascent market. Even if you were inclined to give a little guy like Manoj Bhargava a shot, once the regional sales reps and distributors from Coca-Cola and PepsiCo got wind of your decision, they would likely wield their Microsoftesque price discretion against you like a baseball bat, or just pull their products from your store altogether.

Those were the barriers to entry that Manoj was looking at. If he was going to get into this market, he’d have to find some other way. That’s when it dawned on him. “If I’m tired,” he asked himself, “why am I thirsty also?” By which he meant, why should we have to chug ten to sixteen ounces of a cloyingly sweet liquid in order to get an energy boost? “It would be like Tylenol selling sixteen-ounce bottles,” Manoj explained by way of analogy. “I just want to do it quick. I don’t want to drink this whole thing,” he thought. This is how Manoj arrived at the idea of shrinking his product down from the standard sixteen-ounce drink to a two-ounce shot.

Quickly, everything changed. In less than six months, he’d hired a designer to make his distinctive label, and he’d found a bottler who could produce two-ounce versions of his energy formula. “And at two ounces,” he said, “it’s really not a drink, it’s a delivery system.”

This was 5-hour Energy’s side door. It wasn’t a drink, so it wasn’t an immediate threat to Red Bull or Monster Energy. At two ounces, it also didn’t need to be refrigerated or given a large, dedicated shelf, so retailers didn’t have to worry about space. They understood that the perfect spot for it would be at the cash register, right next to the Slim Jims and pickled eggs!

“It just belonged there,” Manoj said. “You could tell it just looked that way, that it should be there.” Moreover, because the ingredients that went into 5-hour Energy were actually less about energy and more about focus — “vitamins for the brain,” Manoj called them — he could position his product beyond the beverage verticals and outside the grocery or convenience store channels. In fact, the very first place he went with 5-hour Energy in 2004 was the largest vitamin store, GNC, which decided to put the product in a thousand of its stores.

GNC turned out to be a genius side door into the energy “drink” market for a couple reasons. The first is obvious — there was much less competition compared with grocery and convenience stores — but the second is more interesting. “It turns out GNC is always looking for new products, because once a product gets mass distribution, GNC is sort of out of it,” Manoj explained. “If it’s in Walmart, nobody’s going to buy it at GNC.” Essentially, GNC was an easier route to retail distribution than a place like 7-Eleven or Safeway, and thankfully the tolerance for a slow start was higher as well, because in the first week they sold only 200 bottles. “Which was horrible,” Manoj admitted. But they waited it out, manufacturer and retailer together, “and at the end of six months it was selling 10,000 bottles a week.” From there Manoj went to drugstores like Walgreens and Rite Aid, which snapped it up, and now 5-hour Energy is near the cash register in most stores basically everywhere.

Today, RXBar, which was acquired by Kellogg’s in 2017 for $600 million, is one of the fastest-growing brands in the protein bar space, and 5-hour Energy has a 93 percent share of the energy shot business. It is a market dominance that Manoj has enjoyed from nearly the beginning, with only a brief dip to 67 percent when all his competitors — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Monster Energy, Red Bull — flooded the market with their own two-ounce-shot offerings . . . and failed. “Whenever people ask me what product are we like, I say we’re WD-40,” Manoj said near the end of our conversation, as we talked about 5-hour Energy’s phenomenal success. “We own the category. We’re the guys.”

This is the great irony of circumventing the barriers to entry that your competition’s apparent monopoly power constructs and then fighting your way in through the side door. If you’re successful, you stand a very good chance of achieving market domination of your own. Of digging and widening your own moat and building the toll bridge that crosses it. Of massive, unbelievable success. For many entrepreneurs, that is the goal.

Four days after Jeff Raikes sent his famous “Go Huskers!” email, Warren Buffett responded. His reply contained the normal conversational pleasantries, glowing commentary on Raikes’s analysis of his position on investing in Microsoft (Buffett wouldn’t), and an envious description of the company’s monopoly power: “It’s as if you were getting paid for every gallon of water starting in a small stream, but with added amounts received as tributaries turned the stream into an Amazon.” At the very beginning of his lecture in 2014, Peter Thiel echoed this sentiment in his own way. “I have a single idée fixe that I am completely obsessed with on the business side,” he said in his characteristic, hitched speaking style, “which is that if you’re the founder-entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly, and you always want to avoid competition.” You want to be the only one directing traffic and collecting tolls across the widest moat possible.

I mention all this because being really good at going through the side door is an amazing, and sometimes necessary, skill. But it can also be a double-edged sword. It can get you off the ground and set you up for fantastic growth, but it can get you in a lot of trouble, too. Indeed, that tension is present whenever you search for the Raikes-Buffett emails online. They are often held up by aspiring entrepreneurs as brilliant examples of business acumen and strategic analysis, but what many of those people don’t realize is that the entire reason they are able to read those emails at all — most often in the form of pdf versions of a printed-out email chain — is because they are part of the public record, submitted as deposition and trial exhibits in a class action antitrust lawsuit brought against Microsoft in the early 2000s by consumers in multiple American states. This email exchange became a key part of the plaintiffs’ opening statement in that suit, which was settled not long afterward for more than a billion dollars.

All of which is to say, Go through the side door, please! Do everything within your power to find your way into the market where you are likely to have the most success. Just make sure when you get inside and set up shop, you avoid becoming what you fought so hard against in turning your dream of starting your own business into a reality.

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Excerpted from How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz. Copyright 2020 by Guy Raz. Published and reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.