15 Thoughts on Building Businesses 2-4-25
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What are the core thoughts on building businesses?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thank you for joining us today. This is a talk today on 15 thoughts on building businesses. It comes out of the book we wrote on the subject, The Entrepreneur's Edge, just a core book on concepts for building businesses. Second, I have to give a speech on this on Wednesday, so I figured I'd do it as a podcast to get some prep for it. So hopefully you you enjoy this as much as I do. And thank you very, very much for listening. And thank you. Just as an aside to Becker Private Equity Business Podcast, with that and the Becker's Healthcare Podcast, we've now passed 20 something, 22 billion downloads, trying to work towards 25 million. So thank you for listening. And if you have comments on this talk and 15 thoughts on building a business, feel free at any time to text Scott Becker at 773-766-5322. Thank you very, very much.
So everybody builds different businesses in different ways. These are my thoughts on building a business, whether you're doing it in software as a service, technology, or almost any kind of business. The two core businesses that I've built, but I've also served on the board of several and been an investor with several different private equity funds and lots of individual companies. Some of those individual companies have recorded a zero, meaning a loss of everything. Others have done great. But the two corporations I've been involved in built a media company called Becker's Healthcare, separately built a law practice within a large firm called McGuire Woods, helped to build the healthcare, private equity practice and healthcare practice. So I've had those two experiences.
The muscles were on the boards of several companies. And that's where a lot of my background knowledge comes from. So the things we think about in building a business, we start with this concept that was a Jack Welch concept that you want to be in niches. My niches have always been business to business and specifically as possible in those businesses, figuring out who you're trying to serve, what business you're trying to be great at. Can you be great at it? Can you win in the niche? Is the niche worth winning in? In the media business, we're obviously in the healthcare media business, but then we're more specifically in the media business around hospitals and health systems and the media business around surgery centers and orthopedics and spine. In the law practice, well, the law firm is a huge law firm. The core clients that we served in the practice when I ran it were
hospitals and health systems, surgery centers and surgery center chains, and then private equity funds that invest in healthcare. And the more specifically you're targeting a niche and know who you're trying to target, the better off you are in both being great at what you do and building an audience or building a client base. So we're always a believer in niche centric. Jack Welch famously said, You want to be first or second in the niche. And at good times, you clean up. In bad times, you survive. And I basically largely ascribe this theory on being sort of this, you know, in niches and trying to be the best in your niche at what you do. Second concept we talk about is being team and people centric.
How important is niche selection in business?
There's all this discussion today about being a solopreneur, solo entrepreneur versus being a team builder and building a team. I'm still a big believer that if you want to do anything significant, you better build a serious team and double down on great people and constantly trigger who your team is and sort them out. but that you could do a lot of things if you build great teams. If you don't bother to build great teams, you're very limited in what you could do. I can't quite find my way to being the solopreneur as much as I'd love that as the last part of my life, being a solopreneur, but I just don't see it. Third is customer centric. And this is the concept. It became clearer and clearer in my business career is that I have people on our team trying to take care of a very unimportant client or customer that And no offense, I know people take offense at that concept, but you could have one customer that pays you a million dollars a year, one customer that fights with you to pay you $300 a year.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What are the core thoughts on building businesses?
0:00–3:08
2
How important is niche selection in business?
3:08–5:33
3
Why is having a strong team essential for success?
5:33–7:01
4
What does customer centricity mean in business?
7:01–9:24
5
How do you determine product-market fit?
9:24–12:37
6
What role does scalability play in business growth?
12:37–16:20
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