As an entrepreneur, you probably know what circumstances cause friction. Friction can be anything from friction between you and your employees to friction with your customers. There are many ways friction can come into play in any business, but it’s essential that businesses eliminate friction as much as possible to stay ahead of their competition. So let’s talk about the importance of removing friction for startups and entrepreneurs.
Third-party
Third-party this third-party that. Once you decide to build your business on outsourcing or selling someone else’s service with an upsell price on it, you will have lots of friction. You will always be dependent on someone else, on something that is not in your immediate control. Your clients will never be genuinely your clients as there can always be another upseller, another affiliate, another more direct service provider. If you want to sell a service or a product of someone else, then find a way to create it yourself, or hire someone in-house to do it. Either way, you need to own the service, the client, and the distribution.
Partnerships
If you follow my work, you probably saw how I advocate partnerships and tech partnerships specifically in one of my Forbes articles. But if you read closely, you will see that I emphasized the importance of partnerships to be mutually beneficial in the article. This is in terms of bandwidth as well. From my experience, I had several project partnerships that created a lot of friction. This presented itself mainly in being able to provide work for clients in a suitable, agreed timeframe. If you partner up with a bigger agency to grow your business, you should know that bigger agencies have a different timeframe for doing things. They can be slower, as their approval process involves more people. This is why you need to think very closely about how your business partnerships operate. Partnerships should reduce friction, not create it.
Distribution
This is a big one. In almost any business vertical, one of the most important factors is how a product or service is being distributed. Take, for example, the media landscape. Do you know why media moguls are considered so connected and “powerful”? Why do politicians usually prefer to be in their favor? Why do they get such a deal flow? Well, because they own media, they own the distribution. If you do not own your distribution channels, you will always need to pay someone else for it. And not only that, but someone can always charge you more for it. Always. It can come to a point where it doesn’t even matter how much you are increasing sales because the distributors can always pull the carpet.
Friction-Free
There can never really be friction-free in business. That is why businesses are there, to begin with. To remove friction. But, as long as you build your own infrastructures consistently, you will find yourself having more versatility and the ability to expand and grow your revenue. Always remind yourself to find opportunities to remove friction. It can be through buying another company, bringing new hires in-house, developing new expertise, and many more.
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