Every company is different, but often the same theories can be applied to them. The most general one that is used is simple – you have a product and you sell it. But if that’s all you do, you are not taking advantage of the tremendous potential you’d have if you’d do something more.
Imagine you have one product that you sell. If you’re narrow-minded, you might think that here’s not too much extra you could do. But you are wrong, very wrong. You can have one product, but if you vary minor things (maybe just name and package), you could sell the same product to different consumer groups for different prices. Take two beer brands produced by the same company – one is targeted at students and the other is meant for business people. Brands are different, names are different, bottles are different and even the prices differs 50%. But you know what? The beer inside is exactly the same. If you’d only had one brand you would have only one consumer group to sell to, but now you have two, and with different prices. Open your mind.
Imagine you can have only one beer brand available, but you can sell the same brand to the same consumer at very different prices pretty much at the same time. Don’t say it’s impossible. Just think about it. It’s so obvious. Think of beer. You go to the shop and you buy a bottle of Budweiser for cents. An hour later when you’re drunk already (okay, I doubt that happens with a beer that’s close to water but stay with me) you go to a bar where you pay for the same beer 4 times as much. Same beer and sometimes you even get it in the bottle, the same bottle you got from the shop an hour ago. So – you can sell the same product in different places with a different price. And people will not think you are ripping them off. They are used to it. It’s normal. Open your mind.
Imagine if you’re a beer manufacturer then you have all the resources and machinery available to produce beer. Right? Right! But you have more. You can use the same resources to produce other goods as well – lemonades, bottled water and so on. Take Honda (no, that’s not a beer brand) – Honda doesn’t just produce cars, they are using their available resources and additionally they produce motorcycles, engines, lawnmowers. Open your mind.
Imagine - When you first start to produce beer, you have a lot of investments to do and the profit marginal is not too high. However, once you have the factory set up you can produce NEW products with 60% of profit already. Because there’s no extra development needed. Get it? Or let’s imagine you are a programmer and you have developed an online magazine system. To create the first magazine, it takes time and money to develop the system, to acquire the know-how and so on. But now when you want to create a second magazine you already have it all – the system, the know-how. So the development will be a lot quicker and a lot cheaper than the first time, thus increasing your profit marginal substantially compared to your first magazine. All in one – by using the same idea in multiple different ways/times, you can make 60% of pure income from it.
These are just some different ways of making profit, but there’s really hundreds of them. Your imagination is the limit.
