The Message... (Learned by selling matches)... READ AND SHARE... In the early 1940s, a young boy was growing up in the small county of Almhult in southern Sweden. Within a few years, he would impact millions of people. At the time, however, nobody knew his name. The boy was occupied with a small and relatively simple project. He had recently discovered that it was possible to buy boxes of matches in bulk from Stockholm, which was a few hours away from his small town. He could get the matches for cheap and then sell them individually for a nice profit, but still at a reasonable price. Pretty soon, he was riding around town on his bicycle and selling matches one by one to anyone who needed them. Once the matches began selling well, the young boy expanded his tiny operation. Before long, he added christmas ornaments, fish, seeds, ballpoint pens and pencils. A few years later, he started selling furniture. The young boy’s name was Ingvar Kamprad and when he was seventeen, he decided to name his business. He called it IKEA. In 2013, IKEA made over $37 billion dollars. It’s amazing what you can do with a few matches. Selling Matches and Building Skills Everybody is obsessed with building their IKEA. Nobody is focused on selling a few matches. We live in a society that values skills, but everyone is obsessed with results. The problem with this is that it can become really easy to get trapped focusing on results when you should really be building your skills. It’s really easy to focus on the dream of building a successful business. What entrepreneur wouldn’t want a company that makes $37 billion per year? But that’s not how Ingvar Kamprad started. He started by building his skill set. He started by selling one book of matches at a time. He focused on a small problem and then used the skills he developed to solve a bigger problem...
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 18:39:28 +0000
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