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A podcast based on the winning principle that entrepreneurs need only know the laws of economics plus the minds of customers. After that, apply your imagination.
With the development of the Austrian Business Paradigm and the Austrian Business Model, and tools such as the “Value Learning Process,” businesses of all kinds can utilize the deep insights of Austrian economics to further enhance how they facilitate value for their customers.
John Boles — an avid listener of the Economics for Entrepreneurs Podcast — provides an example of how he applies these insights at his accounting firm.
Download The Episode Resource Continuous Value Perception Monitoring Tool – Download
Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
1) Improved customer understanding.
The Austrian business paradigm places the customer in first position. This contrasts with traditional business thinking that puts the firm or the product or service in first position and searches for ways (“strategies”) to sell or market that offering to a set of customers who are to be identified during the selling process.
The way to put the customer in first position is to make your top priority a deep and intimate understanding of the customer, demographically (who they are), functionally (what they do and how they do it) and emotionally (how they feel — about key issues and challenges, about vendors and service providers, about competition and every aspect of business).
The first question Austrian business practitioners ask themselves is: how deep and intimate is my customer knowledge, and can it be improved?
2) Calibrating the customer’s perception of value.
Value is a feeling that exists only in the mind of the customer. The entrepreneur’s task is to facilitate that feeling of value — ease the way for the customer to arrive at that happy state of mind. It’s imperative for entrepreneurs to try to feel what the customer feels — to sympathize with their perception of value, rather than to focus only what the firm is delivering. We must know what the customer is buying, not just what we are selling.
The tools to use are monitoring of customer behavior (what they do — for example, shopping around for alternatives — is more important than what they say); making sure you understand their rankings of features, attributes and benefits, that is, what’s most important to them; and conducting interviews about the value experience. Ask the question: is the customer’s perception of value experienced aligned with the firm’s perception of value delivered?
3) Are value adjustments indicated?
The Austrian view of the market as a process helps us think about continuous change. Customers are continuously interacting with other customers, competitors, ideas, new value propositions, environmental conditions, regulations and a plethora of marketplace changes. Consequently, their perceptions of value are in constant flux. It should not be a surprise that entrepreneurs need to make value adjustments. It may be necessary to change perceptions of absolute value (via an adjustment in the value proposition), of relative value (via an adjustment in comparison with alternative propositions), or of exchange value (via adjustment in pricing, bling terms, or discounts / rebates).
4) Communicating adjustments.
It’s easy to overlook a critical component of value adjustments: communication. The Austrian business model advocates frequent in-depth conversations with customers at every level. These conversations, while always two-way of course, can be primarily designed for outbound communication, describing the adjustments made, and why they were made and ensuring the customer understands the responsiveness of the firm; or for inbound data gathering, primarily listening in order to further increase understanding of the customer and their preferences.
Customer communication is a component of perceived value.
5) Ongoing evaluation.
The customer is always evaluating the service provider / vendor and their value proposition, through the lens of experience: did the value experience match the anticipated experience; and, if not, in what ways was it deficient? The service provider / vendor must also undertake continuous evaluation. Did the value adjustments succeed? Are more called for? What are the indicators of change?
Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode
Continuous Value Perception Monitoring + Adjustment (PDF): Get It Here
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/e4e-cover-97.jpg10632500Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2020-12-22 15:06:122020-12-22 15:06:1297. John Boles: How Austrian Is Your Business? Continuous Value Perception Monitoring is One Measure.
Researchers into entrepreneurship have a powerful incentive to identify new insights about how businesses grow and thrive.
Download The Episode Resource What Entrepreneurship Is (and Isn’t) – Download
Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
Happily for everyone involved in business and innovation, entrepreneurial research is thriving, blossoming, and flourishing.
Professor Vishal Gupta’s book, Great Minds In Entrepreneurship Research, surveys thirty or more years of research papers that were awarded what is colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Entrepreneurship Research (formally known as the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research: GAER). The research field is deep, rich, dynamic and expanding.
Research identifies and examines entrepreneurship in every business size and type as a fundamental economic activity.
In its earliest days, entrepreneurship research focused a lot on small business but, today, business size and stage are not the constraints. The research identifies entrepreneurship in corporations, non-profits, and many more business sectors.
Much of the research focus is on entrepreneurial contribution — to growth, to job creation, to innovation, to progress.
Entrepreneurship is identified as the great economic contributor to betterment and well-being, measured via GDP growth in countries large and small, the creation of new and better jobs for people worldwide, new innovations and new business directions, and individual progress in general. As Mises stated, entrepreneurship is the driving force of the market system.
New entry, properly understood, is one way to characterize entrepreneurship.
The search for a single characteristic of entrepreneurship risks missing critical insights. However, one that garners broad support is “new entry” — entering new markets, entering existing markets with new value propositions, entering established product fields with new innovations, or entering into existing customer mindsets with new ideas.
Economic productivity is another.
A rich vein of entrepreneurship research has measured the efficiency that entrepreneurs bring to the use of resources — producing more with less. For example, research has measured innovation efficiency as the number of innovations per employee, and has found that smaller, more nimble firms are far more efficient on this metric than big corporations, even if the latter launch more new products in total (and generate more PR).
The research has uncovered a new type of firm and business model, and new business ratios that result.
NTBF is the acronym for New Technology Based Firms, those that innovate with new business models and new ways to facilitate service experience via dematerialized delivery. One of the results of these new models is new sets of business ratios — for example, revenue per employees which, with software based companies on the internet, can now reach never-before realized levels. This evolution has forced researchers to re-think some of their models. For example, the biologically-derived product life cycle (PLC) model of business maturity — birth, life and death — has to be revised because dematerialized companies can easily be re-born, even after near-death experiences. Think Apple — the founder died and, at one time, it was thought that the company might, but it was reborn.
Research opens up entirely new ways to think about business.
New research fields such as complex adaptive systems (or complex creative systems as Professor Todd Chiles prefers to call them) represent a new way to think about business — focusing less on individual firms and more on the value networks and service systems of which they are a part.
New ways of evaluating business potential are also emerging from research.
Professor Gupta discussed characteristics of firms such as knowledge absorption and absorptive capacity. Extending the Hayekian concept of distributed specialized knowledge, researchers have identified the ability to quickly absorb and apply new knowledge as a critical capacity of successful adaptive firms, and have shed light on many of the internal constraints this absorptive capacity.
Research recognizes the role of entrepreneurial imagination and subjectivity, although it doesn’t always get it right.
Austrian economics highlights subjectivity and views entrepreneurial opportunity as a subjective phenomenon, based in the imagination of the entrepreneur. Not all entrepreneurship researchers have been able to become comfortable with this idea, continuing to see opportunity as objectively identifiable. Austrians seem to be in the ascendancy on this controversy.
Importantly, entrepreneurship research is becoming interdisciplinary.
Systems thinking requires an interdisciplinary approach. Researchers in sociology, psychology, finance and even anthropology are examining entrepreneurship via their own research lenses. This development can only help the advance of entrepreneurship across a broad front of society and culture, as well as economics.
Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode
“What Entrepreneurship Is (and Isn’t)” (PDF): Get It Here
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/e4e-cover-96.jpg10632500Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2020-12-15 13:26:572020-12-18 04:18:5396. Vishal Gupta and the Nobel Prize For Entrepreneurship Research
Consumer sovereignty is a principle of Austrian economics. Here’s how entrepreneurs apply the principle in business, as told by Martin Lünendonk, co-founder of FounderJar.com, as well as Finance Club and Cleverism.com.
Download The Episode Resource How To Make The Customer Your Boss – Download
Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company, from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.” —Sam Walton
Though they are several decades old, these words by Walmart founder Sam Walton are still very relevant, especially in today’s highly competitive world.
This is particularly true for those trying to make money online. You are already in competition with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other businesses, and if you do not put your customers first, they can easily move to the competition. It’s as easy as tapping a few buttons on their smartphone.
Great business leaders understand that businesses exist for one sole purpose — to serve the needs of their customers. If you want your business to not only survive, but to thrive in this hyper-competitive world, it’s time you started treating your customers like the boss.
Below, let’s take a look at the steps you need to take to place your customers in their rightful seat — the boss’s seat.
1. Identify the Key Problems Customers Want To Get Solved
To effectively serve your customers, you need to first identify what key problems the customer is trying to solve.
Very often, entrepreneurs set out to solve problems they think the customer has, without trying to look at things from the customers’ point of view and confirm whether the customer has this problem, and whether it is a problem they are trying to solve.
For instance, Blackberry assumed that what its customers wanted was a laptop that could fit on the palm, so they focused on improving the physical keyboard.
Apple, on the other hand, realized that what customers actually wanted was a device that was amazingly easy to use, and when they introduced a device with a touch screen and no physical buttons, they took Blackberry out of business.
So, how do you identify the problems that customers are trying to solve? There are two ways to do this:
Listen To Your Customers
The easiest way to identify the problems your customers are trying to solve is to actually listen to them. They know what they are struggling with and why they need this problem solved.
If you listen to your customers, you are unlikely to find yourself in a situation where you are solving a problem no one cares about.
There are two main approaches you can take to listen to your customers and identify the problems they are trying to solve. Here are a few…
Interview your customers: Your first option is to get proactive and ask the customers directly. You can do this using surveys on your website, by getting on the phone and talking to customers, through focus groups, and so on.
Look at customer reviews: Your customer reviews present another great opportunity for you to learn about the problems your customers are trying to solve. Here, you should place more focus on the negative comments, since these are the ones that highlight customer needs that are not being met. However, even positive comments can give insights into customer problems that you’re solving effectively.
Listen To Your Salespeople
The second approach to identifying the problems customers are trying to solve is to listen to your salespeople.
Your salespeople are in direct contact with your customers, and they, therefore, have better insights into your customers’ thought processes.
They know the pain points that drive customers to purchase your products and services, they know the things that customers like or dislike about your products, they know the reasons that keep some customers from purchasing, and so on.
By administering surveys to your sales teams, you can gain insights that will help you figure out your customers’ key problems, which will in turn help you to serve them better.
When trying to gain insights about customer problems, either from the customers themselves or from your salespeople, it’s good to try to get to the root cause of the problem. Sometimes, what you think is the problem might not actually be the problem.
For instance, at one point, Disney was experiencing lots of criticism because visitors felt the queues for the rides were too long. At first glance, the problem seems obvious – visitors spending too much time waiting for their rides.
The solutions to this problem are obvious as well. To shorten the queues, Disney would either have to invest in more rides, or reduce the number of visitors getting into their parks. Both of these solutions would cost Disney millions.
Disney hired a group of designers to help them solve this problem. After interviews with Disney visitors, the designers realized that the problem wasn’t the long queues. The problem was that visitors were getting bored because they had nothing to do while waiting in the queue.
To solve the problem, they had Disney add themed music and videos that visitors could listen to and watch while waiting for their rides. By getting to the root cause of the problem, they were able to come up with an effective solution that saved Disney millions.
Similarly, do not take your customers’ feedback at face value. Try to identify what the root problem is before you start developing a solution.
2. Make Sure Your Offering Solves Those Customer Problems
Now that you have identified the problems that your customers are trying to solve, it’s time to come up with solutions to solve those problems.
The best way to ensure that the solution you are developing solves the actual problems your customers are struggling with is to involve your customers in the development process.
One approach is to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) of your solution and show it to a group of customers with the problem you are trying to solve. You then collect their feedback, and use insights to improve your next iteration and ensure that your final solution solves the customer problem in the most effective way.
SOURCE: Clevertap.com/blog/minimum-viable-product
For instance, when creating DropBox, founder Drew Houston didn’t want to spend months, perhaps years, working on a product that no one was interested in, so he started with an MVP.
Drew’s MVP was a simple 3-minute video demonstrating how his product was meant to work. He shared the video on Digg, an online community of technology early adopters.
After sharing his video, over 70,000 people joined the DropBox beta waiting list within a single night, which was enough validation that his product was solving the right problem.
Another way to involve customers in the development of your solution is to form a small community of beta testers and give them access to your solution during the development process.
This works even if you are developing a service-based product. For instance, if you are a digital marketing consultant, you could create a package — say a content marketing package — and test it among a small group of customers before you launch it in full scale.
The aim here is to have a group of actual customers continually testing the solution you are developing to make sure that it addresses their key concerns in the best possible manner for them.
This way, you don’t have to worry about spending months or years coming up with a solution to your customers’ problems, only to discover that it is not the kind of solution they were looking for.
Another way to ensure that what you are offering solves your customers’ actual problems is to conduct A/B tests. This basically involves creating two versions of your offering, giving two small groups of customers access to each version, and then tracking the results to identify the version that solves customers’ most effectively.
3. Track Customer Satisfaction
Ultimately, what matters is keeping your customers satisfied. If your boss is unsatisfied with your work, you can bet that you will be out of work soon.
Similarly, if your customers are unsatisfied with your business, they will fire you – by spending their money on your competitors.
To know whether your customers are happy, you need a way to track and measure customer satisfaction. Here are five of the most effective ways of measuring customer satisfaction:
Customer Satisfaction Surveys
This is one of the easiest ways of tracking customer satisfaction. With this approach, you simply need to put up a survey asking your customers how satisfied they are with your services.
Depending on the medium you are using to administer the survey, you can add one to three open-ended questions to learn more about what they think of your services.
Customer satisfaction surveys can be served through email, through your website, or through your app.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The CSAT is the standard metric for measuring customer satisfaction. Here, you ask customers to rate how satisfied they are with your products or services on a scale. The scale could be 1 – 3, 1 – 5, or 1 – 10.
After receiving responses from various customers, you then find the average rating to determine your customer satisfaction score. The higher the score, the more satisfied customers are with your services.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
This is another popular metric for measuring how happy customers are with your business and your services.
Unlike the other metrics covered here, however, NPS does not measure how satisfied customers are with your business. Instead, it measures how likely they are to refer someone to your business. This is especially useful for those in the freelance business, which depends heavily on referrals.
The NPS will ask a customer to rate on a scale of 1 – 10, how likely they are to recommend your business to their friends and acquaintances.
Promoters: These are customers who give you a rating of 9 – 10. They are willing to spread the word about your business and recommend your products and services. These customers are already satisfied with your business.
Neutral/Passives: These are customers who give you a rating of 7 – 8. They are indifferent to your business. They aren’t disappointed with your business, but they aren’t satisfied either. They are unlikely to talk about your business to others.
Detractors: These are customers who give your business a rating of 6 and below. They are unhappy with your business, and will spread negative word about your business in a bid to discourage others from doing business with you.
The Net Promoter Score is a very useful metric. If someone is willing to recommend your business to others, then this means that your products or services are good enough that they would stake their reputation on them.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
This metric measures customer experience, particularly how hard it is for your customers to get what they want from your business. Customers are typically asked to rate their effort from 1 (very little effort) to 7 (very high effort).
A high score means that customers have to work very hard to get what they need from your business, which translates to poor customer experience.
Social Media Mentions
Keeping track of what people are saying about your business on social media can also help you figure out how satisfied your customers are with your business.
Satisfied customers will take to social media to praise your business, while unhappy customers will share their dissatisfaction with their social media followers.
Monitoring the conversations about your business happening on social media will allow you to step in and respond to comments in time and control your brand perception, especially when people are sharing negative comments.
Here are three tools that you can use to track social media mentions:
A lot of entrepreneurs believe that the core purpose of a business is to make profits.
Smart entrepreneurs, those with the right entrepreneurial mindset, on the other hand, know that the core purpose of a business is to serve its customers. Therefore, their core focus is on delivering customer value.
Of course, this does not mean that businesses that put customer value first don’t think about profits. They do. What differs is their approach.
These businesses understand that when you keep your customers happy (by delivering great value), these customers will bring more business, and spread positive word about your business, leading to more business, and ultimately, greater profits.
Actually, the findings of research by Deloitte and Touche show that companies that put customers first are 60% more profitable compared to those that don’t.
So, what exactly does it mean to put customer value first?
Putting customer value first means that every single business decision made within your organization should have a positive impact on customer experience.
For instance, when upgrading its systems, a customer-centric company will choose systems that allow it to deliver the best customer experience.
Similarly, when hiring, customer-centric companies go for employees who show a knack for putting customers first. Basically, every decision is evaluated based on its impact on customer experience.
Here are some tips on how to make your company customer-centric and put customer value first:
Understand your customers deeply. It is impossible to put customers first when you don’t even know who they are. To get a good understanding of who your customers are, you need to develop highly detailed buyer personas. Actually, gaining a good understanding of the customer segments you’re targeting is a key component of the business model canvas.
Make sure that all your team members are engaged and have a good idea of the impact of their work on customer experience.
Make it a habit to collect customer feedback, and then use this feedback to gain insights on how to improve the customer experience.
Don’t just focus on getting customers to make the purchase. Focus on building relationships that will turn them into loyal customers and brand ambassadors.
Be easily accessible. Make it easy for customers to get in touch with your business when they have an issue, or when they need any sort of help.
Ready To Put Your Customers In The Boss’s Seat?
As an entrepreneur, you are in business to serve your customers, which means that your customers are your boss. If you want your business to thrive, you need to start treating them as such, by putting their needs first.
In this article, we have gone over 4 key points on how to make the customer your boss. Here’s a recap:
Identify the key problems customers want to get solved
Make sure your offering solves those customer problems
Track and measure customer satisfaction
Put customer value first and profits will follow
Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode
“How To Make The Customer Your Boss” (PDF): Get It Here
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/e4e-cover-95.jpg10632500Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2020-12-08 15:01:202020-12-08 15:01:2095. Martin Lünendonk: How To Make The Customer Your Boss
Six ways — selected from many — that businesspeople can derive more insightful knowledge and perspective from Austrian economics than from traditional Business School teaching.
Download The Episode Resource A-School vs. B-School – Download
Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
More Human
Austrians believe in business as an uplifting human endeavor, focused on how people as producers can best help people as customers to do well, feel better, and thrive. To do so, entrepreneurs cultivate their power of empathy: to understand others, feel what they feel, and understand their hopes and dreams. Entrepreneurs utilize this understanding to cultivate new ideas, design new solutions, and present new value propositions for customers’ consideration. It’s the human project.
When business schools approach business building as an engineering problem, to design and run an assembly of operating machinery — whether physical or digital – at maximum levels of efficiency, and to manage via mathematical models embedded in spreadsheets and software, they occlude the human factor.
More Subjective
Emotion and subjectivity are important elements of human decision-making, both for producers and customers. Data and so-called rationality are important, but how people feel, how they perceive, how they interact, and how they subjectively weigh up options are dominant in shaping decisions. Austrians understand this, especially in the subjective imagination entrepreneurs apply to future customers and their potential preferences. No data or predictive models can reproduce this capability.
More Individual
Austrian economics always starts analysis at the individual level. Every economic phenomenon can be traced back to one buyer exchanging with one seller. What are the motivations and incentives and processes that promote the completion of the exchange? What are the barriers that might prevent it? Can the resulting knowledge be applied in more instances, and even at scale?
Austrians are not atomists. We understand — more deeply, perhaps, than the minds behind the business school disciplines — interconnection, community, and the interaction of individual beliefs, values, and preferences. It is the study of these interactions that lies at the core of the Austrian approach to business. Groups and segments are abstractions — only individuals decide, choose, and act.
And today, technology is moving in our direction, enabling more fine-grained action to reach individual customers with tailored value propositions.
More Imaginative
Professor Peter Klein has been, and continues to be, a leader in unwrapping the role of entrepreneurial imagination in the dynamism of business. He emphasizes that humans are fundamentally creative actors, and that entrepreneurs apply imagination to create new possibilities, new solutions, and new combinations of resources the world has never before seen. Opportunities are not “out there” to be discovered. They’re imagined by the entrepreneur.
Yes, there can be planning, e.g. in the choices between alternative patterns of resource allocation. But even these are subjective, based on individual entrepreneurial assessments. There can be projection of trends, although empathy with future customers is a counterweight to projection. Overall, imagination dominates.
More Action-Oriented
As Peter Klein also teaches, entrepreneurship is characterized by acting to reap the rewards inherent in imagined possibility. This action orientation makes the Austrian approach to business much more realistic and straightforward than the business schools’ insistence on the mysteries and opacity of strategy.
Austrian entrepreneurs form their own beliefs, act on them, and gather the results. The results are a feedback mechanism, energizing the entrepreneur to make adjustments and try again. Business is very straightforward. The Austrian action-orientation to business is empowering and inspiring.
A Role for Theory
Professor Klein told the story of his first foray into executive education. He was nervous about presenting Austrian economic theory to experienced and successful business people. He quickly learned that theory is what business needs and what traditional business instruction lacks. Managers often know everything about their industry, but do not always have theoretical perspective, or frameworks to help them see the forest and not just the trees. Without a theory, all they have is a mess of data.
Theory provides a path to interpretation. That’s what’s so valuable about Austrian economics: it emphasizes theory. One example we discussed for business was pricing theory. Austrian economics provides a pathway for entrepreneurs to map out how pricing for specific goods and services emerges via the interplay of customer preferences and context with entrepreneurs’ value propositions. The price that is right for an exchange can be discovered by following this pathway.
But the entrepreneur still needs to combine the theory with action and experience: set the price for an offering, and test the customer’s willingness to pay in the context of all their alternatives and their previous experiences. Theory provides an invaluable generalized assistance with understanding of the customer’s ultimate decision, but can’t predict the contingencies of the moment and of the individual’s idiosyncratic personal situation. With Austrian theory, an entrepreneur is more likely to get pricing “right” (via theory) but not every time (that’s experience).
Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode
“Austrian School vs. Business School” (PDF): Get It Here
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/e4e-cover-85.jpg10632500Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2020-12-01 13:26:172020-12-01 13:27:4594. Peter Klein on the Advantaged Business Insights of the Austrian School
“Small business” is just a government classification. Entrepreneurial businesses serving well-defined communities via creative specialization exhibit enormous economic productivity, energy and dynamism.
Such businesses can not be defined quantitatively as small, medium or large. They’re defined by their qualitative impact on their customers’ lives.
Download The Episode Resource Ramon Ray’s Entrepreneurial Communities – Download
Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
Entrepreneurial businesses care differently, and care more.
Big businesses must pay attention to size and scale, to their huge revenue and profit streams, to their many, many shareholders, to journalists and bureaucrats and financial analysts. They are, typically, managing to maintain progress or status on a well-established pathway, and have limited time and resources to devote to customer care.
The triple-option of the entrepreneur.
Small businesses are designed and constructed to care for customers and communities. As Ramon Ray puts it, small business entrepreneurs choose to:
Create what we want;
Serve whom we want;
Collaborate with whom we want.
As a consequence, business owners care differently about their customers, their colleagues, and their collaborators and partners.
Small business entrepreneurs create communities of fans.
Ramon sees small business owners serving their chosen communities as Celebrity CEOs. This does not require millions of Twitter followers or a pack of paparazzi. It results from being known and trusted as the specialist supplier of a highly desired service personalized to a well-chosen, often local, customer base. It’s the deli owner with the best sandwiches, or the mechanic to whom to trust one’s 1958 Edsel.
Customers become fans, deeply emotionally bonded to the entrepreneur and the service. Business owners become more deeply intimate with customers-as-fans, and the synergy is complete and lasting. The entrepreneur and the firm come to fit the community perfectly, and become indispensable.
The well-served community is a qualitative measure of business success, not quantitative.
Ramon Ray aims to build a community of entrepreneurs along similar lines of helping and caring.
Entrepreneurs can thrive by serving well-chosen communities, and they can also thrive by being part of a community. His vehicle is a B-corp formed by fellow-entrepreneur Seth Godin, to support small business entrepreneurs. Akimbo provides knowledge, tools, and courses to help entrepreneurs run and grow a business. Ramon’s latest contribution is a series called Small Business Essentials, a workshop in 12 modules. The modules cover essentials including pricing, cash flow, and hiring, as well as entrepreneurial refinements such as properly defining what problem you are solving and who are you solving it for.
A special feature of the workshop is that participants are joined online by fellow entrepreneurs, so that there is a group experience, group knowledge sharing, and group Q&A. The community helps itself by helping each other. It’s a place to learn and a place to ask questions.
Principles of Austrian economics have immediate applications in business. Clay Miller, a deeply experienced and highly successful global tech entrepreneur, makes the case via five principles drawn from five easily-accessible sources of Austrian economic theory, with many accompanying examples.
Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights
Principle 1: The distribution of knowledge requires disaggregated thinking.
Source: “The Use Of Knowledge In Society,” F.A. Hayek – Get It Here
Hayek wrote this paper as part of a research program into the problem that economics tries to solve. He defined it as a knowledge problem. Knowledge “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess”.
The implication he drew was for central planning by governments and their departments and committees that would attempt to plan production or set prices. Such central planning is impossible because dispersed knowledge can not be aggregated and so the planners never have enough knowledge on which to base a plan.
Quote
“The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place…..”
Application
In our Economics For Business project, we have the opportunity to help entrepreneurs apply the same principle to business knowledge, or data. Too much aggregation can obscure information that is really important and most useful for improving business performance.
Here’s an example. A frequently used KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is average revenue per customer. It’s calculated by aggregating all customer revenue into one number and dividing by the number of customers. For this to be actionable intelligence, it is necessary to assume that spending by each customer is very uniform. But consider the case where average revenue per customer is $190 for a customer base of 10 users, composed of 9 who spend $100 each and one who spends $1,000. The KPI does not suggest that each new customer you acquire will spend $190. In fact, it’s more likely they’ll spend $100. And, in fact, what you would really like to know is the profile of the $1000 customer and whether that profile, applied in recruiting new customers, would enable you to recruit more $1,000 spenders. You really want to choose metrics that can provide insight into individual customer behavior — like the nature and motivation of the one $1,000 spender.
Similar Austrian thinking would apply, for example, to Google analytics, which can profile the type of customer interacting with your website or app, and observable behavior such as conversion rate by page visited, or abandonment rate for specific pages. These are disaggregated statistics that can help you serve customers better.
Austrian thinking is rigorous in seeking to identify cause and effect, and to ensure that correlation is not mistaken for causation. A simple example is restaurant data that exhibits a 30% increase in customer traffic on Tuesdays. There’s a correlation between day-of-week and traffic increases — but it’s not causation. Tuesday does not cause the traffic increase. What does? It requires digging to find out, perhaps, that a local firm offers a perk to office workers to pay for them eating out on Tuesdays. As Hayek would say, this is specific knowledge of time and place, more likely to be qualitative than statistical, embracing the subjectivity that’s central to Austrian economics.
Principle 2: Consumer Sovereignty requires that entrepreneurs are directed by their customers.
Source: Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises: Get It Here
This book focuses on the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of bureaucratic organizational structures and processes. In a chapter titled Profit Management, Mises defines the Austrian concept of consumer sovereignty. Understanding and applying this concept is central to entrepreneurs’ capability to create effective value propositions for their offering, brand or business.
Quote
“Thus the capitalist system of production is an economic democracy, in which every penny gives the right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people’s mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.”
Application
Consumers are the ones driving production. It’s up to business managers to make sure that every decision is towards bettering the value proposition offered to customers.
For example, the décor in a restaurant should be chosen not because the owner favors it or because an interior designer decrees it, but for the purpose of enhancing the value experience of those consumers the owner wants to attract and to serve. This requires empathy. Consumer sovereignty and entrepreneurial empathy go together.
Because consumers are the ones valuing what is produced, they are the ones ascribing value to the product or service the entrepreneur produces. The entrepreneur needs to anticipate what they value, and to do so requires ever-greater closeness to the customer. Clay described the value provided by simple but tasty barbecue restaurants in his home state of north Carolina, in a décor of plastic and paper and small booths. But that wouldn’t attract the customers who prefer fine dining in a five star restaurant. The customer decides what experience they value.
Startups can usefully anticipate consumer preferences by creating an imaginary perfect customer, and thinking through the value they want and the value the business can facilitate for them. Once in production, get as much feedback as possible on the actual value experience and the customer’s feeling about it. Every decision made inside the business needs to be for the purpose of and directed towards improving the customer value proposition and value experience.
Principle 3: Human value scales are complex and ever-changing and entrepreneurial empathy is required in order to reach an understanding of customers’ value dynamics.
Source: Human Action, Ludwig von Mises: Get It Here
Human Action is the magnum opus of Austrian economic theory. Every chapter will yield great insights for business. Clay selected value scales as a topic.
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“It is customary to say that acting man has a scale of wants or values in his mind when he arranges his actions. On the basis of such a scale he satisfies what is of higher value, i.e., his more urgent wants, and leaves unsatisfied what is of lower value, i.e., what is a less urgent want. There is no objection to such a presentation of the state of affairs. However, one must not forget that the scale of values or wants manifests itself only in the reality of action. These scales have no independent existence apart from the actual behavior of individuals. The only source from which our knowledge concerning these scales is derived is the observation of a man’s actions.”
Application
When a person makes a decision to purchase your product or service, they conduct a quite complex evaluation to integrate your offering into their scale of values. And the values and the scale is constantly changing. Consumers are not static robots. Their circumstances change, their preferences for saving or spending change, their time of life or even time of day demand rearranging of value scales.
A consumer may have a high preference for Krispy-Kreme donuts. But then they go on a diet. Their value scale changes. Losing weight and increasing fitness are now higher values than enjoying a donut. If you are the Krispy-Kreme donut franchisee, it’s important to be aware of the value scale change, and to empathize with the customer. Maybe you could develop a promotion called “Cheat Day” that rewards them with a donut treat after a week of exercise and donut restraint. As Wayne Gretzky used to say, skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is now.
How can you understand value scales? One interview with a customer — what a researcher would call deep, rich qualitative information — can be worth much, much more than survey data. Mises said that we can only know an individual’s value scales by observing an individual’s actions. Having them answer a survey question such as “How highly do you value this item?” or “What price would you pay for this item?” does not indicate how they would fit the item into their value scale. They may say they would pay $250,000 for a Ferrari, but, when they weighted the experience of owning the Ferrari versus the opportunity cost of foregoing other experiences, would they actually make the purchase? The survey answers won’t tell you.
Entrepreneurs are rewarded for estimating correctly what the customer values and creating the appropriate value proposition.
Principle 4: The market is a discovery process, with uncertainty on both sides of market exchanges. All entrepreneurial actions are tests, with no certain outcomes.
Source: Competition And Entrepreneurship, Israel Kirzner: Get It Here
This is a seminal work on entrepreneurship. One of the major themes is that markets are a process of discovery. That insight directs entrepreneurs to think in dynamic, process terms. The entrepreneur experiences uncertainty in what he or she is producing, because they are not sure of what customers will value in the future. The customer is uncertain, too, because they’re unsure of how they’ll value what the entrepreneur produces. Whenever we, as consumers, feel trepidation about “pulling the trigger” on a purchase, we are experiencing this uncertainty. Meanwhile, the producer is anxiously discovering the receptiveness to his or her value proposition.
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“The market process, then, is set in motion by the results of the initial market ignorance of the participants. The process itself consists of the systematic plan changes generated by the flow of market information released by market participation — that is, by the testing of the plans in the market.”
Application
Kirzner points out that every plan an entrepreneur has, every value proposition, every offering made to prospective customers can only be a test, a trial. Nothing in the market can be certain. Entrepreneurs are trying to anticipate what customers are going to value, and they can never be sure in advance.
That’s why entrepreneurs use empathy, to imagine, if they were the customer, what type of experience the customer would be looking for. Entrepreneurs must imagine what customers might enjoy in the future. They must seek the customer’s agreement that, “Yes, your product or service delivered what you promised and made me feel better.”
One implication of Kirzner’s principle of “market ignorance” is for branding. If a brand has accrued a certain level of market reputation, consumers will feel less ignorant. They will feel they “know” a brand that’s been producing for 100 years, that is symbolized by the 3-point star that can be seen everywhere, and that is trusted and approved by many other consumers. A brand represents the stored experience and the stored reputation of many customers.
Principle 5: All entrepreneurship is for social good, and more social good is achieved by subjecting business to the marketplace test of profit and loss.
Source: Austrian Perspectives on Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Organization, Peter G Klein, Nicolai Foss, and Matthew McCaffrey, “Austrian Perspectives On Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Organization”: Get It Here
In Chapter 4 of this book, the authors discuss the concept of social entrepreneurship. This is an idea that seems to be gaining traction, especially among millennial business owners and millennial entrepreneurs. The idea is that business should be focused on something more than profit and loss. It should provide some “social value”, making the world better. Klein, Foss, and McCaffrey provide some robust Austrian thinking with regard to social entrepreneurship.
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“However, these metaphors (“social value”, etc) often imply a false conflict with traditional entrepreneurship. For example, the contrast between conventional market entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship implies that the former is somehow not social, or even anti-social. This is misleading, however; for example, Austrians would respond that Mises’s calculation argument demonstrates that the entrepreneurial market economy is profoundly social. Entrepreneurs, by bearing uncertainty in an effort to satisfy consumers, work ceaselessly to improve the welfare of all members of society, and their work in turn strengthens bonds of cooperation between individuals and communities, while at the same time disincentivizing conflict and exploitation. This is social behavior in its most fundamental form.”
Application
Steve Jobs improved society greatly by inventing the iPhone. The impact on society was considerable — better communication and information sharing, and higher productivity for billions of people.
Every venture — including social ventures — must grapple with basic economic problems. Taking on a social mission does not relieve the firm of the pressures of the marketplace. Social enterprises are business organizations, and if they earn revenues through the sale of goods and services, they must apply judgement to allocate scarce resources in the face of uncertainty. Genuine participation in the marketplace requires them to be subject to the profit and loss test.
Klein, Foss and McCaffrey make the point that “social value” is incalculable. What’s good for one individual is not the same as for another. Individuals value things subjectively. When a business pleases one group, it may be adversely affecting another.
Profit is not evil. It’s impossible to make a profit without serving your fellow man. You are doing good for society by being an entrepreneur, by producing things that people want and value. You forego your own consumption by investing in your business, and so you are making a sacrifice to serve others. And if social entrepreneurs are not subjecting themselves to the profit and loss test — if they are supported by charity or grants — then they are not receiving the signals form consumers that they are allocating scarce resources in the way that consumers — i.e., society — prefers.
The ethic of entrepreneurship is to serve, and to make others’ lives better, and to receive the approval and reward of customers via the profit and loss mechanism of the market.
Free Downloads & Extras From The Episode
“The Use Of Knowledge In Society,” F.A. Hayek (American Economic Review, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, September 1945; pp. 519–30): Get It Here
Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises (Yale University Press, 1944): Get It Here
Human Action, Ludwig von Mises (Mises Institute, 1999): Get It Here
Competition and Entrepreneurship, Israel Kirzner (Liberty Fund, 1978): Get It Here
Austrian Perspectives on Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Organization, Peter G Klein, Nicolai Foss, and Matthew McCaffrey (Cambridge University Press, 2019): Get It Here
https://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/e4e-cover-92.jpg10632500Hunter Hastingshttps://hunterhastings.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/hh-logo-blk.svgHunter Hastings2020-11-17 14:36:142020-11-17 14:36:1492. Clay Miller: 5 Austrian Principles Applicable to Your Business Today
