Adding Value to People

We all spend a lot of time preoccupied with money, but the money itself is meaningless as a piece of paper or a figure on a screen. Currency has worth only because it reflects value to others. That’s why you should approach all of your business endeavors with the same question, how does this good or service provide value to others?

It’s pretty simple. Adding value to someone’s life is worth something. And when you do that, people will actually pay you for it. They will gladly pay you for it. It’s why we still go out to eat even when we can cook ourselves. We value expertise and craftsmanship.

Value is one of the primary keys to any business, including an online business.

So how do you add value? You can start by thinking about your skills and your area of expertise. What is it that you know that makes you unique? What is it that you know that others would also like to know?

Anytime you launch a new initiative or idea, you should ask yourself who exactly your work will benefit. If you find that you are writing an e-book just because you have always wanted to write a book without deeply thinking through who may actually want to read it, it can still be a worthwhile exercise. But you may find yourself with very few takers once it is actually up for sale online.

This requires a bit of work in assessing the needs of potential customers or users. What problem do they have that they need help solving? What is the end result they want? Are they willing to shell out some of their hard-earned money for someone to help them fix it? Will they value the time that they save with using your service more than the money that they will need to spend to buy it from you?

Almost every wealthy person you can think of has added enormous value to others. There is a lot of hand-wringing out there about inequities in the economic system. It just doesn’t seem fair that some individuals are worth so much more than others. But their wealth is directly reflected by the reality that what they are providing through their skills is enormously in demand or desired.

Bill Gates provided enormous value to the world by helping to achieve his vision of a computer on every desktop, helping workers to dramatically increase their productivity and find new ways to connect. Michael Jordan provided enormous value by captivating millions with his extraordinary skills and then helping others to brand themselves as dedicated athletes through his merchandising.

You’ll find that there are a few common paths to adding value. It doesn’t necessarily involve inventing something completely new out of thin air. It is often as simple as doing things simpler, faster, or cheaper than the other options that customers have to turn to. There are so many choices out there today that it boggles my mind how many companies still persist in treating their customers badly.

I think the airline industry in particular is a good candidate for bigger disruption in the years ahead. The business of booking flights has already been made much easier and pleasant with the help of websites like kayak.com, which have presented enormous challenges for the travel booking industry by adding so much value to the formerly painful process of booking a flight.

Many airlines are only able to still persist in delivering sub-par service because of monopolies in some areas and the high barriers to entry. But we already see success with some smaller companies, like Jet Blue and others, which have set out to provide more amenities and transparency to customers at lower costs. If the big players aren’t careful, they will find themselves in a pinch to compete when others are providing so much more value to their customers.

You may want to follow the same approach of looking at where the pain points are with the big players in the industries you are interested in. Where are they vulnerable?

Value can often be in the eyes of the beholder. What you think of as a waste of time or money may be just what others have been looking for. Some folks might scratch their heads when they see the billion-dollar valuation of an app like Snapchat, which has made its founder Evan Spiegel a billionaire before he reached his mid-20s.

It might be hard to explain the utility of a phone app for sharing messages that disappear instantly explain to older users who just don’t see the value. But for young people, it was exactly what they were looking for. Many millennials have increasing concerns about privacy and the implications of all of the information that they are sharing online through social media sites. They are looking for new forms of communicating that are ephemeral and not going to haunt them forever when they are going off into the job market or moving on to adulthood.

Snapchat provides greater privacy, as well as helping users to communicate in short bursts of video. In the case of other social media sites like Facebook, they were vulnerable because of the lack of privacy protections embedded, which gave an opening for competitors to add that missing value.

It might not be your cup of tea. But it has 150 million active users around the globe. Those are numbers that can’t be ignored. Certainly not if you are in the advertising world. So you may personally see no great use for using a service like Snapchat, but you no doubt would love to have all of those eyeballs on ads you’re your own good and service. So you can see how Spiegel’s creation trickles into enormous value for so many others. Beyond the advertising value alone, he created a new and exciting way for people to communicate. In short, he created value. That’s how he has amassed such a vast a fortune from a company that only employs about 330 employees.

It’s unlikely that he set out purposely to generate these kinds of returns. Of course, it’s always a nice incidental benefit when you find yourself rich. But I’ve found that many of the most successful people I know did not start out with the specific dollar signs in mind. They were just passionate about creating something and helping others. This is why so many hucksters out there find that they never really attain major success. You can only get so far on mediocrity and bilking your customers.

In the long run, what will ensure major success is creating things that people can’t live without because they have added so much enormous value to their lives that they simply cannot imagine living in a world without them. That’s why you should always start out from the vantage point of thinking through how you can add value. Focus on that journey and you will likely find success at the end as well.

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