How Many Ways Can You Make Money With A Potato?

A truck shows up outside your restaurant with 400 pounds of potatoes? What are you going to do? You can’t let them go to waste. You already have mashed and baked on the menu. What do you do? If you owned a restaurant, you would be kept up nights solving this problem.

Ok, so you’re not a restaurateur, you’re a business owner. You have the same problem. You have a truckload of talent and experience and you need to find as many ways as you can to sell your experience. There are a number of things that you can do to get your experience out there in the public. My favorite thing to suggest here is to “productize”. This provides you with options. I’ve already written about that in previous posts. Of course, what if you have already productized?

This is the case with Praura. My partner and I own a project outsourcing firm called IFConnect, which means we know how to manage projects. One of the greatest challenges in project management is sharing information, data and documents with your clients and stakeholders. So we developed a product called Praura. Praura is a software product that helps teams share documents, tasks and schedules, etc. So I practiced what I preach and created a product. Great. Now what?

Finding new ways to sell what you already have is what makes a good business a great business. In the case of Praura, what are we doing? Well we are selling a lot of types of potatoes. First, we are selling subscriptions to the product. We’ve selected a number of markets and are focusing our sales and marketing efforts on those markets. This involves creating a pricing strategy by analyzing different products already in the market that have a similar business model. This will enable us to generate base revenue on an ongoing basis via online sales. This is an obvious thing to do.

Second, we’ve already successfully sold a license to a company that has a pre-existing customer base in a market we were already targeting. We’ve struck a deal where we will stay out of that space for three years and in exchange we will receive a percent of revenue. Even though this market niche is one we planned on targeting, the fact that they already had a customer base means that it is a shorter road to revenues and our cost of sales dropped to zero.

Third, we are developing a strategy where we will utilize the same software to deliver services to different markets. The services will ultimately be delivered by third parties, but we will offer up Praura as infrastructure for a percentage of each contract. This is a creative approach that allows us to be out own customer to generate revenues from channels that otherwise would not be available to us.

Mashed, baked, twice baked, scalloped. The more ways you sell the same product or service the more opportunities you are creating for your company. Every business owner should look down every once in a while and take an inventory of what they are selling and what they could be selling. A down market when things are slower is an optimal time to do this.