Unconventional Entrepreneur

Shannon Jean

The first question I ask my coaching clients is:

What is your unfair advantage?

Here's what I want to know:

What is your hidden genius? We all have something, or we have access to something others dont.

This could be how darn smart you are, Reader. But more often, it is how determined you are. Determination is a huge unfair advantage.

Most people are full of wants. Only a tiny percentage of people have decided. Once you decide what to do, you have escalated to another level. There is no going back once you decide.

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Your unfair advantage could be a giant warehouse to store liquidation products while others are trying to work out of their garage.

I encourage you to list your unfair advantages and post them where you see them daily. These are your superpowers.

Here are a couple of my unfair advantages that I have used to succeed. This concept is not complicated, but its powerful.

Buying broken stuff has been one of my unfair advantages.

The key to this strategy is defining what "broken" means.

A: Its broken - worthless garbage that cant be repaired.

B: Its broken lets fix this and make some money.

You want your supplier to embrace A while you embrace B.

For example:

One of the great gifts Apple gave my first business was the Apple Color Laser Printer.

Heres why: the printer's designer created an oil tray that had to be filled with special oil for the color ink to stick to the paper.

The fun part: if you moved the printer without draining this oil tray, the oil would spill and contaminate the entire printer.

A: Them - Its broken! Its a worthless piece of garbage that is a problem for us.

B: Me how many can we buy and whats the price?

This $6995 printer became worthless within minutes if you moved it or even bumped into it with some force.

This is an opportunity.

I bought one of these worthless, oil-contaminated printers for about $500.

Our techs tore the printer apart and figured out how to decontaminate it while replacing a few parts.

We sold that repaired printer for $3995.

Me: How many truckloads of these worthless printers can we find?

We bought truckloads of these contaminated printers for $200-500 each and sold them for $4K.

Opportunities surround us.

I guarantee companies are using this exact strategy with different products today and making bank.

What broken worthless stuff can you buy?

So, for that unfair advantage, you have to have access to products and have people to repair them.

Thats hard! You are saying to yourself.

Heres an even simpler example of an unfair advantage that I used while I was in college:

I needed to make money while I was going to school, but, of course, I didnt want to get a normal job.

With a couple of buddies, we came up with a system to buy and sell trucks. Heres how it worked:

There was a publication that came out each Thursday called the EZ-Ad. You might have something similar in your area Penny Saver, for example.

This was pre-web. No one was selling cars online.

This text-only publication had all kinds of stuff for sale, including cars and trucks.

We would scour the EZ-Ad for anything priced below the local market, primarily trucks because they were in demand.

Our unfair advantage was that we got access to the EZ-ad hours before anyone else!

A random phone call turned us on to this unfair advantage.

Thursday morning would come, and two of my buddies and I would drive all over town looking for the latest EZ-Ad.

We wanted to find the deals before anyone else did.

But it took a ton of time, and it was random.

So, I finally just called the EZ-Ad offices and asked them when the deliveries were made.

They couldnt tell me.

But before I hung up, the receptionist made this seemingly innocuous comment:

We put the latest edition in our office lobby at 9AM.

Wait, what?!

Guess where we were the following Thursday at 9 AM.

In the lobby of EZ-Ad HQ, of course.

This went on for 3-years.

We would get the EZ-Ad early and call sellers that had trucks priced low.

We would immediately drive to the sellers location and bring cash.

But that wasnt enough.

We found a local guy who could paint these trucks for us for very little money. We painted every truck white with a grey strip along the bottom of each side.

White and grey were hot sellers, making these trucks look newer than they were.

After three years, there wasnt a day that I didnt see multiple white and grey trucks driving around town.

It was glorious.

I'll ask once more: what are your unfair advantages? Respond to this email and let me know!

Cheers to your inevitable success!

~ Shannon

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