A Better Ballpen

Recently, a number of people have turned to me for advice on their business idea. I would worriedly protest that I was not qualified to give them advice. But they would insist that I hear them out. I realized that I could at least look at their idea from a common sense point of view and ask simple questions based on that. I found out that a lot of people either wanted to start a business because they love the thought of being an entrepreneur or see someone succeeding in one type of business and want to imitate it but do it better.

I get very interesting answers when I hear the answers to one simple question, “Why do you want to do this?” The answers often range from, “Because everybody thinks it’s a good idea…” to “I have some money saved up…” But I often get very little response to the question, “ What is it that you really want to do?, What are you passionate about?” I often get a blank stare and a rebuttal, “Can that be a business?”

One of the common threads in starting small businesses is that we fall in love with imitation, being a copycat. For example, if someone starts a barbeque restaurant featuring fresh seafood, if it becomes successful, the street will soon have several restaurants with the same concept. Not enough people want to start businesses that are unique and creative. The common fear is that it is too risky and nobody wants to be the one to try. After all, they can be the one to follow if it works…

I believe there are many ideas that exist for business that actually fulfill a need, a unique solution that people have failed to recognize. We often fall in love with complex plans or sophisticated solutions when many times, the actual answer was just staring at us in front of our noses.

I remember a popular story on how much NASA spent to develop the first gravity ballpen. It seems that it was a big problem that ballpens would not write upside down due to the effects of zero gravity. So not so few million dollars later, a zero gravity pen was made. It was a monumental achievement, one that the Agency was very proud of, until they discovered what the Russians were using: A pencil.

Another humorous story was when a Japanese soap manufacturer was horrified to discover that a customer had bought an empty box of soap. To make sure it never happened again, it directed its engineering team to develop a solution to prevent this occurrence. The team immediately came up with a unique x-ray that was mounted at the end of the assembly line. There, all boxes were immediately scanned to make sure that there was always a bar of soap in every box.

After a successful test run, Tokyo headquarters immediately instructed the engineers to ship the new x-ray machines to all of their factories worldwide. The Japanese president of the Philippine subsidiary was worried about what to do while waiting for the x-ray to arrive. He asked his Filipino engineers to study the problem. They promptly came up with an alternative solution, they mounted a high powered industrial fan at the end of the assembly line to blow away any empty boxes.

There is a lot of room for creativity, passion, innovation and uniqueness in starting a business. It may be risky but when it succeeds, the rewards can be enormous. Google co founder Larry Page once said, “You don’t need a 100-person company to develop that idea.” Remember how Google started? It was a school project, on how to develop a better search engine.

I would like to congratulate the UP TAO Brotherhood and Sisterhood for reaching their 20th anniversary this weekend. I would also like to congratulate the UPS for also achieving this significant milestone. I am proud to have been part of the start of these organizations.

I would also like to congratulate Charmaine Ong on the one year anniversary of the Oras ng Jaycees program on DYRF. Thank you for inviting me to guest and discuss the need for entrepreneurship especially for our youth. Congratulations.

Let’s follow the examples of these ordinary individuals as they strive to make a difference. Each week, lets all get together and share knowledge, stories, experiences, information, all for the sole purpose of getting One Step Up.

For comments, suggestions or stories that you want to share, email me at

[email protected], or visit www.stirspecialist.blogspot.com .