Transcript excerpt from a YouTube interview (Capitalism.com) where Ryan Daniel Moran and Stephanie McMahon discuss entrepreneurship, the need to reimagine business models when primary revenue streams are threatened, and identifying an unchanging core ‘engine’ (the one fundamental capability) around which a company can evolve products and channels.
Would you please speak to the entrepreneurs in the room who are terrified that their primary revenue stream is going to go away, and so they're trying to defend it rather than trying to reimagine or reinvent it. Oh, gosh, that's such a hard thing. Right? Well, I'm not telling you not to do something or I'm not telling you to do something except try to look at it differently. You know, put on a different hat, look at it from a different perspective. Ask the upside down question. Think about how can you shift your perspective? How can you shift your model? How can you reinvent your brand or your company to over deliver on your vision? And to that point, what I'm hearing you talk about is like the product and the audience were always the focus. How about bringing that out was always on the table of how you change that, how you engage the audience and how you bring a quality product to that audience is what you're married to. But the way in which you do that was you were always willing to risk to make it better to bring that product to that audience. A calculated risk. Right. But you know what I actually had, we're doing a big research project right now in wwe. And one of the points that the researchers brought to the company, which I just shared, because I think it's. And I'm going to butcher it, but at its core, what is your engine? What is that one fundamental that you never want to change? And he gave an analogy of a car company that they had worked with and this car company, at first, the leadership didn't want to make any changes. And the car companies started to fade off. They realized they needed to be competitive in the marketplace, develop other lines of cars, SUVs, et cetera, not just sports cars. And the one thing that they did not change was the engine. The engine had the same functionality in every single car, was made exactly the same way in every single car. And that company is a huge success today. So what is your engine? What is that one thing that you can't change that is the core of what you do? And then think about all of the different ways that you can evolve your business. That's beautiful. And this connects with me because I know I've gone through periods in my career as an entrepreneur where you get married to the platform, you get married to the distribution channel rather than the product and the audience. And when you do that, you end up losing your uniqueness, losing the value that you bring, and you ultimately are less successful.
