Interview with Yu Minhong: Eight abilities that must be possessed to start a business
The first ability is the goal ability.
First of all, everyone wants to start a business. Who doesn’t want to be his own boss? But you still have to ask yourself a question: Why do you want to start a business? What are your goals? What do you want to make it into? Status? We do not start a business for the sake of starting a business, but to do one thing well and make it bigger. And the premise is that after you conduct a self-evaluation and find that it is possible, then you can start a business. If you have no goals, just a temporary impulse, and just feel that you should do something, and you don’t have much love for what you are doing, then entrepreneurship will just become a trend rather than a reality, and you will also You may not be able to achieve big things. Personally speaking, when I started New Oriental, I had a very clear goal. At that time, I resigned from my job as a university teacher at Peking University and set up a training institution. I hoped that I could become a truly meaningful training institution. , and it is precisely with this goal that New Oriental's training business is flourishing and moving forward. As the training progresses, New Oriental's goals are constantly changing. From the initial goal of being a school to opening New Oriental schools all over China, we have now become a listed company in the United States. All in all, your goals will rise, but the foundation will not change. For example, when I first started New Oriental, the foundation was to build a training school with brand, taste, responsibility for the future of students, and that students would like. In essence, New Oriental is still like this today. So I think goal ability is very important for entrepreneurship, and your ability to love this goal wholeheartedly is also very important. In addition, one thing you need to pay attention to is: your goal must be something big, not just for your own entertainment. For example, if you like calligraphy, it is not easy to start a calligraphy company all at once.
The second ability that I think is very important is professional ability.
If you start a business without knowing anything about a major, you are likely to fail. Just like if you open a restaurant, if you are not a chef yourself and do not have strong funds to hire many chefs at once, it will be difficult to control the quality of your restaurant, and you will easily be fired by the chefs. For example, if you hire a great chef, he cooks very well and attracts many customers. At this time, when he sees that his status is very important, he will ask you for a price and refuse to do it unless you give him more money. If you get angry and fire him, your restaurant will no longer be able to cook well, and will eventually face bankruptcy. When I started working at New Oriental more than ten years ago, many training institutions around me were fired because of outstanding teachers. It was also because their classes were very good and the students were very satisfied, so the teachers began to ask the boss for a price, but the boss himself did not understand teaching and could not swallow this breath. In the end, all the teachers went to other training institutions, and the boss had no choice but to turn the school over. turned off. One of the important reasons why New Oriental was able to succeed in the first place was that I was a great chef myself, which meant that I could teach many of the courses offered by New Oriental at that time. Therefore, when my teachers received wages that they found satisfactory, they They will not make undue demands on me. They know that if I make excessive demands, I can teach them without causing too much harm to New Oriental. So when you start from scratch, have no money, or have limited funds, there is an important prerequisite: you must be an expert in the field in which you start a business, and a person who can control the professional situation. For example, if you open a software design company and you don’t understand software yourself, firstly you won’t be able to control the quality, and secondly you won’t be able to control the talent, which will be very troublesome. This is the second point. In principle, you must have considerable professional knowledge and reach a professional level in the field where you want to start a business, so that you can have the ability to control your profession.
The third ability is marketing ability.
Once you start a business, what should you do? For example, if your company is opened and a product is built, what is the next step? If no one buys the product, then the company is in vain. Well, there are countless companies that started but closed down in the end. One of the fundamental reasons is that they don’t know how to promote their products and their company brands.
Therefore, what we have to do is to sell the company. One is to sell the company's products; the other, more important, is to sell the company's brand along with the sales of the products. That is to say, let the public recognize your company's brand and let everyone Everyone knows that this product is sold by your company. This involves marketing, which is divided into two parts: real marketing and virtual marketing. The so-called real marketing, for example, when I work for New Oriental, I market New Oriental's courses. I tell students why they should take this course and what they can gain after taking it. However, countless training institutions have always been marketing courses, but they are still only small institutions. But New Oriental can become bigger. What is the reason? Very simple, because we market the brand. That is to say, New Oriental began to have more and more connotations. In the end, people came to class not because they heard about the courses offered by New Oriental, but because they just heard the three words New Oriental. At this time, the brand marketing is considered successful. This is false marketing. . When running a business in China, brand marketing is often combined with personal marketing, which means that your personal image can sometimes represent the corporate image, so it is often necessary to combine personal ethics and behavior with the corporate ethics and behavior. For example, when people talk about New Oriental, they will say, New Oriental is Yu Minhong, and Yu Minhong is New Oriental. When talking about Lenovo, they will say, Lenovo is Liu Chuanzhi, and Liu Chuanzhi is Lenovo. Therefore, in China, the growth of personal brand is largely the growth of corporate brand, and the growth of corporate brand in turn also drives the growth of personal brand. The two together form a powerful virtual marketing for your company. In addition, your product itself can also be accepted by ordinary people, so that the product will be valuable. For example, a company that produces shoes does not have any reputation. Although the quality of the shoes is comparable to that of famous brand shoes, but the brand shoes sell for one thousand, the company may only sell one hundred, and the difference is nine hundred. Where did the money come from? It’s brand marketing. You don’t have a brand, so you can’t raise the price. Therefore, if a company wants to be successful, brand marketing is sometimes even more important than product marketing. The value of brand marketing is infinite. This is why our bags made in China can only sell for 1,000 yuan, while bags of the same material with the LV logo printed on them can sell for 100,000 yuan. Brand value is at work behind this. Therefore, using marketing capabilities to sell products, brands, and yourself has become an important means of enterprise development, and it is also an ability that entrepreneurs must possess.
The fourth ability is called transformation ability.
The first transformation is to transform science and technology into productivity. This is a saying we often say. You have technology and capabilities, but you cannot convert them into products and sell them. This is not okay. For example, if Bill Gates stayed in the laboratory all his life, I guess he would be a pauper. He transformed his research results into Microsoft products and sold them all over the world, and he became the richest man in the world. Therefore, it is very important to transform science and technology into productivity and product capabilities. The second is to transform your personal abilities. Generally speaking, there is a prerequisite for intellectuals to start a business, which is to be able to transform the professional knowledge learned in college into social abilities and management abilities. For example, I came out of Peking University and had no idea what society was like. It would be more difficult to do things with the academic spirit and the simple thoughts and behaviors I had in school, even in Western society. Not to mention in a complex complex like China. Therefore, if you cannot transform the professional abilities in college into social abilities and management abilities, it will be very troublesome. You may be able to manage yourself very well, but you may not be able to manage a group of people, so you need to learn how to manage them. Switch from managing one person to managing a group of people, which means converting professional abilities into comprehensive abilities and professional abilities into leadership abilities. And this kind of transformation requires a very painful process. I personally graduated from Peking University and finally felt that I became the leader of New Oriental. I was able to manage a group of more than 100 people relatively easily. It took at least five years. . Ability can grow. Now I am in charge of nearly 10,000 teachers and employees at New Oriental, and there are still no major mistakes, which shows that New Oriental's management capabilities have increased. Therefore, people's abilities are constantly transforming. The key is that you have to work hard to transform yourself. For example, many college students are very introverted and are unwilling to interact with people in society. If you want to start a business, you have to make these contacts. No. If you fight, you will close yourself and at the same time close the chance of success.