Probably the most difficult of all questions that I’ve ever faced is when people ask “what business are you in ?”. While, it sounds as a pretty straight-forward and simple question, it belongs to the category of questions such as “truth of life” (which, many a saints have tried for ages to answer, yet it remains a question).
The fact that “truth of life” is probably a personal-point-of-view dependent question (philosophical) and “what business are you in” is not (totally a business perspective in there), makes the latter a touch harder to answer. This question is probably what every entrepreneur, successful or not, dreams of finding the answer to, and also what generally a great professor at a good b-school always tries to instill in his disciples mind right from the beginning.
I’ve been trying to really answer myself as to “what business am I in”, and while I have a generally pretty good idea, the specifics are always missing. It’s like that dart game, where you can constantly hit inside the “outer circle” (including sometimes the “bullseye”), but you are never 100% sure whether the “bullseye” is what you are aiming for (and will get) every time. I’ve possibly changed my linkedin profile with varied number of “areas of interest”, all revolving around the common theme of consumer-facing technologies, but the last mile problem still remains as to what consumer-facing problem are we talking about.
But really, is there anyone who exactly knows “what business is he in” ??
