The Secret: Sol Price Part XII: Principles of Success: The World Runs: Have Fun Running With It
We've spent a lot of time talking about how you can protect your business's intellectual property: trade secrets, patents, trademarks, and the like. All that is extremely important, but the truth is that, even after you've taken all possible steps, people are always going to find a way to clone any successful business.
The Price Club, in 2003 already had at least five big-league competitors, plus a host of smaller clones. One of the big competitors is backed by Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, and a firm known for superb execution of other people's ideas. Another is run by a former Price Company executive.
That's a pretty daunting array. But Sol Price, who took on the entire business community of San Diego as a young attorney, who built one retail empire, lost it, and built another far larger, hasn't flinched yet.
When we asked him if he thought there should be something like a "business patent," protecting business ideas for a certain number of years, he answered with a story.
"When I ran Fedmart, many years ago, we had a competitor named Unimart, started by some of our ex-employees. One day, the fellow who put out our Fedmart newspaper came to me and complained, 'Mr. Price, every time I print something in the Fedmart News, two weeks later the same thing appears in the Unimart News. It's just not fair.' "
"Well, I told him, 'That's the way the world runs--and when you get tired of running with it, you come and tell me, and I'll get someone who isn't tired."
And that was all Sol Price cared to say about the idea of protecting business intellectual property.
Good business ideas are meant to be used and improved, not held as private trusts. That's a philosophy Sol Price applies consistently. He got his start by improving someone else's retailing idea. Today he welcomes competitors to take their best shot with his great business idea. If they can use it to bring a better deal to the marketplace, they deserve the business.
(Of course, good luck to them in trying: Every single analyst's report we consulted on the Discount Warehouse industry ranked Price Clubs as the best-managed.)
That, in brief, is the Price philosophy. It built a $6.6 billion-a-year company in sixteen years, made many people fairly rich and several very rich indeed, and turned a major industry on its head.
Excerpted from
The Great American Idea Book: How to Make Money from Your Ideas for Movies, Music, Books, Inventions, Businesses and Almost Anything Else!
Authors: Bob Coleman & Deborah Neville
Publisher: WW Norton
Copyright: 1993; 1995
All Rights Reserved
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