Turning Danger into Opportunity
"Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit."
— Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)
Crisis in Chinese is composed of two words together: Danger and Opportunity.
Powerful.
Danger is Coming
"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty."
— Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
Our domain business was starting to compound and gain momentum.
We were on pace to do over a million dollars a year, and each month, new insights arrived that made the flywheel spin faster and get bigger.
We had made it!
Yahoo, who would later buy Goto (the pay-per-click search engine), was using a company called ASI (Applied Semantics) to target domain names with relevant keywords. For example, Laptop.com had laptop keywords and relevant advertisers for laptops. This allowed better monetization of the domain names.
Guess who decided to buy ASI for $102 million in 2003? A little upcoming company called Google. They were the new search engine on the block, and Yahoo had used them as their search engine, branding them into significance. This was a great strategic move by Google and the beginning of Yahoo's decline. ASI would become "Adsense" and its powerful monetization engine, where it still makes over 90% of its revenues.
This left Yahoo with no contextually relevant ads on the domain names and our revenues plummeted by more than 50%!
Imagine waking up one day to disaster. C'est la vie.
The crisis is Turning Danger into Opportunity
"In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."
– Sun Tzu (544 BC - 496 BC)
Yahoo was scrambling for a solution and asked the larger domainers if we wanted to build our own keyword engine. They wanted to avoid dealing with smaller domain portfolios and wondered whether a handful of us, the larger domainers, could consolidate them.
I would have thought a giant technology company would invest in this 'keyword' engine. Their CEO, Terry Semel, was a traditional Hollywood guy and also passed up the opportunity to buy Google for $5 billion before it went public. Later, they did invest in Alibaba, their $1 billion stake selling for $40 billion. The Yahoo Directors had to oust their Yahoo founder, Jerry Yang, in order to sell it.
So, we were presented with an opportunity to help smaller domainers monetize their domains. This allowed us to learn from the entrepreneurial insights of many agile domainers.
Domainers came from all walks of life and were scrappy, agile, bootstrappers with solid work ethics and ingenuity. I learned a lot from both the small and the legendary domainers. This entrepreneurial real-life boot camp may have been better than attending business school and getting an MBA.
Homage to all my fellow domainers and entrepreneurs. Strength and Honour.
The traffic in our domain network became a Top 100 Global Network, as measured by the industry standard Comscore. I was astounded. Now we were really big.
My Life Dream
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined."
– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
When I was 13, one of my good friends told me that my cousin Don was actually my brother. What? Why are you saying that? I asked my mom, and she sat me down and told me that Dad had a previous family before she had me, and I had two sisters and an older brother. They were stuck in Korea and my mom helped my brother come to Canada. But my mom couldn't love him like a true son, so Don was sent to grow up in group homes, apart from me. I had no idea.
I prayed that I would be able to have a business in the future that would allow me to work with Don. I asked him to join me in this Internet entrepreneurial journey. He had just sold his dry cleaners and was interested.
So, Don managed support on our domain parking business, Hitfarm. I also had a prayer to bring my sisters over to Canada. One sister found her way to the US on her own and my other sister now lives in Vancouver. So blessed.
I couldn't imagine the life they had gone through without parents. I thank God for all the people in my life who have helped me find my way and build a business from scratch. I am so grateful to God, my family, and to each person I have met along this amazing life journey.
Thank you. Much love to each of you. May God bless you with everything in your heart and let you shine like the sun.
Current Crisis
"In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity."
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
It's much easier to talk about crises that have already been averted or passed.
It's hard to see the opportunity in the crisis when it occurs.
But one must seek the opportunity.
My crisis is that one of my businesses, Chit Chats, a logistics company helping entrepreneurs ship their products, is going through a cash crunch as the industry is getting disrupted and rapidly changing. The business is submerged under fixed costs.
We are revamping our hubs from cost centres into profit centres and looking for key partnerships to survive and thrive. Stay tuned. I hope to write later how we turned this crisis into an opportunity.
Life Questions
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers."
– Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
What crisis turned into an opportunity for you?
What is the opportunity knocking on your door?
Life Advice Then
From my 33-year-old self:
"Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards."
– Vernon Law (1930-)
Take a deep breath and sign.
Panic is a flight response. Instead of flight, you must first fight. To do that, you need a calm mind. Breathe and focus on controlling your breath, eventually calming your body. Then, you can calm your mind—serenity.
Zoom out and give it time.
What is the worst-case scenario? What are the new opportunities? Discuss to consider all perspectives. Write to gain clarity. Yes, write it down. You'd be surprised how much clarity comes from writing.
An opportunity for unity and efficiency
Brainstorm with people on the barbells of
Plug the most significant holes (the most enormous hole is your biggest constraint)
What is the new opportunity?
Life Advice Now
From my 53-year-old self:
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
– Buddha (563 BC - 483 BC)
Be grateful for what you have right now
Do you have your health? Do you have your freedom? Do you have loved ones? Do you have food? Do you have shelter?
Pray and ask for help.
In desperate times, almost everyone feels a need to ask for help. "Hail Mary" is used as a miracle prayer or play in the last seconds of a game, business or life event. I pray to God and Jesus but you may pray to a greater power, the universe, or just ask someone, even strangers.
I heard the owner of 1-800-Flowers met the owner of CNN (Ted Turner) serendipitously at a time he needed. CNN ran ads for him, and then, with the Iraq war occurring, he had so much free advertising that it turned his business around. I wonder if he prayed.
It, too, shall pass
This is the message of the Bible, that all adversity and tribulations pass. Patience is the message of Job, who had severe tribulations, losing his family, wealth and then his health. He was restored manifold in the end. There is a lesson and opportunity in all life events, big and small.
God bless you with love, joy and peace.
Next week: No Money? No Problem.
Three $10 million deals with no plan and little money. Just clear vision and purpose.
See you next Thursday!
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