“Everything today is about “disruptors” and if you’re not “disrupting, you’re dying”.
We’re very familiar with the term and everyone wants to be a “disruptor”, but I don’t think we take the time to really step back and say “what does it mean to be a ‘disruptor’. How do you actually be disruptive in your business, in your industry, in your market and that’s where that contrary nature comes in.
Zagging Where Everyone Else is Zigging
One of the traits I love about Entrepreneurs and I think this is the one that has impacted me the most over the years; is their completely contrary nature; they are ‘zagging when everyone else is zigging’ and the key to it is that they ‘zag’ with a purpose.
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I think that’s the real learning we can take from everything that they do. If you learn from it and use it in such a way that you’re constantly questioning the status quo that’s when you automatically actually become a ‘disruptor’, because you’re finding new solutions to old problems and really that’s what Entrepreneurs do.
How Spark Schools Disrupted the Education Sector
Stacey Bruwer who is the founder of Spark Schools is to me is the epitome of a ‘disruptor’. She doesn’t come from an ‘education’ background, she was doing her MBA at Gibbs and she was looking at a huge problem which is ‘education’.
The key that she wanted to find a solution to was “how do we offer a lost cost, high quality education to children who aren’t necessarily in the top earning bracket?
The way she has found that solution is to first of all really distil down into what the problem was and then secondly to say “I’m not going to do anything the way it’s been done before”, and that’s contrary.
It’s saying “If I hear the word; that’s the way it’s always been done, I’m finding a different way to do it!” If I hear: “because that’s the way we do it”, I’m going to say to you “No, that is not the way we’re going to do it, find another solution”.
That’s the way she operates with her team and they have found the most incredible business model to solve this problem because of it.
You Don’t Have to be an Entrepreneur to be a Disruptor
You don’t have to be a Richard Branson or an Elon Musk to be a ‘disruptor’; you can be a manager, a business owner and find new ways to look at old problems.
Look at every challenge as this is an opportunity to do things in a different way, to question the way we do things, to find great solutions that people want to pay for because they need those solutions and that to me is just the heart of everything that Entrepreneurs do and give to society”.
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