Successful entrepreneurs are often seen as impulsive gamblers. Neil Blumenthal says he used a different strategy to grow billion-dollar eyewear brand Warby Parker: minimizing risk.
According to Blumenthal, building your business strategy around risk minimization can save money and help your company scale to meet demand. Warby Parker‘s first retail store was a showroom built into its New York City-based office–followed by pop-up stores and, eventually, a brick-and-mortar storefront. Each experience allowed Blumenthal’s team to learn what parts of the shopping experience did and didn’t work for consumers.
“We didn’t come in with any assumptions on what the right thing to do was,” says Blumenthal. “It was ‘Let’s learn, get better, and evolve.'”
The key to minimizing risk is threefold: Be flexible, take small steps, and make informed decisions. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from this week’s episode of Inc.‘s What I Know podcast, featuring Blumenthal.
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