By: Dezmon Landers

As entrepreneurs, we have big dreams of what our startup companies could be. The nature of growing our businesses requires feedback from partners, investors, contractors and most importantly our customers. I’ve talked with other entrepreneurs about the feedback they received from the various types of people in or related to their companies. A common occurrence in all of the entrepreneurs’ company vision was describing their selves as the future market leader in their space. One entrepreneur is starting a low cost multi-product store similar to the Target stores. The other is in year 3 of his software company that is experiencing ridiculous compound annual growth and his largest competitor is Microsoft.

As many people are skeptics about anything new, the question is always “What is your plan to take over the market?”. To a degree, most entrepreneurs follow a similar model to the current market leader with a variation here and there. Even though, this is a smart way to plan the growth of a successful business, critics will respond by saying your competitor is the “Exception and not the rule”. Most entrepreneurs have heard this argument at some point in their career but no one ever tells us how to become the exception and not the rule.

Since every business is successful because of the person or people with the vision, it is extremely important to understand how you or your team can be the exception everyone refers to.

Bill Gates - Founder of the Microsoft Corporation

Everyone knows Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. What most don’t know is the work he put in before anyone knew who he was. Back in 1969, at the ripe age of 13, Gates was doing real time programming in the 8th grade at his middle school.  Later on, he found out that the University of Washington hospital had a mainframe computer that was available between 2-6 am every weekday. He would set his alarm to 1:30 am, sneak out of his parents house and walk 2 miles in the dark to program until 6 am. Remember, this is 1969 where the computers were still as big as some of our houses today and homes didn’t have them yet.

Sean Combs - CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment

Also known as “Diddy” is one of the wealthiest hip-hop businessman in the game. What’s not mentioned often is that while Sean was a Student at Howard, he used to commute from Washington D.C. to New York by train (1-2 hour ride) everyday after classes to intern at Uptown Records. He risked his degree from Howard University and dropped out to work fulltime at Uptown. He was laid off in 1992 from Uptown and instead of getting another job, he created Bad Boy Entertainment which has a corporate net worth today of $400 million dollars.

Sergey Brin - Co Founder of the Google Corporation

One piece of the Internet’s most successful tag team, Sergey Brin is a multi-billionaire and someone I look up to. I was reading the “Google Story” and there was a pivotal point in Google’s success which Sergey had a lot to do with. Google struggled for a couple years with the search algorithm they created out of Stanford University. They had a great idea but were missing one thing, direct access to all of the pages on the Internet. To most, that would be an insurmountable task but not to Sergey. He said “ Give me a week and I’ll download all of the pages on Internet to my computer”, needless to say everyone laughed at him saying that he would never be able to do that. A week later, he came back with every single page on the Internet at his disposal, from that point Google had captured the last missing piece to their model and were able to grow into a multi-billion dollar company today.

The Beatles - Legendary Rock Band

The Beatles are arguably the best rock band ever assembled. The untold story of how they became so great is still a mystery to most. Before coming to the States, The Beatles were a local band out of Liverpool, England. One day a club owner from Hamburg, Germany heard them play and invited them to play the cover at his club there. What the Beatles didn’t know before arrival was that is was an exotic strip club. Stuck in Hamburg for a couple months, they played 7 days a week, 8 hours straight for months on end. It was said that they played together 1200 times before anyone in the United States ever knew who they were.

So how do you become the exception and not the rule? It seems to come down to 4 things:

• Love - For what you do
• Vision - For your life and business
• Dedication - To developing your skill (Harvard studies conclude it takes 10,000 hours to become great at something)
• Risk - The ability to look at risk as an opportunity to be great versus an opportunity to fail

There you have it. How will you position yourself to be the exception and not the rule in your business?