Page 153 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

The concept of birds flocking together is the same for when there is a type of product or a demographic you are selling to: there will be others, similar to it, that flock together and can create opportunities for you. If you are selling to a particular person or company, there will be other prospects of a similar nature that hang out in the same market. Sometimes it is so simple that we don’t see it.
In the early 1990s, the concept of a positive pressure ventilation system was starting to hit the New Zealand market. The first product introduced to the New Zealand market was one out of the United Kingdom. I decided to develop our own by getting one manufactured locally. This wasn’t successful in view of its quality (the concept tested very well in my own home, but the noise was terrible) and the poor performance of the manufacturer. ‘For every adversity there is a seed of opportunity’, and I also thought: Birds of a feather flock together; there must be another manufacturer in the UK.
This was before the days of the internet, email and websites. So, I went off to the British embassy in Wellington and went through their product manuals for a couple of hours, and sure enough, there were other birds, so I created a list of a few prospects. That night I started ringing around the UK, and that led to a visit to the UK and importing our first positive pressure ventilation system nine months later. I had known there had to be others in the flock, and that was the start of our very successful ventilation journey.