01/16/2026
I had two couples meet with me on the same day with similar stories: both left their corporate jobs and staked everything on launching businesses in 2008.
The first drained savings, including retirement, to start a restaurant. This was a disaster as their restaurant failed and they lost everything. They later launched a successful catering business and are now debt free. The second couple started a medical equipment repair business. The husband saw in his corporate job how medical equipment manufacturers were providing maintenance services and then intentionally "obsoleting" perfectly good equipment by stopping the production of replacement parts in order to force customers to buy new models. He figured he had the ability to do the repairs and the resourcefulness to source the parts from third parties, and he could make a living for himself doing this while saving universities and hospitals huge sums of money. Their business was successful from the start and has also led to them being debt free and working as much or as little as they want.
I took a couple of days to think one why one business failed and the other succeeded. It probably wasn't a matter of personal ability as the first couple did succeed with their second try. The economic downturn definitely impacted the restaurant more severely than the medical equipment repair business, but I felt like there was more to it, though, hence the couple of days of thought.
It finally hit me that the biggest difference between the two was the matter of differentiation. When you schedule a lunch meeting with someone, you will go back and forth over where to eat. You will decide on burgers vs thai, then you will pick a place within the chosen category. If you arrive and it turns out the place you picked was close, you will again choose from a multitude of options. Notice that if you strip away the superficialities, there's no difference between two restaurants: they offer the same thing, for about the same price, with about the same experience. This makes it very hard to start a restaurant and generate the margins you need to be successful because you can't compete on price except to put yourself closer and closer to bankruptcy.
The equipment repair was niche. No one was doing what they were doing, and their prospective customers were left with a pretty easy decision: give in to the rent-seeking behavior of the manufacturer and spend $100,000+ on new equipment, or pay this repair business a small percentage of that to keep existing equipment running. There wasn't an existing industry of repair businesses since the manufacturers provided that service themselves, and it was only the owner's experience working for one of those companies that let him see the opportunity.
This is a good reminder that the most reliable path to success is making ourselves valuable to people in ways that others aren't and constantly looking for needs that aren't being met and finding a way to meet them.
