If You Don't Ask Questions, You Won't Get Answers

Too many entrepreneurs are afraid to ask their customers, suppliers, and manufacturers some really basic things. For instance, why should their product exist?

ANY FOUNDER INTERESTED in thriving over the long term needs to be addicted to innovation. I know I am. But there's long been debate about how best to innovate. In Silicon Valley's earlier days, Hewlett-Packard adhered to an innovation theory called the next bench. One engineer would ask the engineer sitting on the next bench over to describe the kind of tool he would find helpful. Since HP's customers at the time were primarily other engineers, that constituted market research. But when HP became a more consumer-focused business, the company discovered, not surprisingly, that it needed to reach out to consumers for innovation inspiration.

On the other end of the spectrum was Apple, where Steve Jobs famously noted that asking consumers what they wanted was pointless-how could they know they need a graphic user interface? Apple's job, he said, was to figure it out for them.

Granted, Mr. Jobs did OK with his approach, but most of us aren't operating at that level of genius, which is why in the businesses I've owned, we talked to our customers obsessively. We wanted to know everything we possibly could about their needs, desires, and dissatisfactions with our products.

We then used that knowledge to conduct market research on how to solve their frustrations. Thisand the fact that we owned our manufacturing facilities-allowed us to swiftly improve our products and expand the product line to meet market demand.

That was my approach at Big Ass Fans, where we grew on average 43 percent annually over nearly 20 years. We took what most people thought was a boring, basic product and turned it into something unique, over and over again. This is how we did itand how you can too.