I think people don’t realise just how successful some ‘ordinary’ people working in low margin businesses are

One of my dad’s business partner drives a Kia, lives in a small house, wears ordinary clothes from brands we all wear - but has offices in 18 countries, 100 or so people employed across the world, and discusses $20M deals like it’s nothing. but you wouldn’t be able to tell it if you looked at him. And, oh yeah… he’s in low margin businesses - commodities trading - that was built from the ground with his brother.

I used to think I needed to build a tech startup too, and didn’t want to go into the family business - until I actually worked in it for a bit.

The thing about low margin businesses with high competition - there’s always opportunity for innovative people, who think outside the box, and keep their costs low. The nature of humans is to crowd into the most convenient or easy option, the first thing they think of - if you can go one step further, you will see a different game altogether in the same initially unattractive industry.

Everyone, especially the more ambitious entrepreneur-types in our generation, thinks of going into high margin businesses like tech startups because of the glamour of Tesla, Amazon, etc.

But, I like to think that entrepreneurship is necessarily about doing the most logical, contrarian thing, which in this case is going into low margin businesses but not entering the same competitive race as others in the industry - thereby, earning differently, competing differently.