When asked which superpower they’d rather have, most people give you the regular responses: invisibility, teleportation, super-speed, flight – you name it. But in Hanson Cheng’s case, it’s learning.
This seems like a rather standard, run-of-the-mill ability one would naturally possess. However, this is not so. Cheng has, in his experience, proven time and again that picking up new skills and implementing them in order to reap their benefits is an art form, a weapon to be harnessed with the utmost care and persistence. It begins with the sheer will of an eighth-grader from Virginia to make something out of so little, where a young Cheng tutored the kids in his neighborhood in exchange for cigarette cartons instead of the usual twenty dollars an hour. He then proceeded to sell these packs to his fellow schoolmates for five dollars each, gaining for himself a profit sustainable enough for the entrepreneurial dreams of an eighth-grader.
But every effort worth making doesn’t bear fruit overnight. It’s hard to believe that someone of Hanson Cheng’s caliber in the bartering business was dragged through a rough patch, but he did, indeed, spend his first ten to fifteen years in the business going down a different path.
“I was more interested in being perceived as successful than actually being successful.”
There was no doubt that Cheng pulled off the role of a successful salesperson. But this trait isn’t necessarily synonymous with being a successful entrepreneur – and this idea morphed into a rude awakening when one of his start-ups, The Green Spoon, failed and cost him a whopping amount of $127,895 in a mere span of ten months. He was broke. That was when he realized he needed to step back, to reevaluate why he was doing what he did. Cheng eventually decided to refocus his entrepreneurial angle onto learning as a whole, onto rapid skill acquisition, the bartering business, and building systems for people who don’t know how to model a successful one for their own businesses.
Hanson Cheng believes in the power of developing business systems for people who aren’t very savvy with, well, systems. The way he does this is by breaking down a business into more manageable, bite-sized processes before automating or hiring other people with relevant skills to cover certain aspects of said business. This, in turn, gets rid of the bottleneck issue which frequently pops up when a business strives to free up bandwidth in their race to bloom within a short amount of time. Having a bottleneck release allows Cheng or the person he’s assisting to better focus on things that will ultimately drive the ship forward, instead of directing too much attention to the more menial, day-to-day tasks.
This may seem like something that’s too good to be true. However, Hanson Cheng really has found the antidote to a naturally arising problem: he has resorted to his bartering skills. Bartering may seem like an archaic system to some. But, really, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work – and in Cheng’s case, it works wonders. He currently holds a well-deserved title of a mercenary who helps businesses grow by a tenfold. The secret here is that he learned as many skills as he could depending on what piqued his interests, and then proceeded to apply his bartering knowledge.
And how, one might ask, would a person be able to apply the barter trading system to a business? Cheng essentially traded his acquired skills for other services or skills which he had or could pick up from another person. To put this in a more relatable example: if a web developer found for himself an interest in picking up professional photography, he could approach one of the industry’s top photographers. Now, the more conventional method would be to pay said photographer in exchange for his or her insight on photography. Bartering works in such a way where this web developer may instead offer to help the photographer with any tasks related to website development, or even teach the photographer the art of building websites for their business. This system allows an entrepreneur to create arbitrage. What this means is this: in exchange for a current skill one already has or has access to (i.e. where a fellow team member or business partner has the related skill), a person may pick up a new skill from another well-established professional in order to drive their own business forward.
Now, this isn’t just a nifty trick for someone to gain a profitable skill which will inevitably return unlimited dividends in the future by just spending an ounce of one’s time and effort to learn a process, or even by merely getting in touch with someone else who can do the job for them. It’s also a great way to build relationships. Spending time to attain solid connections is never a bad investment.
And neither is the process of learning. Hanson Cheng has proven this; there’s no refuting the results. By applying his passion and past experiences – the good, bad and the ugly – he has, undoubtedly, set himself apart from an endless stream of popular niches by setting up a system engineered for the sole purpose of entrepreneurial success.
“There aren’t a lot of people talking about how systems are the best way to scaling. I’d like to think of my angle as the atomic habits for online business.”
