November 10, 2020

Pick one

Let’s say:

1) You love making hand knit cashmere sweaters

AND

2) You have a passion for helping homeless people

Each cashmere sweater costs about $300 in yarn, plus 40 hours of labor. So in order to have a profitable business doing this you need to charge at least $1,000 per sweater.

This creates a dilemma:

How can you sell $1,000 cashmere sweaters to homeless people?

You can’t.

You have to make a choice:

1) Find a way to offer the benefits of a hand knit cashmere sweater (e.g., warmth and comfort and love and a feeling of specialness) to homeless people.

2) Continue making hand knit cashmere sweaters and find people who are happy to pay you $1,000 for them.

Either not both.

Yours,

—J