Pac-Man and Business Strategy

A few months ago I downloaded the Ms. Pac-Man game for the iPhone at a whopping cost of .99.  I loved this game when I was a little younger.  It was definitely one of the few arcade games I played in my youth.  Now that I can play virtually all the time for free, I am finding I am spending a little too much time but I am absorbed with the “strategy” of getting to the next level.  As I thought more about it, there is a lot of concepts in playing Pac-Man that apply to business strategy.  I keep thinking of new ones and thought thus a series of blog posts is born.  However, you will have to wait until the next blog post to find them out. 

I have been an entrepreneur for the past 22 years.  I am onto my fourth and fifth business.  I didn’t plan them in advance.  They just came my way.  The first three ended up very successfully, but not without great struggles.  The fourth one has struggled mightily and may not be salvageable. It is still in play.  The fifth one is just getting started, but it looks incredibly exciting.  No matter how many attempts I make to move into a different vocation, God keeps putting these businesses in my path.  Over the course of these many years, I have learned many lessons from the “school of hard knocks”.  As I play Pac-Man, I am finding many of these lessons I have also learned in business. 

Below is the Pac-Man board.  It changes as you progress further levels.  Let’s get into our lessons.

Lesson #1 – On the first board, eat as many Pac-dots as possible before going after the power pellets.  The power pellets turn the bad enemies into edible creatures that you can devour for points.  Reason is that you have lots of time in this first board before the enemies get real close to you to pile up the points.

Translation – build infrastructure first.  Be careful that you don’t get over-anxious.  I find that my tendency is to do too much too fast.  Consequently we outgrow our infrastructure too fast and it puts the business at risk.  Generally we have more time than we think.  Usually there is not an immediate “enemy” and we have time to do things right.  As I have gotten older and the over-anxious mistakes pile up, I am becoming more cautious.