There are all types of corporations that were 100 years old that are now out of business. There are all kinds of new mediums, new channels, new opportunities, and I think, as a practitioner, as someone who is out there looking to grow their brand and their business, this change might seem scary. But it’s actually perhaps the best thing that could have happened, and I will tell you why.

When there is change at the top, there is opportunity everywhere else. If you are a newcomer, if you are a few years into your craft, if you are 10 years into your craft but you are not where you want to be, the fact is that at the top of the market, all of the space has cleared up, and it has created room now for those people and professionals who are prepared, willing and able to adapt to the new world.

My father was a presser in a dry cleaner.

He taught me something very important. There was one day in particular, a hot summer day, when I went to ask him for a dollar. He invited me to the back where he worked. He was pressing a blazer, and he said, “Son, you see this?” I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “It looks good, doesn’t it?” And I said, “Yeah.”

He opened up the jacket and showed me that it was wrinkled on the inside. He said, “You see this jacket? It looks good on the outside, but on the inside, it’s wrinkled. Now, I can send this off to the customer, and they probably won’t notice, but I know it’s there.” And he steamed it out. He took the extra time to press the inside of the jacket, and he told me, “Son, the way you do anything is the way you do everything.” And that lesson really stuck with me.

In my adolescence, I worked all kinds of side jobs, but it wasn’t until I got a job as a doorman that my luck began to change.

I recall that the other doormen who had been there for years still didn’t even know the residents’ names. But I remembered my father’s lesson, and I resolved to be the friendliest doorman, the doorman with the best attitude, who remembered residents’ names, their kids’ names, how they liked their packages, what their preferences were when people came to the building if they had a guest, whether to call up or not.

This is when I realized that opening up doors for people helped open doors for me.

The more you put into your craft, the more people will take notice. That started my journey as an entrepreneur. There was one resident in particular who offered me the opportunity to start, of all things, a dry cleaner.

He had a big warehouse of dry cleaners, and he said, “Look, I’m not going to hold your hand, but I can give you the opportunity to use my facility, and I will charge you very cheap prices.”

So, I went out to my neighborhood, and I was knocking on doors, and trying and trying, and getting doors shut on me. I went with the same attitude, but the results didn’t come right away.

Eventually, there was someone out there who said, “You know what? I think I do need to dry-clean some things. Let me give this kid a shot.” Then they would call me, and that got my business career started.

I ended up, with that same attitude, breaking into the film and television industry in New York City, and that was because one of the residents in the building said, “Hey, I’ve been in the film industry for a long time, and we’re always looking for a dry cleaner. Why don’t you come with me?”

Here I was, an 18-year-old kid, and I was willing to wake up at 3 a.m. I was willing to always be on the phone with these customers, to go by public transit, grab their laundry, bring it back, clean it and then lug it all the way back. I was willing to do everything. When you do the things that your competition is not willing to do, you will win.

I won that business over, and that led me to my next business lesson, which is there are riches in niches.

If you are in a space where there is a lot of competition, then you have to try to find a little niche, a little sliver of the market that only you are uniquely well-equipped to address.

Here are the foundations of the business lessons: It’s The way you do anything is the way you do everything, as my father taught me; What you put in, you get out, as my doorman job taught me; and There are riches in niches, as my first business taught me.

There has never been a time like the time we are in now. Right now, offline, human-to-human interaction is not possible professionally. The most important thing I have noticed is that in an environment where offline is no longer possible, the consumer has to go purely digital.

How can you take your business and bring it to a digital context? Because if there’s one thing that we have learned, it’s that the biggest businesses in the world only got bigger, and they got bigger because of their brand. People know and trust their brand, and when you go online to shop, you don’t want to choose from a number of options that you don’t know and trust.

Brand is the most important variable to success in 2021 and the 21st century. Brand is the variable that you must invest in heavily if your business is to grow for the next one, two, three or 10 years.

How do you build a brand? If everyone is at home, everyone is on their phone, and everyone is more or less on the same five channels: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and, increasingly, Clubhouse. There are billions of people on these five channels.

So, if you are a businessperson, you must make sure that you are producing content for these platforms.

Content gives people the ability to develop an opinion about who you are and what you do.

It can be an iPhone video, written content or a podcast, but you need to invest as if your life depends on it, on the production of content.

My plea for you to make content is the key to developing your brand, and eventually people start seeing your face. They become familiar with your face. They become familiar with your offerings. They become trusting of what you do. They start believing that you know what you are talking about, and they start understanding all of the different offerings that you have, and slowly you start building your brand. And brand equals trust, and in a purely online world, as we established, customers and consumers are gravitating toward brands that they know and trust.

If you take the production of content seriously and sacrifice your short-term earnings and income and time, if you are OK compromising a little bit of time so that you can over-index on the production of this long-term investment, and if you do that consistently for one year or two years, your business will triple or more in size. There is no way that it won’t happen because the majority of people in your field will not be doing this.

This goes back to that earlier lesson: When you do the things that your competition is not willing to do, you will win. If you develop the discipline and find the time to produce content where most of your competitors will not, you will develop a brand, and you will win.

John Henry is a Dominican-American entrepreneur and investor. After dropping out of high school at 18, he went from being a doorman to starting and selling his first business by 21. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of Loop, an insurance technology company that leverages AI and data to create more fairly priced auto insurance products.