THE LONELIEST TREK

RUNNING A SMALL BUSINESS CAN BE A LONELY TREK. 

BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.

One of the biggest challenges of being a business owner, running your own show, flying solo, is the sense of isolation you immediately begin to experience. The transition from working in an environment where you can regularly bounce ideas off colleagues, talk about problems you’re having, and usually find some encouragement—to working alone, with no one to confide in or receive support from, can be an overwhelming culture shock. When you are the decision maker, whether you have a brand venture or seasoned enterprise, who do you talk to about important issues? WHO DO YOU TALK TO ABOUT ISSUES? WHO ENCOURAGES YOU? 

Just how lonely it is going to be? Many business owners describe this as feeling totally alone or as “me against the world”. The toll is often health-damaging stress, strained personal relationships, lack of focus on responsibilities, and perhaps a run of bad decisions that run the enterprise into the ground. 

Yet business owners rarely discuss their isolation with anyone. Most just keep it to themselves, because there are just some things you can’t share with employees, friends or even partners.

Think of a recent pesky business issue you faced. Most likely, you didn’t share that with anyone. If you have employees, they have so much at stake they’ll not give you good, objective feedback. You might even cause an unnecessary panic or at least a lively rumor mill. Even if you could discuss problematic issues with employees, they only vaguely understand what you’re all about, they don’t have the perspective you have, and probably don’t share your vision for the future with the same level of enthusiasm that you do. And your customers and suppliers, well frankly most of them are not interested in your personal welfare either.

You probably spend a lot of time—and more than a few sleepless nights— pondering the pros and cons of a wide variety of significant issues. If you’ve facing a “bet-the-farm” decision, the stress of going it alone can be devastating. With so many responsibilities, it can be difficult to get away from the day to day to find perspective on problems, to network, to keep learning, and to draw on the efforts of others. 

Discussing sensitive business decisions with friends or family might make you feel good, but what’s the possibility that you will receive solid, unbiased INPUT on your ideas? Friends and family probably don’t know your company or your industry well enough to give you advice. Many of these well-meaning people may not have been in the buck-stops-here position and, therefore, don’t understand your perspective or what you need to resolve your issues. And some of them may just tell you what you want to hear in order to make you feel better. Don’t count on the people closest to you for help with true change—it’s just not going to happen.

What’s the solution? 

Find a business owner problem solving orientated support group of peer-level people who can understand what you are experiencing because they are too. These are groups of business owners who, like you, have the ultimate responsibility for decisions in their enterprise. Like you, they know what it’s like when you must make payroll every week. 

Emerson once said, “We all need someone who can help us to do what we already can.”

When you can gather 12-15 business owners together, on a monthly basis, with no competitors, customers, or suppliers in the room, and where each person is pledged to confidentiality, you have the opportunity to get substantive feedback unlike any you’ll ever hear. Just being in the room changes you. You can process issues, solve problems, share best practices, and offer each other support and encouragement. This works especially well when you have a professional facilitator to keep the discussion moving forward and on track, and who can add a coaching follow-up component to the process. 

Richard Borough’s Master-Mind Alliance is just such a group. You might want to check into what we offer.

HOW TO RUIN A PERFECTLY GOOD ENTERPRISE

When a business owner sits down to ponder the future performance of his or her enterprise, an internal assessment process gradually unfolds and eventually leads to this question: “What do I want?” Most business people will respond to this question with some version of “more money, fewer worries, and less work.” After all, what business owner does not want more productivity, more profitability, and more simplicity, not just for themselves but for everyone connected with their enterprise? Prosperity, in all its forms, is very desirable.

After clarifying what’s desirable, then the next things for the business owner to consider is, “How do I make what I already have better? How can I propel my business to the next level of effectiveness, efficiency, and wonderfulness? What Business-Prosperity-Generating actions, activities, and behaviors will significantly improve my business?” 

If the business owner can figure this out, then he or she can apply specific actions, activities, and behaviors (interventions) to his or her business, and in due time, expect positive results, measurable progress in reasonable time. 

Now I don’t claim to know everything about creating business prosperity, but I do know how to screw up a perfectly good business. I’ve meet with hundreds of business owners, have seen with my own eyes, or heard directly from them, about a boat load of tragedies. Based upon this observational history, I consider myself something of an authority on how things can go wrong, terribly wrong. I know how to put most any viable business on a course that, if left unchecked for just a few weeks, will absolutely run it into the ground. All that has to happen is for the business owner to apply strategies from two management paradigms: insidious neglect and/or over zealous, hands on control. Applications of strategies from either or both of these paradigms can ruin any perfectly good business, happens everyday in every community. By the way, insidious means working or spreading harmfully in a subtle, sneaky, or stealthy manner.

So, for your edification dear reader, I thought I’d outline several miss-management strategies that will make a business stagnate, falter, and ultimately fail. And I won’t be talking about taking such draconian measures as tripling the costs of things for sale, painting the building black with red swastikas on it, limiting the hours of operation to four per day, or never taking out the garbage, and not cleaning the toilets. The things I’ll describe that can cause ruin are common mistakes business operators make everyday. Nothing more.

To screw up normal business operations here are some options: 

Let’s begin by ignoring the mission (purpose) and destroying the vision (future direction and plans for the business) by never talking about these things with anyone with whom these conversations ought to regularly occur. We’ll stop all meaningful conversations and all talk about the future. We’ll never discuss our values and be sure that all forms of positive communication come to a screeching halt. No more meetings, no more memos and, except for gossip, no more office chitchat. In fact, we won’t talk to anyone except to criticize. We’ll also have lots of secrets and never provide anyone with feedback or knowledge of results. That would be a good start down the path of ruin. 

Then let’s cause a significant loss of focus by not paying attention to money making activities or anything connected to business goals. We won’t even have business goals. And we’ll get seriously and hopelessly bogged down in all things decidedly unimportant. 

To damage motivation, let’s be sure rewards and recognition are virtually impossible to get. We won’t acknowledge outstanding contributions and constantly complain about what we don’t like.

By tossing all control systems out the window we’ll create turmoil and chaos. We’ll encourage the people with the quirkiest, most off the wall personalities to take over and do things when and as they please. We’ll be sure to interrupt people in the middle of things so they forget what they we’re doing. And we’ll have an environment filled with interesting things to do that have no relation to the aims of the business, but that sap the energy of everyone.

Then we’ll micromanage by putting ourselves in the middle of everything. People won’t get to do anything on their own initiative. All decisions will have to come through us. And any form of independence we see, we’ll discourage immediately and mightily. 

We’ll make sure that no one takes enough time off to recharge and rejuvenate. We’ll resist any opportunity for business revitalization, reengineering, and reeducation so we’re sure not to replace any old ways of thinking and doing business with more appropriate and potentially better ones. Naturally we won’t be open to good ideas and we’ll make “Business As Usual” our motto.

To screw up personnel, we’ll have vague job descriptions and never update them, have people doing the wrong things, and consistently reassign our best people to menial tasks. We’ll insist that people never suggest any better ways to do things. And when we’re recruiting, we’ll foster the belief that somehow, we can’t get the “right” people. 

We’ll follow our people around and hound them to work harder and smarter. We’ll overload and overwork everyone causing great stress, which we’ll ignore, so many people burn out. And when they finally do reach their limits, we’ll fire them. And we’ll have no personal policies, no employee manual, and never conduct employee performance reviews.

To screw up the finances we’ll be sure income is insufficient by not focusing on sales, not closing sales, not trying to be innovative, and by not looking for new and better markets. We’ll spoil marketing by trying to sell the wrong things, not keeping up with our buying audience, pricing things to high or too low, and by not stressing value and benefit appropriately. We’ll mess up investment by not setting aside appropriate funds, by investing in the wrong things, and not creating and nourishing relationships with existing and potential funding agents.

We’ll design inadequate cash-flow management systems, or not have any at all. We’ll ignore the people who owe us money, and to ruin our credit rating, we won’t pay our bills on time, or at all. We’ll allow costs to run amuck by not negotiating for better deals when purchasing, not streamlining operations, by hiring people we don’t need, spending money without planning, and by not having a budget or any cost control mechanisms.

To screw up our technology we’ll insure that it’s inadequate. We won’t invest in technology that would lower costs and increase profits, and we’ll allow the old and the broken down stuff to get older and more broken down without repair.

To loose our competitive edge, we’ll offer products and services that are obsolete, or that no one wants to buy in sufficient quality. And we’ll ignore the competition and never think about the big picture or the future.

And of course, should anyone get wind of our devious interventions, we’ll do all we can to ignore and discourage their input, so any appropriate rescue interventions are delayed until it’s too late.

Obviously these miss-management strategies would poison the environment of any business. Implement just a few and the result would be a lack of employee motivation, high employee turn over rates, and unimaginable difficulties recruiting new employees. Sales would flat-line and falter. Cash-flow would suffer measurably. Loans would be called. Management would be a slave to the business, never able to take worry and guilt free time off. 

These horribly negative consequences would occur simply because management applied strategies from either the insidious neglect paradigm, or the over zealous hands on control paradigm, or both. And in so doing, they ruined a perfectly good business, simply by not thinking about tomorrow, while focusing intelligently on today, and by not taking care of what they already had. And all the resulting ruin would be a tragedy that’s completely preventable. 

This is all silly, silly, and stupid huh. Yes it is. But well intentioned business owners make these kinds of mistakes every day. The trick is to know about them, hence the exaggeration in this article, and then to immediately stop doing then when you catch yourself going in the wrong direction. 

More, Less, Start, Stop: This means asking yourself the following questions. For the betterment of my productivity, profitability, and simplicity, what do I need to do MORE of? What do I need to do LESS of? What do I need to START doing? What do I need to STOP doing? Along with, “What do I want, and why do I want whatever that is.” These are important questions when you get to where the rubber meets the road, down to brass tacks, and all the other appropriate clichés about doing things right. 

Hope you found something here to chuckle about, I know I did.

MEASURE PERFORMANCE AGAINST GOALS

You must perform excellently in business in order to stay in business. And it is very helpful to be able to quickly assess progress, to see how you’re doing - to know if what’s happening is going according to plan or not - so you can make course corrections, steer clear of pot holes, swerve around obstacles, take advantage of the fast lane, and drive your business on down the road to providing customers and clients with better and better products and services, and to generating more and more personal financial rewards and experiencing all the success that goes with doing that.

An obvious benefit of measuring your performance is to learn where you are struggling. If you operate your business from a budget, against which you are performing monthly variance analyses, you can see where your results are not meeting your projections.

The numbers paint the picture. You might conclude that your financial projections were too optimistic, that you bit off more than you could chew. You might conclude that your performance - your personal business behavior - is subpar and that it needs some minor adjustment or a total overhaul. You might determine that you are overspending, perhaps using marketing tools that are not generating enough sales. You might determine that you are taking on too much debt leading to more debt service. You might determine that you have a cash flow problem, that perhaps you are not collecting money that is due.

Over both the short and long term, consistent measurements can serve to help you identify your strengths and weaknesses so you can decide to modify your business behavior, put additional controls in place, or initiate other remedies to strengthen the performance of your business.

However, with all analysis there is a big caveat. When you are endeavoring to make some sensible conclusions - so you can grow your business and perform even better - by connecting the result of your monthly budget variance figures to human behavior - the doing of the tasks that produced the numerical result you see in the analysis - is there any real causal certainty. Is it possible to really know HOW you achieved a particular result, or WHY you did not?

To get some useful clarity on this question we must take a tangential turn and delve into philosophy just a bit.

Here we go. Big Fat Truth: The inside of your own mind is the only thing about which you can be sure and certain. That is where you know for sure and for certain that George Washington was the first President of the United States. You know in your mind. In fact, every bit of what you know is based on your experiences and thoughts, feelings and sense impressions. That’s it.

Whether you see it in a bank statement, or on a spread sheet, or in a stack of past due bills, the “facts” are in your mind, not in a piece of paper you hold in your hand, or in a computer document.

Some really smart people say we do not really know anything. We just somehow come to believe things. Our lives - and everything about we say and do in our behavior - is perpetuated upon finely-tuned beliefs made subtly over time. Everything we have ever known has been done before, been repeated precisely, or been changed slightly or radically, and then redone a bit differently, either by us or by other people. There is no evidence to prove that we know much of anything. There is no evidence to prove that we even know who, or what we are, because everything that we have ever learned has been made up by ourselves - based upon BELIEF.

So, back to where the old rubber meets the old road and to the reality of operating your business and calculating the consequences of your endeavors to make a buck or two - sure, measure all the stuff you feel you must measure, all the key variables smart people and well written books say to measure - but remember the truth. When it comes to making rational conclusions and forecasting what to do next based upon them, there will always be a lot of guessing going on - always, because no one can ever know anything for sure and certain. We can only believe we know HOW or WHY something happened, or did not happen, or might happen again.

By all means, please measure and analyze performance Do it because there’s no better way to “know” and no better data upon which to set future goals as you make or remake plans and move ahead in your business. Them's the facts Jack. 

POSITIVE FOCUS

Recently, in our monthly Master-Mind Alliance meetings, we have been asking our members and guests to take a few minutes to recall a positive result or experience from the past 30 days or so, something that made them smile.

We ask all participants three things about that result or experience. What was significant about it? How can you build on it to make a better future? What would be a first-step-action to make that happen? These conversations are fascinating, illuminating and educational.

Sharing the details about recent pleasant events - describing what happened and planning how to leverage these experiences to make the future better - sets a Positive Focus for the rest of our meeting day. We’ll keep doing this.

At Master-Mind Alliance meetings members plan improvements and changes all the time. Reviewing what produces positive desirable results is just another part of the experience. 

DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESS INCOME

Want more income for your business? Sure, who doesn't? Well then, why not make it happen.

Hey, you can actually do this. Others have and so can you. The trick is to correctly exercise one or more of the following options.

What DOUBLING takes is some combination of one or more of these six options. Allow me to explain a bit. READ ON...

You can INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY – This means that by becoming better at organizing and managing your time, you can spend more time on your Top Money Making Activities and, therefore, sell more of your goods, products or services. And make more money. 

You can EXPAND YOUR CAPACITY – This means you can hire people to help you, therefore multiplying your money making efforts through the contribution of other people. With more people working to make more money for the business, the business can make more money.

You can ACQUIRE, MERGE OR DIVEST – This means you can obtain another business like that one you have now and make it your own. Or you can join together with someone who has a similar business and benefit by the synergy you create. Or you can separate off a part of your business that consumes resources but produces little income. Any and all of these options can help you generate more cash money for your business.

You can REVISE YOUR OFFERINGS – This means offering for sale things possibly in addition to what you offer at present - things that are easier to sell, or that have more profit in them, or some combination of both. This also can mean dumping things that don’t sell, are hard to sell, or have little profit in them.

You can ADJUST YOUR PRICING – This means either raising your prices or lowering your prices on a select few things you offer or perhaps everything. This option is the easiest to implement and the fastest to test. 

You can MARKET AND SELL BETTER – This means making corrections or revisions to how your present your goods, products and services to your audience of best potential buyers. You probably spend time doing some of this already as part of your normal routine.

And there you have it. All the business owners it has been my privilege to know who have doubled their business income - some more than once - have utilized these options in one way or another to get richer quicker. That’s absolutely splendid. For each of them, the results were more than they expected. It has been great fun for me to have played a small part in their success. I look forward to more such opportunities, perhaps working with you.

EIGHT ESSENTIALS FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

 

In order to own and operate a successful business enterprise there are eight things you simply must have, must always have, and cannot ever do without. The EIGHT KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS OWNERSHIP – what those in charge must possess are listed here.
 

1. Fire in the Belly, Passion. You believe and those who know you intimately would agree that you have passion for your business ideas and entrepreneurship. You are so firmly committed to succeeding in your endeavor that you cannot see yourself doing anything else. You know that there will be roadblocks to overcome, problems to solve, issues to wrestle with and you are ready for the challenge. You truly love what you do. For you, your business is not a job, it's a joy.
 

2. The Ability to Orchestrate Events. You can make decisions quickly, can plan, organize and implement prosperity generating business activities. You can cope with whatever comes your way. You can manage stress, both short-term and long-term, so you neither burnout nor rustout. Most of the time, you comfortably make measurable progress in reasonable time.

3. Offerings People Need or Want and can Afford. You offer goods, products and services that people - with whom you can communicate via marketing and branding, and all that goes with letting prospective buyers know who you are, what you provide and how to reach you – have a genuine need or desire to buy – and can afford to pay for.

4. Vision, plus Reasonable Expectations. You clearly know where you are taking your enterprise in the short term and in the long term. You share this vision with all who are connected to your enterprise so they can buy into your ideas and support you and what you want to do. Your expectations are sensible. They make sense to anyone who you talk with about them. You are so clear about this and can explain it so simply and concisely that a five year old child could understand where you want to go and what you expect to accomplish.

5. Strategies that Work as Intended. Your business behavior is well rehearsed, practiced and polished to perfection. Most of the time, what you attempt succeeds. Your strategies, while they will need adjustment and revision from time to time, predictable produce the outcomes you envision.

 

6. The Skills of Persuasion and Inspiration. Of all the skills it takes to operate a profitable enterprise two stand above all the others. The ability to persuade people to do what you want them to do - whether that is to buy from you, to work tirelessly for you, to refer to you, to lend you money or whatever – is finely honed. Persuading people to do your bidding is easy for you. And your ability to inspire others results in all those around you finding the inner motivation it takes to get all the things that need to be done, done right the first time, and every time, and on time, and on budget, and with as much joy for all concerned as possible. You have mastered both of these sets of complex interpersonal behaviors.

 

7. Masterful Money Making Behavior. You are crystal clear about what your top money making activities are and how to perform them masterfully. This is true as well for all individuals who are connected to the operation of your enterprise. The necessary amount of resources (including time) to put top money making behavior in just the right place are identified and scheduled and monitored so that the business truly is a money making machine. You, and all those who help you, understand that the only way your enterprise can continue is when the people involved do whatever it takes to always be bringing in new money through new and repeat and ongoing successful sales activities. 

8. Enormous Self-Control and Grit. Last on the list of EIGHT ESSENTIALS is self-control and grit. It just so happens that self-control and grit are more important than intelligence, more important than influence and more important than desire. Running a business successfully is something most people cannot do well. This is why most people chose to work for someone else rather than be self employed. Business owners know that running the show it is at times an uphill battle, a struggle, and that it can be very stressful. Therefore, an inner drive to tirelessly work through challenges, failures, setbacks and adversity to achieve set goals is an essential must, probably the biggest must of all.

All long term financially successful business enterprises stand on a solid foundation of these EIGHT ESSENTIALS.

Have All Eight - Or You’ll Settle For Less. That’s the truth.

When it comes to improving the performance of a business, we start by looking into the EIGHT ESSENTIAL MUST HAVES, for if there is something missing, if something is not quite right there, whatever that happens to be, that’s where we start making things better.

A RHYME FOR ALL OF YOU

When you think about your business - if lately - things have gone askew - and you wish you only knew what to do - so you could start anew - and stop feeling sad and blue - I want you to know that you can get a breakthrough - make a sensible redo - get unstuck from the glue - and out of the stew - because when it comes to sucky results from bad strategy - there is no tragedy - no travesty - or catastrophe - or finality. You can always start fresh - make something mesh - find a new gear - persevere - steer into the clear - make next year premier - then enjoy a celebratory beer.