entrepreneur

Making it on Main Street: Are you looking for the big kahuna?

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Lots of people dream of striking it rich, online and offline, too. Whether it is the Euro-millions lottery or the Powerball, making it big on Wall Street, or selling your company to Google, the prevailing wisdom is that to make it, you need just one big score, one big sale, one big ticket, one…

Others are out there looking for the book, the website, the product, the one thing that is missing in their life that will bring them everything they want in life and more… For blogs like this one, it’s the search for the traffic kahuna (as one product is called), the audience, the reach, … But the odds against each of these events happening are quite staggering.

So what is an ‘ornery person to do given odds like that? Success seems evasive, based on luck, and available to only those who don’t really need it. Each time I hear people talking about their entrepreneurial plans, I had the same concern: if you look for the big one, what are your actual chances of finding it? Not particularly great.

It takes effort, dediction, and time!

Success in any venture requires effort. That effort starts with the initial concept, the preparations for the launch, but most importantly, it requires that you stay focused on the task or goal in the following weeks, months, and even years after launch. Our business reached the eighth year this year, and every day is a struggle at times. But it grows stronger each day as we work on it…

I remember many years ago when my mother and sister were trying their own entrepreneurial activities: They started a small knitting service and toured several markets in our area to see if they could drum up business. It was a brave venture that utilized their creativity, resources and vision. Unfortunately, their expectations were just too high; and, of course, such expectations could not be met on the time scale that they were using.

Success is a series of small victories

Every day that we open our business, welcome our regular customers, and introduce ourselves to new customers, I have to remind myself that victory is a series of small victories. When we started out we used to think that we’d be successful when we reached certain numerical goals only to find that we needed to raise those goals as we attained the previous ones.

And we felt we weren’t successful even when we met the goals. It’s only looking back over those eight years that we realize how far we’ve come in our business, and we look at where we are. In fact, we are perhaps one of the biggest language schools in our area that ONLY focuses on one subject. Many of our competitors are indirect competitors in many regards as they have a number of other services and products. We don’t.

Each student that walks through the doors of our school is a sign of our success; as such, we must go on building our business one student at a time. There are times when it’s difficult, just now it’s been a little easier.

Think Long Term: Is Five Years Long Enough?

Looking at our school eight years ago, who would have known that we’d still be around in 2008. Who? We certainly didn’t KNOW. We hoped we’d still be around in 2002 or 2003. But five years later?

In the golddigger mentality, you don’t plan for longterm horizons because you’re going to win the lottery soon. You can just feel it. You can’t imagine that in five or ten years you’ll still be buying lottery tickets, can you? In fact, the return on your ‘investment’ in lottery tickets is quite negative that if you’d actually put that money in the bank over five or ten years, you’d be surprised how much there was.

But through the magic workings of time and effort, even a small business can grow exponentially to achieve status because its owners start thinking longterm or at least longer term.

Unexpected Events: Insights, Challenges and Outcomes

And unexpected events do also happen: customers suddenly drop your products or services. Why? Sometimes they find something more appropriate to their own problems. Sometimes they find something cheaper. Sometimes they just don’t care that much about your products or benefits that they stop buying it. Sometimes you never know what happened.

Similarly customers suddenly come in droves to ask about your products or services. Perhaps an ad resonated with them. Perhaps there was a referral in the community. Perhaps you never find out what you did right.

Whatever happens, the good entrepreneur must retain their focus on their work, on their business. The good entrepreneur must not get too excited or too despondent when these fluctuations take place. As long as you keep your cool and make sure you can play in the next round, then these unexpected events can have good consequences.

A downturn can help you see what’s wrong in your business: poor advertising, poor service, low staff morale… An upturn can cover over any problems, but also it can create problems with extra demand on limited time and resources. So these events can provide insight into your business challenges. Learn from them.

A Formula for Failure?

One of the challenges in this media-oriented world is that we look at a big company or a successful investor and we assume that there’s a magic formula, a trick or an insight that provides the reason for their success. We always try to attribute it to one item above all else. We call it their ‘competitive advantage’. With Microsoft, it was their market share that allows them to dominate the world of desktops. In Coca-Cola, we always assume its their product’s quality. And so on..

Because we assume that the magic formula exists, we meet an endless succession of books, media, websites, CDs, all purveyed by people who claim to know the formula. Many of these people base their success on persuading people to believe them that they indeed ‘know the formula’ and can teach it. Let’s leave aside even the suggestion that they CAN teach it.

I know I’ve bought several books that ‘promised to reveal the secrets’… and the secret was that you always had to buy something else to find out more. Talk about coffee spoons! If a person is making money talking about how to make money then beware. This is little better than someone who advertises opportunities for those who want to work at home. Usually when you apply you find that you are being told to run the same system to make money.

Success is complicated, multi-faceted

A closer more patient analysis of the success of one company or another will always reveal that there is a complex of ideas, behaviors, people, systems, etc. that interact in certain ways to create the success. In Microsoft’s case, the formula included Bill Gates, the burgeoning PC industry, insights about what people needed, success in providing good products, a system for creating software, etc…

Even successful people often boil down their success to a formula. John Chow’s secret is, he claims: create content, then drive large amounts of traffic. That may be the essence of his formula, but it’s quite clear to me that he is also innovative in creating advertising opportunities, has lots of experience and technical knowledge in building websites, and is skilled in creating good marketing for his blog(s). These factors should not be overlooked at all. Without them, he could not create the content in the first place.

So, if you are starting out in business, or starting a new business, or even considering it, temper your short-term expectations, expand your longer term horizons, and focus on your ‘small’ victories. Without those daily small victories, you will never find the ‘big kahuna’.

Personal Development: Are you imprisoned by “Duality Disorder”?

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I was reading a recent posting on John Chow’s Blog that looked at the issue of Getting It Done. I’m not going to rewrite John’s post for him, but I was reading the comments that were attached. I don’t know if it was just me but I saw a lot of posters using Duality Disorder (the sometimes inappropriate habit of putting everything into two categories) to explain away situations without examining the situation further to find out its complexities, intertwinings and range of possible outcomes.

Examples of Duality Disorder

I’ve listed some examples of this: See if you recognize yourself in any of these duality thinking modes.

Good Bad/ success or failure / ugly or beautiful / now or never / Do or Die / to ‘crash and burn’ or succeed / plan or act / nothing ventured, nothing gained / Wisdom vs. planning / Impulse vs. drive.

How many more dualities are we going to trot out here? There are hundreds: is he gay or straight? is she labour or conservative?… the list is endless.

There is surely more than just duality in our world. Yet from the time of “Adam and Eve” (another duality) we’ve sought to divide the world into convenient dualities. This has to be one of the laziest thinking strategies out there. Why?

Complexity in Duality?

Life is far more complex than good or bad. Common sense examples will demonstrate this to you. A husband is a dutiful husband! He provides for his family! Is he good or bad? He does this by robbing a bank? Is he good or bad now? Could it be that he is somewhere between good and bad, depending on the circumstance? Could it be that he is in fact good at the same time as he is bad! He’s providing for his family (good) by robbing a bank (bad).

There are many situations in life where simplifying problems to dualities does NOT work. It can’t. It won’t. No matter how much we strive. AIDS is one of the problems. Starting a business is another. There are countless more.

Intertwinings.

Success or failure? Which is it going to be? Who knows? If you are starting a business, then you’d like to know the answer to that! But, truthfully there are few situations where success or failure is absolute. Most of the time it is shades between the two. We’re planning a promotional activity for our business tomorrow. Who knows if it will work well or not? It could be a disaster.

But we have success built-in, as we all agreed, that at the very least we’d have fun, a story to tell, and some good pictures for our business blog, whatever happened! So failure isn’t going to happen tomorrow. It’s just we may not be as successful as we would like! There are so many grades or shades of possibility, that simple duality cannot encompass. Moreover, in some cases, the things we get done will be intertwined with the things we did before. And the activity tomorrow will be intertwined with what happens in the future! So, who could say it is a failure in absolute terms?

A Range of Possible Outcomes.

Could it possibly be that we are using these to cover our own excuses? Could it be that there are a myriad of outcomes that are between success and failure or any of the other dualities we’ve written about? Could it be that we may not be a complete failure on day #1, and that is JUST enough for us to go out and build next $1Billion business. Could it be? The results we get from business activities may not be what we expected, true. In fact, they could vary vastly from what we set out to achieve. We may not achieve anything at all that we wanted. Did we fail then? Well, only if we don’t think about what went differently from our expectations? That experience of vastly varying results could lay the solid foundations for success the next time round.

So the next time you are given to duality disorder, catch your thinking for a moment, and just wonder a little at what other outcomes there might be. You might surprise yourself.

The Four Sins of Running Our Business

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I’ve been reading the 10 stupid mistakes made by newly self-employed. It’s a good list that all business people should look at! I think our business has made several of them at least recently.

There are four that are worth looking at in my context. Click on them to read about them in context at Steve’s website.

1. Selling to the wrong people.
2. Spending too much money.
5. Assuming a signed contract will be honored.
9. Failing to focus on value creation.

We’ve had over the years some very troublesome customers, yes, even customers who we treated very generously, with free samples, free materials (a considerable expense to a language school), easy payment terms, and generous price reductions. However, these self-same customers have on occasion thrown them straight back in our face. We found out that we had been selling to the wrong people, and we had spent considerable time and money selling to them.

We’ve also spent quite a bit of money on the wrong things. Our first mistake was to hire too many people to work for us. Our increased use of staff led to bigger budget requirements, in staff and in taxes, for us. This would have been alright. We thought that the staff hiring would help us, but in some respects, it has actually hurt us much more because it impacted the nature of our marketing. People had heard we were good, so they came to us for their schooling. However, they often came looking for a particular teacher partner. Perhaps the staff didn’t have quite the same attention to their kids as they had expected, so they left disappointed in some ways.

Unfortunately, when we hired staff, we also found problems in number five. Our staff failed to understand that they were continually expected to be responsible for themselves, show up for work promptly, work hard, whatever. Staff however are human, and they display some of the quirks for laziness, gossiping, tardiness, etc. We failed our staff and ourselves by not recognizing the problems earlier and dealing with them. Moreover, I think we failed to manage some members of our staff due to language barriers.

We have been trying to create value on our product, language teaching, but I think our biggest failing has been not getting the message out there that our teaching works, that our students do get results, and that it is good value for money. All of these are challenges in themselves.

Kenneth