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snousleWent down to Santa Rosa yesterday where my business coach held an all-day seminar on "how to grow your business in 90 days". Pretty good, actually. Got to meet her other clients, who were an interesting bunch. Pretty sure one of them is a Hell's Angel - I could tell right away he was a biker, and when I queried him on the subject he dropped a few keywords like "red and white" in a way that implied "I'm not going to say it out loud but you know what I mean". He struck me as someone very interested in better management of his auto-repair shop, but was strangely indifferent to the financial details. Hmm...
Anyway, my understanding of business has changed a lot. I was thinking on the way home of a good metaphor: running a business is not like hauling water, it's like cutting a channel so it can flow on its own. Ideally, a business is no "work" at all, but is instead concerned with finding unrealized potentials and discharging them as effortlessly as possible. The catchphrase is "work ON your business, not IN your business", and the ultimate goal is "passive income" through a structure that runs and manages itself.
Alas, the intellectual effort involved in such an approach is appalling and exhausting, which is why most people simply do stuff themselves - in the short run, it's a lot easier. Pretty much everyone was flatlining by the end of it, the seminar really was a lot of work. It brought great clarification to my approach to catering, which remains uncomfortably stranded between a hobby and a career.
One of the principles is "find what you are most afraid of, and do it". I'm afraid of so many things related to the catering business - that the name sucks, that a dish will fail, that my assistants won't perform, that my clients will be unhappy. No wonder it's such a drag sometimes. So I got thinking, why not use this time to take some big risks and see what happens? Push things until they break, provoke all these anxieties at once, sweep up the wreckage and start over from scratch. Not sure how far I want to take this concept in practice, but it would be an interesting exercise that carries with it a tremendous risk of success.
Another principle the seminar promoted is that if you improve your business by just 15% at five key points (leads, conversion, retention, price, and profit margin), you have "magically" doubled your profits. The idea is that 15% is not a big change and isn't hard to achieve at any single point, but if you can hit them all simultaneously their effect is multiplicative.
Alas, most business development is concerned with maximizing profit, while the understanding and accommodation of other motivations is generally neglected. My work would have a lot more clarity if money were a strong motivator. But it's not, so I still feel lost in a swamp of incoherent values and goals.
Anyway, my understanding of business has changed a lot. I was thinking on the way home of a good metaphor: running a business is not like hauling water, it's like cutting a channel so it can flow on its own. Ideally, a business is no "work" at all, but is instead concerned with finding unrealized potentials and discharging them as effortlessly as possible. The catchphrase is "work ON your business, not IN your business", and the ultimate goal is "passive income" through a structure that runs and manages itself.
Alas, the intellectual effort involved in such an approach is appalling and exhausting, which is why most people simply do stuff themselves - in the short run, it's a lot easier. Pretty much everyone was flatlining by the end of it, the seminar really was a lot of work. It brought great clarification to my approach to catering, which remains uncomfortably stranded between a hobby and a career.
One of the principles is "find what you are most afraid of, and do it". I'm afraid of so many things related to the catering business - that the name sucks, that a dish will fail, that my assistants won't perform, that my clients will be unhappy. No wonder it's such a drag sometimes. So I got thinking, why not use this time to take some big risks and see what happens? Push things until they break, provoke all these anxieties at once, sweep up the wreckage and start over from scratch. Not sure how far I want to take this concept in practice, but it would be an interesting exercise that carries with it a tremendous risk of success.
Another principle the seminar promoted is that if you improve your business by just 15% at five key points (leads, conversion, retention, price, and profit margin), you have "magically" doubled your profits. The idea is that 15% is not a big change and isn't hard to achieve at any single point, but if you can hit them all simultaneously their effect is multiplicative.
Alas, most business development is concerned with maximizing profit, while the understanding and accommodation of other motivations is generally neglected. My work would have a lot more clarity if money were a strong motivator. But it's not, so I still feel lost in a swamp of incoherent values and goals.
