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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.
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Date: 2012-01-08 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 05:37 pm (UTC)I would say ... the name is good, you will sometimes have dishes that fail, or assistants that will, but if the percentage of failures is very small, except that at the same time as trying to not let them happen again. Clients ... well some people are not happy with anything... the trick is to weed them out before you agree to work for them.
why not use this time to take some big risks and see what happens?
Good luck, it may be the thing you need to move from hobby to career.
I kept hoping that I will gain some insight into my own business through your posts.
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.
If I understand this correctly ... it means to structure your business so that you become a manager and hire other people to do most, if not all, the actual work. Not that managing is not work, it is. But it is interfacing with the clients and making sure others are doing their job, not the actual 'work' of the business.
improve your business by just 15% at five key points (leads, conversion, retention, price, and profit margin)
I'm not sure was conversion means in this context.
As for retention and price, for me these two are the difficult parts to balance. Higher price can lead to less retention of clients. After all, people are only going to pay so much for gardening.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-08 06:36 pm (UTC)I like that a lot! I think it's worth the risk.
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Date: 2012-01-08 06:48 pm (UTC)I believe there can be no growth (in a small business) without at least some pain. There ARE going to be fuck-ups. I can think of only two things to do when fuck-ups occur: (1) do your best to mitigate the damage so no one fuck-up takes down the whole business, and (2) LEARN FROM THE FUCK-UP and make sure you've changed systems, processes, etcetera to ensure that THAT particular fuck-up never happens again.
Oh...and don't worry, all small businesses almost NEVER run out of fuck-ups to learn from. There will ALWAYS be new ones. :)
no subject
Date: 2012-01-09 08:10 am (UTC)