This is even more the case when you’re an agent, consultant, coach or other professional who is in transition and is constantly beset between the twin imperatives of getting some work done while at the same time maintaining continual contact with clients and potential clients.

Sure, you may have had problems in your corporate gig–everybody has problems at work. But in a group setting you could always ignore them or, better yet, unload them on to someone else.

However, when you’re the chief cook and bottle washer or any of the other 50 or so roles in an independent business, you don’t have that solution. Instead, you have to take care of those problems yourself.

And each time this happens, your productivity goes down because you get angry and agitated. Instead of accomplishing something, you feel trapped and frustrated.Your flow is disrupted.

So, here are some ways to deal with problems:

Are they really problems or just products of “frantic” episodes?

Sometimes, what we perceive as problems aren’t really problems at all. Instead they’re simply a result of some kind of frantic and stressful period when everything, no matter how trivial or inconsequential, seems like another problem. As the saying goes, when you’re holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So it’s important to slow down, and analyse whether this is indeed a problem, or just an annoyance.

Whose problem is it?

People like to unload their problems on — oops, make that “share with” — other people, if only to spread their own stress. That client project you thought you had well in hand can become an urgent problem when the stressed out client calls up and wants it done NOW! because he or she is overloaded with problems too. Your job as an advisor and a business operator is to weather this storm and bring some tranquility to the situation. Unless something has radically changed, it’s unlikely that the problem task has to be done right that second.

Is it a problem, or just a brain response?

Most of us process information in sequences i.e., through our primitive brain, and then our logical brain. The primitive brain looks at information and in a nanosecond (the primitive brain operates at 30,000 times the speed of the logical brain) and concludes whether something is friendly or dangerous, potentially harmful or helpful. If it detects potential threat or harm, it will flood the body with chemicals that spark the fight or flight syndrome. Then it’s up to the logical brain to counteract these chemicals — call off the dogs, so to speak.

When confronted with a stress-inducing demand, it’s important to take a moment and analyze whether it really is a problem or it’s just your primitive brain over responding. I won’t kid you however, this isn’t easy to do at first. You really have to control that monster inside you that looks like the Incredible Hulk (“You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry”)and wants to throw cars around at the first hint of a potential problem. Mind-calming exercises can help you tame the monster when it appears.

Can the problem be turned into an opportunity?

This is probably the number one way to deal with problems. Instead of seeing them as a barrier to be hurdled determine what you can learn from them. Maybe this is a recurring problem (“oh crap, I forgot to do my bookkeeping this month and now I can’t find my receipts”), in which case you have been shirking the responsibility to set up a system to deal with it.  Mark it down as a business task to be tackled later.

Or maybe it’s not so much a problem as it is an opportunity to learn something new, to gain a new ability. Learning is usually an adventure; dealing with problems rarely is.

Turning a problem into an opportunity activates the creative centers in the brain and so kick in the calming endorphins that always come with creativity. Try it and you’ll discover that the wearying anger that follows each new problem turns to an enlivening refresher that makes you even more eager to work.

Controlling your responses to problems, real or imagined, may even increase your productivity, because as you deal with each “problem”, you’ll experience a sense of accomplishment that will make you even more eager to get back to work.

These are some of my tricks to control problems, but I’m sure there are many more that I haven’t tried yet. If you have one you favor, by all means let me know.

If you have found this post helpful, by all means share it with someone who might gain something from it.

Cheers

Tony

Like most people in business, independent professionals have to continually make decisions about various aspects of their business operations. They also often have to make ongoing decisions about clients or how to address particular client needs.

But without the support of large corporate teams filled with number crunchers, decision-making can often be difficult. Certainly, the stakes are lower for a consultant, coach, agent or other professional who is reinventing into their own entrepreneurial business than it is for a corporation trying to decide where to locate a factory. But it can be paralyzing all the same.

I know I have run into it regularly. For a long time, like most new entrepreneurs, I often made decisions based on my own knowledge or beliefs, with maybe some metrics thrown in to justify the process. Basically, I was just letting decisions happen.

As a result I often paid for it. What I thought was a good choice would sometimes turn out all wrong, and I had to expend much energy (and, sometimes, money) making corrections or yanking myself in another direction.

After doing this often enough – I still bear the scars ––I started doing it right. Now I do it for other people who are facing the same problem.

For example, I recently I helped a retailer make a decision about where to open his store. It really didn’t matter that I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about the industry. That was his job. But we were able to cut through analysis paralysis in a couple of hours over a few cups of coffee in an outdoor café on a nice sunny day.

Better yet, afterwards he was confident that he had made the right decision. He didn’t have the nagging fears that many of us in independent business have when we have to make a choice.

Here’s how we did it.

First, he had already performed extensive research on his options and had the required information about the market at his fingertips. He knew traffic counts; he had the average income for surrounding regions of two locations; he was able to discern likely buying habits of customers in each region; and he had already explored the types of businesses in each region that might also be interested in his products.

He had more information as well, but the more he gathered, the less able he was to make a decision: His head told him one thing, but his gut told him another. And considering he was making a sizeable personal investment in the venture, he wanted to run it by a neutral outsider who wouldn’t bring any innate prejudices to the table.

To maintain that neutrality, we sketched out on paper a version of a decision matrix, a methodology that is often used by corporate teams to cut through information clutter.  A decision matrix is a form of visual analysis but goes deeper than the kind of intellectual analysis you make by simply looking at information. More important, it divorces you from the emotional aspects and natural prejudices surrounding a decision.

Decision matrices can be deep or simple, depending on the need involved. However, for small entrepreneurial businesses they don’t have to be terribly complex. No matter who is using it, decision matrices tend to follow a similar pattern.

1. Draw up (or fire up some software) a matrix template.
2. Across the top, list all the alternatives, or options
3. Across the side, list all the requirements that have to be met – even the emotional or crazy ones. This may take some thought, because not all the requirements might be easily understood.
4. Under each option put in a score (say, 1-5) for each requirement (i.e. how well the option meets it.)
5. Add them up. The highest score can be the “winner”. Or, if two alternatives are equal or close to equal, it can be a guide to narrowing down in another decision matrix.

So what happened with our decision regarding the location for a retail space? Well, we were both surprised by that.

He had presumed that Location A was the best because the surrounding population had a higher family income level and his products were generally considered closer to luxury items. Also, it was closer to the large downtown office district, which should have meant there were more potential buyers who would be interested in his product. Frankly, after his initial description of the problem, I was leaning that way myself.

But as we worked through the matrix, it became clear those were not the only important criteria: For example, higher incomes usually meant that both spouses worked, and therefore had little time for discretionary shopping. On the other hand, Location B was more suburban: Shopping for home décor (the closest category for his product) was more common there because there were more women at home.  Also, there were larger businesses around who might also be interested in his products. Not as many as downtown, of course, but then there was less competition as well. So it balanced out.

As a result of these factors, and a few others, we both realized that Location B, while initially looking like the loser, had emerged as the winner.

And then he revealed something that gave us both a good laugh. His wife had reached the same conclusion, more by knowing her own and her friends’ habits than by any formal decision-making process.

So the lesson here was that you also have to consider your own instincts and the instincts of those you trust. The math can often be there to support (or knock down) that factor, but a good dose of gut feel doesn’t hurt either.

It’s a very uncomfortable place to be. So the common solution is to take action. Do more research; question more people; buy a bunch of books online that may provide some inspiration; spend hours combing the Web looking for the “right answer”.

Maybe you go for long moody walks (my favorite) or try to forget by downing a few glasses with friends at the neighborhood bar (not my favorite but sometimes you get desperate).

But an answer still doesn’t appear.

You’re in analysis paralysis. And you better learn how to deal with it, because these situations aren’t going to go away. If anything, they’ll become more frequent and complex as your business develops.

A step by step program to break analysis paralysis

Here’s a path to deal with it. It may not be the best, but it works for me, so it’s a place to start. Adapt or change it as you will.

• Take a few steps back. Analysis usually begins with some concept that you then begin to research … and research … and research. Paralysis usually sets in because you’ve become lost in a thicket of information. So work your way back to the original concept and purpose. What were you actually trying to determine? Look again at the original problem: What was your original purpose for undertaking this analysis?

• Reframe the problem. Paralysis often happens because you’ve set off on the wrong path. And that happens because you really didn’t define what you were looking for. If you’re in that place, redefine it. See if you can look at that problem in some other way, or better articulate it to find the REAL problem (which is often hidden at first glance). Even if the decision is as simple as whether we should buy some gadget, or whether it involves a deep analysis of some client problem, we often start analyzing without really understanding the nature of the problem.

• Take the emotion out of it. Even the most stolid and self-disciplined person among us still has to deal with emotions which enter into the mix. We all have brains with three parts – the thinking, logical brain, the “mammalian brain”, which responds to stimuli with rudimentary emotions like hunger or lust, and the “reptilian brain” which responds to very basic stimuli in simple terms, i.e. hot or cold, fight or flight, like or hate, etc. Often, even though we may think we’re analyzing something with the logical brain, we’re often mixing in emotions triggered by the other parts. In corollary, paralysis sometimes happens because we’re fighting an emotion regarding the situation: We simply don’t like where we’re heading. One way to take emotion out of it is to make it visual: Put it in a mind map, or some other form of visual analysis.

• Lose the past. Too often, our analysis is colored by previous situations. So that we can continually assimilate information, the brain naturally creates thought structures to which it simply adds new information. But that means an analysis can be skewed considerably to a situation that appears similar to a past one but in reality is different.  Memory is good, but it can become a tyrant. Every situation is different, so you have to “consult” that structure, but not become a prisoner of it.  Build a new one.

In a recent survey reported by the Financial Post, one in three Canadians said they were interested in starting their own business in the next two years. Of that group, 35% said they’re going to follow through with those plans.

If we extrapolate from the survey of 1,010 Canadians by the tax and accounting software maker Intuit, that means almost one-quarter of Canadians plan to start their own businesses soon. If even half of those do follow up on their dreams, that will be quite astonishing.

What will also be astonishing, however, is if those thousands of would-be Canadian entrepreneurs proceed as 21st-century entrepreneurs instead of blindly imitating the entrepreneurship methodology of 30 years ago.

Anyone who takes up the challenge of business start-up today would do well to examine how entrepreneurship has changed in this century.

The biggest change is that today, less is best. Starting a business now is all about less –as in less elaborate business planning; less imitation and more innovation; less step-by-step execution and more going with the flow; less one-way delivery and marketing and more conversation with customers.

This less-is-best concept generally goes against traditional business training, which is based on the old industrial/ retail system. Business plans, for example, are about execution of known factors, so if you’re building a factory that is going to be around for 10 or 20 years, you’ll need a business plan. But in today’s world of continuing change, any plan that details steps further out than quarterly or semi-annually is unsuited for anyone starting a small business.

The top entrepreneurship method now is the lean startup, an application of Lean thinking, which is an organizational method of operation derived from the Toyota production system. In Lean thinking, an organization attempts to eliminate all wasteful effort and cost.

Lean thinking means new start-ups rarely use formal business plans in the beginning because in a rapidly changing world they cannot obtain the information they need to plan several years in the future.

In fact, in 2002, the magazine Inc. surveyed founders from its Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing entrepreneurial companies and found that only 40% had written formal business plans. Of those, nearly two-thirds said they changed their businesses considerably from their original plan.

The Lean start-up applies the Lean thinking approach at the crucial period when new companies often have a concept but really don’t know how their businesses are going to evolve. Since most new businesses — even those in traditional areas such as retail or services — now primarily operate online, this learning process is much easier.

Generally, a Lean start-up features three characteristics:

• It keeps costs low by using open source and free software. If those aren’t available, it uses low-cost cloud computing (renting software and other services online) instead of initially buying expensive systems and software.  It also endeavours to “rent” as many business needs, such as personnel, as possible;

• It applies agile development when creating products or services. In this methodology, product development borrows from new software-creation models. Agile development is perfect for start-ups in which the problem (the genesis for all business concepts) and the solution (the business’ answer to the problem) are still fuzzy;

• It constantly talks with customers, existing or potential, to see how it can improve. It usually begins with a simple product or service and then changes or expands it to answer customer concerns. Its main business process is continual customer research and development.

So far, we’ve been talking about start-ups, but the same thinking applies to existing advisory businesses. If you’re an agent, consultant, coach, or adviser of any sort, Lean start-up principles can help you retool your business for operation in this century.

After all the essence of reinvention is to start over and go in a new direction. If you’re thinking of that new direction, you could do worse than borrow these techniques.

If you have fled the corporate straight-jacket for your own entrepreneurial professional business, you’ve probably worried often how you’re going to keep up with all those young hotshots out there.

Maybe you saw glimpse of that in your old workplace. For 20 years you toiled in the trenches, doing what was required, and suddenly all the emphasis was on youth and you felt shuffled off to the sidelines. It may even have been the spark that convinced you take the independent path.

Well, take heart. Research into brain functions indicates that you’re actually smarter as you get older. And not only can you compete with those youngsters, you can very often beat them at their own game.

In her book, The Secret Life of of the Grown-up Brain, New York Times health and medical science editor Barbara Strauch points out that for a long time our view of middle age has been wrong. The only thing those young hotshots, with all their techno-wizardry, have on the middle-aged is brain processing speed.

But in most other brain functions, they haven’t a chance in the thinking department. This is especially true in business activities that require top brain functions like mental outlook, experience, and problem solving.

So if you’re a consultant, advisor, agent or professional such as an engineer, lawyer, accountant or finance specialist, you’re actually better suited to be an independent as you reach middle age. After years of training, your brain is more wired for that kind of job.

In her book, Strauch points out that the grown up brain has several secret strengths. For example:

• You get happier as you get older. Despite the prevailing belief, older people are generally more optimistic because their brain cells respond more to the positive and less to the negative. Makes sense. Anyone who hangs out with younger people has probably noticed that they’re often anxious and extremely negative.
• You are better at recognizing problems and finding solutions. When you’re middle aged you have more life experience, better judgment and (it’s hoped) more wisdom. Science calls this “gist”, which is intuition or that gut feeling that proves to be right. Because you have learned to recognize the patterns, see the connections and move quickly to a solution, your gut feeling is an expression of your accumulated brainpower. You’ve probably also learned to trust that feeling.
• You use your brain better. The middle aged brain is very adaptable and finds ways to function at a top level when required. For example, instead of relying on processing speed alone, the middle aged brain uses both the left and right sides more often, presumably because it has established more synapses between the two.
• You’re smarter. Middle aged people do better than young people in areas such as logic, deductive reasoning, verbal skills and spatial reasoning. At the same time they recognize patterns faster, make better judgments, find unique solutions to problems and are more creative in a range of areas. These are all prime requirements for operating a knowledge business.

New independent knowledge business operators often worry that they can’t keep up with those young entrepreneurs who seem to be flooding the market and get all the press. But those lionized under-30s are largely involved in technology and so design new gadgets that capture the public imagination.

The truth is that business is much more all encompassing, and often much more complex than simply inventing some cool new gadget.

That, in turn, requires more complex thinking. And the middle-aged have it.

Recent statistics show that almost a quarter of US workers are now operating as “independent” entrepreneurs in their own small businesses. In Canada, where governments provide crucial benefits such as health care, independents are the fastest growing part of the workforce.

Although most are called independents, soloists, or free agents, another name for them should be micropreneurs because they operate micro-businesses in an entrepreneurial way.

Micropreneurs are those people who run very small businesses that are usually based on some skill which they employ in a narrow market niche. While many still operate exclusively within their region, many have also discovered the power of the Internet, which allows them to expand that niche into a much wider, sometimes even global, region.

Micropreneurs have several things in common: For example, most are skilled knowledge workers operating as consultants, advisors, agents or professionals such as engineers, lawyers, accountants and finance specialists.

Also, most are at the mid-career or, in the case of Baby Boomers, later and have logged time in some corporate setting. This indicates that a desire to escape the corporate straightjacket played a big part in their becoming independent.The impetus for their action may have come from some event, such as a layoff, but the thinking behind their actions usually goes back to a long-term distaste for the soul-destruction that can be a feature of corporate life.

And, although they are often classed as soloists, many are not complete independents in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, they often employ small teams of workers or partners, whether virtually or in a small office setting.

Micropreneurs are the rebels of the modern industrial economy that we all grew up with. They favor the small over the big; they avoid large-system thinking because they see it as restrictive when they want liberation; they prize an ability to change and move quickly above habitual patterns.

But most of all, they do not hope to grow their businesses into multi-million dollar enterprises that dominate a large category.Instead, they choose to run what are traditionally called lifestyle businesses.

Of course, there are downsides to micropreneuring, such as a lack of dependable income, but overall it is easy to see the appeal of micropreneuring. There are many advantages, most of which emanate from the largest problem of growing a business — the constant need to balance scale with revenue.

Simply, if a business involves thinking or advising, scaling is not required. Very large teams are not needed, management of those teams is avoided and large overheads for offices and other facilities don’t drag on profit margins.

Other advantages include:

• Micropreneurs can be more agile. They can adapt much more quickly to a changing marketplace, which is increasingly required as change happens more quickily.
• Micropreneurs are more innovative. They can afford to experiment, make mistakes and try again.
• Micropreneurs can choose their clients. Once established, micropreneurs can, for the most part, work only with clients they like, or who provide work that’s interesting. Often that means their work is more effective and they enjoy a better work-life balance.
• Micropreneurs can shift between doing and managing. Because their firms are so small, and the division of labor not so rigid, they can move back and forth between the roles, thereby keeping themselves more interested.
• Micropreneurs can have less financial risk. This may seem counterintuitive because the image of the small business operator is of constantly being one step from bankruptcy, but the reality is that micro operations have fewer obligations, financial requirements and overall needs. So they don’t have very far to fall.

In a rapidly changing world, it is understandable that more people are choosing the micropreneurial route instead of the traditional climb up the corporate ladder. For those with an independent streak and a thirst for novelty or change, entrepreneurship can be much more fulfilling then fighting the corporate wars every day.