The Journey is a faith-based program to grow the business and discover "Higher Calling."

The Journey is for business owners and entrepreneurs who want to grow and/or improve their business and do so in a way that is integrity based and God honoring.  The experience of growing  a business that is built on this kind of foundation can be transformative…and lots of fun as well!

The next Journey cohort will be starting soon.  The program is done without fee, through the City Impact Ministries of McLean Bible Church.  We spend one evening a week, for 15 weeks, going through a very structured set of topical areas that cover major subjects and disciplines to grow and improve the business.

In addition to the educational content, presented by myself and seven other highly experienced and successful small business owners, there are wonderful relationships that grow out of our work together.

If you would like to know more, start by visiting the Journey’s website and read more about the program’s objectives and content.  Then, be in contact, and we can answer any questions and let you know about the next start date.

Pre-registration is required and because we limit the number of participants, it is good to get information well before the program begins.  Journey 5 will start during June, the exact date to be determined soon.

Let us know if you want to know more.

By “enhancing” I mean gradually getting better at achieving your goals with the most efficient use of resources.

Start with a few good questions.

The first strategy I’d offer  is “Asking the right question(s).”

Before launching into any of the techniques you read about in books on time and self-management, how about stopping and considering the right question for you, now.

I have a few questions I periodically ask myself, and I will share them, but if you focus on this for awhile, you will come up with your own best questions…along with your own best answers.

The idea here is simple:  asking good questions will set the stage so that you can better apply the more tactical self-management principles.

You don’t have to waste time trying to come up with perfect questions…just get a few that are good.  For example, “What am I doing automatically, even unconsciously, that is currently holding me back from a more productive life, right now?”

Or how about, “What one habit would I like to add to my life now, that would make a positive difference?”

Or, “Over the next year, what one or two goals will make the most difference in my life?” Or,
“Looking at my daily routines, where am I wasting time…putting in effort but not seeing any return?”

How about asking about the randomness, if any, in your daily work flow. “What parts of my day are subject to time waste because I just let stuff happen?….where could I get established routines to reduce the randomness of events and have greater control over my life?”

In searching for good questions that lead to personal effectiveness enhancements it can help to ask “What would happen if….” and you fill in the relevant second half of the question. For example. “What would happen if I started each day by spending 30 minutes on that day’s most critical task, rather than spending the first 30 minutes looking through email?”

Or, “What would happen if I unfailingly started each day with 10 minutes of mapping out and writing down what I will achieve, rather than starting the day on automatic pilot?”

Working with good questions will change your life for the better. It is a great way to think about how your productivity can go to its next level.

What questions about your personal productivity should you be asking right now?

You all were fantastic, and together I think we took quite a Journey through the highways and byways of the enterprising life.

Last month a group of intrepid entrepreneurs finished the Journey program and graduated with lots of enthusiasm.

The Journey is a ministry for small business owners in the Northern Virginia and DC area.

The Journey is a faith-based educational program which serves established as well as just starting small businesses. The program serves within the City Impact ministries of McLean Bible Church.  We meet on a week-day evening and work our way through a very structured curriculum of topical areas vital to the success of small business.

I have six other team members who lead the topics within their area of expertise.  The program has a practical focus.  We concentrate on how small businesses can perform with excellence.  One of the key dimensions of the program is considering how the business can be God honoring, and built on the unshakeable foundation of faith and trust in the Master.

One of the assumptions of the program is that lasting business success is premised on an integration of one’s deeply felt values into the actual practices of the business. This integration of deep values and operational practices is one to the things that makes the business real, authentic, and memorable to customers. When the business expresses our best self, lots of great things can start to happen.

We explore this intersection of faith and work in a very practical way within the Journey experience.  For a more detailed description of the program content, we invite you to visit the Journey website.

We are now forming the next Journey cohort, and will be under way about mid-April.  Let us know if you have an interest in the program.

Some success and failure factors are nearly universal, while others may be particular to your industry’s product or service.

Here is one factor that I’d nominate for the universal category:  a mindset of continual learning.

An obvious but overlooked business success factor: your personal learning.

Have you met many successful business owners who are able to survive the ups and down of cycles, that are not serious learners?  I have not.

People learn in different ways.  Whatever your preferred mode of learning, the key is to be in a state of constant learning.  Being more skilled in this state of mind and way of being will change your business life in a big way.  And it will add a deeper level of survivability and prosperity to your bottom line.

Here is a simple way to enhance this learning mindset:  Read at least one book per month.  When I say “read” I don’t necessarily mean cover to cover.  Just pull out the author’s main idea.  Get the core concept out, and let it be part of your ongoing repertoire of tools and ideas.

If this is not currently part of your business discipline, you may be amazed at how valuable this practice can be.  By the way, those Amazon book reviews can be valuable sources of insight on the quality and content of business books.  They will help you select books that others have found useful.  Some of these reviews are sufficiently thorough that you may feel you don’t need to order the book because the reviewer has provided such a good summary of the key ideas.

If some form of structured learning is not currently part of your business life, give this “one book a month” practice a shot.

Getting habitual exposure to high quality business thinking will add immeasurably to your growth potential.

Where to start?  A book I am currently enjoying, that is brimming with insights on how great strategy is formulated, is “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by Richard p, Rumelt.  This is a terrific explanation of how good – and bad  -  strategy is formulated by an author who speaks from many years of practical experience.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

By “events” I am referring to special gatherings that show appreciation and attention to your past, present, and prospective customers/clients.

Consider an annual event as one powerful way of growing your repeat and referral business.

In the current resource-constrained environment, many small business owners are either unable or reluctant to invest in events, but when it is possible for you to make the investment in putting on an event, the rewards can be significant.

Every year during the early part of December we do a holiday event to show appreciation for clients of one of our enterprises, our real estate business.  We do this because we sincerely want to show appreciation and respect for the people who have and will support our business.  The event gives us opportunity to renew relationships, build or sustain emotional connections, and demonstrate how much we value our clients as people.

Here is my point in sharing this aspect of one of our businesses:  if you do not have one customer “reconnection and appreciation” type event in your business now, consider incorporating this into your strategy.

You don’t have to spend a fortune.  You can find creative ways to stage some kind of event whose primary purpose is to express appreciation and reconnect.  As best you can, of course, you want to offer something that provides an incentive for folks to attend the event.  Some have found that doing something fun for kids is a nice way to bring in customers with children in their life.  Obviously it depends on the demographics of your customer base and area.

Here are a few critical points to keep in mind as you think about orchestrating an event.

• Your first event is a learning process. But once  you get a process established, you can repeat it with much greater ease.

•  Customers and clients must feel appreciated if they are to return and tell others about us.  The event will help achieve this goal.

• When done well, events create buzz among your customer base, and they will be anticipated and attended by many of the same people each time.

• Events are effective way to sustain any emotional connection you made previously with past customers. They will help keep people in your orbit.

There are lots of other good reasons to do events.  Of course, the big concern businesses have is financial costs and time in preparing and executing the event.  If you can start small and test the effectiveness of an event, you can better judge the usefulness for your business.

One thing is for sure.  To build sustainable, repeat and referral business we must have methods to keep our relationships with customers alive and well.  Events are one way to do this.  Let me know if you would like to know more about what we do and how it works for us.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

“How do you deal with that feeling of being overwhelmed…having too much to do and not getting it done?”

Good question.  Most of us in the world of small business have to deal with this challenge.

You might not solve this problem in a day,  but you can invest 30 minutes to get a start that can be life changing.

Coming out of overwhelm: physical space, mental space, daily habits.

The first thing is to not accept “overwhelm” as inevitable, and schedule a 30 minutes block to get started on a strategy that will move you toward an increasing sense of control.

Work through three primary dimensions of your business:
• your physical space
• your mental space
• your daily habits

Our Physical Environment becomes automatic and taken for granted.  But the level of order, clarity, simplicity, and ease of use of your physical space has everything to do with how efficiently work is done.  The order and refinement of all the things you need to use to accomplish work has everything to do with personal performance and personal emotion.

POINT:  get your personal space in a state of extreme order and neatness, maintain it, and watch what good things start to happen.

Our Mental Space includes all kinds of “stuff” that sits in our minds and hearts.  The point here is to reduce and simplify that mass of perceptions and feelings down to a few key areas of our work that are the focal points.  You will have more that three things in your work life, but identify the three really important areas of your work life that will be at the top of your list.

POINT:  Radically reduce the mental clutter, by getting clear about the three most important things in your business at this time.

Our Daily Habits determine how the day plays out.  Sure, stuff happens that you can’t control, and things arise that you must respond to.  That is small business life.  But our habitual ways of doing work determine a good deal of our productivity, as well as how “overwhelmed” or “in control” we feel.

POINT:  Take a good look at how your daily habits are helping or hurting.  Some habits are like fuel on the fire of “overwhelm” – such as jumping from one task to another before finishing anything – and other habits will start to reduce “overwhelm” and increase a sense of positive control.  For example, starting the day with a clear image of what we will focus on, and staying with it, in spite of potential distractions.

Overwhelm is not a condition of nature.  It can be reversed.  It just takes starting somewhere.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Identifying and improving the primary systems and supporting processes for your small business is critical for sustainable success.

Many small business owners get the idea that they need clear, repeatable steps that produce a predictable result, but they are not sure how to get the whole business to the place where it is lean, process oriented, and fully “systematized.”

For sustainable small business growth work on clear systems and repeatable processes.their business. But they are not sure how or where to begin.

System and process thinking and execution can transform your business, and take you to a whole new level of business performance.  But it won’t happen with one single step, or in one 30 minute time period.  You’ll have to work at it over time.  But for the business that clearly lays out their major systems and the supporting processes, there is a whole new level of possibilities that will open up.

We work on this challenge in The Journey and it is a joy to watch participants make progress.  By the way, the next cohort of The Journey will probably start around April of 2012, so if you are in the Northern Virginia or DC area, we certainly invite you to learn more about this program.

Where do you begin if you are serious about crafting or re-crafting the major systems of your business?

Start with identifying the overarching categories under which you will list your systems. This is simple.  You could start with something as intuitive as Before, During, and After.  “Before” might include your marketing and lead conversion activities.  “During” might include the delivery of your primary product or service,  And “After” might include your follow-on activities such as how you stay in contact with past customers.  You could also nest your Administrative and Financial support functions here.

Another way of categorizing the high level activities of your business might be Marketing, Sales, Operations, Product Development, Financial, and Human Resources.  Obviously your high level Category identification depends on the size and complexity of your enterprise.

The next step would be to identify the Systems and Processes that fit under your prime categories.  More about that in the next post in this series.

Getting your Categories, Systems, and Processes identified and organized so that you can perform the functions of the business in a lean, coherent, and repeatable manner will separate you from many of your small business competitors.  And as someone who has consulted with many large organizations, I can tell you that even, or should I say especially, big businesses are nowhere near as lean, and systematized as they could be.

Once you get hooked on well formed systems, you won’t want anything less.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

We develop habits and accept them as “normal,” but some habits can severely constrain our level of productivity, and personal satisfaction.

Here is the simple – yet overlooked – point I’d like to make in this brief post:  There is a very good chance you have way too much “stuff” in your work space, and if you do it can really slow you down, on many levels.

The structure, logic, and basic order of our physical space has everything to do with how productive we can be on any given day.

Where do you start if you want to get a more functional, deliberate, and productive design for you work space?

Decluttering sets the foundation for big gains in personal productivity.

Start by asking and answering this question:  What can I throw out to make the space lean, more visually coherent, and eventually far more productive?

Then start somewhere…anywhere.

Pick just one focused area of your work space..maybe one file in one filing cabinet (physical or digital, and eventually both), and get that one area totally cleaned out and organized.

Then work through the whole space, one small area at a time.

Toss everything you can, being aware of legal needs to hold some docs.

Removing the things you do not actually use in the performance of work, is one first step in applying design principles to your personal performance.  The intent is a design of space and a discipline of maintenance that contributes to flow, speed, ease, organization, rapid retrieval of documents and other “things” you use to do work,  and that great feeling of being in control.

Tossing is so obvious and simple that it is often overlooked, but know that there is good theory and more than enough sophisticated thinking behind the design of uncluttered work space.

Clutter in your work space is like carrying extra weight on your shoulders.  Remove it and feel the liberation.

[Fran O'Neal is a small business owner, consultant and researcher who helps business owners use a remarkable business growth system.  He is also the founder of The Entrepreneur's Journey, an educational ministry for small business owners.]

Better listening can improve your business in a big way..start by asking more questions.

One of the critical skills of exceptional leadership, and certainly of small business leadership, is the ability to listen consistently and skillfully.

You can start improving this skill anywhere, anytime.  And if you do, you will get “hooked” on how satisfying and rewarding it can be to really “hear” and “see” what good listening reveals.

There are dozens of ways to upgrade your listening capability, but here is one simple place to start.

Begin by asking more questions, and after you ask the question, just be quiet and listen.  The truth is, most of our conversational routines happen automatically, without much thought.  When you get aware of better listening, and start by asking more good questions, you are on the road to taking your small business leadership skill to a whole new level.

The Journey is a faith-based program to grow the business and discover "Higher Calling."

The Journey is a faith-based program that explores how to grow and operate one’s enterprise on Biblical principles.

It is a journey of discovery, learning, networking, improving the quality of your business, and exploring the “Higher Calling” of your enterprise.

We spend one evening a week, for 15 weeks, going through a very structured set of topical areas that cover major subjects and disciplines to grow and improve the business.  The current Journey cohort has started, and is full, but if you have an interest, be in contact, and we can answer any questions and let you know about the next start date.

Pre-registration is required and because we limit the number of participants, it is good to get information well before the program begins.   The next Journey program will start around March of 2012.

You can also visit the Journey’s website, and do let us know if you want to know more.