• Find a way to make your business grow during difficult times. Find ways to streamline, automate and cut costs.
• Or, you can ride it out. Get by doing what you’ve always done and hope for times to get better.

You’ve probably heard it before…but hope is not a strategy. You may ride out the storm, but your competition that takes this opportunity to refine their business model and get better, leaner and smarter will leapfrog past you when things pick back up.

Don’t get left behind seeking shelter from the storm. Embrace it and make it work.

What is it?

I’ve had the opportunity to work for and observe all kinds of leaders. I’ve seen good managers and bad managers. I’ve seen all sorts of management styles. I had the privilege of working with and for my father for several years and observe him in leadership positions. I’ve also had the opportunity to grow into a leader myself.  I’ve learned leadership skills by example from my father as well as formally while studying for my MBA. But, I think the leadership lesson that has stuck with me the most came from him.

Now I should tell you, he doesn’t have an MBA. So, you’re not likely to recognize this right away as something you’d read from the HBR or something. But he taught me his leadership philosophy long ago …

You gotta have faith in the folk

What does that mean?

As the years have gone on, I’ve come to realize that it’s much deeper than originally seems.

First with your employees

Put your faith in them. Trust them. Let them do their jobs. Explain the goal to them. Help them see how they affect that goal. Help them understand how their decisions affect the larger picture and then let them choose what to do. Trust them to do it right - to make the right decisions. Let me walk though the implications of this:

1. Don’t micromanage. Give people empowerment to do their job however works best for them - provided they are striving for the greater goal.
2. Don’t put silly metrics in place to measure people…share the overall goal, explain to them how they affect that goal (read lots of transparency and communication) and then let them go…faith…people instinctively want to do a good job - your job as a manager is to help them frame what constitutes a “good” job.
3. Don’t watch people work, watch the results. do you really care how they work? Beyond making sure that their ethical, etc. no. Now, if there’s a process to doing something and that process is core to your business, then following the process becomes part of the “result” - so there’s an exception made for that sort of thing.

Then with your customers

1. Level with them. Air some of your dirty laundry - be genuine. They’ll appreciate it and trust you.
2. Provide outstanding customer service and ask for nothing in return, trusting that it will all come back to you in the end. Get paid for the value to provide, but this is the old adage of underpromise/overdeliver.

I just had a bout of that today!

It happens….you know, we need fear and doubt. Those feelings are there to protect us from making mistakes. To warn us against danger.

If you’ve never had a moment of doubt about your business plan then you should be afraid. That’s usually a sign that you’re so in love with your idea that you’re blind to the potential issues that you’ll need to address.

So, for me, I often go through this thought process:

Self-Doubt Cycle

I need more clients, therefore I need to..

• drive more visitors to my site
• transform those visitors into subscribers
• make targeted offers to my subscribers that turn some of them into clients

Then I remind myself, that my target audience is unlikely to find me through that funnel, and here’s why…

• My target audience isn’t very internet savvy
• My target audience are extremely busy and so even if they do use the internet much, they’re unlikely to be searching for my stuff (as it sounds too hard, out of reach, too expensive or like a lot more work)

Then I get discouraged and think…well crap, I can’t drive the kind of traffic that’s going to get me more business here through PPC campaigns very well, so why do I bother with the blog?

Pulling Myself Back

Answer: because it’s a resource for my clients. It’s a way for me to stay in touch with them and continue to provide value to them, even when we are not actively engaged. It’s a way for me to talk with people that might be prospects or partners. For me, this blog is NOT a sales funnel. It is and should be for a lot of you, but it’s not the primary focus for me. I guess I should practice what I preach

Shameless plug: subscribe to my blog for free because it will keep me from having these depressing conversations with myself (you can get new posts via email too using the form on the top left if you prefer).

I need to have these little conversations with myself - usually after seeing disappointing statistics reports, etc. The important thing, I think, is to not give up and don’t paralyze yourself into inaction either.

Keep. Moving. Forward.

The plan in the long-run is to have a bunch of courses on everything from setting up your own web host, getting your own domain name, doing online PPC marketing campaigns, business blogging and the one I’m working on right now, setting up and running an online storefront with ZenCart.

I’ve already got almost an hour of training videos up with more on the way during the coming weeks. If you’re interested in getting in on this course, hop on over to my “university” and sign up. For anyone that signs up in the next 30 days, instead of paying a recurring fee, you’ll only have to pay the one-time fee of $97 and I’ll give you access to all other courses I add down the road, for life…at no extra charge.

This is a great venue for me because I can sell access my knowledge and experience to way more people than I could in person and because of that, I can do so for a fraction of what it would cost to engage me personally. Everybody wins.

Let me show you a sneak peek at the kind of thing I’m doing…

So fast forward…it’s taken me two days (not two full days mind you, but two evenings) to get it together. What a mess. It’s easily the most complicated thing I’ve ever assembled.

While I was finishing up, I had two thoughts that I wanted to share with you about my experience putting it together…

The curse of knowledge

I really loved the Heath brother’s book Made to Stick. My favorite concept from that book was the curse of knowledge. It has so many uses. The idea is basically this:

Once you really know something, it’s nearly impossible to remember or imagine what it was like to not know it.

Ponder that for a moment….

You know what your service does for your customers. You know how cool your product is. When you approach customers or work on your marketing messages…are you failing to connect with your customer because you aren’t communicating on their level? Are you assuming some knowledge that isn’t there?

Every time I put together some bookshelves, an entertainment center or in this case, a couple-hundred pound excercise machine…I always find serious flaws in the instructions. Inevtiably, it occurs to me that 3 steps ago, the orientation of something made a huge difference, wasn’t terribly obvious and the instructions did nothing to point out the potential issue….

and you end up redoing some parts.

This could so easily be fixed…grab 10 random people off the street and offer them some money to put the thing together as per the directions and videotape it. Offer no assistance at all.

What steps do they stumble on. Does everybody screw up step 7a?

Takeaway: Pay attention to patterns with your customers and remove confusion that’s preventing them from buying.

I can do that!

Good for you!

That doesn’t mean that you should do it, simply because you have the skills to do it.

This has been a terribly difficult lesson for me. In my past, I was a software guy. So, I have a hard time hiring someone to do anything technical because I can’t help thinking I don’t need this guy, I can do this myself.

As small business owners, we often take things on ourselves because we can. This is often (thought not always) a mistake.

Being a good technician in some job does not make a business. Owning and running a business is totally different from performing the service/making the product that your business sells.

Given what my day job charges for my time and I what I charge for my own business…it would have been an easy sell to me to have the elliptical put together for her by a professional. It took me no less than 5.5 hours.

That’s $29/hour.

My time is worth way more than that.

Takeaway: Choose wisely what you take on yourself, simply because you can.

I have to hand it to him though, his explanation of the virtues of laziness are much more eloquent than mine in his article The Lazy Manifesto.

Lazy means you don’t want to work too hard, which often leads to figuring out how to do less work. Just about all of the advances in technology come from laziness: we drive cars instead of walking because we’re too lazy to walk, we use washing machines because we’re too lazy to do it by hand, we use computers because writing things out by hand is hard. Of course, reliance on machines isn’t a good thing, but using laziness to figure out better ways to do things is a good thing.

It’s a fine-line to be sure, but when running your small business, every time you catch yourself thinking “I really don’t want to do this again, it’s so tedious, there’s got to be a better way to do this”. You could beat yourself up for being lazy or you could recognize it for what it is…

an opportunity.

This is instincts speaking to you.

We’re surrounded by technology that can automate much of the mundane and repetitive tasks for us. Sometimes, it’s not technology you need, just a better process. And sometimes it’s better to step back and evaluate whether what we are doing is even truly necessary or worthwhile (concentrating on being effective rather than being productive…or in other words, making sure we’re busy doing to the right things instead of being really good at doing all the wrong things.)

You’ve all seen those cartoons with the angel and the devil caricatures on someone’s shoulders telling them to do the right thing or the wrong thing. Well, I say we all have an additional companion - the Lazy Gnome.

This third little guy has an aversion to anything that even smells like effort. Everybody has one. Some of our Lazy Gnomes are louder than others though.

While your Lazy Gnome can be destructive when he convinces you to truly do nothing (aka procrastinate). We’ve been trained our whole professional and academic lives to silence him. My practice is built around the premise that we need to learn to embrace him and listen because when he starts squeaking in our ears, he’s usually alerting us to an opportunity to eliminate useless busy-work or an opportunity to find a way to do something better.

I still say that the comedian Steven Wright summarized it best:

“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.”

I’ve printed this out and posted this in my workspace as a humorous reminder that there’s a big difference between being busy and being effective and that my Lazy Gnome deserves attention.

If you feel overstressed, time-crunched, you feel can’t-get-it-all-done-in-24-hours-itis and you’re working yourself to the bone and not making any headway - let me help your Lazy Gnome come out of hiding.

Now, in fancy terms - through a combination of multiple disciplines: business process analysis and re-engineering, organizational analysis, business model analysis, industrial engineering and the appropriate application of technology automation, I help you do it better, with less effort and better results.

Sound like your thing? Let me hear your story and I’ll tell you if I can help you.

She has a online store presence that was built from scratch and is anything but easy to use from the admin side, not to mention that it was custom built and the guy that built it is gone. Not a good situation.

At the same time she’s looking to use the opportunity to launch a new online storefront with a blog to go with it and to alter her business model to expand her business. The trick is, I’ve got to help her to remove a lot of manual garbage that she does right now and automate as much as possible between her suppliers, her resellers and her direct customers. I’m going to do all this leveraging off-the-shelf open-source software, tweaked to her particular situation.

It dawned on me however that part of this meant having to train her on how to use the blogging software (which is Wordpress) and how to use and configure the storefront which will be run from Zencart….

Here’s the trick - I’m busy and she’s busy - how the heck are we are going to find time for me to train her?

Well, my answer was that I would create screencasts to train her on how to use them with the intent that I will repackage and resell these screencasts as part of an online course.

Sounds easy! Well, it’s not. I’ve monkeyed with several screen capture tools, video compression software and various ways of delivering the video online…what a pain. I think I’ve got the technical pieces together now and I know the content that I want to do (more or less). I still have some kinks to work out in terms of finding the optimal video size to use vs. the size of the movie file that the student will need to view.

But, that’s not the biggest obstacle that I’ve had. You know what it is? Me.

I’ve been too much of a perfectionist with it…wanting the production quality to look and sound fanstastic. So much so that I just wasn’t getting anywhere. The other problem that I’ve got is finding time to record that the kids aren’t screwing around in the background.

So here’s what I’ve decided….

I’m going to forge ahead with the tools that I’ve got.

I’m going to do a decent job of producing the videos and not worry too much if it doesn’t look and sound like it was done in professional studio (so what if you can hear my kid playing with his toys faintly every now and then?).

I’m going to call it “ready” when it’s got at least couple of full lessons done. (it wont be “done” but it will be enough to let some students in).

Result? Something will get DONE.

I hate talking on the phone. I feel it’s intrusive and so I don’t like people calling me and I consequently don’t like calling other people because of how I know it makes me feel.

I - am an email guy. I love email. I check it very often…so often that if you’re fast at responding, it’s like chatting on Yahoo! Messenger with me with a short lag.

But! I recognize that not everyone likes email. There’s a good friend of mine that I work with that if he can’t get you live on the phone, will simply not communicate with you. If I send him an email, he’ll respond with a phone call. He doesn’t have any IM accounts either, so don’t bother. Voicemail? Forget it, he’ll hang up.

Now, you might be thinking that this person is a technophobe and just hates technology….here’s the kicker…he’s a brilliant software engineer and has worked in high tech forever. So, what gives?

Everybody has their own peculiar way of communicating that they are most comfortable.

Your customers, your co-wokers, your partners, your suppliers…they all have their preferred ways of communicating with you. I attribute a large part of my career success to being a bridge - a communicator that facilitates dialogue were none existed before. Many times, that’s 90% of what it seems I do - bringing people and ideas together in meaningful ways….

Getting coworkers to understand each other and coordinate what they are doing better

Getting customers to understand how I can help them

Getting partners to see my vision

Business cannot happen without people making connections somewhere and communicating. It’s uber basic. If you’re going to be that master communicator, you need to pay attention to the ways people communicate best and meet them there.

My friend that prefers live phone conversation when I hate it? I just have to tell myself not to feel guilty about interrupting him with a phone call because I’ve learned that he prefers this.

I’ve had a bit of success and I’ve got at least 1 paying client.

But you know what? I still don’t really know what I want this business to be. It seems like the more I try to pigeon-hole it into something hyper-definable, like you’re supposed to, the more uncomfortable I feel about it. There are so many things that I can do or know that are really no big deal to me, but are indistinguishable from magic to others who are more than willing to pay for it - likewise, there are a bunch of things I don’t know - but at least I know which is which and I don’t try to pretend otherwise.

I guess what I’m saying is that I still don’t feel like I’ve had that a-ha moment where I can concisely describe what it is this company does.

Putting your small business on auto-pilot is close - but it’s still not quite right.

I named the business Stage3 because I saw myself helping small business owners take their business up a notch…making it to the next level - the next stage of evolution.

I’ve got a crazy combination of attributes, skills and experience that might just be a total disaster for some businesses out there, but there will be plenty of you, somewhere, that I’m exactly what you need.

How do you know which you are?

Well, that’s the problem, I don’t know yet. I’m sure if I talked with you I could tell you within 10 minutes

I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s gone through this and I’m sure that my perfect answer - whenever it comes, wont last forever as the perfect answer - so bear with me through this identity crisis (and feel better if you’re going through something similar that you’re not alone).

I had never heard one of them before that Brian brought up, but it immediately resonated with me.

“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.”

Gee…I wonder why that hit home? That may be a joke to some but to me, it’s deep truth

I thought I’d play along and have some fun with small business lessons you can learn from Steven Wright:

“I have a box of powdered water. I never know what to add.”

- Lesson: don’t make a product in search of a problem.

“I recently got a new camera. It’s so advanced, you don’t even need it.”

- Lesson: keep it simple.

“I was sad because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet. So I said, “Got any shoes you’re not using?”

- Lesson: keep your eyes open for opportunity

“I went to a garage sale. “How much for the garage?” “It’s not for sale.”

- Lesson: Make sure your marketing messages are clear and above all, the prospect knows exactly what you can help them with.

“I’m a very difficult size to shop for; I’m an extra-medium.”

- Lesson: always be on the lookout for those under served niches.

“The severity of the itch is proportional to the reach.”

- Lesson: understand your customer and what their pain is.

“When I was in school the teachers told me practice makes perfect; then they told me nobody’s perfect so I stopped practicing.”

- Lesson: don’t listen to those critical voices (especially the one’s inside your own head).

“I bought some batteries, but they weren’t included - so I had to buy them again.”

- Lesson: don’t nickle and dime your customer and lose an opportunity to make them say “wow”. Include the batteries.

“If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.”

- Lesson: don’t be afraid of failure. Edison failed hundreds of times to build the light bulb. When asked how he felt about the failures, he said he didn’t fail, he merely found hundreds of ways that didn’t work.