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Running a business successfully.

Guest post by: Craig Jennings

Article Overview: People use me to help them run their businesses successfully. I'm a professional business coach, have been so for 10 years. I work with about 25 entrepreneurs every month to help them manage their businesses. Most of them are doing extremely well - even in these tough times. Enclosed is a huge document I give them all. When you look at it, you'll probably guess that many small-business owners, eager to get into the part of the business that makes money, skip critical steps that should come first - steps about self-knowledge, mission, vision. And, while small business is the heartbeat of the engine that drives American commerce, 40% of new small businesses are gone in 1 year, 80% in 4 years. So, have a read. See if this makes sense to you. Use it as you please. For conversation, please call.

Running a business successfully.

VMG WORKSHEET (revised 12/2009)

Vision, Mission, Goals This is a long document. I have given it to many of the clients who use me as a business coach.See how it reads.

Most small-business owneers, entrepreneurs, just get into action. We usually skip the early and critical steps.

Your business will succeed only if you make sure you continue to support and motivate the most important person in the business - yourself!

Start with Self-Knowledge -

- Find out what you're good at. Buy Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath, or Now, Discover Your Strengths by Clifton and Buckingham. Do NOT buy used copies from Amazon - the key to the utility of the book is a free assessment available through the internet which will tell you what your 5 greatest strengths are, and it only is available to the first owner of each book.

- Find out why many other people listen and understand differently than you - why and how to bridge the gap. (ColorQ)

- Find out about your learning style - visual, auditory, kinesthetic, how to recognize in self, and in others.

- Go deep into the Myers-Briggs analysis - and find out whether you are an Extrovert or an Introvert, a Sensor or an Intuitor, a Feeler or a Thinker, a Judger or a Perceiver. Find out, from your patterns, what are the best work situations for yourself.

- From your new self-understanding, redesign your business to allow you to exercise your greatest strengths, and get others to do what you're not good at. If you have partners, everyone needs his/her own book. If you found out what their strengths were, would it be of value to you?

- Consider this revision of the "Golden Rule." Instead of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" consider "Do unto others as they would be done unto!"

If you spend some time discovering who you are, you will come to the conclusion that many others are very different. Conventional approach: they're jerks because they don't think and operate your way. Another approach: speak to them in the way that they can most easily understand (yes, it will take extra effort on your part to do this.) The ColorQ assessment is particularly helpful here.

This is a very effective assessment which can be performed in 5 minutes, and lasts a lifetime.

Covey has a neat communications mantra which comes from Aristotle: "Seek first to understand, then to be understood!" Outcome: others will actually like you more, and also think you're smarter.

Another possibility which comes from this Point Of View- Others'way of thinking may bring important benefits to your organization, benefits which are perhaps not available to you. Besides, you're discovering you can't do everything.

- Analyze your current business (Business Vantage). Instant, personalized business plan. You can fix what's not working if you know what it is.

Then, use the following processes to help you define success for yourself, set a vision and a mission for your business, and then set critical goals. I believe this process is essential to success in the small-business world.

Dialog from Alice In Wonderland:

"Can you give me directions?"

"Where do you want to go?"

"I'm not really sure."

"Then any direction will be fine!"

A. The top 3 ways you define business success for yourself.

This may turn out not to be about money.

Observation: If you don't define business success for yourself, someone else will do it for you.

I know how successful I am by: (finish the sentence 3 times.)

1 ____________________________________________

2 ____________________________________________

3 ____________________________________________

B. Vision

The three wise men followed a "star" to their goal - and you and I need to put our own star in place. I don't believe your business can be successful unless you do this. You might wonder why you haven't done it yet... Vision? Success?

Vision is what your business or your industry might accomplish in your lifetime. Frequently transformational. Often seen as impossible, absurd, ridiculous.

Example: Christopher Columbus notices how arriving ships appear from the topsails down, suspects the world might be round, not flat. His vision - Go east by sailing west. This is what took him to Isabella in the first place.

Conventional wisdom says: Ask your customers. Henry Ford's response: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said "a faster horse." Your dream can be the central focus of your business.

Create a vision for your business:

____________________________________________

____________________________________________

____________________________________________

Example #2 - Bill Gates says, in 1983: "A computer on every desk (vision) and Microsoft Software on every computer" (mission). People laugh. They stopped laughing long ago. At last count, Bill Gates was the richest man in America.

C. Mission

Mission statement:

A statement of what your organization will ultimately achieve - in your town, in the marketplace, in the world. (has to be portable, easy to remember - has to fit on a tee-shirt!)

Example: Queen Isabella says: "No mission statement, no jewels." Chris Columbus grumbles, "I'm a ship captain, not an MBA," but he considers, then replies: "Our mission is to find a better trade route to the riches of the East." He smiles, "And then we could really screw the English and the French!" Isabella smiles, produces the jewels.

Write a Mission for your business.

____________________________________________

____________________________________________

_______________________________________

Japanese proverb.

Vision without action is a daydream;

Action without vision is a nightmare!

So, do both.

D. Goals:

"The bridge between goals and achievement is discipline." Jim Rohn. Yessss!

Observation: Discipline is something which others clearly lack, which your parents, teachers, others gave you and you probably resisted.

Now that you're a CEO, you don't have to report to "the man" any more. Goals make you "the man!" What kind of "man" you are or can become depends on how you manage your goals.

Definition - a goal is something you strive to achieve, and when you achieve it, it disappears! Goals need to be expressed as specific and measurable. Making the world a better place is not a goal. Getting 5 restaurants to contribute their leftovers to a soup kitchen is not a goal until you add: by next Friday! Both success and failure must be possible, and an element of time is essential.

About success and failure. Running your own business is an exercise in success and failure. You must do both. Many of us are reluctant to call failure by name. It hurts. And so we keep our goals fuzzy, so that we can't fail. But what we miss is that failure is a critically important teaching tool available to the small-business owner. It's expensive, it's painful, and we don't want it. But if we dodge the pain and duck the consequences, then we don't get the lesson and the training opportunity is lost.

So, when you set yourself goals, make sure they are specific, written, time based. If you miss the goal in some way, notice, and pay very close attention. Keep score. Be open to understanding your failures. They are crucial to your success.

Irony: If you ignore the little failures, a really big one will be along that you won't be able to ignore.

3 year goal. Set yourself 1. Write it down. Put it up.

1 year goal. Set yourself 3.Write them down Put them up.

Cycle goal -1-3 months. Set yourself 3. Write down, put up.

Weekly goal. Set yourself 3, every week, Sunday night? Write down, put up.

Daily goals. Include one of the weekly goals. Write down, put up.

Score yourself weekly. (This is the payoff statistic.) Write down, put up.

Here's what write down, put up means. You wrote it, in words. You posted it on your bulletin board, your bathroom mirror, wherever. You have put your goal in your own face. You are commited. (If you didn't, you're probably not.)

Key - weekly goals are very powerful. Weekly is the only interval that's man-made. If you can succeed at making and keeping weekly goals, you must, you will do very well.

I don't know which is harder - setting the goals or keeping them! But after a while, it gets easier. Post the goals where you can see them. Tell someone else what you have promised. It's exclusively up to you to create what you need to get the job done. When you keep track of what you accomplish, you get a powerful sense of accomplishment - something that's often missing for us in running our own business. Some form of accountability partner is critical. Create one.

Goal Criteria - When you've reached what you thought was a goal and it doesn't disappear, the problem is usually definition.

Try on the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. In this model, a goal must be:

S - Specific

M - Measurable

A - Action-oriented

R - w(Ritten)

T - Time-based

There are other definitions for S.M.A.R.T. I particularly object to R-Reasonable.

Tricks and Tips around goals.

1. When you succeed in reaching a specific goal in the specified time, call it a success and publish/post/share it with others! Sharing is an absolute must.

2. When you succeed, write down your success, and replace the goal with another one.

3. When you fail, have a look at what happened. Decide whether you want to re-create that goal with a changed mission or a changed date, or give it up completely. Identify the lesson in the failure. Put it in writing. (Why do we focus on writing stuff down so much? Because most of us will fudge if we don't commit our plans and issues to writing.) And then, there's also forgetting!

4. When you fail to reach a specific goal in the specified time,declare it a failure and publish/post/share it with others. (Don't skip this step, you will be surprised at how much value there is in it.) You'll find that failure, just like joy, is sharable, and doing so will lift a huge burden from you. As previously discussed, failure is just another definition of training, except you pay in advance.

5. As a businessperson, you should expect both success and failure. My belief: If you don't fail once in a while, you're playing too safe, or you're fudging.

6. Don't kid around with goal-making. It's a terrific process which gets you out of your head and into action, and you can't be successful (in business or life) unless you hold yourself to account and are held to account.

7. Holding yourself to account may be one of the most difficult things around - we all know how to sneak away from our own accountabilities and responsibilities. It may be one of the reasons you took on your own business - so that you didn't have to report to "the man." The bad news: Reporting is still necessary if you want to get it all done. That's one of the reasons why many businesspeople take on a coach, to help them hold themselves to account, and to work their way through the complexities they create for themselves.

What comes after goals - making them powerful? Kim George, in her brilliant pursuit of the idea of "greatness" suggests:

A. Greatness is built in when we are born. The acorn contains the complete model of the final oak tree. Wind and weather and our minds, keep us in the world of scarcity and what we come to know as comfort. Kim George lists 7 illusions which help us ignore our greatness.

a. The illusion of "not enough." Consider a squirrel cage? Yes, that's why the squirrel keeps running. Does he have your face?

b. The illusion of comparisons. Comparisons are seducers. An elephant is bigger than a chicken. So what? Someone else is richer than you are. Do you suffer by comparison?

c. The illusion of struggle. Struggle is overrated. (the hardest one for me to give up.)

Struggle that starts out with the understanding that I'm not good enough always produces a result. Can you guess what that result is?

d. The illusion of control. We manipulate others while trying to prevent them from manipulating us. Are you managing yourself well enough?

e. The illusion of time. Regret is useless, in the past. How far in the future lie your true happiness and fulfillment? Ah, that far? Too bad.

f. The illusion of hope. The dark side of positive thinking. Hope has a long waiting time.

g. The illusion of certainty. Ultimate certainty lies within the satin-lined coffin. The 80/20 rule works well here.

(a fuller discussion of Ms. George's ideas available from her book, Coaching Into Greatness!)

B. We can discover our own greatness simply by getting into action, embracing change, risk and opportunity as a way of being, and letting go of the illusions. I don't think you can "achieve" greatness. I don't think effort works. It may just be a way of being.

C. What do you aspire to? There are several aspiration models. Find yours.

a. "My cup is half-empty." Scarcity model

b. "My cup is half-full." Positive-thinking model.

c. "My cup runneth over." Abundance model.

d. "I Am The Cup!" Greatness model.

Consider greatness as a perfect payoff for being a human being.

Ultimately ... (and these are my targets)

-Become a master. Know your strengths, build on them. Mastery offers you fulfillment.

-Go for greatness. Your definition is fine.

-Have it all. End up by getting what you really want in your life, every day.

Feedback, objections, questions, different points of view? Please feel free to contact me!

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Article Tags: first steps, money, professional business coach, running a business, small businesses



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