Jumpstart Your Business

The CEO of a company sets the vision, makes a set of rules to establish a company culture, builds the management team, then leads the team on the journey to make the vision a reality. The CEO needs to be able to fly at thirty thousand feet to be able to differentiate the forest from the trees.

photo credit: nggalai

The management team is tasked with using the set of rules to realize the vision. They are similar to referees in a game, making sure that the game is played according to the rules. Generally the environment may be changing and the rules need to be tweaked. The management team typically operates at ground level, planting the trees, and generally cannot see the shape of the forest.

The entrepreneur in a successful start-up has to learn to be both the CEO and the manager. He/she needs to fly high to establish the vision and see how the forest is progressing but also needs to come down to ground level to keep planting the trees in the forest.

1. Improving Your Leadership Skills
A good leader is never satisfied with the status quo. There is always need for improvement. Keep honing your skills. Seek out others who don’t necessarily agree with you. Diverse opinions cause ideas to spark and take you to somewhere you couldn’t have reached alone.

2. Keeping Abreast of the Marketplace.
The business environment is changing rapidly because of economic, sociological and technological factors. If you can see it happening and can react quickly or are able to anticipate it you’re assured of keeping ahead of your competition.

3. Be flexible
You grow when you are flexible and can challenge unchanging points of views, yours or others’. Do not allow anyone to limit what you can achieve. You should constantly strive to surpass your own boundaries.

As an entrepreneur, you wear two important hats: management and leadership. You put on the management hat as you run the day-to-day business operations. The leadership hat you don as you set the vision and the mission of the organization and take it along the path established by your strategic plan. The challenge today is the meaning of strategic.

My friend P. Griffith Lindell way back in 2007 left this comment to one of my posts:

Leaders learn that it is easy to “think like a loser” when leaders get all caught-up in themselves.

Why we do what we do says more about our character than what we do. Our motivations are often hidden, sometimes even from us.

Leadership that is self-centered is limiting. In Success Built to Last, the authors suggest that leadership that succeeds over time is attributable to the strength of the cause they pursue: “Enduringly successful people serve the cause–and they are lifted up by its power.”

John Kotter observed in his article What Leaders Really Do, “Well-led businesses tend to recognize and reward people who successfully develop leaders.”

Now there’s a cause. Find and control the motivations that are just about you. Feed and nurture the motivations that are about developing your team.

Leading is about others.

My thanks to Karen L Fink for forwarding this video clip to me. It does say it all!

Take the recently announced Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Initiative — a $500 million initiative that will unlock the growth and job creation potential of 10,000 small businesses across the United States through greater access to business education, mentors and networks, and financial capital.

photo credit: markwgallagher

It is based on the broadly held view of leading experts that a combination of education, capital and support services best addresses the barriers to growth for small businesses. 10,000 Small Businesses will be guided by an Advisory Council co-chaired by CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein, Warren Buffett, and Dr. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.

Many a business of yesteryear has come, flourished for a time and gone because they focused on pushing a product down the customer’s throat without paying attention to the needs and wants of the customer. The customer needs changed with time, sometimes because of technology, and the business failed to understand that. Railroad companies did not pay attention to the advent of the airplane and failed to comprehend that their business was transportation. Newspapers failed to understand that with the advent of the web, news was much more available for reading in real time and the customer did not have to wait for the printed articles and they are now a dying breed. They failed to acknowledge that they were in the information and not the advertising business.

There is another phenomenon occurring and an entire industry is again failing to understand the changes that are happening in the customer environment. The customer is now actively involved in the creation of information and entertainment at the same time because of the the capabilities of social media. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr are allowing the customer to become involved in realtime in creating information and to a great extent their entertainment and now no longer are forced to sit and stare at a television set taking whatever programming is being dished out to them. Now they are literally involved in the programming of their own entertainment in real time by tweeting or posting on Facebook or the other social media sites.

All of your life you have been told to learn to think outside the box. All through school you have been taught to think outside the box and now comes this idiot who says the time has come to think inside the box. When did he arrive from Pluto or was it Uranus?

The Wikipedia definition of the term “Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel, creative and smart thinking.” Thinking outside the box inspires our creative juices and gets us looking at all the different possibilities that lay around us. It makes us look at all the options and then some, before we choose the strategic path upon which to tread.

Click on this picture to donate to the Red Cross for Haiti Relief

. . . Or, tell us, if you were given the opportunity, what kind of small business you would start up in Haiti when the rebuilding begins and the most important thing you’d do to ensure that your business can recover from a disaster like this. We’ll donate $1.00 for every comment we receive to this post.

This too shall pass!

As a small business in this tough economic climate, you need a change in your attitude. Here is what is happening to you and your bsuiness:

Your clients are coming just to look see and now want it free
Cause they got little money,to spend on inventory,
This makes your A/R stink, and your bank account shrink,
Your inventories swell, your sales look like hell
And your business is drooping, your profits went pooping!

So here is your change in attitude:

So, the Great Recession is here at last
Well, tell this recession to kiss your —!!!

Understanding your limitations or what you are not proficient at, lets you focus on those things that you’re good at and by so doing helps you channel your energy to get the best results.

Looking ahead as opposed to always being absorbed with the past lets you chart new courses in life. If the great explorers had been satisfied with reliving their history we would not have discovered the new world. History is good for giving us a frame of reference for our future exploits. The past is simply a milestone against which future progress is to be measured.