Small Business - 5 tips to keep you sane and successful:
By Eric Basu
Find mentors.
Good mentors will make your dreams
achievable more quickly. The best mentors are those who
have done what you are trying to accomplish before, successfully, and who are helping you for friendship or selffulfillment reasons. They may be formal Board of Advisor
or Director members, friends, colleagues, or interested
peers. Service providers can be mentors as well, but be
careful, as there is always a potential for a conflict of interest when someone is trying to sell you something and offering advice at the same time. Ethical advisors will be
able to navigate this conflict, but the world abounds with
unethical people who will exploit it to their advantage. We
had a local outsourced accounting firm whose CEO we
invited to our
Board of Advisors, and all of his
advice seemed to
result in his firm
increasing
our
billings by an order of magnitude. By the time
I finally removed
his firm and insourced
their
work, he had
come close to
financially devastating my firm. The best mentors don’t
need anything from you, but if you have an arrangement
with them for payment in cash or stock, ensure that arrangement is clear and the advisor doesn’t have an interest in pushing you in a specific direction for their own gain.
Work out.
Exercise. Be fit. Life is better when you
work out. I know your answer, which is the same for everyone, “I can’t possibly find the time with my schedule to
work out, the business will suffer!”. Quite simply, BS. The
stress you are going through is probably the highest you
have experienced in your life, and if you don’t work out
now, your ability to be at your best will start to fall, quickly. I’m not saying you suddenly need to take up some time
consuming pursuit that is a job in itself, like training for the
Ironman, but there are so many little things that you can do
during your day to start getting fit, after a couple of months
of getting into a routine you’ll wonder how you functioned
without doing them. Park on the opposite side of the street
and walk further to work. Take the stairs. Take a break at
lunch and do 50 pushups, 50 situps, and 50 squats daily. Work your way up to a solid 30-45 min of exercise daily. On days when you wake up late and can’t possibly do
30 minutes, get 5 minutes in so you keep your momentum.
Set a schedule for yourself. Particularly if you’re
still working by yourself or working out of your house, you
need to have a set schedule for work and stick by it. It’s
too easy to just do whatever happens to come to you reactively, but that is not the way to build a business. Especially if you are not good at working on a
schedule, set your working time, family time, and relaxation time and stick to them. If you deviate, get back to your
schedule asap.
Know your weaknesses.
If you are extremely uncomfortable dealing with customers, doing your books, or
going on sales calls, whatever your weaknesses are you
need to recognize them first. Once you recognize them,
you need to compensate
for
them. Compensation
may be that you take
extra time to prepare
for a sales call, rehearsing it until you’re
as comfortable as you
can be, take sales
training or Toastmaster’s courses, take
bookkeeping classes,
hire somebody to do
that function for you
or a variety of other compensation methods, but the key is
to know your weaknesses, face them, and compensate. Often, depending upon how much effort you put into
it, a weakness can become a strength. As an example, I
get extremely nervous speaking in front of large
groups. Because of this, I spend a lot of time rehearsing
my topics to the point where I can brief them without slides
and without any notes other than simple topic bullets. When prepped appropriately, a speaking engagement then becomes another opportunity to excel at a new
skill rather than a dreaded ordeal to be endured, and I
have received many comments on how I can brief without
relying heavily on aids, and how composed I look, despite
my trepidation and butterflies before and during.
Finally, set deadlines and goals for yourself
and adhere to them. Determine your goals for your
business, write them down and give them to a trusted
friend with a date set for 6 months or a year from then to
review them with you. On a daily basis, set your goals for
the day and at the end of the day review them. It’s a common trap to get immersed in the chaos of a startup and
find a year later you were phenomenally busy, but never
achieved the goals you originally planned. You can revise
the goals as need be, but you need to set them first to revise them later.
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