Do Business Well

Believe it or not, the bruises will heal, it will get worse before it gets better, and you will see your children again. If these are not some of the things you are currently thinking about, you aren’t working hard enough to make it. During this period of your business’s development, you need to be as devoted to it as you were to your spouse on your honeymoon . . . as devoted as a mother is to a newborn .. and for all the same reasons.

If you’re not coming very close to your goals yet, now might be a great time for you to write down your daily schedule—where you go on a particular day and whom you talk to. By engaging in that exercise, you may be able to see where you are poorly allocating time. Wise use of your time in these early days will greatly improve your company’s fortunes.

Training, Training, and Retraining

The comparison of your month-old business to a newborn doesn‘t stop with their common need for massive doses of time, energy, and emotion. Both also need constant training and retraining. In fact, a baby may be easier in this regard. One writer claims that infants rarely have to learn the same lesson more than once. This won’t be true for your employees. Maybe not even for you.

One aspect of starting a new company that makes training difficult is that you haven’t done it before. Thus, as you learn, you need to untrain your employees of the bad habits you had earlier trained them in.

Training should be a daily enterprise. Some management experts suggest a daily meeting for this task. Some suggest you can accomplish great results a minute at a time. My personal preference is to write a short memo that treats the issue, make copies, and disperse them to those who will be affected an hour or so before a meeting announced with the memo. If I believe the meeting will take five minutes or less, I conduct it standing. If longer, sitting. However, the critical issue for me is to keep the meeting on the subject at hand and as brief as possible. I invite questions and comments, but I am not interested in providing grandstanding opportunities for those in the group. There will be plenty of opportunity for that in the looser format of a brainstorming session.

 

Decision Making

One of the most formidable new skills you’ll have to learn in the first thirty days or so is how to make a decision. Most who haven’t led before haven’t had the opportunity, or the burden, of making critical decisions—especially ones where timing is essential. Hence, it’s easy to second-guess the decisions you do make. My advice is: Don’t.Rather, just charge ahead, and do your best to make it work. If it doesn‘t, park your ego at the door and make another decision: how to solve the new situation.

How does one go about making good decisions in a timely manner? The only skill harder to teach is creativity, and they operate similarly. Here is a step-by-step approach that can be used by anyone.

1. Determine the specific problem or opportunity that needs to be addressed. At least half of decision making is knowing what the problem is, and the problem frequently isn’t what it appears to be.

You have an employee who doesn‘t seem to be cutting it. He appears lazy and disinterested. You have encouraged, admonished, trained, and threatened. Nothing is working. You need to decide whether or not to fire this person.

The problem seems to be that you’ve made a poor hire. You feel bad about letting the person go. You aren’t sure how quickly you can replace him. Right now, he’s better than nothing. Take the situation and stand it on its head, shake it around, and turn it inside out. Here are just a few of the possible problems that aren’t so obvious that might provide an easy solution.

• During your attempts at motivation, etc., you never really explained to this person what you expected and/or what he could expect long term.
• You’ve been doing a great deal of talking. Have you done any listening? Maybe your employee is going through a difficult time, or has a tendency to say yes to you during training even when he doesn‘t understand.
• Is he really better than nothing? Could the rest of your staff fill in until you could find a replacement?
• Does he have enough specific direction? Some employees need a detailed list of things to do.
• He hates the work and is only staying because he feels bad about letting you down.
• There really isn’t enough to keep him busy.
• He finishes tasks very quickly and therefore appears to be lazy when he doesn‘t know what to do next.

Do you see that each of these possible problems practically screams its solution? So, step number one is to evaluate the situation from every perspective you can think of and make certain that you have correctly identified the problem.

Many times you’ll identify what you believe to be the problem and you’ll still be faced with several valid options. In this case, you’ll move to step two.

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• Serious Selling Your Business part 3
• Money Matters, Small Business Financing
• E-MARKETING Planning Process
• Get Your Business off to a Quick Start Week 1
• Better Finance for Wheels
• Serious Selling Your Business part 2
• Targeting Your Plan

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