THE FIVE PROVEN STEPS TO

  ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS

  THAT MAKE IT HARD TO FAIL

1.

BE passionate about your ideas and make them work with the help of others. This means, of course, being emotionally committed to what you’re doing 24/7. By doing that, odds are you’ll never have to solicit and recruit others to your crusade. They will see a place for themselves and gravitate there on their own.

When that happens, others’ commitments will be more solid and grounded than if you had gone out hunting for them and then had to talk them into joining forces. It’s a proven fact: When people make their own decisions about what they want to do, they are happier, more dedicated to achieving results, and they do a better job!

2.

Often ACT first and plan second. This does NOT mean rashly jumping from the frying pan into the fire. It instead suggests that over- indulgence in evaluating, assessing, diagnosing, and long-term planning (I call it “analysis paralysis”) wastes time, money, energy, and opportunities.

Entrepreneurial leaders take action, make adjustments, act again, make adjustments, and act again. Except for formal loan and investor-required formal business plans, they limit their planning to the short term — hour, day, week, month. And even those plans are temporary and flexible. Not unlike being too focused on one’s goals instead of the path that leads there, watching the finish line causes stumbling and falls.

3.

Always RESPOND instead of react. A key ingredient in the success of this pursuit is stress management. Bottom line: If you always respond instead of react, you can never over-react. If you never over-react, you will be faithfully followed. Built snugly into this thinking is this important awareness:

HOW you respond to someone who

(or something that) is out of control

. . . IS WITHIN YOUR CONTROL.

And we know this because? Because every behavior — yours, your employees’, your customers and prospects — is a CHOICE. It’s just as easy to choose to make a situation easy as it is to choose to make it hard. It may require some conscious stress management effort but, in the end, leadership is measured by ability to gain results through control and responsiveness!

4.

LEARN as much as you can about yourself –your SELF– may be the single most important determinant of entrepreneurial leadership because it is the foundation, the cornerstone, of each of the above criteria, and of any others you might add to the list. Without knowing what makes you tick, you cannot pretend to understand others enough to be a true leader. TALK TO YOUR SELF. Oh, and remember to listen!

5.

USE hands-on specifics. Keep a journal. Date every entry every day. Separate facing pages into “What Happened” on the left and “How I felt” on the right. This discipline helps sharpen your skills to separate fact and observation from opinion and feelings. Write, draw, diagram, paste photos, spit, whatever floats your boat. It’s YOUR journal.

Attend group and individual “personal and professional growth and development”-type discussion and counseling sessions. Take advantage of local adult education programs that focus on self-expression — from giving speeches and stand-up presentations to writing or painting or photography or music or handicraft courses. DISCOVER YOUR SELF!

 # # #

“There’s no business like small business

It makes economies grow

Everything about it is revealing

Got everything that customers want now

Nowhere could you get that happy feeling

When you make a sale-with-service vow”

(With There’s No Business Like Show Business adaptation apologies to Irving Berlin)

Like Broadway without lights, imagine America with no small business. We have thrived as a nation because of small business. Small business employs the vast majority of workers in this country, and stimulates the U.S. economy more than all the nation’s giant corporations put together!

ALL things great that happen in business

happen first in small business.

Entrepreneurs deserve the credit for our existence as a people. They brought us (and continue to bring us) to our senses. They made (and continue to make) the freedom of our daily lives happen. Our military forces deserve the credit for keeping our existence free.

Yet neither finds favor in Washington? Or, in fact, with a great many state and local governments?

Why do you think this is?

Government people are charged with regulating business but rarely if ever have enough business experience to even understand the consequences of their regulations. If, in fact, they were entrepreneurs to begin with, they would never have ended up in stultifying government careers.

What more poignant example could there be than the U.S. Postal Service . . . dying a long, painful death since 2008 (at taxpayer expense!)?

Show me a single entrepreneur who thinks that the way to make more money and compete with Fed Ex and UPS et al is to reduce services, close down basic operations, and raise prices. Please. The Postal Service is a shameful waste and an ideal example of everything that’s wrong with our government and our economy.

• They take mailboxes off the streets because they don’t know how to make them profitable.
• They cut employee hours, close offices and stop Saturday delivery in many locations to save money.
• BUT they spend many millions of dollars in meaningless, empty advertising campaigns run by Madison Avenue ad agencies seeking to win awards instead of making sales. Clearly an example of what your Grandmother used to say about the right hand not understanding what the left hand was doing.

What’s really discouraging is that it doesn’t take—pardon the trite expression, but it says it best—a rocket scientist to figure out that the U.S. Postal Service is in shambles and that it’s ego-maniacal ad agency is certainly not the bail-out answer. It takes an entrepreneur.

Only an entrepreneurial-spirited soul has the wherewithal to fully understand and appreciate how to transform the Postal Service into a privatized, profitable business. Think this is unimportant stuff? Guess what? America’s government from the top down is agonizingly in need of reform and innovative new approaches if it is to survive.

This kind of thinking is not forthcoming from our nation’s leaders, and never will be until they are replaced en masse. You own and operate a small business? Are you willing to step up? It’s YOUR business, and ultimately your family, that’s on the line. Please do SOMEthing. Even if that just means “Talk it up!” Without small business, there IS no America!

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 Hal@BUSINESSWORKS.US        or comment below