Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

In the marketplace, it ain’t over ‘till it’s over

One of sports history’s greatest upsets happened at the 1975 U.S. Open tennis tournament at Forrest Hills, New York, when the Spaniard, Manuel Orantes, defeated legendary Jimmy Connors in straight sets (6-4, 6-3, 6-3), in Connors’ own back yard.

But that contest isn’t the best part of this story. Beating Connors to win a professional tennis Grand Slam tournament couldn’t have happened if the night before, against all odds, Orantes had not demonstrated enormous courage and extreme perseverance.

In the semi-final match between Orantes and Argentinian, Guillermo Vilas, the Spaniard was down two sets to one, five games to zip in the fourth set, and two match points in the sixth game. Vilas was serving triple match point to the seventh power.

If Orantes loses one more point in this game the match is over. And even if he battles back to win this game, he would then have to win the next six games in order to force the fifth set to determine who advances to the finals. Tennis fans know a score of 2-1, 5-0, 40-love, is an against-all-odds, improbable comeback scenario.

There’s another group that can appreciate the long odds Orantes faced—small business owners. Entrepreneurs are no strangers to the marketplace equivalent of triple match point to the seventh power. Here’s what it might look like: losing a major customer, having an unexpected expense, and a cash flow crisis resulting in a call from the bank, all in the same hour. The question is not whether a small business will have triple match point challenges—Orantes faced it only once, small businesses see it all the time—but how well the owner manages them.

Back to the tennis match: In perhaps one of the gutsiest display of guts in the history of pro tennis, Orantes overcame that triple match point to take the sixth game, and then proceeded to win the next six in a row to claim the fourth set 7-5. This courageous comeback not only produced the momentum to beat Vilas 6-4 in the final set and get Orantes into the finals with Connors, but, as you now know, it carried over to the next day when he became the 1975 U.S. Open champion by dispatching one of the greatest tennis champions of all time in straight sets.

Next time your business is down triple match point, remember that as long as the game isn’t over you can survive. As long as you have the desire to win you can succeed. As long as you believe in yourself you can gain the momentum to win today and become a champion tomorrow.

Even when you’re down triple match point, you can still win.

 

Find work you can love

Whether work is a blessing or a curse depends on what you are working on and your attitude about it. James Matthew Barrie, the Scottish novelist said, “Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.”

Many hard working entrepreneurs were once unproductive employees, but now, with their wagonhitched to their own star, work is the stuff of their dreams. Many productive employees – once unsuccessfully self-employed – now understand the blessings of employment, and become the most valuable of resources: the entrepreneurial employee who loves his or her work.

Work feeds our stomachs with food and our spirit with accomplishment. Work creates, produces, energizes and fulfills all things humans need for survival and happiness.

If work is not a blessing for you – whether owner or employee – the problem is not work itself, but the work you are doing. Lebanese novelist, Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Work is love made visible.”

Life is short. Keep searching until you find work you can love. I did.

It’s good to be a business owner

The military has produced many acronyms, one of which is RHIP, which stands for, “Rank Has Its Privileges.”

RHIP is the unofficial way to point out when a person accrues some benefit by virtue of their position. Mel Brooks’ character said it another way in his comedy “History of the World” with, “It’s good to be the king.”

In that spirit, here’s a new acronym for small business owners: OHIP, which stands for “Ownership Has Its Privileges.” Let’s look – sometimes with tongue-in-cheek – at a few business ownership privileges.

By virtue of being the owner, you have the privilege of working all you want. That means you’ve earned the right to work half-days. And as an added bonus, you get to choose which 12 of the 24.

If you so choose, you can brand the company with your name, which can be pretty rich ego food. But it also helps a plaintiff’s attorney – the one who represents the customer who “slipped and fell” in your business – to identify at least two of the co-defendants in the lawsuit: the legal entity and its founder.

When getting a bank loan, almost all small business owners are afforded the high honor of signing their name twice on loan documents. Having perfected the belt-and-suspenders approach, banks provide you with this special moment to acquire not only the business assets as loan collateral, but also your personal estate as a double guarantee.

But seriously folks, as Mel Brooks might say, here are a few real ownership privileges.

Structure your small business as a Sub Chapter S Corporation (S Corp) or a Limited Liability Company (LLC), both non-tax-paying entities, and accrue the benefit of having business income or losses pass through to shareholders or members, respectively. These two legal entities are handy because personal tax rates are typically lower than corporate rates, plus you avoid double taxation of dividends. Additionally, S Corps and LLCs allow owners the privilege of sheltering personal assets from liabilities that may befall the business.

Finally, there is something I call the stealth benefit of business ownership: owning the real estate your business operates in and leases from you.

For example: John Jones owns the property at 21 Enterprise Blvd. and leases it to John Jones, Inc. John receives rental income, tax advantages and asset appreciation. Plus, as long as it can be justified, John can raise the rent instead of giving himself a pay raise because, as passive income, it avoids payroll tax.

So are you taking advantage of all of the “privileges” of business ownership?

It’s good to be the owner.

Some thoughts on certainty

As we conduct the due diligence on what’s next for our business, we seek the information that will help us acquire knowledge and create conditions that minimize the risks and maximize the opportunity. After all, we want to be as certain as possible that our next step is the right one, don’t we?

That’s an interesting word, certain. Webster says it means fixed, settled, determined, not to be doubted. But it’s a word that isn’t often found in business plans.

The 19th century president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, said, “All business proceeds onbeliefs, or judgment of probabilities, and not on certainties.”

What do you think the marketplace – indeed, the world – would look like if business had been built more on certainties than beliefs? I think we would probably be closer to holding a stone ax on our hand than a smartphone.

It’s important to understand that on the entrepreneurial scale, each of us resides somewhere between the foolhardy and seekers of certainty. The challenge for entrepreneurs is to know when to seek certainty and when to move forward with our beliefs.

No position on this scale is better than another – the world needs all kinds of entrepreneurs. But understanding where we reside on the entrepreneurial scale helps us make better business plans.

Managing the three clocks of small business

“Time Is On My Side,” is the title of one of the classic rock ’n’ roll songs performed by Mick Jaggerand the legendary English band, The Rolling Stones.

This bold statement works in a song, but for small businesses … not so much. The reason is because of the complicated dynamic between time and our most precious asset, cash.

In the marketplace, there are actually three different clocks at work that every business uses: one for operating expenses, one for sales and one for cash. Let’s take a look at how these three clocks impact your small business.

Operating Expense Clock
Every month like clockwork, regardless of sales volume, cash collections or profitability, payroll must be met, rent must be paid, taxes must be remitted, plus phone, utilities, insurance bills, etc., must also be paid. The Operating Expense Clock is hardwired to Greenwich, England for accuracy within a nanosecond per millennium, and nothing stops it short of a global, thermonuclear holocaust coinciding with a direct hit from Haley’s comet.

The only way to influence this clock is through operating efficiencies – you won’t be billed for what you don’t buy.

Sales Clock
This clock is powered by the customer relationships you’ve created so sales result each month. You project when each sale will occur by qualifying prospects and attributing a clock to each potential transaction so that you can budget future sales volume and meet your cash requirements.

How the Sales Clock operates is completely logical and intuitive, but it only works in your favor when the purchase requirements of customers have been met.

Cash Clock
What is not logical or intuitive is the Cash Clock and its relationship with the other two. Think of it like this: Cash is to sales as snow is to cold: You can have cold without snow, but you can’t have snow without cold. You can have sales without cash receipts, but you can’t have cash receipts without sales. And expenses are like weather – you get some every day.

But what hits small business owners hard is that for every glitch in the mainspring of the Sales Clock, there are 1,000 potential sprocket failures that slow or stop the Cash Clock. Consequently, the Cash Clock requires constant maintenance.

Murphy’s Law lives inside the Cash and Sales Clocks, but the Operating Expense Clock is immune to this insidious law and rocks on just like The Rolling Stones.

Small business success requires understanding the three clocks of the marketplace.

Entrepreneurial patience = Success

If you were to identify synonyms for the word entrepreneur, you would come up with things like, risk-taker, industrious, visionary, perhaps even capitalist. But one word that is definitely NOT synonymous with entrepreneur is patient.

It simply is not in an entrepreneur’s DNA to wait for the world to bring him or her things. Entrepreneurs bring things to the world.

But having said this, entrepreneurs who enjoy long-term success have learned entrepreneurial patience. Even the most impatient entrepreneurial farmer understands that a corn harvest doesn’t take place until after the seeds are planted, the plants nurtured and a certain amount of time has passed.

Having entrepreneurial patience means knowing the difference between wasting time and energy and investing time and energy. Successful entrepreneurs are impatient about steps in a process — getting the seed, planting the seed, cultivating the plants, etc. — but not about accomplishing the ultimate goal of harvesting the result of the process.

One of the most prominent guarantees of failure in business is not understanding the simple wisdom of Renaissance author and father of deductive reasoning, Sir Francis Bacon, who said, “In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business and so ripen it by degrees.”

When you see someone trying to “sow and reap at once,” you’re witnessing failure waiting to happen. The only thing left to be determined is whether this failure will become a valuable lesson in entrepreneurial patience, or a bitter experience.

Whether in the field or in the marketplace, all endeavors are subject to natural laws, like the time it takes for a seed, or a project, to germinate and produce fruit. Successful entrepreneurs understand this and have learned how to employ their impatience prudently, as leverage for success.

Impatience is often synonymous with failure; entrepreneurial patience is usually synonymous with success.

Do you prefer achievement or success?

success conceptWhat’s the difference between success and achieve? Webster is unable to define either word without the other.

If there’s no difference, why don’t we use achieve more to describe wealth, fame, status, credentials, etc.? Perhaps it’s because success is a noun and achieve is a verb, and nouns are handier than verbs.

But grammar isn’t the only reason success is more popular. Even achievement, the noun cousin of achieve, isn’t as preferred when describing accomplishment.

Perhaps early on, success just had better PR than achievement. Today success is synonymous with celebrating at the finish line, holding the trophy or the check, while achievement has more of a work and effort connotation. But don’t you have more memories of the journey of work and effort toward your goals than of the high fives at the end?

Legendary actress, Helen Hayes (1900-1993), said, “Always strive for achievement; forget about success.” But are there benefits to focusing more on the virtues of achievement? My friend, Dr. Gene Griessman says there are.

In his audiotape, “The Path to High Achievement,” Griessman identifies common characteristics of high achievement and how they’re in evidence long before anyone flourishes a checkered flag. Here are five of those characteristics, each followed by my thoughts.

1. The power of self-knowledge.
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses may be the most important characteristic to seeking excellence. High achievers regularly critique themselves and make adjustments.

2. Time consciousness.
Like soybeans or gold, time is a commodity. And although not traded in any market, any billionaire will tell you that time is more precious than gold. High achievers don’t waste time.

3. Persistence.
Stick-to-itiveness is a real word and a handy noun coined in 1884, meaning dogged perseverance. High achievers personify stick-to-itiveness.

4. The power of decision.
Indecision is the Kryptonite of achievement. History has shown that an army with a poor battle plan boldly executed can defeat a greater force tentatively deployed.

5. Learn from mistakes.
No one likes failure, but high achievers recognize the value of setbacks and actually leverage them in the quest for excellence. Failure is the abiding harness mate of achievement, and high-achievers expect to always be hitched to both.

No one lives their life in the winner’s circle. Strive for success, but focus on achievement.