Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.