Category: Mindset

My family had a neighbor with ground that my dad farmed when I was a kid. The neighbor died in a tragic accident and, the following year, his son decided that he wanted to become a farmer.

My dad told him that it wasn’t likely going to work and that he’d be better off acting as landlord than trying to farm the ground himself. The neighbor’s son decided to go ahead with it anyways, convinced he could figure it out.

My dad gave him some initial pointers, but mostly he withheld guidance and sat back and waited for the neighbor’s son to fail.

Farming is resource intensive, skill intensive, high stakes gambling (and, in my opinion, boring.) It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, because by the time you figure it out, you’ll be long out of business.

Not surprisingly, the neighbor’s son quit farming after a year. What did surprise my dad was that rather than give the contract for his ground back to my father, he gave it to another neighbor who had provided advice and guidance when my dad hadn’t.

“When I started ignoring the advice and doing what I thought I should do is when things really started to kick into gear for me,” my friend John told me in between bites on a chicken wing. We were talking shop in a hip, Korean BBQ restaurant in downtown Portland last Wednesday.

I had shared some recommendations I received from a consultant last year concerning a goal we both have and John doubted the advice because it ran counter to his plans.

In the past ten years, I’ve spent around $100,000 in training, education, and working with consultants and coaches.

I would have to agree with John that it’s a bit of a fool’s errand.

There were no post-education inflection points where I learned something that was transformational to the business. In fact, there were several things I learned that when I applied them worked against my goals.

There’s a Catch-22 situation that entrepreneurs often find themselves in. My agency is in it right now.

We’re trying to penetrate the professional association market. The problem is that associations will only work with agencies who have already worked with associations- especially on association specific software. To get new association clients, you have to have worked with association clients. Catch-22.

This limits the competition in the market to just a handful of existing agencies who have been doing this work for twenty to thirty years. “Insular” is a phrase I’ve heard thrown around a lot by consultants who service the space.

It’s a great market- if you’re on the inside. But how do outsiders like us get on the inside?

There’s a tactic that I’ve employed in the past that I call, “Folding Nothing.” You start with nothing, and you fold it in half. What you end up with is something a little more than nothing. You fold it again and it becomes more substantial yet. Within a few more folds you have something and you keep working with that something until you have what you need.

That reads like the inscrutable, seemingly nonsensical Tao Te Ching. But it’s not so esoteric (or profound) in practice, it’s just investment, sacrifice, and risk taking.

“They’d pay $60,000 to $120,000, and really sixty is on the very low end,” Wes told me. I had just asked him his ballpark price range for a website redesign for the target market we’re positioning our Steward brand around. With this range, he validated the price point I expected to hit on these projects.

I had cold emailed Wes asking for his advice. The goal with approaching him was to both form a connection with someone who could refer us, part of our marketing strategy, and also to learn about the market to address risk in our growth plan. As a veteran technology consultant in our target market, he met both goals.

In May, for a six-week cycle, I worked on a second version of our growth plan. If you’re not familiar, a growth plan is similar to a business plan, but for an established business that is making a strategic push to grow.

Over the six weeks, I did a lot of thinking, analysis, and research. In the process of developing the growth plan, I tweaked several of our systems and existing strategies. Due to that planning, I’m smarter today than I was previous to working on the growth plan.

I work in six week sprints and at the close of every sprint I self-prompt with some questions on how the six weeks went. During a recent personal retreat, I reviewed my answers for the past year.

Here are some excerpts from that:

• The challenge is that I’m always ambitious,so I stepped over the lines I set up…
• I filled my mornings with tasks and meetings that weren’t essential and ended up working on important work in the margins…
• I re-realized that protecting focus is a primary strategy for enabling my strengths and to do that I need to limit my commitments…
• I didn’t have time to chase sales because I was doing client or personal stuff…
• … competing priorities have created a habit where I note I need to do something, but don’t always make it a priority….

When I failed at completing an objective, much of the time the reasons why had to do with my drive.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t getting stuff done, it was that I was doing too much. In and out of work. Objectives weren’t completed not because I wasn’t moving, but because they were eclipsed by other objectives.

In my Strengthsfinder profile I have a couple very closely scored strengths: achievement and strategic. Achievement is a reflection of drive and a focus on getting things done. All the goals I pursue and commitments I make are a manifestation of that drive.

I’ve noticed that people often use discipline and willpower interchangeably. They say something like, “She’s incredibly disciplined,” but what they mean is, “She’s strong willed enough to keep on track with her goals.”

This false equivalent is an issue because willpower is an expensive resource that quickly erodes as time passes.

Discipline, on the other hand, concerns consistently meeting your commitments. You could do it through willpower, but that’s only one option and not one you can rely on.

Discipline matters in a business because it affects the quality of your execution. You can have a brilliant strategy and a great culture, but if there isn’t discipline in execution, the business doesn’t progress.

Just like in your personal life, you could attempt to maintain discipline in execution through force of will, but the chaos of your environment will naturally break it apart.

I have a long list of backlogs in my to-do list tracker. These are full of things that I didn’t get around to doing:

• 4/12 Micro Distributing SOP
• 4/29 Tefi’s Admin questions
• 5/10 Schedule backup and shut down of Pantheon
• And many more…

In your business, these tasks will focus your attention on the here and now. Many of them have to be done or there will be consequences. Of the items above, two of them are important and when I found them in my backlogs, I thought, Crap! How did I lose track of that!?

There’s always lots to do.

The gut reaction to this pressure is to focus your attention on the here and now. This introduces a problem though: what got you here won’t get you there.

I spoke with Melissa, an owner-operator out of Chicago today. She runs a management and events planning company for associations. She’s a 10,000 Small Business (10KSB) Alumni like me.

If you’re unfamiliar with 10KSB, it’s a small business accelerator funded by Goldman Sachs and operated by Babson University. It’s a three-to-six month program that provides education and access to capital and is organized around the participant creating a comprehensive growth plan.

She told me, “I went through 10KSB in 2013 and expected that my business would just take off after I created my growth plan. But actually, nothing much happened until 2019.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I had to sort of settle into all the ideas. Then in 2019 things seemed to catalyze and the business did take off. I’ve been busy ever since.”

We get used to things pretty quickly. What was new becomes normal within weeks.

A challenge that this introduces is that it’s hard to assess things. Most of the time, progress comes in inches and you get used to your expansion in capabilities very quickly.

When you sail, you might be moving at a steady clip, but it doesn’t feel like you’re making progress because of the static features of the environment and your distance from the shore.

This is why it’s so critical to measure. Measuring enables us to have visibility into where we are and what still needs to be worked on.

No featured image today- jamming!