Category: Mindset

“They had these really ambitious growth goals with no connection to reality. Two months later they’re laying people off and asking me to work less,” one of my peers told me over a steaming bowl of ramen.

It was almost a year ago that he sold his company and hired on as the acquiring company’s chief marketing officer.

“They think they can meet those goals without marketing?” I asked him.

He shook his head, “I guess. With no leads, they’re going to have to do a hell of a lot of outbound sales.”

As entrepreneurs we take on hard goals. But there still has to be a plan to bring those goals into fruition. Otherwise the goal isn’t a goal, it’s a wish.

Featured image is Zawba’a or Zoba’ah, the jinn-king of Friday. Used under public domain.

“It’s just like business, you have to problem solve it,” Mike told me. It was a dismal Saturday morning, and we roamed the top of a squat house with an earthen roof picking blueberry vines from the soil. I was running a volunteer service event at a YMCA camp for my Rotary group. Mike was responding to my observation that only two Rotarians stepped up, despite more than a month’s worth of promotion.

There are a class of problems that are innate to entrepreneurship. They’re problems that you can’t read a book to get an answer to. They’re problems that few can give you advice on.

This is because they’re contextual and shifting. Unbounded and murky.

Surmounting them requires considerable technical skill. But perhaps as importantly, it requires optimism that you will figure it out.

“Success is the ability to move from one failure to another without loss of enthusiasm.”

Featured image is Honest Abe in his 40’s when he was a “prairie lawyer.” Used under public domain.

“It took me three to five years of sustained effort to turn a profit and the board just doesn’t have that sort of patience.”

This was the assessment of an entrepreneur I spoke with last week who sold a company that they’d built over twenty years and hired on with the company that purchased it. We were discussing a new project the purchasing company had assigned to them and the unrealistic expectations of their board.

If there’s one virtue I lack, it’s patience. Like many entrepreneurs I’m aggressive. I’m energized by accomplishing objectives.

Business results rarely conform to this style. You can’t make seedlings grow any faster than they’re designed to do, even if you drown them in water and bake them under a heat lamp.

Which isn’t to say that there is something magical about time. If the entrepreneur I spoke with was to hop in a time machine and returned to advise their younger self, it wouldn’t take three to five years to turn a profit.

But even with perfect knowledge, many initiatives still take time. Relationships take time to establish, brands take time to penetrate the market, trends take time to develop, and opportunities bubble into existence over the course of months and years. We need to be aware of this and be patient.

And yet, there’s also a higher level ability to master as entrepreneurs: to anticipate and work around initiatives that take deep time investments. Unlike seedlings, we’re inside the business and can make direct interventions to how it develops. Just because many things need time in the environment, doesn’t mean that you should accept that waiting is inherent to the game.

Be only as patient as you have to be.

Featured image is Richard of Wallingford pointing to a clock, his gift to St Albans Abbey. Used under public domain.

One of the common refrains you’ll here in business, is that you need to work “on the business rather than in the business.” For many small business owner operators this is a challenge because of all the other needs involved in running a business. It’s the tyranny of the urgent, where what is most pressing overshadows what’s most important. One of the methods I’ve developed to combat this is with two lines.

My week starts with planning and thinking. In that process, I reconnect to the larger goals I have for the business. For me, these take the form of 6 week objectives that support annual goals.

In my journal, I draw two horizontal lines.

Under the left line I put the projects that support delivering value to our clients. These are operational needs. They’re functions that at some level of growth I would hire for. They’re “working in the business.”

My mum and I are trying to attend a writers workshop together sometime this summer. Because there are so many writers applying to these workshops, you have to compete to attend (“juried in.”) I spent all Friday writing fiction to meet a submission deadline and my mum sent me a message Saturday that she had done the same. She said that she didn’t know if we’d get in, but just the process of editing and revising her writing sample had engendered growth. Even though it was tiring, stressful, and a hassle.

What we work on in business often comes with challenges. Good goals are challenging, people are challenging, shifts in the market are challenging.

However, there’s a higher form of challenges. These call forth our best in the form of new capability.

To give an example, last January I was heading out on vacation just as everyone was leaping into the work of the new year. I set a challenge of getting six weeks of objectives completed in the four days before I left and without grinding day and night.

On Sunday, I hit a wall with my six week objectives. I need to get a LinkedIn campaign going to warm up a cold email list. When I set the goal to do this, I had intended to promote content in the form of an article (boosting a post to this cold audience.) What I realized on Sunday was that I needed to promote an asset to the list instead.

This meant I had to write and design an ad for some sort of offer that I would create. That meant that the finish line on my six week objectives were further away than I had planned. I had two days to engage a designer, plan, and promote something. And I needed to integrate this work with all the other commitments I have on my plate.

“Well, that’s not realistic,” I thought, “I may need to set this aside and say that new information made it impossible for the deadline.”

This is very reasonable.

It’s also a predictable threshold you encounter when you set any goal that’s going to stretch you.

“If only I had:”
We whine about our constraints
Then magic unfolds

Featured image is a print from Yoshitoshi’s Hundred Aspects of the Moon. Bashō meets two farmers celebrating the mid-autumn moon festival. The haiku reads: “Since the crescent moon, I have been waiting for tonight.”