I took a class on mountaineering knots last night. One of the knots they introduced was the truckers hitch. It’s a knot used to tighten a line, where you put a loop in the line and then wrap it around an object and back through the loop, using it as an anchor to take the slack out of the rope. The rope running back through itself creates a “Z.” Our instructor pointed at this and said, “3 to 1 mechanical advantage. If you practice this at home, don’t accidentally pull your couch across the living room.”

One of the abstract ideas I often employ is leverage. How to create leverage in this situation, in that situation, etc. etc.

Leverage is all about positioning. It’s the arrangement of objects to amplify force. The rope doesn’t inherently have a 3 to 1 mechanical advantage, but if you arrange it in a certain way, the force on one end is exponential.

If you were going to arrange yourself in your business, with the intention of creating leverage for yourself, what would that look like?

What would be the activities you would do? Wouldn’t do? When and were would you do them?

Featured image is the Truckers Hitch knot using the Alpine Butterfly for the loop. Used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Image by Mindbuilder – Own work.

“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.”