You can, you really can! I think running your own business gives you the tools and confidence to do just about anything you set your mind to. You look around and where everyone else sees problems you see solutions, you see a way to get from where you are to where you want to go – you can see the money. However a rather painful realization I’ve been dealing with is that you are ultimately just one person. You only have 24 hours in each day less the 5-8 hours you sleep every night (hopefully at least 7!!), your bound by the same limitations as every other mortal and as such so is your ability to do the things you want to do.
The second realization which paired with the first to create this blog title is that no business is ever done and there is really no limit on the amount of time and energy you can invest in one endeavor in order to ensure it is a successful one. That being said obviously the more endeavors you engage in the less resources you have to invest in the other. In addition “switching gears” bears a price as well – I’m not nearly as effective dividing my attention between a promotion task and a website task as I would be doing one or the other exclusively. Businesses that become the most successful do one or a few things and do them WELL! – that’s IT! I believe this fact of life has equal implications for the individual professional… despite my love of Emerson’s ranting about how men today are reduced to parts. If you chop your energy into too many endeavors at the same time you will fail, despite any degree of potential – no matter how fantastic, in all of them.
I need to remind myself of this daily – my goal for next year is to be involved in 1 primary endeavor with a light sprinkling of a 2nd and the year after to be focused exclusively on 1 endeavor. You can do whatever you want but you can’t do everything you want. Right now I’m cut as such: 60% Food Importation 30% Website Development 10% Event Promotions and Marketing. 3 is too many things for me to be doing but it’s not bad from cutting back from well over 10 different things I was working on and several other things I put on my plate that I simply ended up having no time to do late last year. I’ve managed to cut down on the event’s side these past 2-3 months by bartering Website services in exchange for event organizing services with my good friends at NetworkPRD.com in this way I’m able to consolidate my energies into two primary endeavors instead of a more even spread across 3. This is a step forward! – or at least I tell myself it is .
So if I had the power to spread a bit of wisdom over your cranium I would say find and focus on your value, wherever that may be, and develop it through a focused channel. Of course you’ll want to make sure your customers see the same value, and more importantly, are happy to compensate you in an agreeable fashion. Don’t spread yourself too thin over too many things, entrepreneurship has opened a lot of doors for me… too many… I have been forced to learn – in failure – how to courteously close some doors or pass it on to another when the timing is not right or the opportunity falls too far outside of my focus. Have the wisdom, courage, and resolve to execute on the rules you make for yourself in this regard. Who knows! maybe you’ll save a few more strands of hair from stress related fall out in the years to come .
I think we’re a ways off from that but in honor of the rising consumption of video content and my love of social media and it’s implications for marketing I present unto you this stat filled eye candy. Again if your experiencing internet blockage in China or other not-so-free-to-browse countries take a look at my How to Access Facebook on China article. Happy watching – social media is the future – deal with it!
Take a look at this video I found surfing around today – awesome and on point – this is what I’m talking about everyday when people inquire about social media and what to do about it! It’s legitamite, it’s real, and it’s here to stay, your not going to be able to get away with being a spectator for long – even here in China! Anyway have a look I thought it was good
If your in China and can’t access youtube (thanks GFWC!) please take a look at my “How to access Facebook in China” post – or if your exceedingly lazy you can directly download freegate – just unzip it on your desktop – double click and you should be good to go if your using IE or Chrome – if your using Firefox you’ll need to add the proxy to the plug in your using. No worries though if your using FF your probably smart enough to know how to do that all by yourself .
Know ‘em. Define ‘em. Make sure you reference them whenever your planning out important steps and decisions in your life personally and professionally. Take them into account when defining your goals – use them to guide you when you find yourself in confusing situations and examining new opportunities. Redefine them when necessary
These are a few of the things I tell myself when I think about priorities. What are my priorities in life right now? Well, let’s see these are basically them in their order of importance:
work (more specifically, developing this new food retailing business – developing website and online marketing business – developing my event and promotions business.)
health – My body is precious, it’s the only one I have and I need to take care of it so it will take care of me. I can’t perform my best at work if I don’t exercise enough and consume enough nutrients. This also includes taking into account sexual needs
emotional health – meaning my support system, family, friends, good friends, girl friends, etc. I think I have a unique appreciation of this priority. Many might see this as a subcategory under health but I think it is important enough to consider as a category all it’s own.
It’s been really tough for me to find a way to manage all of these priorities into the 16-19 hours I have each day. I’ve had to make sacrifices to health and emotional health for the sake of professional goals several times recently. Not getting enough sleep, neglecting my personal network of friends, eating poorly and inconsistently, not joining in social events I normally would attend. We all have to do these things sometimes I suppose, I just hope that with proper planning in the next several months I’ll figure out a basic routine and schedule that will allow me to accommodate each of these priorities to a tolerable degree. That will inevitabley equate to a lot more “smart” working across the board and more time devoted to health and emotional wellness
Planning
I think I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again, my life more and more, my value I see more and more clearly is in putting together solutions. In planning out solutions using the skills I have and more and more the people in my network that have complementary skills that allow me to piece together a complete solution for my customers problems. The biggest piece of the puzzle in my current retail business is really just planning – creative problem solving and planning. How do we get from A to B, how do we measure our success along the way, what are the defined deliverables and What are their DEADLINES.
Deadlines has become a bit of a thing with me, I’ve been bad, I still am bad with them. So I’m focusing on adding them to all of my planning. I’ve migrated from the world of might and maybe into can and will but one must also apply a time-stamp and date to each of these actionable items to put together a concise and executable plan. “Sure I’d be happy to meet up with you to discuss how we can work together…” but when?. “Of course I can do that for you, if that’s what you need I’ll take care of it for you… by what time?. The process of planning in and of itself identifies and eliminates some problems but I’ve found within adding the time constraints you are forced to narrow down to a detailed enough level where you can eliminate any of the critical barriers that would require my thinking in one strike as opposed to when they came up later on during the execution of the planning.
Putting time-lines in also forces you to define actionable pieces of your plan where you may have overlooked them before. I love actionable items – throughout the last year I’ve found myself harboring a growing disdain for the ambiguous, purely conceptual, and inactionable. Sure they can be interesting and thought provoking – but I suppose I’m too focused on plowing forward in the world of small business.. I need to get my hands in the dirt. I can’t frolic in the clouds as much as I might want to most of the time. More and more of my energies are working on getting things done, getting deals made, and solving people’s problems in their terms.
Moral of the mini rant – I need to spend time developing my own planning ability and process!
Time Management
This word always pops up when at some point during the night when I’m pulling an all-nighters. Yea sure I can choose whenever I want to sleep and define my own schedule – I’m an entrepreneur after all right? Then again if my customers are unhappy and I don’t get paid I can’t put food in my mouth and living in a cardboard box, though cost effective, is a downgrade in living standard I’m not comfortable with. So if I get an excited/agitated e-mail or phone call in the early evening from a customer that requires my immediate and extended attention to fix – well then I’m going to go ahead and compromise my schedule to make them happy. I’m learning, I’m not particularly satisfied with my coping with the demands of customers at this point – in terms of time management – but I think I’m moving forward. I should note, I think it is necessary for me to be a bit unstable now – my business is just starting out, I need to ensure my current customers are happy and will bring me solid referrals. My current customers are the life blood of my website biz’s success right now.
However generally speaking I think I need to focus on developing my self-directed time management skill. Too much and too often I let the things that pop up during the day define how I will spend my time. O! My cousin wrote me an e-mail about a trip to HK that requires attention today – I’ll deal with that now! O! one of the computers in the office is having a printing problem – let me take a look at that. A phone call from a client to reschedule a meeting, and a quick request to modify something on a current project. Have to communicate that back to my outsourcing partner. I lose half hours and hours in this way constantly throughout the day. I’m aware that many of the things I do are not what I’d call.. “critical tasks” the things I write down at the beginning of the day as most important to take care of – and I’m SLOWLY getting better at saying “I’ll take a look at that ____” instead of now in cases where it’s unimportant or my relationship is particularly strong and I can get away with it. I still falter quite a bit when it comes to customers though – I need to show them a sense of urgency in all that I do for them so breaking schedules on their account is something I don’t see stopping in the near future.
I think it’s about time for me to hire a part-time assistant as well..
Some reflections on negotiating business relationships
I have to be careful, each day I believe I’m getting better and better at discerning people’s position and desire in business and putting pieces together in ways where incentives are aligned and risks are sufficiently managed in so far as each party is concerned. However, I still find myself occasionally in a position where I feel like I’ve wasted my time with someone I’m vetting. Maybe it’s when I’m most engaged with my own side of the equation that I falter – though maybe it’s of little concern as I’ve only just recently gotten out on my own. Learning to stand on ones own two feet by means of my own endeavors is no easy nor small task.
Recently I have been in negotiations with a language training center to involve my language activities into their marketing mix in return for an invesetment. Things are looking iffy at this point and here are some of the lessons I’ve pulled out of the endeavor thus far:
Find the decision maker
Yes of course! Well who doesn’t know that! well like many text based understandings this lesson has found it’s solidification in a mistake. I originally began conversations with this company through a contact I had made through a networking event several months ago – what I failed to discern immediately was that she was not infact the key decision maker in their business, a partner yes, but the real ‘driver’ of the business – No. If your talking to the wrong person your just creating more wind between ears in my opinion, if you want to get something done you need to get to the key person making things happening and making the hard and fast decisions about the company.
Listen, THINK, Discern THEIR position
Again not rocket science but something I believe you always need to be developing a real keen ear and eye for. Deducing intention, desire, and position not just through what people you are investigating doing business with say but what they don’t say and how they word it. What kind of person are they? Where are they in their career? What do they want to accomplish with their business? How do you fit into their goals?… and if you don’t why would they do business with you? The last peice fell a little hard on my head during our last meeting. It was quite clear to me at that point that the real decision maker, who was now in front of me, would not have agreed to the conditions under which I began a ‘trial’ relationship with these guys.
You really need to be able to put your agenda aside, completely, and focus on building an understanding of that key decision maker and their business. I forgot to do this sufficiently, I think I filled in a lot of the blanks myself early on because I knew what this company was, their size, their service, their position in the market – more or less. However I did not know the heart, mind, and passion of the key decesion maker and I did not sufficiently consider how she would like to work together and what problems they were currently facing. Do I have a marketing product to offer them with fantastic ROI potential? I believe so. Is that relevant to the key decision maker? Let me stress this – it depends entirely on their position and of course your relationship with him/her. Small business is messy – I have a firm understanding of this. Time is always on short supply and catering to any agenda but your own is damn near implausible. I forgot this in my blind ambition to reveal how valuable a proposition I was making them. I pushed about how valuable what I had was instead of investigating what their current plights and agenda were for the business
Greetings, Dave here - trying my best to get ahead by finding my way in China. Getting my hands dirty daily in the world of online marketing and promotions. Hope you find my rantings and learnings of business and the new world around me helpful and useful in some way :). O ya - and drink some red wine - it's good for you!
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