Automate your Business
Strategic Thinking for the Solo Business Owner
As more and more “regular” folks move online to start businesses, it is quite apparent that not all of them think about their businesses in ways that will help them to become successful.
And you really can’t blame them for this thinking . . . after all, very few entrepreneurs are involved in some type of formal owner-operated business education prior to setting up their shop.
Typically, Joe Average (and I’m not using that name as a “slight” or criticism in any way) decides that his fortune lies in being his own boss. He’s had it with working for other people and wants to try his hand at self employment.
Joe hears or reads that there is a lot of money to be made on the Internet. And because the barriers to Internet solo business are minimal, he ventures online to make his fortune selling ____________ (whatever it may be.)
Joe has never had any training about business, marketing, selling, customer relationships, product sourcing, business law, bookkeeping, taxation, business finance, and on and on.
Typically (in an average year), 96% of all new businesses will fall by the wayside within the first five years of operation.
Is it any wonder? What training and preparation has Joe done to become one of the four in 100 that survive in successful business creation?
I’m not saying that there has never been a person successful “right out of the gate” with a home business or a small shop downtown. There are exceptions to this rule just like there are exceptions to most every rule mankind has developed.
If Joe is like most new business owners, he thinks like most of us do . . . that is, without the insight and experience of what it takes to create and operate a profitable business.
You see, unlike the great business creators and developers of our day, most of us average folks don’t think systematically and strategically about business. We tend to piecemeal things together without a clear vision of the “big picture.”
The average person will create a business with the goal of making $100 per day, or $500 per week, $2000 per month, or $50,000 per year.
They dream of an income level that will cover their wants and needs (even if it’s supplemental to their other full-time income) and then try to figure out how to grow their sales to that level.
As a result of this thinking, short-term strategies and reactive tasks fill their business day. They have a to-do list a mile long, and every one of those items has been segmented into stand alone mini-tasks that can be checked off one at a time upon completion.
This type of business focus tends to be non-strategic, live-in-the-moment, deal with one crisis after another, the day is never long enough, activities and projects that are typically very inefficient and disjointed.
Owners of highly successful companies, on the other hand, tend to view their businesses as strategic, efficient, systemized machines where all the various parts (people or departments) work in harmony to produce well designed products and services over and over again.
Their businesses have systems in place that are sustainable and enduring. They can create a high quality proprietary product then replicate that effort over and over again a million times. They can sustain their effort and grow their output. They can develop new and associated products then fold these into the system for long-term value.
These business owners are growing an asset (their systems, property and people) that will live beyond their own lifetime.
When I compare the solo business owner mindset with that of large profitable business owner’s thinking, it seems to me there is an important difference – the solo operator has a very small and short-term horizon about his business compared to the large business owner who’s view expands well beyond daily tasks and reactionary techniques.
So what kind of thinking are you doing about your business and its future?
To your online business success,
Steve Browne
www.SteveBrowneDirect.com