Small Business Growing

Archive for the 'Personal Productivity' Category

Books and Business: The Difference Between Success and Failure?

To survive and prosper, small business owners need a sharp sense of what correlates with success and failure for their own business.

Some success and failure factors are nearly universal, while others may be particular to your industry’s product or service.

Here is one factor that I’d nominate for the universal category:  a mindset of continual learning.

An obvious but overlooked business success factor: your personal learning.

Have you met many successful business owners who are able to survive the ups and down of cycles, that are not serious learners?  I have not.

People learn in different ways.  Whatever your preferred mode of learning, the key is to be in a state of constant learning.  Being more skilled in this state of mind and way of being will change your business life in a big way.  And it will add a deeper level of survivability and prosperity to your bottom line.

Here is a simple way to enhance this learning mindset:  Read at least one book per month.  When I say “read” I don’t necessarily mean cover to cover.  Just pull out the author’s main idea.  Get the core concept out, and let it be part of your ongoing repertoire of tools and ideas.

If this is not currently part of your business discipline, you may be amazed at how valuable this practice can be.  By the way, those Amazon book reviews can be valuable sources of insight on the quality and content of business books.  They will help you select books that others have found useful.  Some of these reviews are sufficiently thorough that you may feel you don’t need to order the book because the reviewer has provided such a good summary of the key ideas.

If some form of structured learning is not currently part of your business life, give this “one book a month” practice a shot.

Getting habitual exposure to high quality business thinking will add immeasurably to your growth potential.

Where to start?  A book I am currently enjoying, that is brimming with insights on how great strategy is formulated, is “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy” by Richard p, Rumelt.  This is a terrific explanation of how good – and bad  -  strategy is formulated by an author who speaks from many years of practical experience.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Small Business Growth: Getting Control of “Overwhelm”

A question was recently  asked by one of our Entrepreneur’s Journey participants. (The journey is a faith-based educational program for small business owners in the Northern Virginia and DC area).

“How do you deal with that feeling of being overwhelmed…having too much to do and not getting it done?”

Good question.  Most of us in the world of small business have to deal with this challenge.

You might not solve this problem in a day,  but you can invest 30 minutes to get a start that can be life changing.

The first thing is to not accept “overwhelm” as inevitable, and schedule a 30 minutes block to get started on a strategy that will move you toward an increasing sense of control.

Work through three primary dimensions of your business:
• your physical space
• your mental space
• your daily habits

Our Physical Environment becomes automatic and taken for granted.  But the level of order, clarity, simplicity, and ease of use of your physical space has everything to do with how efficiently work is done.  The order and refinement of all the things you need to use to accomplish work has everything to do with personal performance and personal emotion.

POINT:  get your personal space in a state of extreme order and neatness, maintain it, and watch what good things start to happen.

Our Mental Space includes all kinds of “stuff” that sits in our minds and hearts.  The point here is to reduce and simplify that mass of perceptions and feelings down to a few key areas of our work that are the focal points.  You will have more that three things in your work life, but identify the three really important areas of your work life that will be at the top of your list.

POINT:  Radically reduce the mental clutter, by getting clear about the three most important things in your business at this time.

Our Daily Habits determine how the day plays out.  Sure, stuff happens that you can’t control, and things arise that you must respond to.  That is small business life.  But our habitual ways of doing work determine a good deal of our productivity, as well as how “overwhelmed” or “in control” we feel.

POINT:  Take a good look at how your daily habits are helping or hurting.  Some habits are like fuel on the fire of “overwhelm” – such as jumping from one task to another before finishing anything – and other habits will start to reduce “overwhelm” and increase a sense of positive control.  For example, starting the day with a clear image of what we will focus on, and staying with it, in spite of potential distractions.

Overwhelm is not a condition of nature.  It can be reversed.  It just takes starting somewhere.

[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers.  Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]

Achieving Extreme Organization: Start a Productivity Transformation with Simplicity (2)

We underestimate the impact our physical work space has on our motivation and personal productivity.

We develop habits and accept them as “normal,” but some habits can severely constrain our level of productivity, and personal satisfaction.

Here is the simple – yet overlooked – point I’d like to make in this brief post:  There is a very good chance you have way too much “stuff” in your work space, and if you do it can really slow you down, on many levels.

The structure, logic, and basic order of our physical space has everything to do with how productive we can be on any given day.

Where do you start if you want to get a more functional, deliberate, and productive design for you work space?

Start by asking and answering this question:  What can I throw out to make the space lean, more visually coherent, and eventually far more productive?

Then start somewhere…anywhere.

Pick just one focused area of your work space..maybe one file in one filing cabinet (physical or digital, and eventually both), and get that one area totally cleaned out and organized.

Then work through the whole space, one small area at a time.

Toss everything you can, being aware of legal needs to hold some docs.

Removing the things you do not actually use in the performance of work, is one first step in applying design principles to your personal performance.  The intent is a design of space and a discipline of maintenance that contributes to flow, speed, ease, organization, rapid retrieval of documents and other “things” you use to do work,  and that great feeling of being in control.

Tossing is so obvious and simple that it is often overlooked, but know that there is good theory and more than enough sophisticated thinking behind the design of uncluttered work space.

Clutter in your work space is like carrying extra weight on your shoulders.  Remove it and feel the liberation.

[Fran O'Neal is a small business owner, consultant and researcher who helps business owners use a remarkable business growth system.  He is also the founder of The Entrepreneur's Journey, an educational ministry for small business owners.]

A Small Business Must Do: Living Beyond The Fear Envelope

When fear is properly understood and placed within its right context, it can be a friend.

But for many people, fear sucks the life and energy right out of their spirit.

For small business owners, fear can bring a business down.

Fear does not have to be a destructive force, but the reality is that many people live with a low grade anxiety that takes the form of negative images that replay in their mind like memories of a frightening movie.

Fear is common to the human condition, but as small business owners we can learn to better channel it so that it serves a constructive, rather than a destructive purpose.

Use this short article to assess whether you have unhealthy fear in your life, and consider what strides your business could make if you were living with less irrational fear.

Conduct a life experiment in which you ask and answer the question,

How different would my life be if I lived each day, with fear only serving a positive purpose?”

If you direct attention on just how much fear you have, you may discover that it is playing more of a role than you realized.  Like many thought patterns, fearful thinking can become so automatic that it starts to be invisible. We become automatic in our reactions, and the fear sits below the surface, but it impacts how we think, feel, and act.

As with so many positive changes in our life, it starts with getting conscious and fully aware of how we are thinking.

What impact does fear have?  In its negative form, fear reduces our sense of confidence, undercuts our ability to take action (fear paralyzes), gives us a distorted view of reality, and puts us in an anxious state where we are liable to over-react to life’s setbacks.

What is the path toward a more fear-less life?

Start with the experiment mentioned above.  Just take one fear that is present in your life, and assess what impact it is having on how you think and feel.  How would your life change if you could live without the negative presence of this fear?

We’ll discuss a few simple strategies to reduce or eliminate irrational fear next time, but just getting conscious of it is a great start.  You may find that simply becoming aware of fear starts to get it off “automatic pilot” and reduces its presence.

Small Business Productivity: Achieving Extreme Organization (1)

As a small business owner, your level of personal productivity is absolutely critical to the ongoing success of your enterprise.

What are the factors that determine personal productivity?  How do you take your own productivity to its next level?  How important is the example you set to the other members of your team?

In a series of short posts. I’d like to explore a concept I call Extreme Organization.  There is nothing radical about the approach, but you may find some useful ways of thinking about your own current level of productivity.  My main thesis is simple:  you can significantly enhance your personal productivity by establishing a set of systems that organize the content and execution of your work.

By “personal productivity” I am referring to the impact and output of your work.  At least in my definition, this includes three primary dimensions:

• WHAT you work on – the content of your work.

• HOW you work on it – the systems and methods you use to do the work.

• WHY you do what you do – your set of practical and personal motivations for doing what you do.

All three are important.  But before we get to each, I suggest a good place to start is with a little ASSESSMENT.

You can use the model above – WHAT? – HOW? and WHY? to take a quick look at how you are doing now.

As you go through your normal work routines over the next few days, bring your WHAT? and HOW? to full awareness. Get very conscious of WHAT you are doing, especially compared to what you are not doing.  As you focus your attention on how your day flows and WHAT you work on, awareness of your own productivity starts to heighten.

Along with the WHAT?, start to take a closer look at HOW you actually get things done.  It is amazing what conscious attention on HOW we work can start to surface.  For example, we may become more aware of the number of interruptions  – from self or others – that break into our work flow and slow down productivity in several ways.

Let’s talk about the WHY? later.  For now, just take a careful look at your WHAT? and HOW?.  Make your own observations on what you like and dislike.  The simple act of starting the self-assessment process can lay the ground work for some significant enhancements in your personal productivity.

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