“When I’m in debt I’ll cut back”

Wrong.  Too late.

Diversions

Because the “Hard Work” is hard, (hard to face, hard to execute) we allow ourselves to get distracted and diverted.  Busywork, buying things, food, television, alcohol, hobbies, sports.  And after a while we say “I can’t or don’t have time” to do what we know we must, to significantly change the course of our lives and businesses for the better.

What’s most important to you?  

Peace is where the options are.

You can’t be a good leader if you are crazed.  Great leaders remain calm outwardly, and most of the time, inwardly as well.

Peace is where the options are.

Unmet expectations

Frustration and disappointment is when what happens doesn’t match what we expected to happen.  Maybe it was what happened that was a problem.  But often, it’s just that we were overly optimistic when we set our expectations (goals) about the day, week, month, or event.  

If we can stop playing the “I’m so disappointed” song in our heads, we can end our suffering aboout it.

Tomorrow’s another day.  Try again.

The “Hard Work”

In a business of any size, there are people doing many different things.  There are people using their muscles – working hard.  There are people doing transactional work and keeping things organized.  There are people planning the work of others and watching over them.

In an entirely different category, there is a tiny minority doing the “hard work”.  They are experienced, skilled and care about it all.  They are thinking, observing and understanding the organization close enough that their intuition can guide them.  They take on any challenge, any problem.  They are creating or commissioning the systems, structure and innovations to see to the businesses’ survival, improve it, and move it forward.  Often they are moving out of their personal comfort zones to do what nobody else can or will.  They are doing the “hard work”.

If there is nobody in the business doing the “hard work”, it will languish and fail.  And the degree that the people doing the “hard work” do it well, determines the fortune of the business.

What about your business?

“Don’t be evil” is dead

When Google first came out they were the fresh new upstart to battle big bad Microsoft who was defending the “monopoly” in court.  Google extolled – “Don’t be evil”.

I’m calling it.  Those days are gone.  Google controls internet search and video and therefore is controlling where we end up and what we are shown.  They do a lot of great things for free, sure.  Increasingly, they have found so many ways to put ads everywhere and charge us businesses for the traffic, rather than primarily reward good content.  They do that too, but it’s become their secondary priority.

Their first priority is to get you to click on something they make money off of – and they seed these links everywhere on your screen.  At first it was the top three links and they were shaded.  Now it’s the top, side, and bottom.  In video they make you watch their commercials before they will show you the video you want to see.  And in Search they change their algorithms to punish “cheaters” (sounds good) and then make exceptions for junk listing sites to come up on their searches because the company splits their revenue with Google.  Meaning they have found a way to make money off “Organic” results, and you don’t realize it.

It’s their service and they can do whatever they want – and we still use it.  Fine.  But “Don’t be evil” has turned into “See no evil”.

Too Many Calories to Burn Each Month

 If you HAD to cut back any and all expenses in your business so it could be healthier, you could pay your bills on time and make an acceptable profit, you’d find lots of things to cut.  

Why are you waiting until you have to? 

Make it easy

What can you do to take the complexity out of your business? – To make it easy for employees to learn what to do, and why and how?  – To make it easy for your customers to understand what you offer and why it’s important to them?

Genius lies not in making things more complex, but it in simplifying them.

Unstuck

“I keep so and so because there is nobody else that can do what they do”.

This is false.  And how false it is depends on how much time you put into recruiting.

What people (and things) cost

Spending a dollar in business cost way more than a dollar. 

How much does it cost to pay a person, lets say, $40,000 a year?  With labor burden and overhead its likely $60,000.  But wait, how much do we have to sell to pay them that?  $60,000 divided by our gross margin on sales of (lets say it was) 40%, equals $150,000.

Using a 40% gross margin, we have market and sell and deliver $150,000 of business to pay an employee ($769 a week) $40,000 a year.  So in this example, for every $1 in payroll our breakeven goes up by $3.75.

Does that explain something about what’s happening in your business?