Falling Up
Part 2 - Getting Where You Want and Need To Go
I love to hang out with Start-Up Entrepreneurs. The excitement on any typical opening day is intoxicating. Hope is in the air, thick enough to be sliced with a knife and served on a platter to those at the ribbon cutting. The brand new business is propelled through those first few months by sheer adrenalin alone. I love to watch it. Everything is new! Nothing is broken! Nothing needing to be fixed! They approach every opportunity like a young preacher riding the circuit. They have been to the mountaintop, and have seen the Vision and the glory. Hallelujah! The Vision is compelling, and they smell the essence of destiny!
And then. Then the Vision takes us down into the valley to batter us into shape. The Vision will take all of our theories, grind them down to a fine powder, and refine them with heat. It will hammer them thin and shape them with hard knocks into the real deal. If we do not grow weary, we will come forth as gold. This is another reason why I love small business: this kind of pressure creates some of the finest diamonds of humanity.
Most entrepreneurs are prepared to endure the chaos up to a certain point. Some of us are even savvy enough to plan for it. These are the work-related issues, or the Monday blues. It is the day when your star employee does not show up for work or your shop truck breaks down–the irritating, monkey-wrench sort of things. But it is when three big jobs fail, a customer gets irate, a vendor sends the wrong supplies, and you get an NSF notice from the bank on top of the Monday blues that we begin to lose our nerve. When chaos morphs into crisis, we doubt our sufficiency.
Truth be told, every business will experience chaos, and yes, even a disaster at some point. If no one has told you yet, this is normal business. Once you accept this truth, you can begin to anticipate a few things that might go wrong.
Small business does not cause the problems. It simply reveals them.
If you have been in business for a while, you know every business needs methodical maintenance. You develop an eagle eye for monkey wrenches that are lying around, waiting for someone to trip over them–and we are not talking about your facility. The longer you have been in business, the more that needs to be improved. While we review the list of all the things that need to be fixed, we must also face the poor choices we have made. The problems you have today are a direct result of yesterday's decisions. It can be overwhelming. We might begin to believe that people like us do not succeed. We begin to think that successful people have something special that we do not have. We start the stinkin’ thinkin’–that everyone else has the right stuff, and we do not. Social Media exacerbates our wounds, with the highlight reels of those who have reached the coveted mountain-top, apparently unscathed. Not.
Nothing could be further than the truth. The same year, (1923), that Babe Ruth broke the home run record, he also struck out more times than any other player.
The more you try, the more you fail.
You did not begin business to have it dashed to pieces. As difficult as it may be to achieve, your Vision is not a pipe dream. But every problem, both those that you anticipate and those that catch you off guard, can be used to advance your cause. These problems shine a light on the obstacles that will keep you from achieving your Vision.
I have been in business 28 years, and I need this message. How do you think a company gets to be 100 years old? (And there are many such businesses.) They experience the same problems that every other business has–they just have many more because they have had more time to experience them. The difference between those that sustain and those that do not is that the successful business recycles the disaster. They use every single problem as an opportunity to make their business better. They use every single failure as an opportunity to start again in a stronger place. They use every single mistake to blast through another barrier, and come out stronger on the other side.
Instead of falling down, they fall up.
This year, instead of fretting over failed resolutions, failures, mistakes, and monkey-wrenches, make them count. Redeem them. Use each problem to show you exactly what is in the way, so you can get out of your own way. Try, fail, and try again. The largest room in any business is the room for improvement. We will make mistakes again. But they mark the trail all the way to the Mountain Top.
Choose to fall up.
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Why do we at etc!graphics inc, a graphic design company, care about your business strategies? Because no matter the talent of your designer, your business graphics will never make more sense than the clarity of your vision. The clearer your vision, the more lucid your marketing will be, and the better connection you will make with your customer. We want to help you find the gold in your business. Join us all this month as we share ways to help your small business sustain and grow in a crowded marketplace. Etc!Graphics is devoted to helping you, the small business owner, think like a marketer.
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