It’s so easy it feels like cheating. When it’s our turn, we breeze through the work we have to do while, of course, doing our best work because the pressure is on. Then we watch while others take on all the heavy lifting. The best part is, everyone feels that way. The project gets completed quickly, the results are great and everyone is raring to get going on the next project.

How do you create a team like that?

A strong vision and an interesting why are essential to attracting great people and motivating them to give their best. We’ve talked about that already.

A strong team is complete with thinkers, doers, people people and communicators. A really strong team has mature enough individuals to not only accept the diversity of the group but to revel in it.

Everyone is clear on the project, their part in it and how that fits with everyone else.

Communication is key. The more people know exactly where the project is, the more effective they can be.

Celebrate successes and learn from failures.

Maintain a sense of humour.

What’s the best team you were on? What lessons can you share?

I enjoyed this book. It is well written and the material spoke to me. I found they went farther along the affirmation route than I can. Thinking of my car as a good friend, giving her a name and saying out loud that I love her doesn’t work for me. That doesn’t mean I don’t pat her dash and encourage her sometimes. I’m just not into the personification of objects.

The second aspect that doesn’t work for me is the separation of my body parts as distinct from me. I had this same challenge with Eckhart Tolle’s work. I am me, not a liver me, a stomach me, a finger me etc.

Here are some of the thoughts that spoke to me and that I flagged as I read:

Every experience has value and brings the opportunity to grow and learn, even bad ones.

We all want it now, but the journey is just as important. Along the way appreciate:

• Simplicity
• Optimism
• Patience
• Trust
• Growth
• Service
• Action
• Faith
• Magnetism (serendipity)

It takes years to achieve mastery, and in the mean time, enjoy the process of learning, the thrill of seeing improvement and the sense of accomplishment that can come every step of the way.

“We are powerful, creative beings who determine our future with every thought we think and every word we speak.”

Recognize that there isn’t one right way to do things. In a study, people identified 250 different ways to wash dishes. It doesn’t mean that they would all work for you, but that you should be open to other options.

“The beauty of awareness is that it interrupts a pattern.” Seeing the way things are from an outside angle means becoming present to the truth of the way it is.

As you go through your day, check in with yourself for how you feel in the moment. How do you feel about your commute? What are you thinking as you walk into your office? Are you happy when you arrive back home? The way you feel will shape how you act towards the others around you and their reaction to you. Do you see how this goes?

Sometimes the best gift you can give someone else is to accept the gift they give you.

What are your thoughts today?

Shantaram: a Novel by Gregory David Roberts This was a 900+ page novel so it took most of December to read. It was pretty dark in places, but I couldn’t help feeling total sympathy with the protagonist even as he was hurting people, being hurt and breaking the law. It read more like an autobiography than a novel.

Midas Touch: why some entrepreneurs get rich and most don’t by Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki. I wrote a whole post about this one.

Little Bird of Heaven: a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. Is it fate or is it a series of wrong decisions? How many generations should pay? A woman is murdered. Her husband and her lover are both suspected, brought into custody and released without charges, except by popular opinion. This is the story of one’s daughter and the other’s son.

I read a lot of business books and most are full of great information. In this book, the authors have presented information from the trenches in a way that is practical and useable. They talked about business concepts in ways I have thought about them but hadn’t heard before.

They presented five traits of successful entrepreneurs which they likened to the five digits of the hand.

Thumb: Strength of Character

Index Finger: F.O.C.U.S. (follow one course until successful)

Middle Finger: Your Brand

Ring Finger: Relationships

Little Finger: Little things that count

The 2 biggest takeaways were:

• Successful Entrepreneurs are prepared to take risk because they know that the faster they fail and learn and move on the faster they will succeed. 
• The bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.Taking responsibility in your business also means taking control and vice versa.  Without those, you won’t exert your power to win.
  

Here are the points I flagged as I read the book:

They talk about the Peter Principle of Small Business – your business will grow to your level of incompetence. Here’s one of those points I mentioned earlier. I wrote about this, but hadn’t heard it anywhere else.

Once you take responsibility for all you touch, the power is in your hands to make it extraordinary.

Schools teach us to avoid mistakes. The A students are the ones who can do the work the same as the teacher (or curriculum) demands. In Business, the Entrepreneur who fails the most, wins.

Your brand is the Promise you Telegraph and the Experience you Deliver. A brand is founded on what the entrepreneur stands for.

You and your business must mean something in the world. Your business must be about more than you and your product or service. In thinking about your Brand they suggest you answer this list of questions;

• What is the problem you want to solve?
• Why is it a problem?
• What causes the problem?
• If your business were gone tomorrow, what would the world lose?
• What makes you think you can solve the problem?
• How does your product or service solve the problem?
• How does your product or service make your customer’s life better?
• What do you think your customers really need from a company like yours?

(Emphasis, mine – I always wanted to say that)

Most lists of Branding questions don’t talk about the world losing without you, or making your customer’s life better (unless it’s toothpaste).

Your business is your lab – it’s your best business school. If you pay attention you will learn much of what you need.

In school, we are taught to compete for grades along a bell curve. In Business, you cannot make it on your own, you must cooperate with others to be successful.

Successful businesses focus on one little thing – lowest prices, fastest delivery, easiest buying experience. What is your one little thing?

My objective was to focus on my businesses; to figure out where they can go and to set it up so they will. I outlined 3 business ideas: Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd, this Business Owners Success Club and Repair-Share.

That’s how I started. How I ended that 100 days is very interesting. Yes, it’s a great idea to stop and look back once in a while.

Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd.

I had 3 full-time people in the summer. My vision has been to build a business with a whole room full of bookkeepers helping lots and lots of business owners. The reality is that the margins aren’t there, meaning, for the cost of paying my bookkeepers a decent wage, continually training them, and paying for non-billed time, I can’t bill enough to do much more than cover overhead.

We also came to the realization about the type of clients we prefer. We work best with people who are actively building their businesses and engaging in the way their business. At the same time, bookkeeping is changing. (see the post here)

So we went back to our core mission: helping Business Owners succeed.

Two things came out of that exercise:

Work less on data entry and more on interpretation and coaching. Working less on data entry has us exploring the world of programing and web development. Cool, in a bumping along in a dark basement kind of way, not really knowing what you are going to run into.

We have enough experience and knowledge with business to offer a more complete way to make business, I don’t know, more Effortless. I spun off a new concept called Your Effortless Business in this blog. I’m really excited about this, mostly because of the response I’m getting. One of the responses is a group of friends who decided to make a publishing platform and they have decided to make Your Effortless Business book their first project. I’ve been writing furiously for the past month or so (which explains why I haven’t posted as much). Fun and exciting!

Business Owners Success Club

As I developed the Your Effortless Business concept, I wrote about it here. Eventually, I realized it needed it’s own platform so I gave it one here. That left me wondering about this. What is this about and why am I doing it?

The BOSC is about you, the Business Owner. YEB is about your business.

One of the keys to an Effortless Business is for the owner to belong to a group of people talking about business and being a business owner. That’s what this will continue to be. I can’t stress how important that is for your success and even peace of mind. Many of you already belong to groups and that is terrific. For those that don’t, I would like this to work for you. How can we make that work? What will give you the best benefit? The technology is available for us to meet in many different ways to have the discussions we need.

I haven’t come to any clear conclusions about what to do with the BOSC. I will continue to post Business Owner type stuff here.

Repair-Share

I haven’t made a lot of progress on this one. It will be an interesting exercise in teams. Have a look here for more information.

Other

I have been asked to join the Board of the Kentville Development Corporation Limited

I belong to an online, international book club and we are exploring the idea of starting a project to help entrepreneurs fail successfully. Failure is inevitable and even a necessary part of reaching in business. We want to help make it a smoother process, by helping people up, dusting them off and helping them understand what happened.

I’ve been invited by TEDx to join them in Doha, Qatar for a TEDxSummit. All paid, but the airfare. Now I have to raise the airfare very soon.

So the project list looked like this when I started:

• Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd
• Business Owners Success Club
• Repair-Share

Now it looks like:

• Crystal Clear Bookkeeping Ltd.
• Software Project
• Business Owners Success Club
• Your Effortless Business
• Book
• Help Develop my Town
• Failure U
• TEDx Summit

I don’t know if I am farther ahead or farther behind. I do know I’m excited again.

How about you? What will you do with the first 100 days of 2012? What will your 100 day project be? How can I/we help you with that?

I am a great starter. I thrive on having several projects on the go at once. I often find synergies and efficiencies that way.

I’m not so great at finishing. I have many jobs and projects waiting for the last check, the last edit, or the last bit of research to get them off my desk and onto someone else’s desk. These jobs tend to pile up as I give in to the resistance to finishing them.

There are lots of reasons to resist finishing. Once it’s done, I have to put it out there to be judged or, worse, ignored. What if I miss something? Once it’s done, I won’t get to work on it any more and I enjoy all my projects.

There are better reasons to finish the work. I can get paid for it. I will learn from the feedback. I can move on to the next project.

I spent some time this weekend thinking about finishing and my resistance to it. Thinking it through and practising a few techniques on the idea. I’m ready this week to finish off a few lingering projects.

It feels great to clear them away.

How about you? How many projects do you like to do at once? How are you at finishing? Do you do a clean sweep once in a while?

So far, I only seem to have lost one doc.  It was my reading list, a private doc, although I post it every month (except maybe this one), so it was the only thing not backed up elsewhere.  There are probably lots of other bits I’ve downloaded over the years, but I will either be able to get them again, or I won’t remember them, so it doesn’t really matter.  I haven’t tried to read the hard drive, yet.  It’s very likely all on there.

As for my client, all their info was on a server.  They just plugged in their new computer, set it up and away they went again.

There’s no excuse anymore for losing data when your computer crashes.

PC World has an indepth look at backing up, including different strategies for different reasons.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/170688-8/7_backup_strategies_for_your_data_multimedia_and_system_files.html

Lifehacker has a summary article including links for further information in other articles.

http://lifehacker.com/5405775/youre-backing-up-your-data-the-wrong-way

It’s great to have that peace of mind knowing my data is safe.  What about you?  What if you lost a computer?

I don’t go to 3 events every week, but when there is a good event, I go.

I don’t understand Business Owners who say they are too busy to go to events in their community.  Since when did engaging with your customers become optional?  Since when is improving yourself a luxury to be cut out?

A good friend who has owned her family business for almost 40 years talks about the loneliness and self-recrimination she felt during the really hard times during the 80’s (inflation, interest rates and energy costs went through the roof).  She says that she and other business owners felt that they were doing something wrong because their once-profitable businesses were now not so profitable and they had to let staff go.  That’s a double whammy hit.  You don’t feel like meeting up with other Business Owners if you aren’t doing so well and if you are short staffed, it’s harder to get away.

Having talked to other business owners since then who felt the same way, she goes to every business event she can get to.  She says she will never deny herself the support she could have had.

If you are having tough times in your business, so is everyone else and that’s the time to work together, not hide away.

What’s the worst thing that could happen if you opened an hour later every Wednesday so you could go to the Rotary meeting?  You’d be inspired?  You’ll get to talk to others about what’s new in your business?  You won’t feel like it’s so much your fault?

Our Community Development Coordinator just cancelled a Business Event scheduled for this Wednesday because of lack of interest.  There was even a FREE LUNCH!  I went to this event last year and it was very well attended.

I met 2 new people at an event last week.  One of them is interested in working on a bookkeeping app and I’m interested in making a bookkeeping app.  We’re meeting about it next week.

The other one installs software – the kind of software we train Business Owners to use.  We’re getting together soon, too.

The more I get out to events, the more business comes our way; the more business opportunities I find and the more energy, inspiration and courage I have.

How about you?  Do you get out to events?  What about the Business Owners in your community?  Do you put on events?  What is attendance like where you are?

Peter Principle

The Peter Principle: “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle).

The same holds true for small business.  Our business tends to rise to the level of our incompetence.  That’s why it is vitally important for business owners to continually upgrade their skills

Business skills are important and you must understand them; but you can hire them in.  It is more important that you know they exist and that they make your life/business easier.

Marketing is essential for your business.  There are proven ways/systems/tactics and strategies to make a highly efficient marketing machine.  The more of these that are implemented, the more effective your marketing becomes.  Do you have to understand all this and implement it in your business?  No.  You have to cause it to be implemented.

The management theory we are using now was designed for large manufacturing based businesses.  We are moving to a time of service based business, with a workforce that can be scattered around the world.  We are, also, seeing teams come together for short-term projects, then disbanding to work on other projects.

Your level of incompetence isn’t dependent upon a deep knowledge about the ‘4 pillars’ of business – operations, marketing, HR and finance; it’s about the skills you bring as a leader.

WHAT

Change agent

We are living through a period of tremendous change.  The Industrial Revolution wreaked havoc on society and the environment as machinery necessitated the movement of goods and people into centres.  It changed the way people lived, ate and had families – pretty fundamental stuff!

People no longer produced the goods they needed.  They traded their time for money to buy the goods they needed.  They moved from living in small villages, very much in tune with nature, to living in cities.  They had less kids and they were now living away from their extended families.

We are going through another similar revolution and what we call it is immaterial.  The fact is, it’s happening and you as a leader of your business must help the people in your teams to navigate this change.

People don’t like change.  It scares them.  Your job is to help them learn how to accept the change that is happening.  At the same time you have to become comfortable with the fact that we don’t know how this will all turn out.  You are navigating in uncharted waters.

You have to manage despite your own fears of change and help those around you manage their own fears.

Motivate Desire

Some of us may remember the time when it was enough to give someone a set of tasks and a paycheque and that was the extent of motivation.

People want to do more with their lives than live to work and work for the weekends.  They want to know they are making a difference in the world.

Your customers want to know you are interested in more than money.   They want to know how you are helping the environment, our community and saving the world.

Daniel Pink wrote the book on motivation.  The conventional notion is that the carrot and stick are all we need to motivate people.  It turns out that what people really want is to have the Autonomy to direct how they work; the ability to gain Mastery of what they do; and Purpose and meaning in their work.  Your job is to let them have those things.

Leadership

Understand your leadership style.  Some leaders set out exactly how they want things done, some set the expectations for the finished product and let their teams make it happen.

People are all different and it is exactly those differences that can make your business robust and exciting.  But even though opposites attract, they also create friction.  Your job is to assemble a diverse team that can all work well together.

HOW

Vision

As the leader, you hold the vision for what you are trying to achieve.  You set the direction.  You inspire.

You don’t have to know the path, you don’t have to draw the map.   You have to paint a picture of the destination and make it so compelling and so clear that your teams are all working together to get there.

Culture

The culture is the way you do business.  It’s how you know everyone is providing the service, in the way you want it done.  Culture brings predictability (or not) and lets people know what to expect.

Communication

Communication is key.  The more you communicate, the clearer the vision and the firmer the culture.  The more you communicate to your teams, the better they feel about where they stand within the organization and where they are going.

Marketing is merely communicating your story.  Make your story a great one and let it fly.

These days communication is about letting the real you shine.  Authenticity is essential, because people can tell spin from real.

Your responsibility as a business owner is to continue to grow yourself so you can grow your business.

KNOWN

You know where you are and where you are going.  You know how to do what you want to do.  You know when to ask for help and from whom.

You know your why.  Your Business Model is clear.  You have policies and procedures in place that everyone follows.  You have an effective financial system (mostly automated) giving you the feedback you need to keep you moving forward.

Most surprises are good ones.

AUTOMATED

Your business can run without your direct input for the day-to-day running.  Everything is in place so you can give it your all.

Your information is stored appropriately and in a way that makes retrieval easy.  All repetitive tasks are automated.

TEAM

The people around you support you and the work you do.  Your team can articulate the common goal; they understand how they fit into the big picture, everyone shares similar values.  Everyone brings their own unique value and everyone appreciates the value others bring.  The team is compatible and able to work independently.  You practice effective delegation.  You coach your team to communicate, collaborate and cooperate.

WELL PAID

You offer true value.  You can do the work efficiently and cost-effectively.  You bill appropriately and you make it easy for others to pay you.

You have a marketing system in place that attracts the right customers and makes what you offer clear.  People feel they are getting a great deal when they work with you.

What do you think?  Does that sound right to you?  Which of these do you do well?  Which would you like to work on next?