Most small business owners would agree with the statement “I wish that I knew what I know now.”
Over years, owners inevitably gather many lessons about how to grow and run a business more effectively.
Being a business owner can be an isolating experience at times. “Especially if you’re a solo business owner, you can lose touch with other business owners.
Staying networked in the larger business community is essential. That means meeting with mentors or business coaches for an hour every four weeks. Coaches help find solutions to problems and work through tough decisions with you in business. Networking on Facebook and Linkedin from the comfort of her own home is massively beneficial.
Find a business group you can belong to and find time to meet. There you can discuss problems and solutions, and talk to each other.
Break big goals into smaller ones. Have 3-year goals and 1-year goals and 4 month goals.
Building a performance-driven business all starts with being very specific about goals.
When the Marks Group, a technology consultancy, started in 1994, it was just Gene Marks and his dad. “He was doing sales and I was doing service,” Marks recalls. Then his dad died. “When he passed away, I took it over and realized I couldn’t do it all, and hired some new employees. I’ve learned that you can make a lot more money when you have other people doing it for you.”
Eight years ago, it dawned on Marks that he was just sitting in an office costing nearly $30,000 a year in rent, while his employees were out working with clients. So Marks got rid of the office in suburban Philadelphia and made his workforce virtual. Along the way, he replaced the landline with an Internet-based phone that cost about $10 a month, and he ditched computer servers for the cloud, too.
Lowering the overhead brought Marks some peace of mind through the Great Recession. “When things turn bad, you don’t have to panic, because you can take a cut in revenue,” Marks says. “Even in the brunt of the recession, we never lost money. Cutting down overhead really gives you that peace of mind. If your overhead is low, you can make pricing decisions that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to make.”
Trying to do too much too soon? Feel like you need to be all things to all clients? Maybe diversifying isn’t always the best strategy. Sometimes, it’s good to replicate the magic if you have something that works really well. That’s been the successful strategy for Ace Apparel, says Marc Mathios, who along with his two brothers are the third generation to run the 78-year-old family business.
“One of the industry silos that we’re really good in is parking garage operators,” Mathios says. “The reason that parking garage operators like to work with us is because we manufacture our own line of jacket that’s suited for parking garage companies. … We’ve duplicated that success with 30 different parking garage operators across North America.”
A few years ago, Seattle-based content marketing company AudienceBloom was operating so swimmingly that its founder and CEO Jayson DeMers decided he could get away with focusing on a second startup that he was intrigued with. DeMers would come to regret the decision.
“Running a company ‘just fine’ is not what an entrepreneur’s job is,” DeMers says. “Successful entrepreneurs don’t do the minimum for their company; they constantly work to grow it, evolve it, and prepare it for the future. Because I was splitting my team between the two startups, growth stalled at my first company, and I didn’t have enough time to dedicate to the new startup to make it successful.”
Eventually, the second venture failed. AudienceBloom was able to grow again once DeMers was able to focus his full attention on it. “I learned that a successful venture requires 100 percent attention, focus, and effort. Secondary ventures need a full-time manager or else they’ll just distract you and derail your existing efforts if you aren’t careful.”
Avoiding distractions applies to managing yourself so you get stuff done on a day-to-day basis too. “I know when I’m smart and when I’m dumb” says Marks. “I save the big tasks for the morning when I’m smartest, and do the monotonous ones when I’m dumb at the end of the day.” Keeping yourself organized and on-task is the real key to small business success.
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