Innovative Business Versus Current Trends

Stay Current But Innovate Always

It is not easy owning your own gig.  Some of the greatest winners in business have travelled the roughest roads to victory.  In the world of small business ownership bumpy travel is par for the course.  Most self-taught business owners come to their business life with limited resources.  Add to the fact that we have limited resources for managing how to professionally recognize market trends well, we also come up with some very unusual thoughts and ideas.  We employ many of those strange ideas every single day in our business walk.  Some of those ideas work, but many do not.  We also have some unique leadership styles.  Some leadership styles suck, while other methods work very well.  Every business owner gets to experience all of the pains their efforts produce as they move closer to the victories they desire.  I have not met one business owner who has been able to escape this simple reality.

In most cases, a private business owner is usually self-taught.  Most of them come from the ranks of being very unemployable.  I have met hundreds of self-employed business owners.  The lion's share of them are not especially bright when it comes to operating all of the necessary facets of a well run small business.  Neither was I.  I missed on a lot of important cylinders.  We all came to our own ownership patterns because we were not especially good at allowing someone else to tell us what to do.  As a result, we became truly unemployable people.  We make very poor followers.  Our next best option was to run our own gig.  Hence, business ownership.  Welcome to the expensive school of hard knocks.  I be one of those students!

Trial and error offers some very expensive lessons.  Even though those lessons are expensive, they are effective.  We learn quickly what works and what does not.  We get our education straight from the world of reality.  No spin, no tricks, no magic and no fooling.  Our checkbooks become our leaders.  That checkbook balance allows or kills many of our great ideas.  We do exactly that which we can no longer afford!

If a business owner survives this messy start and these messy lessons, they move on to the next level of operations.  They graduate to the world of survival.  Instead of truly failing, they learn how to hang on and make each penny stretch beyond where it was supposed to live.  These are the true entrepreneurs who work on making their future business happen, above the closure line and below the make it big line.  This place they learn to master is a place that most owners feel controls their destiny.  This becomes the next level a business owners reaches.  They find just enough success to keep their model alive and produce just enough reach of success to offer them a few monetary victories here and there.  They remain bound.  This is the place where most survivors of a small business learn to manage.  It becomes their little prison where they can live out their lives without being employed somewhere else.  Welcome to the truth.

In this pile of business owners pops up a head or two once in awhile.  Those heads pop up as they look for better ways to grow larger.  Once in awhile, one of those small business owners works their way out of that crab pot.  Those few business owners get enough gumption and create some interesting ways to grow up and out of that crab pot existence.  They are also able to fight off the gripping claws of the other crabs trying to pull them back inside the pot where the rest of them remain.  A few work their business in a growing way.  They become the hated few who create our interesting world of jealous activities.  They become the few business owners who win well at what they produce.  They are sometimes the ones we envy the most.

Let's take a look at how these few winners produced the victories they experienced.  How did they climb out of that crab pot of living?  How did they survive that small business trap?  How did they win when nobody else could?

Page two.

Stay Current But Innovate Always

Innovation is such an easy word to use.  We know exactly what it means.  We know exactly what it is when we see it.  However, ask a small business owner to become more innovative and they will freeze.  Most will stop coldly in their tracks when someone else tells them to become more innovative.  It is natural stuff.  We all have this quiet desire to remain the same.  It helps produce stability for our confused and expanding world of responsibilities.  Innovation means we must learn and test unproven ways.  We must add confusion and error to our complicated lives.  Who, pray tell, wants to do that when their business model is barely remaining alive?  It is just simply too much risk.

Welcome to business leadership.  Risk is part of the fear of fun.  We must have fun with the fears we manage.  If we fail at that approach, we will never reach out beyond what we know.  Most small business owners work overtime trying to keep their senses refrained from experimentation and the loss of control that risky ideas promote.  Most small business owners want to remain safe.  They like fighting each other in the crab pot of small business life, pinching each other until it no longer hurts.  Only a few pioneers move out of this mode.  They work instead on their overtime hours trying to discover the next best thing.  They want to improve where they are right now.  These are the few who will pop up their head and find new ways to do similar things.  Success is always right around the next corner of new design.  These are the innovators of small business.  They are passionate about finding better ways to do better things.

As we discover who these innovators are, we mimic their actions like small children copy their parents.  I used to travel about and counsel small business owners.  It was always amazing how the children in those houses quietly told me how their parents behaved.  I might ask the business owners, the parents of those children playing in the other room, if they are patient and compassionate.  As the parents answered positively, I can hear their children fighting in the other room telling each other to shut up right now!  I can hear those children tell each other how stupid they are and I hate you to each other!  All the while, their parents not hearing their children's cries in the other room while telling me how patient and compassionate they themselves operate in their business affairs.  Children mimic their parents actions the very same way business owners mimic the innovators of our current business world.  We all do the things that seem to work.  We copy what we interpret working.  We duplicate current trends.  I am guilty.

In the world of business success, it is vitally important to do what works.  Trend the stuff that makes the trends.  Make sure we copy what is timely and working.  This is simply no-brainer stuff.  Every single business owner who wants to win well must adhere to this kind of management style.  Winning is not all about being a noble pioneer.  It is more about being able to fund your innovations more carefully.  I love innovative styles.  I am always pushing the next envelope of new ideas.  However, I must first make sure my business boat does not have any low bottom leaks before I wander out into the unknown depths of the extraordinary lake I see in the future.  Innovation is good if the boat does not sink before the idea gets a chance to mature.  Maintain the current trends that produce the wins that are needed to grow.  Then once those trends are managed in place, get busy with making your innovative ways travel well above where you once thought they might learn to fly.

Innovation versus current trends.  Know the difference and respect both for what they provide.  Go ahead, move out and beat the crowd.  You will only notice how much more they will try to pull you back in.  Respect how you pull away and respect how you trend your ways.  Stay current, relative, relevant and above all, fund innovation.  Sometimes that means you must feed your heart with plenty of drive.

Until next time...