Where Do We Find The Glue That Holds Our Business Together?

What Kind Of Relationships Have You Built?

A first time business owner has a lot of ideas and dreams on their mind.  When they get started they have more to do than they have time to use.  Each moment is filled like a race to squeeze in more stuff.  Excitement dominates the energy levels.  Enthusiasm blankets all of the other undone edges.  Hope is filled with blind faith.  The new business is up and running.  It has activity.  It has enthusiasm.  It has energy.

These unbridled dimensions help to produce some interesting growth.  The business stirs up some selling interests.  Consumers get a bit caught up in the excitement that is produced.  The newness blooms some enjoyable results.  This new business owner is off and running.  Now the seriousness has been set in place.  Sustainability becomes the main effort for the next few years.  Making sales growth happen with enough good controls in place will be the new business owners next test of ownership.  This kind of pattern will lead that new owner down the path of 'on-board' business school, the one which includes a lot of hard knocks.  This becomes the middle of that new business owner's life.  The invisible but tough lessons of owning a small business begin to arrive and make life interesting.  This process looks like a bell curve.

Small business owners find this bell curve a strong reality when they look back at their ownership career.  They see the up-tick beginning that produced so many hopes and dreams.  They can graph out the climb to volume that supported the excitement they once developed when they opened up the gig they started.  They can see how the bell curve was running uphill on the charted graph.  Those were exciting times.  The level of blind faith was much like the first proposal that landed in the hearts between a future husband and his wife.  Both could see only the wonderful things that were about to occur.  Neither spouse could see how the first real spat would turn into a dividing line between them.  Certainly none could see the fighting that occurs between their three little children when one physically hurt one of the other two and the third child lied about it.  Those were not the visions these two love birds once envisioned when they proposed to each other.  This is exactly how a small business owner begins their trek through the business ownership forest.  It all starts on blind faith then as it grows with excitement as it morphs into this huge bag of challenges to manage.  The bell curve begins to turn downward.

So how do these self taught business owners keep it together?  How do they learn how to manage the first serious business obstacles that have been planted in front of the road they are travelling?  What provides the glue that holds them together when important and cherished stuff begins to fall away?  How do they keep it all together when they wreck their ship along the bumpy shores of trial and error?  These kinds of challenges are not silly things when they park their existence inside the doors of a troubling business model.  How do those owners apply the glue that holds it together when this kind of pattern comes home to stay?  Let's face it, big challenges are coming.  They are part of a growing business.  I have yet to meet a single successful business owner who could not tell a deeply tough story about how they had to learn how to make it through some of the most challenging stuff ever imagined.  In business, this kind of work is a reality.  It may not show up during the first six months when all of that newness and excitement is overflowing, but it will arrive.  Crap will happen.  It will seem much like living through a car wreck and losing some of your most important friends.  It can get real ugly.

Some business owners find challenges in lawsuits, employment issues, theft, fire, accidents, insurance claims, bad publicity, mismanaged funds, out-of-balance checking accounts, terrible losses, disrespect from staff, marriage separations, children resentments, time issues, location changes, popular product discontinuations, increased and fiercely added competition plus countless more that come inside the halls that do their damage.  Small business need to find some glue to hold it altogether when these things happen.  Where do they find this glue?

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Individual Rights Exceed Our Business Skookum

"Nope.  I Ain't Gunna' Do That!"

I had to look up the spelling of this word, 'skookum'.  Although I have used it in many sentences when I speak I do not ever remember writing it down.  I looked it up.  Technology is great stuff.  I typed the word and they corrected the spelling for me.  They even defined the word more clearly to me.  Now I have it correctly spelled and its meaning very much in tack.  Is this donkey above exercising its business skookum or is it practicing to protect his personal rights?  We see the difference, don't we?

Skookum is a term that gives the impression that something is strong, dominate or very accurate.  It represents something that is 'right on' or 'smart' and 'understanding'.  It reflects a positive position.  It suggests that someone has the right kind of knowledge happening at the right time it needs to be employed.  They have skookum.  They are 'right on' the target.  Good perception on complicated matters.  Skookum does suggest a bit of stubbornness, but in the right way.

How well is your business skookum?  Is it producing a long list of profitable outcomes?  Your pocketbook will tell you the truth.  Your bank account reflects how well you are doing.  Your debt accumulation reveals the level of your business skookum.  If any of these three rates of business measurement are a bit lower than what they should be, your business skookum might be running a little bit low.  Everyone in the business world is facing tough times.  Nobody was passed over.  Therefore, do not use this as your excuse for having a poor cash position, too much debt or a terribly shaped checking account.  This bad economy hit everyone.  The ones with the best skookum have come out better than the ones with less skookum.  No doubt about it.

Skookum.  It all comes down to skookum.  What kinds of things interfere with our level of business skookum?  It comes down to our level of skookum.  How well do we understand complicated matters?  How well do we navigate the complexities of human relationships in the slippery waters of business management?  What levels do our skills reveal?  What are our weaknesses?  Where are we deficient?  When do our strengths run out of room to move?  What is our skookum level?  This is where the world of business success meets the road.  It has nothing to do with how well we repair automobiles, if we are a mechanic.  It has nothing to do with how well we bake cookies, if we are a bakery.  It has nothing to do with how well we build cabinets, if we are a carpenter.  It comes down to our skills of having enough skookum to deal with all of the complexities and challenges that a small business must learn how to manage.  It is within these crossroads that a business leader learns how to profit well.  It comes surrounded by our skookum levels.

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In Business, Things Always Pair Up.

Owning a small business can be become a cruel path to walk.  There are times when the path is so unfriendly that we wonder sometimes what the heck we are doing.  Nothing seems to be unfolding favorably.  The checkbook is always overdrawn, the bank is always calling for more deposits and the creditors are appearing on the caller ID more frequently.  Owning this small business becomes a pressure of sleepless worry and endless challenges.  Every day seems to start off with two steps behind.  The fun has completely disappeared.

Every small business owner recognizes this mental position.  The ones who have not witnessed this pattern of worry are either very new at business ownership or very good at what they do.  In reality, very few miss this pattern of feelings because they are very good at what they do.  Most miss it because they have not owned their small business long enough to produce this position of ownership.  The later is usually the truth in how it really works.

Unfortunately, nobody told the new business owner that this would eventually become some of the stuff they would need to learn how to manage and endure.  New business owners are not privy to these kinds of terrible patterns about how tough owning your own business can become.  Furthermore, even if someone with a lot of knowledge and credibility about this pattern was able to share how this works with new business owners, most new owners would not have listened anyway.  That is how stubbornness works.  I have found very few owners able to escape this pattern.

Things happen in patterns and fall along the lines of a series.  We seem to pair up what goes badly.  If the checkbook is out of line, so are the credit cards.  If the promises in business relationships are staging unreal stories, so are the relationships at home.  If the slippage of productivity drops its patterns into the employee ranks, it also begins to erode the accounting responsibilities.  Prevarication drives the flow of information while equivocation dominates the patterns of sales.  Bad stuff happens in pairs.

A driver delivers some products to the wrong house.  On the same trip, they forget some important tools on another installation delivery.  Stuff happens wrong in a series of events.  They seem to happen in pairs.  A bid for auto repair was offered too short to make a profit and due to some parts delays gets completed late with an unhappy customer who expected it done sooner than what was delivered.  This unhappy and lost profit repair job then discovers some of the work failed two weeks later and the repaired auto was returned for customer service adjustments, adding injury to insult.  Things happen in pairs.

Every business owner recognizes this unfortunate pattern of business control.  Unfriendly stuff comes in pairs.  The old saying goes, "When it rains, it pours."

The true leadership of the owner gets qualified when bad stuff comes in pairs.  The true colors of leadership show up when the feathers are ruffled.  We can see what color lies behind the outer coat.  It is at these times a small business owner paves the path to better success.  This is exactly the time when the true qualities of the best leaders comes to the surface.  The best business leaders show up when the pairs of events do not match up as they had hoped to be.  The business owners who manage the worst events well are the ones who profit most when the dust settles to the ground.

Here's why.

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Why Do Things Become More Valuable When They Are Suddenly Taken Away?

Some Of The Values We Lose Are The Important Ones We Need

Why do things become more valuable when they are suddenly taken away?

This is a subject worth deeper investigation.  The human condition seems to hold this pattern true to its heart more often than not.  We tend to place higher value on many things we own but only notice this value after they have suddenly disappeared.  When we still own them we do not seem to respect them near as much as when they have suddenly disappeared.  We tend to take many valuable things we own for granted.  It is a common occurrence as well as becoming a very natural thing that humans practice.  The value of many things becomes diminished with familiarity and routine.  They get quietly lost in the pile of existence.

Business leaders fall prey to this effect on a daily basis.  The practice of doing what needs to be done while these business leaders work to produce patterns of success becomes the dominant focus of each day.  Little things of value can become lost in the menagerie of this kind of daily work.  Routine, although critically important to success, can grow up to hide some tremendously valuable quiet components.  A sharp business operator will not miss the responsibility to search this effect out.  They will actually guard against losing values that mean quite a lot.  It is one of those hidden features that separate the good business leaders from the 'also rans'.

What types of values easily fall into this kind of lost category?  What becomes lessened with time?  Which values go unnoticed as daily stuff takes over the mind?  Where do good leaders look to protect the quality values they need to protect?  Which values, when protected properly, prove to become the ones that help the business model grow away from the competition and to become one of the great models in its region of play?  What are those values that when they disappear they become recognized for the magnitude of their loss?

If you are a business leader and you have trouble describing what those values may be, you are not consistently winning at what you do.  This much is true.  Regardless of what you may perceive to be the things you control, winning is one of those things that remains just far enough out of the reach of what you do.  You have a desire to produce more wins, more often.  You recognize the need to change things up a little bit so more wins will come home, more often.  Likely the most motivation you found to recognize this truth is the loss of something very valuable to you.  That is exactly how improvement patterns work.  We seem to need a loss to get us going.  We have to drop or lose a thing of value before we recognize how much we need to change up what we are regularly doing.  It is the loss that provides the source of the motivation to move up, to move better.  Welcome to leadership.

Why do things become more valuable when they are suddenly taken away?

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"Restaurant Impossible" And "Undercover Boss", What?

I like these programs.  They are fun to watch.  I am a pleased part of their captured audience.  "Restaurant Impossible" and "Undercover Boss" are entertaining stuff.  These kinds of reality shows offer some captivating exchanges between people and ideas. Just keep in mind the focus of these programs is to sell advertising to a larger audience.  These programs are owned by a network that is going to work, itself, each day to make a profit.  The Food Network and CBS are working their creative stuff to capture your attention so they can sell more advertising to larger clients who will need to pay more for that exposure than the advertisers want to pay.  That is the heart of their gig.  These networks are a solid business model.  The 'news' is not just reporting news.  Reporting the news is a part of a larger marketing machine that has a goal to make more money for its shareholders.  Entertainment is a business.  News is classified in that same category.  Reality shows are certainly part of that category.  They are all part of a business model.  End of seminar.

My father was a self-made business entrepreneur.  He practiced his business ownership successfully for over 40 years before he passed away.  One of his favorite comments when he was able to share it with other people was to remind them that the news was a business.  He would say, "Be careful with watching the news...it is only a business...they are telling you exactly what you want to hear just enough to keep them away from getting sued.  It sells advertising.  They have a neat knack for pushing your limits to draw you in.  The ones who draw more in can earn more advertising dollars.  Get used to it.  News is just a business."

He was correct.  They sell what you want to hear.  That is their primary goal.  They are in the business of selling their stuff to attract more readership, a larger audience.  Ratings become their primary goal.

When I operated my retail store front the television, newspaper and radio representatives would always come by to sell advertising programs for me to consider.  They would pull out of their bags some data sheets to prove how large their audience had become.  They would point out the measurable demographics to make a case for me to use their advertising potential.  They would sell time and space to increase revenues for the programing they produced.  It was clearly a serious business model.

They would make deals that centered around the Cosby Show, the NFL, the NBA or the evening news.  They tried to get your top dollars to plant your exposure near their most watched programming.  This is where they made the most money.  This is where they could convince you to speak to the largest audiences about what your business had to offer.  Business to business, this is how it works behind the scenes of "Restaurant Impossible" and the "Undercover Boss."  They sell advertising.  They make money doing this kind of thing.

Now that we have cleared the way for the message behind this post, let's see why this understanding is so important to see.  First of all, fixing up a broken eatery that is destined to fail does not and cannot happen in just one week.  Only for television will that impression come to life.  It sells well.  The programming experts behind the business model of "Restaurant Impossible" know this to be true.  However, they must capture your complete attention in that thirty minute segment to make you want to come back while telling others how much you enjoy seeing them fight through the resistance and immediately help others to win.  It sells well to a lot of hearts.  It works well to increase the audience support.  Unfortunately, it is not the truth in how it really works.  No business, headed for failure, can be repaired in just one week.  That is simply fairy tale stuff.  It is only good for TV.

The same holds true for "Undercover Boss."  No boss can go behind the scenes, see a lot of ill-fated things going on, and return two weeks later to have them all fixed up and gone for good.  This only happens cleanly on TV.  It sells well.  Oh, I know, they give little snippets in written captions that report how each problem is doing months later.  They run those captions across the bottom of the screens for the viewer to read near the end of the current series.  That sells well, too.  Did you know that?  It does.  Many times, it is not made up of completely true stuff.  Did you know that?  I am sorry if I have burst anyone's bubble on this piece of news.  Be reminded, these programs know what you want to hear, how you want it delivered and why you will come back to honor what they need you to honor.  It is their business to do this stuff very well...and they do.

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Candid, Sincere Views About Small Business.

One of the most committed people you will ever meet are the ones who own a small business.  This is especially true if you meet one who has been managing their way through a small business for more than ten years.  These are truly some of the most dedicated, seriously-sewn-into-the-fabric-of-how-they-perform-their-daily-life, people.  They are routinely buried into the business they manage.  The two things, their life and their business, are one of the same.  They have become what their business has become.  Small business owners are deeply engaged into doing what they do for a living.  Their small business model defines who they are, what they do and how they think.  Small business owners have made their life become what their business is.  Rarely an exception can be found.  End of seminar.

When these small business owners work their way into this kind of groove, they become so emotionally buried into the depths of their being that they cannot see, think, imagine or do anything outside of the way they see their business performing.  Small business owners are completely consumed by the circumstances they face in their small business activities.  Their business has grown up in their life and has taken all of it by the tail.  It is very much like watching the tail wag the dog.  The dog no longer has control of how the tail wags.  The tail becomes the boss.  The tail defines the owner.  The only thing that appears normal when this stage of life is reached by the small business owner, is that the tail is still attached to the body.  Seeing the tail attached to the body is the only normal thing remaining to be seen.  Everything else becomes a blur of wrongful reactions...tolerated for the sake of supporting the business struggles.  The small business owner is finally captured by the net of owning that small business model.  End of second seminar.

Coming this October first will be the completion of my fortieth year of being a part of managing some kind of small business.  Forty years doing stuff that a small business owner does.  That is an amazing process to describe.  It has become a long history of ups and downs.  Good times were had and awful things have occurred.  Family damages run common.  Trust has been built and trust has been broken.  Shame has been avoided on most fronts and public surfaces but lurks heavily under the top of the skin where it bubbles on fire with threatening reminders.  Every small business owner completely understands what I just described.  The public eye sees a lot of what is not really going on, inside.  Inside the soul of the ones in charge is a long list of serious challenges being managed away from everyone they can afford to avoid.  This is how the heart of a small business owner behaves.  They work diligently to avoid showing the bruises they acquire.  They spend "over-time" energy cleaning up the face after it has been damaged with loss.  The small business owner has the real view of how bad circumstances burn hard behind closed doors.  They spin this view out of the sight of anyone who could judge them wrongly.  End of third seminar.

How much pressure can one person endure?  How much secrecy can one small business owner protect?  How much strength will it take to admit lacking the skills to win more often?  These are some of the quiet questions a small business owner ponders.  They wrestle inside their minds about revealing bad stuff that reflects the truth about the weakness they own.  Remember, their small business has grown up to define who they are.  If that small business has developed some serious problems, it will not reflect well on the character and knowledge of the owners skills.  Bad things happen to every small business.  Everyone gets behind on their payment obligations.  It happens to everyone, some time or another.  Unfortunately, each small business owner does not understand this simple truth.  Hence, the spin to protect this truth begins its motions.  The small business owner starts to work more on hiding these rotten truths long before any one of them can become comfortably resolved.  They spend countless hours and too much energy on protecting the wrongs they have come to protect.  The messes they grow to protect and manage become suppressed beneath the sight of others.  It becomes some of the most serious work these owners have ever performed.  In addition to becoming consumed by this "personal protection" game, they avoid the help that others can share.  Pride takes over.  Pride expands to cover every surface it can find.  Pride wins this war.  End of seminar number four.

Small business leadership is not the work for a weakened heart.  It will weaken a heart, but it cannot be managed by a weakened heart.  This is where the collision occurs.  When the challenges grow too big for the owner to manage the suppression gets set on fire.  No fire will burn under control when the suppression is fueled by the wrong prevention techniques.  No man is an island.  No island is a part of a larger country.  And no connections to a larger country becomes the first break of some needed help.  Most small business owners wait too long before they ask for help.  They allow the gusty winds of the small business world to blow down their house and destroy their properties of protection well before the real hurricane comes to shore.  It is when that real hurricane hits and everything begins to fly away into the sea that this small business owner cries for help on this tiny island.  They send out messages that describe the winds that have taken them down.  The storm they define becomes the reasons why they admit their loss.  A really bad storm becomes an acceptable excuse for they way their business never performed.  This becomes the best time to begin the work on repairing the loss.  Hopefully, the helpers arrive and do not investigate how the home and the properties where not initially built to survive these winds.  No blame may be found and the repairs can come about without injuring or bruising the ego at hand.  This is how the small business owner will spin what has been going on wrong, all along.  End of the fifth seminar.

What seminar is left?

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