Small Business Essentials for Entrepreneurs

I love to watch those in the arts - Comedians, Bands, Singers and Dancers. You would think that the arts are the furthest thing away from business and is completely unrelated. However, after I watch something, I chew on it for a while and I will find a gem that translates to Business and Marketing lessons. Almost all artists have good Business and Marketing nuggets if you dig a little deeper. By coincidence I was struggling on finding relatable material of this theme of "Are you killing your Marketing." One day why mindlessly flicking through youtube I stumbled across a golden nugget. A lesson sticking out like a sore thumb. A story about an artist that had a great business lesson.

I've found that when I work with people who struggle with their marketing their is a deeper issue going on under the surface. Currently, I am working with a small service company and they really struggle with grabbing the concept of building a customer acquisition system and all the things that must be learned to make a successful system. After several conversations I came to the realization that the owner does not have a burning "WHY." If you struggle doing the things that need to be done you may not have a burning WHY as well.

The nugget I found was a Michael Flately interview. I have always been a fan of his dancing but had never heard him speak or his story. An unbelievable story if you haven't heard it. He is the dancer who put an Irish dance group called Riverdance on the map in the 1990's. A story from being on top of the world to being fired and then bouncing back. He has since created his own successful dance company. It's been going now for 25 years so I would qualify it as a success. His story reinforced two good lessons.

First, Flately believes his PASSION for dancing was something put into him, almost like he had no control over it. If your going to run a business or you have a business you must have a burning desire. Behind the desire their usually is a "Why." Your "Why" has to be so strong that you cannot be held down Do you have that burning desire?? If you don't have that burning desire to build your business you will just flounder and survive day to day.

Second, Flately described the rythems that would go on in his head. Boom..Boom BoomBoomBoom ClickClick..Click..ClickClick...ClickClickClick..etc.. Always having the beat in his head. His Vision of the Dances consstantly going on in his head.

When I was young and an IT technician, I used to do subcontracting work for IBM. Their was a time before Microsoft came along and IBM was the Dominate force to be reckoned with. I learned some valuable lessons when I worked for them. One of them was for my own business. I need to become a Billing Company. What do I mean?? When I started other IBM techs would work alongside me. Then one day they dissapeared. It was me a subcontractor that had very little interaction with IBM and very little interaction with the customer, It felt like I was delivering the Checks to IBM. Though it felt like that at the time because I was young and naive it was IBM who was building strong relationships with their customers while putting the customers systems in place. It seemed as though IBM was just billing the customer and providing very little effort in the deliverable. All the effort of deliverables was on me. This is the vision for my company and I flirt on the edges of achieving my vision. My company does jobs that I have never seen nor do I care to see them. Sometimes my company has very little to do with the deliverable.

One of the early Presidents of IBM was Thomas Watson. He was idolized in the Business world because he took IBM from a 4 million dollar company to nealy a billion dollar company. When asked on how he did it he would tell this story.

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was a completed reality.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would behave when it was finally the great company I had a vision of it becoming.

The third reason IBM is what it is today is that once I had the picture of how it would look and the picture of how it would act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company, it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one."

Assuming you want to build a business having a vision and having goals are a must. There has been tons of books on Goal setting and thousands of ideas on how to set goals. I am not here to rehash how to set goals or debate which method is the best. What I will say is that you need to have them fresh in your mind every day. How you do this is personal to you. Myself, I read them daily.

Another lesson from the arts is from Jim Carey the famous actor and comedian. When younger, he wrote himself a check for 10 million dollars made out to himself for "Acting Services Rendered." He held onto it for years until he reached his goal. This was his daily reminder and is vision and he never veared off track. Do you have a vision? Have you written it down?

Just a quick recap. If you want to build your business you will need those three things. A "Why"... that burning desire that gets you out of bed everyday,

A Vision..How do you percieve your business in the future and your personal life.

The goals you need to reach your dream..starting with what are you going to get accomplished today?

If you have those three things you have a great base to start with. However, these three things alone will not get you where you want to be. The last piece is learning and understanding the Strategy of Marketing. However, if you do not have the very basics the last piece will never fall into place and you will kill your business before your even start.

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