“You Don’t Know My Business”

Many a wise statement has been made by the embattled entrepreneur.  Remember these?

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” Steve Jobs

“Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.

I have been in meetings with clients over my career, where we are discussing why their respective businesses were not flourishing as they intended, or why they’re working so hard and not making as much profit as they felt they should. Then, I am  asked for my opinion, and after voicing it I immediately know I've hit a nerve. The client’s face gets red, and these words come out of his mouth…

“Well, you don’t know my business.”

The ultimate defense mechanism, right up there with “I know you are, but what am I?” and “Your mamma!”

Are there intricacies within the four walls of your business of which I’m not aware? I’m certain there are. Have I ever stood behind your desk/counter and interacted directly with your customers? Nope. Are there universal truths in all businesses, some of which I am aware and will use to help you? AFFIRMATIVE.

In no particular order, here are three of my universal thoughts about your business:

No matter what you’re doing, it is your job to provide your marketplace with an awesome service/product and delight your client base by filling a need in their world. If this weren't true, you wouldn't be talking to me. I may be boiling down the main purpose of your business to three lines of text, but maybe you’re over thinking things. Heck, we all do it. We think our business challenges are so great that it can’t be this easy to think about. I disagree. I know that to accomplish the task, we need to be innovative, forward-thinking, customer-centric and somewhat maniacal in our approach to service.

You have the same number of hours with which to work that I do. 
I once told a former client that he needed to raise his prices to achieve better margins because he would never grow and flourish at his current pace. He replied with the quote that titles this blog, to which I replied “Are you going to somehow create more hours in your work day? OK, if you can’t do that, then you need to raise your hourly rate to make more money (he refused to entertain the idea of value pricing or bundling his services into a flat fee package). If you have indeed hit a wall, and you’re maxed out with the number of hours you can work, this is a simple fix.” I gave him other advice as well, and while he’s not a client anymore, I found out the other day from a client who contracts with his company that he changed his pricing policy and initiated other changes I recommended. His team size has doubled, his wife is much happier with her life, and he has moved to new office space nearly three times the size of his former office. We all have the same number of hours to work each day/week/year. How you price makes all the difference in the world, and there are more options out there than $xxx.xx per hour. Maybe I wasn't totally off the mark after all.

If you don’t take care of your team/employees, the talent will someday leave and you’ll be screwed. 
Taking the people who work with you for granted will hurt you. Period. Read any recent studies on employee satisfaction, and you’ll find that higher pay isn't the only way employees feel valued. I don’t think it’s even in the top 3 or 4. There are more subtle, personal, moral-building things you can do as the boss-man to make people want to work with you, sacrifice their waking hours to help you build something, and spend more time with you than they spend with their family. One of our new clients asked me to prepare her employee’s personal tax return as part of my engagement with her company, because she knew the employee would value that perk. BRILLIANT! I had never even thought of offering that to any of my other clients. I asked her nicely if I could steal it, and she agreed.

I believe that realizing these universal truths has helped us make lasting differences in our clients’ lives. I’m not a know-it-all, and I hope that I never come off sounding like one.  But I find that it helps to remember this quote about the game of baseball from “Bull Durham:”

“A good friend of mine used to say, ‘This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.’ Think about that for a while.”