Empirical and observational data along with a healthy dash of intuition often have to be combined as business owners begin to look outward, not inward, at what solutions they can provide to their customers.
If you expect to grow your business, you need to be plotting out your schedules days in advance. Until you get that most basic of steps orchestrated, you can never get to the critical steps that I outline in any one of dozens of books.
People crave predictability, and when you design and use systems, you give people predictability. More importantly, when you build systems, they can help you orchestrate, and orchestration helps you create the habits that continuously improve the systems!
'Product life' is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a 'product,' understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.
Here's the problem with phones - they are a ready-made diversion from the considerably harder work of growing a business.
The only choice that leads small business owners to real success in their endeavors is the one that requires real thought. Understanding and building the systems they need within their company to afford them a framework of organization that can scale the business from a company of one to a company of one thousand.
Most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. Most entrepreneurs fail because you are working IN your business rather than ON your business.
Look at what is average in your area, your industry, and your company and then be better. That could be as simple as reading another book each month or attending a seminar each year. On the other hand, it also means acknowledging what 'average' actually is and how you, as the owner, arrive at that figure.
Small business owners and entrepreneurs worthy of the title need to build systems that replace themselves.
If you are with five successful people, then you are the sixth successful person. The reverse of this is true as well, so who are you hanging out with?
Without concentration, a business will be ordinary in every respect, because it will have no presence, no inner force, no way to attract the people upon whom it depends for its very existence - employees, customers, suppliers, and lenders.
Certainly, the human race can be fickle, and times do change, but overall, the barriers to bringing a product to market - and understanding what 'the market' wants - have remained unchanged.
No matter what your company does - build, manage, produce, import - as an owner, you can't avoid the hard work and skip straight to success. No class can give you that, no YouTube video can teach it, and no book can mark it off your list.
