Napoleon Called—Your Bridge is Ready
So you're not getting everything you want from your small business. Maybe it's those annoying customers. Maybe it's that pesky competition. Whatever the cause, your visions of world domination aren't exactly fulfilled.
What's a Miniature World Conqueror to Do?
As a small business owner or solopreneur, you know what you're doing or you wouldn't be in business. But if you're not getting what you want, something has to change. It's a universal truth that you can't change others: not your customers, not your vendors, not, especially, your competitors. If the things you're doing are correct, you don't want to change them, either.
The greatest strategist and implementer of his time, even Napoleon had to change tactics when he came to a river. This world conqueror couldn't walk on water any more than the rest of us. Napoleon's bridge-builders (his pontonniers) were vital to his dream of conquest.
To reach others and get what you want out of your business, you need bridges; you need to do something you're not already doing.
My job is to be the bridge-builder.
You can be Napoleon.
Why I Created the Commonsense Entrepreneur and the Northern California Association of Entrepreneurs
Early Origins
From the time I was a small child, my dad obsessed about doing things in the most efficient way. It often wasn't the way other people did things; he was always a maverick and did things the way he thought made sense.
Professionally, he eventually ended up in quality control. QC is where, after something's built, they test it to make sure it's up to snuff. Eventually they realized they needed to move him to production control, which is based on the idea of preventing problems rather than fixing them after the fact.
The Commonsense Entrepreneur Mentality
Over the years I realized the lessons I could learn from this:
- Preventing problems is better than fixing them after they arise.
- Unconventional thinking isn't automatically right or wrong, just like conventional thinking isn't automatically right or wrong. The number of people who believe something has no bearing on its relevance or truth.
- Problem-solving (by resolution or by prevention) is a worthwhile thing to do with your life.
- There is generally a best way to do things.
Clear Thinking for Best Practices
In the opposite of pragmatism it's very rare when two ways to do something are equally good. It doesn't mean that there's ever a one-size-fits all solution. But in each situation there's probably a best way to do something.
This isn't the same thing as trying to make something perfect before you can use it. You'll never make a perfect book or song or website or painting or child. So if you're trying for perfect you'll wait forever.
Nor is 'best' a series of steps to follow. Best is a guided outcome. Best is different from perfect. Best includes practicality, feasibility.
While every situation allows for (and probably demands) a best solution, there are principles that those best solutions are built on. Since you're going to have to be creating the best solution on the fly you can't always go consult someone about what's the best solution for here and there—and you don't want to. Instead, have a good solid foundation in yourself and you can make these customized best solutions.
Complementary Organizations: For Profit, and Not For Profit
The purpose of the commonsense entrepreneur is the money-making side of that: how I, as a business, help other businesses to be a strong foundation for themselves. The NCAE is the social networking aspect of it—a way to get together and in an informal, not money-motivated way talk about business, learn from other people, see if I can teach them. Then, we all use the lessons learned there: they go and improve their businesses and make money from the free information they get by being part of the NCAE. I do the same: use the information gained there to make the Commonsense Entrepreneur a better business for me—which really means being the best possible business for my customers.
A Mentor, Not a Coach
Rather than being a 'business coach' my intent is to be a mentor. A paid mentor, but still a mentor, not a coach. I think about the title I chose for myself as co-founder of the Northern California Artistic Achievement Awards, 'The Grassies'—Anamchara Eolais. It means one who guides others through what could be a complicated process, but is instead a simple path to useful knowledge. It comes from the ancient Gaelic word for the older priest who mentored the younger in. not only his duties, but his thinking. It's combined with a word that means more than just information, but information which has value.
Mentoring AID
This mentoring will have a specific focus: AID—Accountability in Implementation and Decisionmaking.
Making decisions can be incredibly challenging in the vacuum most small business/solopreneurs find themselves. And for every idea that sees the light of day, hundreds languish for lack of a clear plan for implementation.
Knowing that someone else is genuinely interested in your success creates a personal sense of accountability. That's the accountability I'll create: not of you to me, but of you to yourself.