Growing Your Business – is it so hard?

(apologies to those of you who already received this, but quite a few people didn’t, so it’s hopefully going out again …)

What’s one of the biggest reasons for small businesses to stay small?

Is it a lack of talent, knowledge, and commitment?

NO, says Internet Marketing Guru Rich Schefren - these can only determine the potential of your success, but not the level.

What keeps businesses small are constraints:

Fast growth involves identifying and eliminating the one core constraint currently holding both you and your biz back…

So, in the spirit of the times, I’m going to tell you what my business-related core constraint is, and what I’m intending to do to eliminate it.

My main constraint is a common one for people who have been employees for many years, and then branch out on their own.

It’s having the self-discipline to plan your short and long-term goals, define the activities that you need to do in order to reach those goals, and then having what my parents used to call “zitsfleisch” – actually sitting down and doing the activities that you have planned. It’s all too easy to waste days and days, as if you were on vacation, especially if you work from home. You see, Pavlov has us where “being at home = vacation”, so breaking out of that mould is pretty hard work.

How am I going to eliminate my core constraint?

I once had a boss, a newly appointed VP of R&D, who needed to find out in double-quick time what the 500 or so people in his section were actually doing.

How did he do that? He requested from each of his direct reports (each of us managing departments ranging from 30 to 100 engineers) to send him a daily report.

“Yikes” we all thought – a daily report of what 100 people are doing? How on earth are we going to do that?

But it turned out to be not so hard. What did he want in that report? He wanted us to write everything that we personally had done that day to further our department.

I’ll let you into a secret (it’s not a secret to my ex-boss – I told him after a few weeks) – I have never been so productive in my life. It’s pretty obvious why … who wouldn’t want to impress his or her new boss every day for weeks on end with what they were doing to further the products and people they were responsible for !!??

Now this was quite a few years ago. Why did I just remember it today?

I read a blog post from a young man who calls himself “the Millionaire in Pyjamas” (המיליונר בפיג’מה). He’s a very interesting person, having decided to spend his year after the army on teaching himself Affiliate Marketing, and trying to earn 1,000,000 shekels. Everything he has done since he started on the 1st of January, he has written about in his blog. In today’s post he told us why he originally promised himself and his readers that he would blog every day – it was to eliminate his one core constraint: laziness (he said it!). If he blogged every single day about what he was doing, he had better make sure that he was actually doing something worth blogging about every day !!

Sounds familiar?

OK, so that’s what I’m going to do. No, I’m not going to bore you all with it in my blog, but I am going to look for a victim (oops) volunteer to whom I will send my daily reports. That victim volunteer will hopefully help me make sure I’m actually doing useful things day after day …

So, which of you wants to volunteer?

And have any of you had a core constraint that was holding you back, and cares to share how you overcame it?

If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my RSS Feed, to keep up with all future updates

Bookmark