1. Failure to evolve.
Markets change over time. People’s needs change over time. One of the biggest problems that I see with entrepreneurs and small businesses is that they start the business based on a single solution, or set of solutions, products or services, that satisfy one particular need or pain point in a market, and they may be doing it very well at that point in time.
But over time, markets evolve, needs evolve, pain points evolve and everything changes. All too often, the people who are providing solutions for those markets don’t continue to evolve with the markets and are left with a bigger and bigger gap between the need and the pain point of the market and the product, service or solution that they’re providing. Add a drastic change in the bigger economy and the speed at which these gaps open grows exponentially, as does the width and depth of the gaps.
The answer here is to keep your finger very much on the pulse of where the pain points currently are in the market and how they’ve changed from when you started your business. Create regular check-in mechanisms to see whether your current solutions are driven more by ego or the desire not to endure the anxiety of change or a continuing need in the market. Then use that information to change the nature of the solutions that you’re providing, if needed, to keep them as relevant and powerful as humanly possible.
2. Perceiving R&D and marketing as separate functions.
Very often people start a business by creating some sort of product, service or solution and then turning around and asking the question, “How do I market this?” Truth is – product creation and marketing are two points along the same continuum. The more remarkable, the more powerful, the more effective you can make your solution, the less you then have to turn around and say “What do I have to do to market this?”
Dan Pink’s recent book, Drive, he reveals some fascinating research which showed that for very simple, rogue, mechanical tasks, the traditional carrot and stick – meaning, if you do X, I’ll give you Y and if you do X even better I’ll give you even more Y – tended to work fairly well as a motivational system.
But as soon as you bring in tasks that are more complex, more creative, or innovation oriented, the traditional carrot and stick type of motivation not only doesn’t work, but it literally disincentivizes behavior that naturally would have been incentivized simply by the opportunity to do something very cool. So, when it comes time to figure out how to motivate those types of activities in your organization, take a step back and instead of offering money or particular tangible things as motivation, think about how you can facilitate mastery. How you can allow people the opportunity to move more aggressively toward mastery of something that they’re already intrinsically drawn to and that becomes about the most powerful motivating factor that you can have for people within your organization.
9. Focusing on hours over results.
One of the biggest gripes of a lot of people that I know who work for bosses, is a focus on what used to be called “face time.” You had to be in a place for a particular amount of time, you had to attend meetings because that’s just the way it was. You had to push a certain amount of documents, because that’s the way it was – these were the processes. Meanwhile, all these actions were being taken, meetings were being had, and clocks were being punched, but results weren’t being accomplished.
A much more effective way to grow an organization is to allow people a certain amount of freedom. Allow flex-time. Being at the office for a particular number of hours, being seen at an office, really isn’t relevant if the results aren’t coming. Focus on results. Task people with goals that are meaningful to them. Give them the resources needed to meet those goals and then, step back and like we talked about in #4 above, tell people In business and in life, fun matters!
Genuine joy in what you’re doing matters. It infuses and impacts every aspect of your business. Maybe it can’t be there every moment of every working hour. I didn’t particularly love cleaning the toilets in the early days of owning a yoga studio. But, it was a minor blip on a bigger, more joyous radar screen. Do what you can to preserve as much sense of joy and delight as possible for those who help build your business. When you do, not only will you have a better time, your employees will, too. And, that will spill over into every touchpoint with your customers as well.
12. Bailing on your body and mind. Even if you love what you do, starting and growing a business includes a whole lot of stress and uncertainty. There is no way to eliminate them. But, it is mission critical that you develop practices that allow you to move through them without losing your mind and watching your body decompose. That means, like it or not, some kind of daily movement or exercise and some form of attentional/mindset training are not only important in your quest to stay focused, fit and capable of enduring the stress of entrepreneurship, they’re mandatory.
By Jonathan Fields, Awake @ the Wheel
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