How Do You Run Your Small Business -- Patch and Mend or Multiply Results

There are three kinds of small businesses:

1)      Non-survivors

2)      Survivors

3)      High performing growth companies

What is the biggest difference between these businesses?

Mindset! Your success or failure starts with a belief about you, your business, and how to manage your business.  The dividing line between all three is how they believe they should respond to the problems that every business will have.  

When business owners hit the wall like many have done due to the recession do you know how they typically respond?

1)      They hope the problem goes away

2)      They believe they have to fix it right away . .. Panic Mode.

3)      They look for someone to blame it on

Non-Survivors 

Basically non-survivors worry about their problems and hope they get resolved while blaming someone else or some thing, like the recession, for their problems. Worry, worry, worry, blame, blame, blame. But none of that is going to help them resolve the problem.

Survivors

The survivors are more likely to Patch and mend, fix the gaps they discover, and do it quickly. They don’t set and worry.

They are the ones that will put chewing gum in the hole in the dam. At least they will act, where the non-survivors blame, and run around saying, oh me, oh my.

1)      The survivors see problems as normal. They don’t worry about them, they deal with them.

2)      They see problems as an opportunity to learn, and to reach yet another level even higher.

3)      Solutions are inevitable.

High Performers

A survivor pays the bills, where a high performer grows rapidly and makes the kind of money that he had hoped when he started this business.

The high performers, however, look at everything differently.

·       They may patch the dam but they will also find ways to replace the dam with one that will produce 10 times the power output and do it quickly.

·       Instead of being misdirected with a panic mode, to “fix it quickly” they may even start looking at opportunities for much bigger returns even before patching.

Or they might even move quickly to an alternate energy source that’s even more efficient and do it even faster than they could fix or replace that dam.

Which are you?

What’s the difference in the mindset for these three kinds of thinkers?

My father was a farmer back during the great depression. He learned to keep his equipment running with bailing wire, and even kept many of the old broken parts from his tractors so that he could patch things to keep his farm operating. He was a survivor during the depression, and did a good job of it.

There is a time for patch and mend, especially when you know that you won’t be able to run to town to get what you need and you still need to get the corn planted right now or you won’t have an income by fall.

However, there is a difference between keeping a business operating that is already successful, and keeping one operating that has never reached a significant level of success. And there is an even bigger difference between just trying to stay afloat and one that is continually looking for the multipliers of the business.

Survivors work to “save a buck.” High performers look for the ROI where “the buck” generates 10 times, 100 times, or 1,000 times, and then he decides which buck to spend.

Are you a non-survivor, survivor or high performer?

Alan Boyer

Small Business Coach, Kansas City

Alan Boyer

 816-415-8878
alanboyer@leaders-perspective.com
http://www.leaders-perspective.com