It's the ultimate dream! Owning your own business, being
your own boss, making lots of money. It's why you decided
to start your own small business.
Consider these facts from How to Make Big Money in Your Own
Small Business by Jeffrey Fox:
• Small business today represents 99% of all employers in
America
• Small business today generates 80% of all new jobs
annually
• Two-thirds of the top 5% of taxpayers are small business
owners averaging $400,000 of income per year.
That's a lot of money!
For most, however, the dream becomes a nightmare. According
to the Wall Street Journal® there were 572,900 small
business births in 2004 and 554,800 deaths, a business
mortality rate of 97%.
The human cost of this statistic is even more staggering:
families, friends, personal savings, and even physical
health.
I regularly meet with business leaders who have not had a
vacation in years and can't remember the last time they
took a day off. I've been told many times, in moments of
brutal honesty, "If I keep working like this it will kill
me!"
If this is where you seem to be heading, there is hope. I
believe with all my heart you can succeed wildly at what
you do AND experience a satisfying personal life. I have
clients who enjoy that reality every day.
TRADITIONAL TIME MANAGEMENT DOESN'T WORK ANY MORE
You see, traditional time management doesn't work anymore.
Traditional time management says, "Do you have 10 things to
do today? I can show you how to do 15. Do you have 15
things to do today? I can show you how to do 20."
But the stark reality of business today is that we have 30,
40, and even 50 things to do every single day that simply
cannot get done through greater efficiency.
Returning from a typical day out of the office, today's
small business owners have over one hundred emails to read,
scores of voice mail messages to answer, and a series of
appointments in the calendar made electronically without
their consent (curiously called "invitations").
With this explosion of things to do we must make choices,
hard choices, about the way we spend our time. Success in
today's' tidal wave of 24/7/365 living demands that we
separate the important from the urgent and do only that
which matters most.
In short, greater focus NOT greater efficiency.
FOCUS NOT EFFICIENY IS THE KEY TO BETTER BUSINESS RESULTS
"Concentration-that is, the courage to impose what really
matters most and comes first-is the business leader's only
hope of mastering time and events instead of being their
whipping boy," wrote leadership expert Peter Drucker over
40 years ago in his business classic The Effective
Executive.
This kind of courage is needed even more so today!
Focusing on what matters most, both personally and
professionally, is what gives us calm in the middle of a
storm of activity.
Focusing on what matters most, rigorously and relentlessly,
sets the highest priorities for each and every day and
determines the most important steps of action needed to
fulfill them.
Focusing on what matters most refuses to live on the
adrenaline rush that urgency gives us and does what is best
for our self, our family, and our business.
FOUR QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU FIND YOUR FOCUS
Here are four questions to help you apply greater focus to
your personal and professional life:
1. What are my top 4-6 personal and professional
priorities? You don't get more than six! Most business
leaders I work with land on 1-2 personal priorities and 3-4
professional priorities.
2. What are the 1-2 most important steps of action I can
take to act on these priorities each and every week? These
are not the only things you do during the week, but they
are the most important things THAT GET DONE NO MATTER WHAT.
3. How can I put these 10-12 top priority steps of action
in my calendar so that they are protected and
uninterrupted? If you had an important doctor's appointment
for Tuesday at 3:00 PM, how would you make sure you got
there? Treat these 10-12 steps of action–that's just 2-3
items a day–like a doctor's appointment.
4. What things am I doing during the week that are NOT my
top priorities and should NOT be done? Drucker again
observes, "I have yet to see an executive, regardless of
rank or station who could not consign a quarter of the
demands on his time to the wastepaper basket without
anybody's noticing their disappearance."
A POWERFUL SUCCESS STORY AT IBM
Louis V. Gerstner was appointed CEO of IBM on April 1, 1993.
IBM stock had plunged to $12.73 a share, but when Gerstner
left the company eight years later, Big Blue's was trading
at $120.96. It was the greatest turnaround in business
history. Gerstner tells his story in the brilliant book,
Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Central to Gernster's
success was an epiphany he had a year into the job. One of
his senior leaders came to him and said, "Over the weekend,
I counted them up, there are about two dozen things that
you want me to wake up in the morning and focus on. I can't
do it. I'm not that good. What do you really want people to
do?"
These words stunned Gerstner: What do you really want
people to do? Not 10 things, certainly not 24 things.
Gerstner landed on three and these three revolutionized
IBM. That is the power of focus.
If it can turn around a company with 300,000 employees, it
can certainly do the same for your small business.
And your life!
----------------------------------------------------
Bill Zipp is a seasoned small business specialist. Bill has
spent thousands of hours working with hundreds of business
leaders across the country, and his proven program, The
Business Fitness™ System, provides a step-by-step plan for
building a strong, self-sustaining small business. For a
FREE Special Report, The 3 Biggest Killers of Small
Businesses Today (And What YOU Can Do About Them!) visit
http://www.LeadershipLink.net .
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