A Small Business Easy Button?

Upon telling a doctor that I really wanted to find the motivation and get up early and go running rather than face the mountainous task of exercising after work, she told me “the body knows what it needs; the thing that you obsess over the most but never do, is the very thing you should be doing.” Dammit. She seemed so assured I knew I had no recourse.

But, much like anything that doesn’t thrill me I was soon able to forget that bit of sage advice - evidenced by the fact that I have not once gotten up to run since that appointment two weeks ago - and then there it was again in Stacy Karacostas’ article 10 Simple Rules for Growing a Successful Business. Rule number ten, which I think makes it the most important, demands:

“Face your fears. The very things that scare you the most when it comes to marketing and growing your business are probably the things you most need to be doing.”

Dammit.

Deep down I know this to be true, both about clawing my way out of bed every morning with more than ten minutes to spare, and doing scary stuff to grow this business, but I also like this advice from Seth Godin:

"Q is for Quitting: Sticking things out is overrated, particularly if you stick out the wrong things. In fact, I think you'd be much better off quitting most of what you do so you have the resources to get through the hard slog I call the Dip... The challenge, then is to not quit in the Dip, but instead to quit everything else so you have the focus to get through the slog of what matters."

So how do you know to which scary things you should square off your shoulders and from which ones it is permissible to run a la Scooby Doo fleeing a bad man in a monster mask?

We’ve come across this quandary already when trying to figure out whether we should be networking or writing, finding clients or doing work for the ones we already have. In this case we were blessed with an easy and definitive answer in the sit down with Giselle from CherryBranch Consulting I mentioned last week. According to her 50% of the hours you work should be billed, 25% on marketing yourself and 25% on education. This is where I press my easy button (I really like that voice).

Obviously Staples still has some work to do because it’s not always that easy. Another Godin nugget is about choosing your customers. He claims we get to choose them not the other way around. I know that in theory if you market yourself to a certain audience or price yourself out of the reach of certain groups, you are choosing, but how does that play out when you have bills to pay, and people to whom your income is important. Surely then there has to be some flexibility or realism?

At what point can we quit the customers we don’t like? I suppose at the point we’re able to quit the abhorrence of getting out of a toasty bed to go jogging because we’re now free to set our own hours. Ah, if only Staples had an easy button for that.