Posted by Sam Polimeni
One of the things when we’re talking to small business owners about how long they have been in business and how much experience they have. A lot of them think that hey! I’ve been in business 10 years, I’ve got a lot of experience. I know what I’m doing…
And in a lot of cases this is Not true! If you’ve got 10 years experience, is it 10 years experience or is it just one year repeated ten times. Why? Because when we start a business, we learn a professional skill, we start doing it for somebody else, we think we can do it better, but we get sick and tired of doing it for them, so we think we can do it better for ourselves. So we go off and start a business. But the thing is,no one ever taught us how,and we didn’t have any real training on how to run a real business. We think we have experience – but we don’t.
I was talking to a couple of clients the other day who’ve been in business for over 10 years. Even though they’re installing kitchens in multi-million dollar homes, the business, when we analyzed it, wasn’t making much more than basically a wage. It wasn’t making any real profit. They looked at me and asked how they could improve their situation.
My reply: ‘Okay, have you changed what you’ve been doing over the past 10 years, has your business kept on improving, have you kept on doing the same things this year that you did last year. Now, you know, one of the definitions of insanity is “if you keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result” nothings going to happen. What we need to do in business is focus on how we can do things better. How can we do things faster? How can we do things cheaper? We’re going to focus on improving our business all the time, while learning new and better ways to run our business.
I went to a seminar a few years ago; Alan Weiss was the guest speaker. He said that he couldn’t believe “how stupid he was two weeks ago.” I think that the key to a successful business is that there’s always something to learn. When you get to the point where you think you know all the answers, your business is going to start going downhill. So I always encourage myself and everybody else to continually learn how to improve their business. Always coming up with better systems, always coming up with how we can get new customers. How to get better people and how to improve on our sales and marketing processes.
What did you work on this week to improve your business? What did you work on today to improve your business? If you didn’t work on anything last week to improve your business, you wasted the week! If you didn’t work on anything new last month to improve your business, you probably wasted the month. And sadly, if you didn’t do anything to improve your business last year, then you just wasted the year!
Some of you will be screaming at me saying Sam, you don’t know! You just don’t know how busy I am! The point is: you might be busy, but are you busy doing the right work that’s going to get your business better today than it was yesterday?
If you’re busy and your business isn’t any better today than it was yesterday, you just wasted the day. Do the right work, start working on your business rather than just in your business. When we’re working in the business, we’re working on today’s income. When we’re working on the business, we’re working on tomorrow’s income. So, if you spend too much time working in the business, you’re not going to have a good business tomorrow.
The key is to get the right balance. You have got to get that balance right. Once you get that balance right in the business, the key starts to turn. Have you got 10 years experience or 1 year repeated 10 times?
