entrepreneurship

Ideas are a lot like zucchini. They tend to be prolific in production, but after a while you realize that a giant pile of zucchini isn’t all that useful (or appetizing). To get the full value out of a garden full of zucchini, you must use a recipe and transform them into something else — like zucchini bread, zucchini casserole, and my favorite - zucchini sushi.

To turn your giant pile of ideas into profits, you need project planning. Why? Because a project plan is the recipe that helps you define, manage, and complete the transformation of an idea into a new reality.

Thankfully, project planning isn’t that complicated. Oh, it can be – particularly given how people like to over-complicate things! But with an affordable project management software and some project management basics, you can become a project management guru. Read on to find out how.

Elements of a Project Plan

Purpose and Scope

Begin every project plan by defining its purpose and scope. This is important. Without purpose and scope, every person who hears about the project may have different expectations. Let’s use an example. If we created a project to select a project planning software, the purpose and scope would be essential to choosing the right tool.

For instance, some project planning tools are good for small projects, but not for large, detailed projects with many due dates and participants. Some project planning tools are good for only 5-10 people, and others are useful for large organizations.

Project Scope and Purpose A:

We need a project planning tool for our 7-person marketing team. We manage short-term projects, and the projects rarely exceed 1 level of task detail. We need this project plan to help us reduce our planning cycles and do a better job of hitting deadlines.

Project Scope and Purpose B:

We need a project planning tool for the 70 people in our head office. We manage large and small projects, and our most complicate projects can go to 2 or 3 levels of detail per task. We need to be able to include outside participants. We need this project plan to achieve strategic objectives, improve corporate communications, and create global transparency regarding our projects.

As you can probably see from those two descriptions, the project plans and software selections would be quite different from one another.

Create an Outline

The best way to start a project plan is to create an outline. This doesn’t have to be done in your project planning software. Sometimes, it is easiest to create the outline on a piece of paper, with lots of room to move things around, scratch things out, and develop good descriptions. For example, let’s use “Project Scope and Purpose B” from above.

We begin by asking, “what are the broad tasks that must be done to achieve the objectives of this project?” Your list may look like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
5. Shortlist and Test
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software

Are you done? No, but that is a good start. The next step is to create more detail in your project outline. It looks like this:

1. Review current project planning processes and tools
   1. Operations Team project planning processes and tools
   2. Marketing Team project planning processes and tools
   3. Merchandising Team project planning processes and tools
   4. Sales Team project planning processes and tools
2. Identify needs and wants related to project planning
   1. Senior Executive/C-suite needs and wants
   2. Department Head needs and wants
   3. Team member needs and wants
3. Create short list of project planning software to consider
   1. Develop list of known project planning software
   2. Request references and recommendations from business partners who use project planning software
4. Assess each software against our software requirements
   1. Using online information, develop preliminary description of each software
   2. Narrow list to 5 software packages to consider
5. Test Shortlist
   1. Contact vendors for product demonstrations or do online product demonstrations
   2. Document advantages and shortcomings of each software
   3. Review findings with representatives from each functional area
6. Select project software
7. Implement project software
   1. Create implementation plan and schedule (this is a mini-project — which would be created exactly the way we created the overall project plan).
   2. Follow the implementation plan

Assign Resources and Dates

The next step is to assign a point person for each aspect of the project plan. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who will do all the tasks themselves — they will likely be delegating many of the tasks, and keeping other tasks for themselves. But this person will be responsible to ensure that whomever is assigned the task is doing the task on time and correctly.

The date part is trickier. The way we set dates on a project plan depends a lot on the type of project plan; long-term or short-term. But let’s start with the way they’re both the same. Every project, large or small, must be assigned a completion date. This is the date at which we expect the entire project to be completed. Every other date assigned within the project must meet that overall due date. So, you can’t have an overall project due on October 15, 2019, but have a task within that project due on December 1, 2019.

Now let’s look at the way long-term projects and short-term projects are different.

For a short-term project, you will likely assign all the due dates at once. Many short term projects are repeated year after year (Valentine’s Day promotion, summer sale, Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Trade Show Plan). In those cases, the participants know the steps that need to be done and they launch and complete projects like this every single month. So assign due dates for each task at the same time you assign responsibilities.

For long-term projects, you set milestone dates at the outset, but save individual task dates until you are closer to working on those tasks. What is a milestone? Milestones are the significant stages or segments of a plan. The numbered items in the above list are the major segments of the project. The completion date for each group of tasks is a milestone.

For example, you would set the due date for the entire project. You may also set dates by when you want to accomplish the first level (milestone) tasks in your outline. But for the individual tasks within the outline, you may not set due dates or delegate responsibilities until you turn your attention to that task group. This is part of managing the project.

Once you have your project scope, outline, resources, and dates identified, it’s time to plug all that information into your project software.

Managing a Project

The best projects are inclusive, cross-functional, and heavy on communications.

With today’s Project Management tools, we pretty much have it made when it comes to project management, because this software category is well-defined and robust. Whether you use programs like Basecamp, Asana, or Trello for loosely structured projects and communication, or programs like Plutio, Zoho, Wrike, or Microsoft Project for highly structured projects and communication, all modern project management tools have a few common elements:

• The ability to create a list of tasks and assign due dates and people to them.
• The ability to create conversational “threads” on each task and on the overall project, which helps eliminate phone calls and email and creates better overall information sharing.
• The ability to track progress on the project plan, maintaining accountability and transparency.

Now back to due dates for a minute. In the long-term project plan, you may start out with due dates for the total project, and for the major groups of project tasks or significant time intervals, but few dates or assignments at the detailed task level of the project. That’s not only OK – that’s good.

In the not-so-distant past, project management software forced us to set dates for the entire project at the outset. But we all know that it can be hard to envision all the necessary detail for long-term projects. And once all those dates and details are set, we have to manage a lot of detail that may or may not be accurate or relevant – particularly as the project goes on.

The best way to set and manage accurate dates and responsibilities in a major project is one chunk at a time. The project team should meet weekly or bi-weekly. At those meetings, they should decide as a group which elements of the project to elevate next. Once decided, the project plan should be updated to reflect those dates. This method makes the project plan more accurate and meaningful, and it ensures that all project team members are focused on the right things at the right times.

The project team should also hold one-another accountable for due dates and results. If there’s no pressure within a project team to meet their responsibilities, the project will languish. A manager can certainly help to apply pressure, but case-study after case-study demonstrates that the best-executed projects benefit from peer group commitment and motivation.

Why Planning?

It may be difficult to imagine, but not everyone loves project planning equally (a bit of sarcasm here). Yet, there’s a huge benefit to project planning that turns all motivated professionals into raving fans.

As this graphic demonstrates, the cost of planning is lower than the cost of execution. So by spending more time in the planning phase, you can shorten the time you spend in execution phase and reduce your overall cost.

Because planning helps mitigate time-consuming execution errors, spending more time in planning also tends to speed up the entire project.

You can also improve the quality of the project with better planning. Well-planned projects experience better overall results than projects with little planning effort.

The message is clear. Professional project planning is more economical and effective, and ultimately of higher quality, than seat-of-the-pants project management. And considering the fabulous software tools available today, project planning is easier than ever.

So that’s your recipe! Now it’s time to sift through that giant pile of ideas you have, and start turning those ideas into profits, using a project management approach that is easy to implement and makes managing the project (the real work) more effective than winging it. You’ve be so excited at how much more you will accomplish this way.

Here’s a simple question. Well, two. What is it that you sell? What business are you in?

The correct answers to these questions lay the foundation for a successful business. And a surprising number of businesspeople fail to get the answers right. Let’s review a few examples you’ve probably seen before.

What is it McDonald’s sells?  Food? Actually, no. They sell convenience and time. Sure, it comes in the form of hamburgers and French fries, but what they are selling is the ability to get a hot breakfast without slowing yourself down on the way to work, the sanity that comes from quickly feeding a few whiny and argumentative children in the back seat without braking your pace to the grocery store, and the opportunity to put food on the table for a house full of always-hungry teenagers without cooking dinner after a hard day of work.

What business is McDonald’s in? Real Estate. McDonald’s owns the best corner in nearly every community in the U.S., and some of the choicest real estate to be had in the world. If you were familiar with their P&L, you’d see how important real estate is to the financial performance of McDonald’s. If you were to look at their corporate resumes, you’d see how many real estate professionals hold senior positions in that organization.

Let’s do another. What is it Starbucks sells? Coffee? No again. They sell an experience. They sell what they (Starbucks) refers to as the third place, the place other than home and work where one can spend time, relax, socialize. Starbucks is the Country Club, the Men’s Club, the Women’s Circle, the university lounge, for people who never had, no longer have, or otherwise would never have those places.

What business is Starbucks in? Not everyone will agree with my answer, but I think they are in the business of entertainment, and coffee is just a draw. They own Hear Music (an excellent indie label and music catalog since 1989 or 1990 which Starbucks bought in 1999), they have a joint venture with Apple, they have their own label called Starbucks Entertainment and produced the 2006 film Akeela and the Bee, and they are currently rolling out the ability to download to your iPod the music tracks being played in Starbucks stores.

If McDonald’s had approached their what are we selling as a question of just selling food, today they would be nothing more than a restaurant or two in some town somewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with being in the business of selling food. But the act of selling food is so common that merely selling food rarely evolves beyond a local phenomenon. The power of national or global franchises always lies in something else – positioning them as a lifestyle choice (Hooters, Melting Pot), a known commodity (IHOP, Denny’s, Applebees), or cheap and fast (Burger King, Wendy’s).

The answer to what business are you in is trickier. The enduring challenge of business is to figure out what will provide profits. One of the major failings of most small business owners is the fact that they are unwilling to shift gears and turn attention to what earns them profits. That may sound crazy, but it happens all the time.

Imagine for a moment that a woman opens a knitting store filled with scrumptious yarns, knitting needles, and other knitting notions. She has a terrific location and gets good traffic. Based on customer feedback she puts in a small section of beads and decorative metals. This section of the store is very popular. But she perceives herself as being in the business of selling knitting supplies, so she doesn’t expand the beading inventory or offer classes in jewelry making or embellishment techniques.

Maybe this woman has landed in the business of retailing, because she has either effectively selected or lucked into a great location. Or perhaps she has landed in the business of selling crafts, by virtue of her location, her street presence, or some other factor. If she’s smart, she’ll shift her attention to where the profits are and continue riding that wave, which is likely to shift and change over time.

Some people believe they must approach their business as a vocation. If you can think of one and only one thing that will make you happy in life, then it may be wise to pursue that vocation no matter what (which means, profit or no profit). However, if you are in business to make money, have personal independence, build a satisfying retirement, and do work you enjoy doing, there are a variety of things to sell and businesses to be in that will make you happy. In any case, not making a profit, wasting money for years on something that will never make a profit, and attaching your personal identity to a piece of real estate, a logo, or any inanimate object are sure ways to obliterate happiness.

Public companies are less likely to make this mistake but not immune to it. General Electric is a completely different company today than it was when founded in 1876. The majority of products it sells didn’t exist technologically when it was founded. GE has developed a talent for redefining what it sells and what business it is in, and this talent has rewarded it with profits and growth. Perhaps the strong personalities or egos of the original founders – Thomas Edison, Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston – would have interfered with successful evolution of the business, had they remained involved (indeed, alive) throughout the 132 years of the company’s existence. Your job – whether you are an independent business owner, a director or manager of a division in a corporation, or in the idea phase of your own dream business – is to answer the questions what am I selling and what business am I in in such a way that profit and long-term sustainability can result.

Now try this exercise again, thinking carefully about what your business must do to set itself apart from the competition. What do you sell? What business are you in? If you are not satisfied with the answers, I suggest pondering them for the few weeks. You’ll be impressed with the creativity and energy that can result from developing the proper answers to and focus on these questions.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, an ice cream vendor was doing so well that he repeatedly ran out of bowls. The neighboring booth, selling Zalabia (a Persian, wafer-thin waffle), wasn’t doing well at all. Capitalizing on the neighboring booth’s success, the Zalabia vendor rolled his wafers into cones and offered them as an alternative to dishes for serving ice cream, and the ice cream cone was born.

It happens fairly often that we have something customers wish to buy, but it’s not the thing we think we have to sell. If you have paid a small fortune in trade show fees to make relatively undesirable waffles, and you are lusting after the success of the ice cream booth next door, you might just be jolted into a fit of creativity. But most of the time, we’re simply stuck in our offices, studios, or ideas, wishing things weren’t as difficult as they are, instead of imagining how successful we might be.

We find it very difficult to get past our acceptance of reality.

 Of course, we’re supposed to deal in reality, aren’t we? We’re supposed to accept the way things are, deal with the facts, lie in the beds we’ve made, and make silk purses out of unseemly materials. But from that mired state of thinking comes a host of assumptions about why things are the way they are, which ideas we should be committed to, how we should be doing business, what activities constitute the correct activities, and for whom we should be doing all this work. We make annoying little speeches to our eye-rolling teenagers about what it means to ass-u-me, but then we turn around and invest the majority of our energy into validating our own assumptions. Asinine? Yes. But my, we’ve been trained. 

Or rather, we haven’t been trained. We’ve been indoctrinated. From the dawn of our individual existences we have had experiences, become familiar with results, and drawn conclusions about how things work – even if the experience was that of a 2-year-old, or presided over by an elder 8-year-old sibling. Even if the experience was taught by an uneducated parent, a miserable or bored teacher, or simply stumbled into alone (I am already rethinking my offer of only paying half of any therapy my children may require . . . ), we have taken each experience and cataloged it in our subconscious as an answer to something. And even now, at an age at which you can run your own business, your hyper-efficient brain goes surfing through all those conclusions – the 2-year-old ones as well as the college-age ones – to help you resolve any puzzle you may stumble upon. This, dear reader, is the foundation of your reality. And it’s why your reality is different from mine, and each of our realities are different from everyone else’s.

So what does this have to do with what you have to sell? Only this. When you are confronted with a situation in which you are selling less than you would like to sell, capturing less profit than you require to maintain your desired lifestyle, or encountering less opportunity than you would like to achieve that desired lifestyle, you are confronted with a puzzle.  Your brain flips through the catalog of solutions you have developed for the past however-many years, and it comes up with solutions that are part of your present reality. The obvious solution is to toss aside reality and come at the puzzle from, what, unreality? Someone else’s reality? Virtual reality? Hey – as long as it’s different from your operating paradigms, it’s probably good. So how do you do it?

Any activity you choose that forces you to question and challenge your assumptions can work. It can be as straightforward as standing at a whiteboard or easel and making a list of every single “fact” you know about your business. Once the list is complete, return to the top of the list and indicate if each item is a fact, or an assumption. After you complete that pass, return to the top and challenge each item marked as an assumption. I have seen this process yield remarkable insights.

If you wish to make that exercise more powerful, invite someone with greater or very different knowledge than your own to participate with you. Such a person will likely challenge ideas you are less inclined to challenge and ask questions that cause you to think about things in a different way.

 Another activity is to create a list of each of the functions of your business (for instance, design, production, sales, marketing, accounting, inventory management). For each function, ask and answer the following questions:

• What is the purpose of this function
• How does that purpose align with my corporate strategy
• How does this function serve that purpose
• What are all the ways a different company, selling different products or services, might fulfill the purpose of this function?
• If I were to consider this function strictly through the eyes of my customers, what would I think the purpose of this function was?
• How might my customers wish I would change/improve this function?

As with the first exercise, inviting a person with greater or different knowledge than yours can lead to creative conversations you may not have had otherwise.

Some games are already enshrined in business management process. From Lean Manufacturing we get the “5 Whys,” a game in which we take a problem, ask why the problem exists, then ask why for each subsequent answer, drilling down to the core reason for the problem. In nearly all cases five whys are all it takes to get to the bottom of things.

I like any problem-solving or assumption-challenging approach that turns the effort into a game. At the very least games are fun, and fun is creative. Taking a problem and turning it into a game also helps us think about the problem from different angles. 

Whatever you do, try to remember that the way you have always thought about things (solved problems, earned kudos, even made fortunes) is reality, and reality isn’t the future – it’s the present, and it’s the past. To achieve a future that looks a lot like the present, keep thinking about things the way you already do. To imagine a future that is wildly, creatively, excitingly different? Toss reality to the side. You’ve already extracted what reality has to offer.

© 2009. Andrea M. Hill

Are you showing up to work energized each morning? Are you excited about the work you plan to do that day? Do you feel intellectually stimulated and emotionally satisfied by your work?

If you can't answer yes! to these questions at least seven days out of ten, then you're not having as much fun at work as you shouldbe.  No, I'm not joking. I'm not even blue-skying. Not everyone has the privilege of work they can enjoy — I do get that. But if you're reading this blog, chances are very good that you own a business. And if that's the case, you can do something about this rut you're in. You not only can, you must.

So how do you do that? By stretching, innovating, and growing. Reams of psychological research support that people who are growing and learning are happier than average. Stacks of business case studies show that people who continuously learn and innovate have more successful businesses. And I don't have to provide you with any supporting data to state that businesses that are paying the bills have at least more relaxed - if not happier - owners.

Where do you start? I'd suggest starting with the core premise of your business: your business vision. Your business vision answers the questions:

1. Who do we serve?
2. What do we provide that makes us different?
3. Why do we matter?

When you return to your business vision, you may notice several things. You may notice that you do not have a clear answer for one or more of those three very important questions. You may notice that your answers have migrated or even changed completely since the last time you pondered them. You may realize that you had never asked them in the first place.

Related Post: I Will Figure Out My Brand Story

As you work on your answers to these questions, you will gain insights about your business. You will see that you are sometimes spending your time in the wrong ways or on the wrong things. You will realize that your prospecting efforts are not targeted enough. You may see that what once differentiated you has now been copied, and that it's time for you to jump out ahead again.

From these insights, it's a very short leap to discovering new ways to improve your business, feeling like you accomplished something at the end of each day, and waking up energized.

Related Post: Sit. Crawl. Walk. Run. Stairs. The Strategic Process

So stop fighting the same old battles and doing the same old things! If that's what you're doing, it means you've stopped reinventing yourself. Take hold of your business vision and give it a good shake. You'll be surprised at the new ideas that will fall out.

CNN Money offers a quiz entitled "Are You Ready to Start Your Own Business?"  I found it while skimming the small business news this morning, and decided I should take it.  After all - it's been 15 years since I last owned my own business - 15 years doing the corporate thing - and now I'm on my own again. What if I'm really not ready? What if I've gotten soft while surrounded with hundreds of people doing work that, in a very small business, I have to remember how to do for myself?

So I took the quiz, got a 90% (hmm), and most important, found it to be an excellent refresher in 10 very important concepts which, while necessary for any businessperson, are particularly crucial for those of us who are going it on our own.

The statistics for new business success aren't pretty.  For many years it was reported that approximately 80% of new businesses failed in the first 5 years.  The numbers may be looking a little better now - the Small Business Administration (SBA) recently reported that "two-thirds of new employer establishments survive at least two years, and 44% survive at least four years." An article by Patricia Schaefer, called "The Seven Pitfalls of Business Failure and How to Avoid Them," gives good insight into the reasons for these statistics.

According to Schaefer, small businesses fail due to: 1- starting a business for the wrong reasons, 2 - poor management, 3 - insufficient capital, 4 - location, location, location, 5 - lack of planning, 6 - overexpansion, 7 - no website.   Funny.  Except for the seventh point, those are the reasons that any business - large or small - has failed in the history of business.

I've spent a lot of my years developing executive talent in corporations. The individuals with the greatest potential for success had innate qualities of strong intelligence, critical thinking skills (or the willingness to develop them), and excellent people skills. Without these three things, the rest doesn't matter. In addition, they all had well-rounded business skills, which correlate well to the first six points in the "why businesses fail" list. Whether they were working in a specific functional division or were performing at a general management or global level, the skills of understanding why a business exists (business proposition and strategy), the functions of management (planning, organizing, controlling and leading), financial management, and sales and marketing (location, location, location) are critical to individual executive success as much as they are critical to the ability to start a successful small business.

In a small business its tempting to get so focused on one thing - a website, a specific customer, a project - that one forgets that all the functions of management have to be tended to at all times. In a large business the same risk exists. The solution to the risk for large or small business is surprisingly similar. Systems have to be designed to ensure all the elements of the business are served at the right time and by the right people.

In a small business, that system is designed to enable one person to attend to the needs of the business and to know when to hire outside help (unless you are an accountant, an accountant is absolutely the first help any small business should retain). In a large business, the system is designed to help dozens or hundreds of people serve the businesses requirements effectively. And knowing when to shift from the small business approach (I have to do it myself) to the large business approach (I am not micro-managing others who have to do the work) means at some point the ownership/management was smart enough to start developing the people who would eventually do the work.

Business disciplines scale. The systems that support them change dramatically, but the underlying elements are all the same. And they're not that hard to learn, which is good, because they must be learned.  My oldest child is studying to be a pharmacist. She pointed out to me not long ago that the difference between her career and my career is that if I make a mistake, nobody dies.  And she's absolutely right.  The skills I honed as a CEO of a mid-sized corporation are the same skills I need for running a small business. The skills a professional climbing the corporate ladder needs are the same skills as an independent entrepreneur. 

Now I just need to figure out how to get our 5-year-old to manage my website.

(c) Andrea M. Hill, 2007

Ever share a great idea and get... crickets?

It may not be the idea. It could easily be the frame.

When you come up with an idea outside the usual frameworks or structures... when it doesn't look like something people are familiar with, or follow familiar rules... people often don't know how to think about it.

The brain likes patterns. Known shapes. Clear comparisons.
No pattern = no traction.

I'm sure thousands of million-dollar-ideas have been abandoned because a person of influence didn't 'get it'.

So if you've done the work of assessing your idea*, and you're pretty sure it's good, don't let other people's ho-hum reactions cause you to lose your mojo. Press on! Give yourself permission to be the only one that 'gets it', and maybe your idea won't be one of the million-dollar-ideas lost to history.

People get confused between order and chaos, creativity and noise. Maybe not all people, but a certain category of people suffers from this malady more than others (besides teenagers, I mean). That category is entrepreneurs who have grown their business past the up-and-coming stage and are now faced with the established-business phase.

I can understand how this happens. The entrepreneur is an idea guy or gal. They are turned on by a business concept, and they throw themselves happily and energetically at the task of turning the idea into cash. In the process, they take on any role that must be filled, they try out crazy ideas that happen to work, and they work insanely long hours. Because they don't have any money to begin with and they're constantly afraid of losing what they've gained, they take a long time to hire anyone and they do so sparingly.

As the business matures a few interesting things begin to happen. The first thing is determining the answer to the question exit or keep going? If an entrepreneur is very lucky, if they have built a firm foundation, and if they want out, they may be able to sell to someone else. At that point any self-respecting entrepreneur does it all over again with a new product or service.

If the entrepreneur does not want to exit, doesn't have something saleable, or can't find a buyer, they keep going. Changes begin to happen that are very small at first, but over the years they add up. The entrepreneur (or their spouse) gets tired of working so many hours. Customer demands begin to require better, faster attention. The requirements of some of the disciplinary areas of business – whether it be marketing, finance, operations, or IT – become too challenging for the entrepreneur (yes, anyone can learn how to do QuickBooks, but the accounting function of a business is generally beyond the scope of most non-accountants). So the entrepreneur begins to hire experts in specific areas in order to avoid messing up something they don't understand and more importantly, to advance the business beyond their personal abilities to do so.

Once you hire some people, they begin to hire more people. There are a number of good reasons for this. The first is that the people the entrepreneur has hired do not want to work 60, 70, or 80 hours per week. Many entrepreneurs struggle with this. They think "Well, I do it. What's wrong with everyone else's work ethic?" The problem with everyone else's work ethic is that they are not paid to work 60, 70 or 80 hours per week. And there are very few entrepreneurs who make the ultimate reward of working 60 - 80 hours per week worth the trade-offs. So, the people the entrepreneur hired, who are working 40-50 hours per week, hire other people who will also expect to work 40-50 hours per week. And as the business grows, more people are needed. Even with efforts designed to improve efficiency and assist the business in growing staff at a lower rate than the growth rate of sales, a growing business will hire more people.

Here's where the confusion between chaos and order, creativity and confusion begins to cost. The entrepreneur is generally a person who dislikes any restrictions on their freedom. They don't want a boss, they don't want to follow rules, and they don't want to be told what to do. Creation of systems is not their strong suit. Not only that, but they resent any system to which they are subjected. But the dynamics of communicating and planning with 3 people are significantly different than the dynamics of communicating and planning with 20 people. And the challenges expand exponentially with each doubling of the workforce. Systems, the very thing renounced by the entrepreneur, are necessary to grease the wheels of a group of people trying to work together effectively.

I don't believe bureaucracies are effective, so please don't assume that I am advocating for their perpetuation. Many management improvements have been introduced in the past 20 years that reduce bureaucracy, nearly all of them related to a matrixed organizational approach.

No, the tools I am advocating are the tools that systematize what can be systematized so workers have more energy and time left for creativity. Things like project management approaches, new product development systems, and content management disciplines solve for the most common causes of miscommunication and mistakes. What are those common causes? They are 1) assuming all of the people who need information have the information, 2) accidentally leaving out people who need information, 3) failing to pass on the relevant information to the next decision-maker, 4) failing to put disciplines in place that guide and monitor time spent on tasks, and the big one 5) failing to recognize early enough when the goals and objectives are not clearly understood or even shared.

When I consult for entrepreneurs I invariably encounter some version of this problem. The entrepreneurs who have hired me like the idea of enhanced planning and communication, but they always balk when they realize that they, too, must use the systems that are being put in place. What they resent is any restriction on their personal operating approach. What they complain about is that things are getting "more complicated," that "creativity will go out the window," and that "all these systems will cost us a fortune."

Despite much talk about Microsoft losing its entrepreneurial edge, they were awarded 1,687 patents in 2007, up from the mid 600s in 2004 and the mid 700s in 2005. That's one patent for every 46 people on their international payroll that year. IBM received 3,148 patents (one patent for every 113 employees), Samsung 2,725 (one patent for every 93 employees), and Intel 1,865 (one patent for every 55 employees). There is no doubt that a small organization can react more quickly than a large organization. But how are these entrepreneurial firms measuring their current creativity? One measure – patents per year per employee – would suggest that anything less than one patent per year per 46 employees would be unacceptable, if your goal is to compare the relative creativity of a small process-free organization with the relative creativity of a process-encumbered organization such as Microsoft.

If current creativity isn't up to snuff, there is a strong possibility that lack of procedure to enhance communication and planning is getting in the way. Yes, when an organization commits to following a project management discipline, there are steps that must be taken that did not exist before. But what people fail to consider is all of the steps that will disappear – the steps of correcting communication mistakes that have gone unnoticed until the project is well underway, correcting information sharing mistakes that have led to product development errors, correcting interpretation errors that have led to creating features that customers do not want or do not need, and the list goes on and on. Each failure in communication and planning must be accounted for at some point in the process. Implementing processes such as project management and product development disciplines simply account for required communication and planning steps up front, leaving the organization with more time and resource to do the creative work.

Anyone who has ever raised a teenager knows that it's not difficult to confuse simple communication requirements (call if you won't be home by 10:00, let me know where you are going) with unreasonable restrictions on personal freedom. But our goal as human beings is to get past the hormone-laden years of adolescence and into a mature adult frame of mind. We should have the same goal for our businesses.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

Why Character Matters in Small Business

I love going through my daughter's mail. Oh, I wouldn't go through it without her! But her mail still comes to my house (that's another story - she has had her own place for ages), and it's frequently filled with tiny boxes and envelopes from all over the world. Like so many people her age, she uses the internet as her shopping mall, and she finds interesting and eclectic items from wherever on the globe they are sold. Her options are endless and exciting.

It's not new news that this is a troubling development for traditional retailers. Consumers have never had so many, nor such interesting, options. Furthermore, consumers want something from their purchasing experience - something that historically played a smaller role in consumer demand. The new consumer expects the purchasing experience to also deliver meaning, experience, and relationships - or some combination of those three.

Many things must be done to attract and keep the new consumer - from merchandising strategy to experience to branding and marketing. But at the heart of all the changes (fun changes by the way) is your brand. At the heart of your brand is your character.

The dictionary defines character as "the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual." Likewise, a business must have distinct mental and moral qualities, qualities that make it matter to certain customers. Your qualities won't matter to all the customers, and they don't have to. You don't need all the customers to be successful, you just need the right customers.

If you know precisely who you are, why your business matters to you, and why that should matter to your customers, you have the beginnings of a brand. If you take that beginning further and stay true to your core purpose, expressing your values as part of your unique and meaningful offering, your brand will begin to grow. When you ask and answer every question through the lens of your values - from how you work with your vendors to what merchandise to offer to the messages in your marketing materials to how you treat your customers - your brand will be come powerful. And that, in a nutshell, is character.

The most powerful thing a small business owner can do is be an effective leader, and ensure his entire organization conveys a strong message of character and integrity to his business community. This core strength will benefit your business in every possible way.