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Crowdfund Your Next Business Venture

Have you ever had a great new business idea but lacked the money to exploit it? Yeah, me too. More times than I care to count. For many small business, however, crowdfunding may be the key that unlocks the golden door of your next opportunity to a Great! business.

Crowdfunding has been around for a long time using a variety of different names. Artists, authors, and composers have for eons presold their works and only created them once they have sufficient subscribers to make it worth their while. Now, everyone’s getting into the act. Take a look at GoFundMe.com, Kickstarter.com, Indiegogo.com and other crowdfunding sites and you’ll be amazed at what’s out there.

Two primary types of crowdfunding exist. Rewards crowdfunding, wherein entrepreneurs presell a product or service to launch a business concept without incurring debt or sacrificing equity ownership of their company. Equity crowdfunding, wherein the entrepreneur obtains several small capital infusions from several backers, usually in the company’s early stages, and each backer receives some proportional share of a company in exchange for the money pledged.

For most new ventures, entrepreneurs prefer rewards crowdfunding instead of equity crowdfunding, because they want to continue solely owning their venture, calling all the shots, and keeping all the profits. Nonetheless, equity crowdfunding does have its place in the collection of financing options out there.

So, the next time you have a great idea and no money to back it, think about crowdfunding.

[reminder]How big of a list of potential funders do you think you would need to get a new venture requiring $50,000 of initial capital going?[/reminder]

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Put a New Concept in an Old Space

Have you ever been sitting in a dumpy little restaurant and thought to yourself, “Gee, this old place would be a great location for [insert your favorite food place] to open up a new store.” Yeah, me too. More likely than not the owners of the the worn out place your in are tired of owning it and it can be economically bought, updated, and changed into the new concept you desire.

My son, Yitzchak, and I recently associated ourselves with Transworld Business Advisors of Baltimore to add business brokerage to my evergrowing scope of business consulting services company, The Besser Business Bureau. Over the past several weeks, we have been wearing the soles off our shoes walking around Baltimore’s downtown harbor districts getting to know as many of the business owners there as we can. If the owners aren’t in when we pass by, we leave the head person in the store a sealed envelope marked “Confidential For Business Owner Use Only” containing a brief note from us asking them to contact us if they’ve ever considered selling their place. If the business is closed as we go by, then we tape the envelope to the front door of the business based on the high probability that the next person unlocking the door will either be the owner or will give the envelope to the owner.

Three things have surprised the heck out of us. First, drop letters are very effective contacting tools if properly done. Second, there are a ton of business owners out there running marginally successful enterprises who are tired of owning them and seeking to get out of what they are doing for a reasonable price. Third, there are tons of people looking to buy a marginally successful business in the hopes of making it better by making it their very own.

So, if you think you see an opportunity to put your expertise to work in a new location, find the owner and ask about buying the place.

[reminder]Do you have what it takes to break out of your rut and try a new way of earning a living?[/reminder]

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Policy, Procedures, and Work Instructions are the Key to a Turnkey Business

Do you ever worry what will happen to your business if you get hit by a bus? Yeah, me too. And I tell my clients all the time, “A quality management system comprised of good policies, procedures, and work instructions will handle all the details of running your business for you, so you can work on growing your business instead of doing your business.” A recent article in Washington Business Journal shows the strength of my position. Nea{cosmo}politan Pizza Favorite Rises To Franchise Heights, WBJ, August 26, 2016, p.6. http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2016/08/24/attention-pizza-lovers-there-soon-could-be-many.html

A husband and wife team started moving pizza from a food cart and then opened one great Neapolitan pizza business, Pupatella, that gets national recognition. But, they hate dealing with the day-to-day details of running the business and their lack of a detailed quality management system has prevented them from opening additional locations. To get over this obstacle to growing their business, they hired an outside consultant who grew his own business from one to 50 locations by putting in organizational systems and formalized processes.

Hopefully, the expert will give them the playbook they need to grow the number of locations they want and Puppatellas will be popping up everywhere.

I help people optimize their businesses by helping owners stuck working in their businesses work on them instead by proceduralizing them from top to bottom, side to side, front to back, start to finish.

[reminder]What process centered quality system do you have in place in your business?[/reminder]

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Can You Pass The Bus Test?

If you writing your business plan gave you trouble, try writing your business transition plan. Entrepreneurs incessantly think about developing, building, and scaling their enterprises. And, except for the big dream of going public or getting bought by a bigger fish, if you are like most owners, you will seldom think about transitioning your business to its next owners. And the failure to put in place a transition plan now, will almost certainly  cause you or your family to lose almost everything you have worked so hard to build.

Think about what would happen if you got hit by a bus walking to the coffee shop around the corner.

  • If you were unconscious for a week, a month, or longer, who would step in for you and keep your business running?
  • If you died, that same question applies, as does, what would happen to your business?
  • Would someone run it for your family? Why would they?
  • Would someone buy it from your family? Who? Why would they? How much would they pay?

In as much that failing to plan at succeeding in your business is tantamount to planning to fail at it, failing to plan at transitioning your business is tantamount to just letting it whither on the vine as you lay disabled or dying.

Don’t just think about this. Do something to prevent it. Find a good business advisor and build a good transition plan.[reminder]Do you have any clue what your business would do tomorrow if you got hit by a bus today?[/reminder]

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3 Ways to Engage Your Upline and Downline Team Members Bidirectionally

OMNIDIRECTIONALENGAGEMENTDo you feel unengaged in your business workplace? Unengaged with your upline supervisors and chain of command? Or unengaged with your downline team members? Or, worse even still, just totally unengaged in both directions?

Yeah, me, too, in various times during my forty years in business. So I know how you feel, because I’ve sometimes felt the same way, but let me tell you what I found out.

You control the level of your engagement both upline and downline and the success of your engagement in either direction is directly connected to the success of your engagement in the other.

 

So, in order to be Great! All the time! you need to engage your entire team in both directions. Here’s some tips on how to do this:

Substitute annual (or more frequent) performance reviews with continuous bi-directional conversations.

Talk more often to both your upline and your downline. Take notes (using a mechanical pencil in a paper journal is best, IMHO) of only the key points discussed. Use whatever opportunities to communicate you can create to set expectations and goals, praise success, correct only nicely to repair occasional lapses, and listen closely to the needs of both your upline and your downline to learn how you can help each and all of them do their job better

Encourage specificity.

Generalities are generally nonactionable. Being told, “Frank, I’m just not happy with your performance” and leaving it at that provides no information about how you can do things better. The best response to such a statement would be, “Well, frankly, Frank, I have no idea why that’s so, so why don’t you tell me exactly why you’re so dissatisfied.” (Okay, maybe not quite so smarmily, but you get the idea.) On the other end of the stick, when a subordinate person tells you they are not happy doing what they are doing how they are doing it, ask them to describe in immaculate detail how their practically perfect performance in this aspect of their life would look. And then, listen intently and take notes.

Realize that everyone everywhere in your organization hungers for consistent appreciation, dignity, and respect; so give it to them.

People like being loved at times, but strange as it may sound, they love even more just being liked all the time. Continuous appreciation of other team members leads to better job satisfaction, which fosters better internal and external client/customer service, which leads to better client/customer satisfaction and progress, which leads to more things to appreciate in one big happy continuous circle.

We will talk more about working with both employees and employers in the future.

[reminder]When was the last time you told your upline or downline, “Thank you for letting me work with you another day!”?[/reminder]

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8 Ideas To Keep Your Team Strong and Stable

Build a good team from the ground up!Have you ever lost a valuable member of your team? We all have. And we all hate it.

If you want to keep your team strong and stable, then you have to study how others manage to be the best places to work and then become and stay one of those types of employers. The most important indicator of Great! teams is the level of strategic engagement between team leaders and the members of the teams they lead.
Top teams use massive amounts of strategic engagement to create and build on a culture of having loyal, talented, and enthusiastic players who want to stay on the team forever. They do this by: Continue reading “8 Ideas To Keep Your Team Strong and Stable”

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The One True Way To Stop Hating Your Job

Have you ever heard someone cry, “I hate my job!”? Or, worse, have you every cried that yourself? Yeah, me, too?

Susan and I hear these words often in our jobs as a family physician and lifecycle lawyer as we try our best to mentor our patients and clients back to a state of balanced health. And, yes, we have even said that same thing a time or two as well. So, we know how you feel, because we have felt that way ourselves. But, let me tell you what we found out.

You never have to hate your job ever again. Never. Ever. Again. If only you will learn to appreciate and enhance the relationship between you, your job, and the rest of your life.

To get you ready to love your job from now own, we need a quick set up of the core principles of my theory of Greatness!, which you can get from my book, Great! All the Time!

  • We all have eight types of life’s precious resources: self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people.
  • Our lives are nothing but the sum of our relationships with the people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which we have relationships and to whom and which and for whom and which our values make us responsible.
  • In order to be Great! All the time!, we have to enhance our relationships in our lives and use our POWER by proceeding only with every resource we have at our disposal.

Why do people hate their jobs?

A recent article in BusinessInsider.com (http://www.businessinsider.com/reasons-you-hate-your-job-2014-6) listed the most interesting 17 Reasons You Hate Your Job. They were:

  1. You picked a conservative career when you were young and never switched jobs.
  2. You are influenced by extrinsic motivation.
  3. You feel like you are working for the wrong reasons.
  4. You are not living up to your potential.
  5. You feel like your job lacks meaning.
  6. You feel obligated to work.
  7. You don’t feel in control. 
  8. You work too much.
  9. You procrastinate on the important things.
  10. Your job lacks stability.
  11. You place a heavy emphasis on work.
  12. You live too far or too close to your job. 
  13. You don’t like your boss.
  14. You don’t use your non-work hours effectively.
  15. You have higher standards.
  16. You have the wrong mindset. 
  17. You don’t have perspective.

Other surveys taken and articles written over the years show similar things. The ideas flowing through the many thousand-word discussions of these “reasons” have a core reason flowing through them.

People who hate their jobs do not seek and find opportunities to recognize and appreciate the true value of what they are doing for over half of their waking hours each workday not only to themselves, but, and more importantly, to the others around them.

Think about this until next week when we circle back to the business facet of your life and talk about how to do just the opposite of what the job-haters do by learning how to seek and find opportunities to recognize and appreciate that value what you most of the day for most of your days. Here’s a way to get you started and tide you over until then.

Think of your job as a precious resource factory

Your business job is just one big factory through which you invest some of each of your types of resources (self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people) in order to extract out a collectively larger volume of that same collection of resources. If you design and run your job correctly and invest your life’s precious resources in your job correctly, then you will get out of job a positive balance of resources out of your work and an especially enhanced amount of energy, emotion, intellect, property (money!), and (positive relationships with) people.

[reminder]What’s your suggestion for how to find value in your job?[/reminder]

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7 Ways to Give and Get Respect in Almost Any Relationship

Have you ever felt your relationship with someone is going downhill, but you cannot quite put your finger on why? Yeah, me, too.

Usually, it revolves around allowing our mutual respect to get minimized in our relationship. We just live our lives acting toward and reacting to each other without being mindful of what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Most dictionaries define “respect” as either a verb or one of two nouns.

  • Verb – admire (someone or something) deeply, as a result of their abilities, qualities, or achievements.
  • Noun – a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their exhibited values, abilities, qualities, or achievements.
  • Noun – a relation or reference to a particular thing or situation or a particular way of thinking about or looking at something

As part of my concept of Greatness!, I believe respect is a relationship between two particular people based on a deep admiration of each for the other elicted by their respective exhibitions of their values,  abilities, qualities, or achievements.

In one of his many books on relationships, the noted psychiatrist, Rabbi Abraham Twerski, M.D. discusses relationships based on respect  acronymically as a “magic formula” using:

  • Restraint,
  • Effort,
  • Sensitivity,
  • Patience
  • Empathy
  • Consideration, and
  • Tolerance.

I could not agree with him more.

 

 

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5 Changeology Steps To Become Great! All The Time! – Part 8 – The Final Chapter

book_imgWe are now in John Norcross’s fifth and final step in Changeology, Persist.

Unless properly managed and maintained over the long term, effective change dissipates slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly as a result of minor slips. Just like Norcross consistently teaches the first four steps/stages of change require working on them in order and mastering each step’s skills and strategies, Norcross maintains his persistence step/stage requires not only mastering the skills and strategies, but also a fundamental shift in thinking.

An example of such a fundamental shift is moving from the limited, short-term deprivation of a diet to the continual, long-term enjoyment of a more enhanced lifestyle.

I have often said, “Maintenance is the largest burden of ownership.” Norcross explains that psychologists define maintenance as Continue reading “5 Changeology Steps To Become Great! All The Time! – Part 8 – The Final Chapter”

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5 Changeology Steps To Becoming Great! All The Time! – Part 7

book_imgUsing one of the core principles of Greatness! and the P10 Principle, Norcross begins his fourth step of change, the perseverance stage, in his book Changeology, by reminding one and all that most mere mortals cannot achieve perfection. But here’s the good news.

  • Studies show 58 to 71% of change-seekers slip at least once in their first 30 days of Step 3 (Perspire).
  • The average changer slips six times.
  • 71% of people who resolve to make changes and have slips and manage those slips feel the slip strengthens their commitment to their resolution.

Change is an experience. My definition of experience is breaking things and having to fix them. Norcross says the perseverance stage of behavior change is Continue reading “5 Changeology Steps To Becoming Great! All The Time! – Part 7”