We don’t know what we don’t know
I always chuckle to myself when big companies that sponsor awards to start up and existing small business give, as part of the prize, mentoring or advice from a senior executive in their company. Perhaps it is no laughing matter.
Firstly, it’s arrogant to assume that starting and running a micro enterprise is so easy that someone without any experience of doing it, just because they’re a top corporate executive, can offer useful help. Start ups and micro enterprises are not boiled down versions of corporates!
Secondly, because the fledgling micro business owner doesn’t know what is good and what is bad support they could implement something that turns out to be the kiss of death to their business.
A colleague, Robert Craven, has just written a blog describing how a potential start up lost their redundancy money to unscrupulous ‘support’ providers. How were they to know that they were being conned? One of the reasons we founded the Enterprise Rockers movement is that we felt that a massive community, ‘the power of plenty’, of micro business owners could be self sufficient and we could sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It is important that we do sort out what’s good and valuable from the vultures and the ‘well intentioned but dangerous’. The right micro business to micro business support will lead to 80% of start ups surviving over 3 years with 6% becoming substantial, employing businesses. Essential enterprise skills and know how make all the difference to success. So, it is worth seeking help.
We should encourage prospective and existing business owners to continue to learn and to continue to seek support.
We never know all about enterprise
Twenty four years ago when my business partner, Clare Francis, and I were nearly two years into our business we learned something that saved us from the scrap heap. It was incredibly simple and it was learned by watching videos of our influencing, selling and presenting.
Not only was our product and service offer usually wrong we were often presenting offers without having really found out what our potential clients wanted. Frankly we were desperate to make a sale and no-one wants to buy from people as desperate as we were. We weren’t unskilled. We’d both done postgraduate business courses and we’d both been at Director level in UK subsidiaries of American multinationals. We’d been superbly trained but not on how to start and succeed in our own business.
What I learned this week-end
This week-end I was at the FSB Annual Conference in Scarborough. On top of my membership fee I paid another £100 to participate in the events during the day. My prediction is that these two days were worth thousands of pounds to me in future earnings and hundreds of hours saved of wasted effort.
The three things I learned were:
1. How to improve my use of Linked In so that I can influence someone I wish to make contact with to speak to me. I learned this from the brilliant presentation of Andy Lopata.
2. How it may be worth resetting your goals in a different way if you get stuck in a rut and are not improving your performance. I learned this from the inspirational Roger Black, former Olympic silver medallist, who got silver by focussing on running his perfect race rather than seeking to beat his competitors.
3. This third one is a bit of a cheat because I didn’t learn this at the Conference. On the Saturday lunchtime, co-founder of Enterprise Rockers, Tina Boden, and I met the supremely wise, Andy Peers. Andy is one of the foremost experts in setting up and running social enterprises. I’m certain that everything he advised Tina and I to do will mean we do get over 500,000 micro business owners in our Enterprise Rockers movement. We will make Britain a fairer and better place for micro enterprise.
So, maybe we ‘get the Enterprise T shirt’ for having started and run our own business, but we never truly have fully earned it. That’s because we must keep learning from others and seeking the right kind of support in order to survive and thrive. .
It’s motivating and good fun too. Keep learning.
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Social Impact of Working From Home
A few days ago I was once again reminded by Joshua Levy and his piece “One Blogger Asks: Is the Grass Really Greener on the Web Worker’s Lawn?” on his blog Web Worker Daily that I wanted to write a piece about what I believe to be the social impact of home working.
Joshua is asking some interesting questions about working from home:
If I ask myself these and other questions I’m invariably drawn to find answers in my personal work life and how it has changed in the last decade.
In 1999 I was still office based, traveled from one of our offices around the world to the next and was rarely home. In fact most of the time those years I came home Friday very late or Saturday and then often left Sunday night again. So I saw little of my family and especially my son who is now grown-up and ready to go to university.
Then in 1999 I sold my ISP-business and went back to run WinWeb. This time around I worked from home, right from the start I did not want to be in an office and lead the same life as before. So for the past eight years I have been there when my son came home from school, I even picked him up often enough. I was here when he came home with the latest music CD, I had to listen to – not always easy, I admit – or the latest sport-shoes form addidas had finally arrived at the shops.
Similarly I spend much more time with my wife, going for lunch, doing some “essential” gardening – I hated gardening, but love it now. I could give you many more examples, but you get the picture.
While there are many challenges for home workers, I believe we are seeing the beginning of an “reversal” trend. I would like to list here some challenges I believe our society is facing currently:
There are many more examples. This whole process began with the “Industrial Revolution” some 150 years ago. Some of us may even remember a time when three or even four generations of a family lived in one house. People worked in their villages, child-care or care for family “just” happened – was that a bad or good thing? Looking at single parent families and the impact on our children, I would argue it was a good thing, and so would the many parents working from home exactly for that reason – to provide a healthy family environment for their loved ones.
I believe that the whole trend of home working may in the future allow us to have a much more natural work/life balance and will reverse some of the damaging effects of the post industrial revolution changes in our society. People will live closer to family, local communities will be revived – I believe that is happening as we speak, and our children will benefit from “more family”, and all this will have a profound impact on all our lives and the environment.
I would encourage Joshua and everyone else working from home to relearn the social skills of building local friendships, or live near family and give you the social life you need.
After all, this technology we at WinWeb and others supply makes it possible to work from anywhere, gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to live the life you want, where you want.
Let’s hope in hundred years from now people will see this era not only as the “Information Age”, but also the age when we learned to live a better work/life balance, in tune with our emotional and social needs as individuals, families and society as a whole. What do you think?
Have a great weekend with your family and friends.
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