Are you a dog with a bone? I am.
It is an invaluable business skill and one of the few I possess, but it has always held me in good stead. The analogy works perfectly for me, and this is why.
The dog instinctively knows the bone is valuable and worth gritting teeth for, fighting for. But if you are, like me, a hound with several bones and therefore an inclination to bury some for a later date – an inevitable practice among all of us juggling a micro business – the danger is you might not remember where you hid them. Time (and fresh bones) can erode their significance and (doh) you may even forget about them long enough that another hound has sniffed them out and run off with them.
This isn’t a blog about keeping lists and a good diary, because anyone running a micro business knows the importance of that.
Rather, it is friendly nudge to ask you to ask yourself if there are any bones you have buried in your cerebral garden that you should retrieve and lock your teeth into right now.
Ideas come thick and fast, don’t they?
They can be efficiency or costs related, technological time or cash investment considerations, key contacts that need chasing, new markets, new products – you name it. As a writer I am never without pen and little notebook, and my computer has several different files for ideas, whether they be for books, for our olive oil business, or for the farm. The way I keep tabs on my best bones is to sink my teeth into them regularly, even for just an hour, and I find it refreshing to see ideas and, hence, the business, develop and evolve this way rather than attempting to find a huge, undisturbed lump of time – some day never – to attempt an enormous bone in one gulp.
So, what have you got buried?
Maybe, on digging them out, you find some of them were not such good bones, so throw them away. Clear a patch of your verdant mental garden.
But maybe, just maybe, at the second time of getting your teeth into them, you realise what treasure has been buried at the back of your mind.
