photo by moonsheep 

Electricity can be a great metaphor for a lot of things – as a business owner, it’s a great way to describe the entrepreneurial spark that powers your business.  It can be a blinding flash that makes a lot of noise or it can be a powerful steady thrum that consistently drives your business forward.

What’s the difference between the two?  In a word – grounding.

Benjamin Franklin initially invented the Lightning Rod in 1749 as a way to tame powerful electrical discharges (lightning) by shunting it to a natural grounding circuit (literally the ground of the planet).

As a business owner – it’s important to have grounding of your own, a way to keep things under control and not burn out!  What keeps you grounded?

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  photo by viZZZual.com 

As a business owner, you always have choices on how you run your business.  It’s not unusual to see a taskmaster chewing out their employees and running a tight ship.  You will also find those businesses that are run with encouragement and a high degree of compassion.

The cynics out there will sneer at the power of positive thinking.  It’s all about profits and the bottom line and there’s no room for fluff and nonsense and making people feel good.  These employees are grown-ups, if they can’t handle getting yelled at, then they need to go somewhere else!

On the other hand, the uber-idealists will tell you that all you need is love (or maybe that was the Beatles) and as long as people are happy, the results, the bottom line doesn’t matter.  It’s okay to spend more than you have if it means helping people out and giving them what they want.

Clearly these are extreme examples, but directionally what is the better answer?

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photo by lepiaf.geo

The continuing evolution of the internet has changed a lot of things – how people communicate (Facebook, Twitter), how they establish expertise (blogging, answering questions, wikis) and how business is done (online presence is mandatory now).

What’s really exciting is that social media and the internet has generated a lot of cool new businesses and business models.  Business models like Threadless – a t-shirt design studio that’s completely driven by fans and users in terms of what t-shirts get made and sold (and they’re selling millions of them!). Or Woot! – a deceptively simple site that sells 1 product per day until it sells out or runs out of time.  It’s popular enough to have turned into a phenomenon on it’s own.

The latest fresh business model that I’ve seen is Groupon (a combination of Group and Coupon).  They just made it to Kansas City earlier this week.

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Photo by Eneas

Are you a hero in your business?  Are you out there applying your super heroic selling skills, delivery abilities or micromanagement ‘gifts’ in order for your business to thrive (or survive)?

Do you take special pride in your ability to fight the fires and the chaos that surrounds your day to day operations?  Are you especially proud of your creative way to get things done right at the last minute – knowing you are the only one that could pull off delivering the customer’s expected results…or that you were the only one that could close the deal.

If this describes you or maybe one of your key employees, then you are slowly killing your business, headed down a path that far too many businesses end up on.

Here are 5 reasons why you need to stop being the Hero for your business!

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  photo by Robert S. Donovan 

As a business owner, when you first start out you create some sort of vision of success.  A vision that’s compelling enough to get you to take the big leap, leave your job, take the risk…whatever it might be.

That vision usually has a money component – ultimately you want long term financial independence (what ever that might be for you), and you also want to make good money along the way (be well compensated for your efforts above and beyond the hours you spend). 

Most business owners would like a certain amount of freedom and flexibility relative to their time – you know you’re going to work a lot of hours, but if you can have some say as to when those hours might be, that would be great.

Finally – as a business owner you’d like to be doing something you believe has a larger purpose or is at least interesting…and you’d like to carve out some time to hang out in a hammock by the ocean every now and then!

Unfortunately for most business owners their vision of success gets lost somewhere along the way.  That’s why I found it really refreshing to hear some friends of mine talk about the business success they had achieved in the last couple of years.

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