photo by lrargerich 

When you get some quiet time, when you have a few minutes to yourself and you think about your business, do the numbers scare you?  Whether it’s your bank account balance, your taxes, your profitability – are those financial numbers scaring you?

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night sweating because of the numbers?

While that may or may not be true for you, it is sadly true for a lot of business owners.  They love their business, their clients and even their employees but they don’t have a good relationship with the financial numbers around their business.

The good news is there are ways to deal with the fear (and the numbers) and if you can get past this issue you will find your self in a position of power and control that is probably hard to imagine right now.

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We’re at that time of year when the winter blah really sets in (I’m sure February is the longest month of the year!).  We’ve at least had a couple of days that weren’t gray, but it’s certainly been looking more like Seattle then Kansas City.

It’s cold outside – so here are 5 diversions on your computer that might help brighten your day up.  Shake it off, have some fun and check out some cool stuff (some with a local tie)!

1.  Amazing Shot!

You’ve probably seen this sometime in the last few days – it’s been all over TV and the internet, but in case you missed it – you need to check out the vide of the Olathe Northwest Girls Basketball coach who’s getting set up for a prank.  The students are challenging him to shoot a 1/2 court shot…blindfolded and if he makes it he wins Final Four tickets.  The prank is that the students are going to cheer wildly when he shoots to make him believe he hit it.

The drawback to their plan?  He actually hits the shot!  It’s unbelievable and a lot of fun to watch.

If that video doesn’t work, here’s a link with the video along with some additional coverage:  http://onwravens.net/media/www.onwravens.net_media/The_Shot.html

To complete the story, it turns out someone has now donated Final Four tickets so he actually did win!

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   photo by egarc2

I had a chance to catch the 2nd half of an episode of Shark Tank over the weekend (I saw the last half of Episode 7 if you’re looking it up).

If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a 1/2 hour reality show where aspiring entrepreneurs pitch their idea or business to a group of self-made multi-millionaires who have made their money by wheeling and dealing, creating, buying and selling businesses (the Sharks).

The business owners have an opportunity to raise money and make a deal on the show – either as an investment or a buyout.  They’ll pitch their idea and then ask for an amount of money in exchange for a portion of the business.

The Sharks are all legitimate business gurus, and they’ve got big personalities and egos to go along with it.  They don’t seem to like each other very much and there’s a lot of back and forth that has little to do with the business ideas – hard to tell if it’s staged much, but it does make for good TV.

Here’s a couple of the ideas that were discussed in the episode I saw:

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Looking through the lens of nostalgia, business used to be simple.  You could set up a road side stand (or the equivalent) and offer things that people wanted locally.  Your long term success totally depended on your local reputation and at the end of the day it was more about how you interacted with the community and your customers then it was about having some sort of great business model or get rich scheme.

Honest weights, Square Dealings – with the fish specials of the day.  Back in the day, it wasn’t just a numbers game, it wasn’t about having a sophisticated sales and marketing strategy or coming up with a surefire closing technique.  It was about doing the right thing, adding value and helping your customers win (while you win as well).

Sounds refreshing doesn’t it?

Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of those values – maybe because slow and steady wasn’t good enough or all of the technology got in the way of good business practices.  However…the good news is that we’re starting to see a return to the good old days – people are using the technology that’s out there to break down the barriers, not create more of them.  Let’s look at few examples:

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   photo by visulogik

I ran across an interesting article on CNN Money that talked about how recessions don’t spark start-ups – essentially the number of new businesses that get started every year (at least over the last 30 years) is steady and doesn’t have any correlation to difficult times (or much of anything else).

The source of the data is a recent study from Kansas City’s own Kauffman Foundation:

Regardless of the dataset examined, each year’s total of new companies is consistent with other years, with annual numbers fluctuating only mildly.

It’s surprising to me at least there’s no apparent correlation to the economy, government policy, availability of resources or education – in general the takeaway is that at a macro level there’s a consistent number of new businesses formed every year.

So what can we learn about starting a business during difficult times?

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