So I had the ‘opportunity’ to go to the dentist this week.  It’s not my favorite thing to do, although luckily there were no issues!

On this trip I distracted myself from the scraping and polishing by observing how they ran their operation.  Maybe  a lot of dentists are this way these days (I’ve been going to the same one for quite a while) – but they have things running like a well oiled machine.

It got me to thinking – what could other business owners learn from this?

photo by azrainman

Although it’s a medical treatment, there are a lot of similarities with other kinds of businesses.  They have customers who have an issue, they create the solution using fixed resources and generate revenue based on their team’s efforts.

What could you learn from my dentist?  Let’s take a look:

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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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  photo by ms.tea 

Halloween is just around the corner, which means it’s time to start thinking about carving pumpkins.  I remember learning how to carve a pumpkin around our kitchen table from my parents and older brothers.  There was always an element of creativity in terms of the design and certainly some of us were better than others in terms of drawing or actually cutting, but overall we used a consistent system to create our art.

Now imagine that you want to create a really cool Jack O’Lantern this Halloween, but you don’t have a clear process or system for how to do that.  You’ve seen the end result, but you’ve never actually gone through any steps…and in fact you don’t even know what steps there might be!

Odds are your pumpkin is going to look more like road kill than a cool, scary design!  Without a systematic process, you’re stuck with making it up as you go and even though it’s not that hard (once you know how to do it) there are lots of points where you can trash your pumpkin if you do it wrong.

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Plan for success photo by WorldIslandInfo at FuturistMovies

About 1/3 of Small Businesses fail in the first 2 years, and just over half fail within 4 years (according to an SBA Study done in 2005).  These are always controversial studies – how do they define Small Business?  How do they define failure?  Wouldn’t there be a big difference (higher?) failure rate in the last 2 or 3 years?  All great points, but in general we can agree that there are a lot of businesses that don’t make it.

On the other hand, there are also lots of examples of businesses that are still in business but aren’t really making it.  I ran across an interesting article in Fortune Small Business that initially caught my eye because it was about a local Kansas City business.  The article on ‘Why Small Businesses Fail‘ is about a home furnishings boutique in Prairie Village called the Curious Sofa (caution the site loads with music on).  If you haven’t been, Curious Sofa is a great store with lots of interesting stuff  to look at.

Here’s the part from the article that I thought was really interesting:

Dusenberry’s financials explained clearly why her business has potential – and why she’s in trouble….But here’s the thing: Her statements show that she’s lost money eight years in a row.

Every year, Dusenberry said, she told herself that she was going to work harder and sell more stuff, but working harder doesn’t fix a broken business model.

Working hard, loving what you do, and having a skill or product that other people want enough to pay for are all part of the puzzle, but there are other things that are even more important and if you don’t figure them out, it can be a long way down.

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