Goals & Friends are like Peanut Butter & Jelly.

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Grab a pen and a friend. Quick.

There is new evidence from a Dominican University study that you can really, truly move yourself forward, whatever your objective, if you just follow a simple three-step process.

The Dominican University study broke people into five groups:

  • Group 1 – were simply asked to think about their goals
  • Group 2 – write them down
  • Group 3 – the above, plus create an action plan
  • Group 4 – the above, plus send their action plan to a friend.
  • Group 5 – the above, plus send a weekly progress report to a friend who would be supportive.

The Result?

  • Group 5 – Those who reported weekly to a supportive friend accomplished significantly more than those who just sent the action plan once.
  • Group 4 – Those who sent the action plan only once to a friend still accomplished significantly more than those who simply wrote their goals and an action plan.
  • Groups 3 and 2 – those who wrote down what they wanted accomplished significantly more than those who just formulated the goals in their head.

The point?

This study is even more evidence that three things create success – a written objective, public commitment to it, and ongoing outside support to finish the plan. I’m a recovering “rugged individualist” who has learned that the most effective results are achieved in community, not by ourselves.

Once you know your objective, success is three simple steps away:

  1. Write it down
  2. Share it with others in public
  3. Work with friends on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to achieve those objectives.

We call these types of business groups, “Committed Communities”. These live at a much higher level than any of the standard networking groups, with much better results.

I used to lead small mastermind groups of 6-8 business owners as a great expression of Committed Communities. We now have three Committed Community approaches to working with business people – 3to5 Club, FasTrak, and OnTrak. All three were built around the belief that written objectives, public commitment to them, and ongoing outside support are the best way to get where you want to go.

So go it alone if you want, but just know you’re taking the road more traveled – the hard one. I’ve been on that road – it’s really bumpy and slow-going. Lots of blowouts, over-heating and break downs.

If you want to move from survival right through success to significance with the least number of rebuilt engines along the way, find a Committed Community of business owners near you and jump in with both feet. If you can’t find one, guess what you’re next step should be.

Risk what I risk, not what I say.

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Grab the flag. Lead the charge.

Recently a client and good friend said, “I would be willing to bet a smart guy like you with a lot of success in your past wasn’t in danger of losing your house when you started your business, even if it had failed.” She’s wrong, but she’s not at all alone in believing that. Why?

Does anybody lead by example anymore?

For years I’ve ranted about going all in, burning the bridges, sinking the ships, shredding the parachutes, being willing to lose it all to be successful. I’ve shared all the research I can find on this, and my own experience in five businesses of waking up at 3am in cold sweats wondering if we would make it.

Yet it’s still hard for people to believe that I actually lived at risk in any of these businesses. For some of them I didn’t, but for the ones that were most successful (including this one) I was at the most risk. That correlation between success and risk is not surprising to me, because when we don’t have a back door, we are more likely to be successful. Survival is a very strong instinct.

Risk and commitment go hand in hand and are fundamental to success.

So why don’t people believe me? I’d love your thoughts. My own two cents:

  1. We have apparently lost most if not all connections between what leaders say you should do and what they themselves actually do. We’re indoctrinated with the academic model where information goes from head to head, not life to life. The professor spews info and goes home.
  2. The “training” and “success” industries follow the academic model. I know a number of trainers who were hired to learn to impart tools and tactics for how to live life who never did any of what they taught. And I know success trainers who have never been successful. In many if not most cases, it’s not even expected.
  3. We’ve gotten use to separating the private and public lives of actors, politicians, big business CEOs and others as if who we are in public is magically different than who we are in private.
  4. “Experts” and “Gurus” have created images of themselves that are nearly messiah-like, where they can’t be seen to ever struggle or do dumb things. So they spout the “miracles”, “secrets”, and “5 easy steps” they used to make life so easy that they have no problems any more. We actually believe these people don’t struggle (they make more money when we believe that).

I struggle. I have bad days. I have to work at seeing everything as “fascinating!”. And I risked everything in a number of businesses when I truly believed it was worth doing. I’m not an expert, or a guru, and I’m not smart, I’m just relentless. It’s how successful business owners build businesses.

Why small business is fed up with government

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Both sides are addicted to Big.

What really grinds the gears of small business owners is the near-complete inattention by lawmakers on who creates jobs.

So said Kimble Fletcher Ainslie in a Cato Institute article from December 20, 2001 titled “Bush Ignores Small Business.”

Eight years later under a different president, Catherine Clifford’s article in CNNMoney.com on September 30, 2009 continued the criticism of lawmakers ignoring small business:

Business owners really bring out the pitchforks when they consider the speed with which billions of dollars were distributed to large Wall Street firms and banks. That is what sticks in the small business owner’s throat more than anything.

Banks received $700 billion dollars in handouts in October 2008, with almost no regulations or restrictions. In February 2009, big businesses and big state governments received $787 billion, an incomprehensible $1.5 trillion total dollars. General Motors alone received $30 billion dollars when they would not have qualified for a credit card.

The top job provider in the U.S. economy is businesses under 10 employees. Those with 11-19 employees are second. Seventy-nine percent (79%) of all businesses in America have less than 10 employees.

In February 2009 while big businesses and big state governments were receiving $787 billion, the politicians threw a $255 million bone to small businesses in the form of the SBA ARC loan program, providing a potential $35,000 for a business that could get one. That’s 2/100th of one percent of the $1.5 trillion dedicated to the single largest job growth sector in our economy. While giant banks and corporations got handouts and bailouts many times in just a few days, the first ARC loan didn’t get processed until June 2009, five months later. By December 2009, only 45% of that tiny amount had been loaned.

Adding insult to injury, in December 2009, Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, a self-proclaimed small business advocate, introduced legislation to kill the program and return the remaining 55% back to the Treasury immediately.

Small business owners are not fed up with the government because they don’t get handouts. They are fed up with the symbiotic, parasitic relationship between politicians, big business and big banks. It’s hard enough to grow a small business. Swimming upstream against the constant deluge of advantages, handouts, bailouts, special loan programs and preferential treatment given to big businesses is the real rub.

The mis-named Small Business Administration is of no help. When the SBA was created in 1953 the big business lobby got their political friends to define small business as any business with under 500 employees, which is 99.94% of all businesses in America (only 17,000 of 28 million are larger than 500 employees). It’s like calling everyone under 7′ tall “short”. So it’s no surprise that almost all of the SBA’s attention is on businesses that are 6-7′ tall. Businesses under 5′ 4″ aren’t on the radar. So even with the SBA, true small businesses are on the outside looking in.

In 2009 Australia passed the Fair Work Act, legally defining a small business as having fewer than 15 employees. A similar law in the U.S. would be a good start. Then small business needs the creation of a real SBA, not so they can get handouts, too, but so they have a seat at the table to level out what has been an un-level playing field for decades.

The big business-big government parasitic relationship has been exposed by this last recession. It’s time to put an end to all the patronage that goes between the two of them, all to the detriment of true small businesses.

Building a Business is Really Simple

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Get out of the garage.

My friend Alan Wyngarden has done some adventure travel and says: “The hardest thing about climbing a mountain is just getting out of the garage.” Huh? Actually, it’s pure genius.

A year ago I shared a business concept with Alan around building intimate assisted living homes that I had heard about.

I didn’t have the inclination to do anything with it but wanted to see if others I knew might benefit from running with it. I shared it with a number of people who loved the idea, but only Alan gave birth to it.

Yesterday I attended the open house for his first home. It is gorgeous and Alan has the best people in the industry working for him, creating a unique, honoring and beautiful environment for those who need a little assistance at an advanced age. It even has raiaed gardens for them to plant without bending over – great stuff.

I chatted with Alan about this last summer and within a week he was moving on the idea, with the full dream realized yesterday, only a few months later. The others who thought it was a great idea never moved on it. Alan is thinking he’ll have five of these homes up and serving the elderly in the next year or so.

Building a business is really very simple. You just need to get out of the garage. As with climbing a mountain, the training isn’t the problem. It’s leaving the garage to DO the training that hangs us up. GETTING STARTED stops us more than any other thing in business. If we would just get started the rest of it would fall together for us.

But we wait. We research, we talk, we think, we plan, we collect data. We believe we need to get it all figured out before we move. But neither life nor business works that way.

Planning never creates movement, but movement can create a great plan.

Alan had no experience in the industry when he started moving. He just got out of the garage and started looking for a property, then started sniffing around to find those who might be able to help him build an expert team.

By the accounts of others who have been in the industry for years and who own many of these types of homes, he’s hit a home run with both his facility and his team. He didn’t get there by reading. He got out of his garage. And that movement created a marvelous plan.

Building a business is really quite simple. We just need to get out of the garage.

Speed of Execution is so important to success. What great idea are you sitting on that you just need to get out of your garage and get started?

Culture Matters More Than You Think

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Hire for culture, not for skills.

Great idea? Focused market? Good financial backing? Skilled employees? You’ve got it all, right? Maybe not. None of that matters one whit unless everybody holds the same core values. The numbers don’t lie – culture is the number one priority if you want to go the distance.

65% of all mergers fail and the #1 reason is because their culture’s clashed. Forget the merger – I believe even a higher percentage of small and local businesses fail because of this issue, without ever getting much past the first employee stage. We almost never pay attention to the things that matter. Why would culture be any different?

We at the Crankset Group always look at culture fit long before we look at skills. And if someone is a clearly better culture fit, I’ll hire them instead of the much more highly skilled person. It’s a no brainer. But most of us still go right to the resume’ (what I call “the tombstone”) to find out all the great things somebody did in their past lives, and never ask, “Will we want to be together 9+ hours a day for years to come?”

The Industrial Age left us with a terrible cultural legacy some have labeled the “allies” model of company culture. It was supposed to be the most evolved, but it doesn’t work.

Here’s six views of “employees” that are common in local (and giant) businesses. See which one is yours:

  1. Employee as enemy – all processes are set up to box them in and treat them like prisoners/numbers. Inmates, I mean employees, are to be mistrusted on the way in.
  2. Hired hand – a necessary evil; we give away tasks to them reluctantly, even though nobody can do it as well as me. We never want them to think, just do tasks.
  3. We are family – the parent/child approach – good luck with that! Do you really want more kids? Some business owners apparently do.
  4. Friends – everyone is on a level plane. Everyone is in charge of everything, therefore, nobody is in charge of anything – “we’re all friends here, right?” Anything with two heads belongs in a circus. Where does something belong with no head?
  5. Allies – The dominant Industrial Age culture. The focus is on the task. Like England, Russia, France, and the U.S. in World War II, we don’t have to like each other; we just need to focus on the task at hand. This is the worst and most advanced form of Industrial Age thinking. Most companies still live here. Let’s just hire for skills. Culture is woo-woo crap.
  6. Business as COMMUNITY – The great companies are already doing this. They believe strongly in why they exist, what they are doing here and where they are going. And they don’t hire people who don’t want the same things. Committed Community is the basis for getting the task done in the new company.

Community has hierarchy – somebody is in charge. But it emphasizes collaboration and true “team” – using agreed upon methodologies to achieve an agreed upon goal. Community imputes trust and creates an environment where everyone is encouraged to take ownership and make a contribution. Community members play clearly defined roles as part of a team, not behind cube walls.

Hire for culture. You can teach anybody a skill, but if they don’t believe in what you do, it’s a short-term gain with long-term pain.

What’s your company culture? And by the way, if there is only one of you right now, that’s the best time to answer the question.

Who WE are is so much more important than who people want us to be. Who are you as a company?