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Trapeze Moments in Business

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Leap!

One of the most common drivers of success is how we handle Trapeze Moments in business. All too often the most sensible response is the wrong one.

A couple years ago we were looking to publish Making Money Is Killing Your Business, our first book. It was in the hands of the largest business book publisher in the world. As I learned what the contract would look like, I discovered what a lousy deal every author gets with giant publishers. We would lose ownership of the book to the publisher, get paid a tiny fraction of the revenue, and not see any of it for up to 18 months.

But the alternative was equally uninviting. If we didn’t let the giant publisher own the book, we would have to start our own publishing company with no knowledge of the industry, give up on distribution through all traditional bookstores and spend at least $25,000 on design, layout, websites, printing, and fulfillment.

Two years ago publishing a book yourself was an even scarier option than today – it was a generally new way of doing things. Doing a deal with a giant would save us the $25,000 we didn’t have, and get the book into all major brick and mortar and internet book channels immediately.

We had a decision to make. We believed in our book and that it would have a major impact for small and local business owners worldwide for decades to come, long after a giant publisher would have lost interest in it. But we had no clue how to publish a high-end hard back book and get it out to the world around us. And we didn’t have $25,000 to risk on printing thousands of copies of something that might sell less than 100 copies.

Decisions Based on Where You Want to Be
This was a Trapeze Moment for us. A Trapeze Moment is one of those times in a business where the only way to get to the next place in your business is to let go of something you’re hanging on to for dear life. We had been profitable for a couple years and were “hanging on” to that with a death grip. The last thing we wanted to do was go backwards again and throw another $25,000 at this business.

But businesses don’t grow by hanging on to what they’ve got. They grow by making decisions based on where they want to be, not on where they are. If we make decisions based on where we are, where do we think we’ll be next year? The same place – on the treadmill.

So we dove in once again, let go of profitability, borrowed $25,000, started a publishing company from scratch with no knowledge of the industry, and printed thousands of copies of our book. A year later Making Money Is Killing Your Business was rated #1 Business Book of the Year by NFIB, not because it sold a million copies, but because they believe it was the book that had the greatest impact that year. That was what we were shooting for – a book that transformed businesses, not just an interesting read.

Risks Create Rewards
Two years later we’re into our second printing and book sales are increasing every month, something the giant publishers said could never happen after the first year. The book has been translated to Chinese and is selling well in China. Other translations are on the horizon. Because the revenue deal is so bad with giant publishers, we would have to sell 100,000+ books through them to equal the profit we have realized from the first printing. And we would still not own the book.

As the book gains momentum, we are glad we made the decision to start our own publishing company. Others are now coming to us to publish their books and we have three more of our own already in the works. And publishing isn’t even our core business, just something we did because we had to in order to keep control of a book that is central to driving 3to5 Clubs forward throughout the world.

Leap Forward
Every business has Trapeze Moments. It’s scary to let go of the one we’re hanging on to, do a backflip and trust that as we reach out the next trapeze will be there. But it’s what business owners do. They make decisions, not based on where they are, but where they want to be.

What Trapeze Moment are you facing right now? Make the decision based on where you want to be, otherwise you’ll end up where you are again next year – on the treadmill.

Make the leap!

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.

“Making Money is Killing Your Business” is named Business Book of the Year

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Making an impact.

NFIB, the leading small business association with 500,000 businesses, has named my book, Making Money is Killing Your Business, the number one business book of 2010.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses, or NFIB, rated it #1 because they thought it has the most potential for real impact in the lives of the readers.

Readers are indeed finding their lives and businesses transformed by the principles and practical in this book.

“Never in my life have I read a book so full of transformational content that actually got me creating a better business for myself.” – Julia Gentry, TheUltimateE.com

“Every small business owner will benefit from this easy yet profound read. I was ready to throw in the towel on our six-year-old real estate business, but after reading Chuck’s book we have increased our gross revenue by 27% and doubled our net profit.” – Sandy Corrigan, The Corrigan Group

Making Money is built on profoundly simple ideas that have been around forever and ignored as being too simple to work. I’ve learned the hard way that the profound things are always simple and will revolutionize any business willing to give up complexity for effectiveness.

Making Money helps business owners move from a focus on trying to make money to building a business that does it for them while they’re on vacation. It debunks the idea that small business is a 30 year grind, and introduces the concept of building a business in just three to five years that runs itself.

Making Money also replaces the traditional concept of retirement with using your business to quickly build your Ideal Lifestyle, moving you and your business from survival through success to significance.

The principles and tools in this book grew out of years of hacking it up in the trenches and learning what really works. It’s been a privilege to start and build a number of businesses before helping others do it. I don’t see myself as a business coach, advisor, consultant, etc., but as a guy who built a number of businesses and now helps others avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

My company, The Crankset Group has an off the grid approach that has been adopted by thousands of business owners. We’re growing internationally now with 3to5 Clubs (our committed communities for 24 business owners each) starting in throughout the states and in Europe, with an objective of having 3to5 Clubs in every major city in the world.

It’s also been a privilege to have articles and mentions in the last year in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNNMoney.com, NYTimes.com, other magazines and small business blogs throughout the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand.

I firmly believe Making Money is Killing Your Business inspires a new way of thinking that will transform how you approach your business and your future. I’m getting regular feedback from people we’ve never met who confirm it.

I’d love to hear how it’s impacting your business.

Think Globally. Shop-Locally. It’s a perfect fit.

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Live local. Buy local.

ShopLocally.com aims to change the world, not just make money. My company, The Crankset Group, is focused on the same thing. We’re going to do it together going forward. It’s possible you will benefit directly. We certainly intend for you to.

Colin Pape, founder of ShopLocally.com and I met via blogging and Twitter. Very quickly we found we share a common objective: to build infrastructures that empower local businesses everywhere to be the big dogs on their own block, and to see that there are advantages to being a local business that giant corporations can’t begin to tap into.

It is exciting to find and build a formal Strategic Alliance where everything we both do compliments the other company’s strengths, and as a result of us working together, all of our clients are better off.

The Power of Local

ShopLocally.com offers everything online that a local business needs to grow and thrive, from local listings and full shopping cart to increased visibility and a place to be found by people dedicated to shopping locally.

Over the last ten years ShopLocally.com has built an impressive online infrastructure providing a gathering place for local businesses to showcase themselves to people who want to keep their hard-earned money from ending up in a corporate headquarters a thousand miles away. They have the domain strength of 8,000 cities worldwide and growing (ShopParis.com, ShopDenver.com, ShopMidland.com and thousands of others), combined with unmatched offline advertising.

Shopping locally creates the “velocity of the dollar” – the more the same dollar gets spent locally, the more everyone including the local consumer benefits. Supporting independent local businesses increases the velocity of money in your area. We can help our towns best by shopping locally, and ShopLocally.com is far and away the best online infrastructure for bringing that to reality. They even promote local ownership and operation of their own systems.

What We Do That Compliments Them

The Crankset Group is committed to building locally-owned 3to5 Clubs for business owners, to help them get off the treadmill and use their business to build their Ideal Lifestyle. We intend to use 3to5Clubs (see 3to5Club.com), workshops, seminars, my books and speaking engagements to very intentionally support the growth of the ShopLocally.com network and provide ongoing local business training wherever ShopLocally.com is growing.

What We Intend to Happen

ShopLocally.com’s online infrastructure and the offline business transformation support of The Crankset Group’s 3to5Clubs will work together to level the playing field, cast vision and provide the resources business owners need in order to capture and hold their local markets. He who makes the rules wins, and we look forward to assisting local business owners to create business rules that leave the big corporations wishing they were local.

It is rewarding to be part of such a strong vision to transform local business, and it’s a great honor to begin building that together with Colin Pape and ShopLocally.com.

I’m excited to be part of ShopLocally.com’s Board of Advisors. Together we look forward to supporting local businesses throughout the world for decades to come, one business owner at a time.

Please go to www.ShopLocally.com to see how you can get connected to your own local business community, and email us at Grow@CranksetGroup.com to inquire about a business owner’s 3to5Club forming in your area—or check out the new 3to5 Club website.

Guidelines vs. Rules – Creating Wildly Successful Employees

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Employees have changed. Rules don’t cut it anymore. The newer generation isn’t sure it even wants to go to work and has in some ways decided to retire BEFORE working. They’re out there “gigging” instead of working. How do you as a Business Owner respond to this new world?

How is the new world different than the old industrial age employee world? The old world had rules the employee needed to live by. The new world has guidelines that create ownership, freedom, teamwork, and creative involvement for the employe:

Employee Guidelines (principles) → → Employee Rules (laws)

  • Provide Framework → → → → → → → → → Box to live in.
  • Gives you a “floor”-minimum → → → → → Gives you a ceiling – “maximum”
  • Encourages innovation → → → → → → → →Encourages conformity/sameness
  • Frees up employees to win → → → → → → →Creates fear of losing
  • Emphasis on effective result → → → → → →Emphasis on process/procedure
  • Emphasis on employee ownership → → → Emphasis on we/they blame games
  • Encourages participation/innovation → → Encourages hiding/work-arounds.
    Examples of each:
    Apple Computers → → → → → → → → → → U.S. Government

A Key Objective in creating happy employees: Create “ownership” of their job, and help them see how it fits into the bigger picture (process mapping is a great way to do this.)

How do you lead in the new world? By becoming a Servant Leader. The best leaders have always led this way, but if you don’t lead this way in the new employer world, you won’t keep your employees.

Leaders do not exist to be served by those “under” them. They do not have the right to have others make them look good. Having a title on a door does not make you a leader. Leaders are focused on how they can make everyone else around them more successful (the servant leader). Employees are very clear that the leader’s job is to champion them and give them the vision, environment, resources, training, and connections to be wildly successful. The smart leader knows that if everyone around them is successful, they won’t have to worry about their own visibility or success.

Be a servant leader – create ownership among your employees for their positions, and focus your energies on making them wildly successful. You’ll have a great business and make more money in less time as a result.

Deciding when your Business is Mature, and How To Pick a Date to get there.

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As a business owner, Business Maturity isn’t about how big your business gets or how much revenue it generates. It’s about 1) your own ability to choose what to do with your time, and 2) the ability to walk away from your business for weeks or longer and have it still make money while you’re not there.

You could decide that it means that the leadership is completely turned over to others and the business is ready to be sold. But at a minimum, a business is not Mature if you are still necessary to the daily production of products/services (there is a difference between being necessary and being able to choose to personally produce.)

Here’s how to paint a good picture of what your Mature Business looks like:

  1. Know your Lifetime Goals. (Why are you doing this? To what end??)
  2. Calculate the cost of the Ideal Situation for living out those Lifetime Goals.
  3. Decide WHEN you want to be in that Ideal Situation. Stop reading here if you don’t want to put a date on when you get to your Ideal Situation. Growing a Mature Business won’t matter enough to you to actually do it.
  4. Decide what salary/cash you need to support your Ideal Situation.
  5. Make your best prediction of how much revenue your business will need to generate to allow you to pull the salary/cash you need to support your Ideal Situation.
  6. Make your best guess at how your business will do this. There are three ways to make money when you’re not around.
    1. Talent – The painter Renoir bought his massive French villa w/ two paintings, and his car with a pencil sketch. If you have unique talents then you can charge enough per hour to work very few hours. The problem with this approach is that it’s a crapshoot to have your talent recognized at this level, and your business really never matures because it still relies on you to produce. If you get sick or injured or worse, the revenue stream stops.
    2. Employees – this is the most common way to make money when you’re on vacation – buy someone else’s 40 hours a week at a discount, and resell it to your customers at a premium. The difference creates profit for you even when you’re not there.
    3. Products/Services – If you don’t want employees and you’re not über-talented, you can create products or services that you can license to others to produce. Or you can franchise your services for others to deliver, or create online software, products, or services that need very little maintenance.
  7. Paint as clear a picture as you can of what your Mature Business looks like in terms of the salary/cash it provides you, the time it allows you to use in other ways, and how the what will produce the revenue (Talent, Employees, or Products/Services), then
  8. Pick a Business Maturity Date – the single most important step in the process. If you don’t want to do this, don’t bother with Steps 1-7.

Don’t torture this – you’ll know you have a good enough picture when you’re excitement level for getting there has gone way up. If you have an Objective that is motivating enough, you will figure out the steps required along the way to get there.

Do you know what Business Maturity looks like for your business? Are you completely committed to a Business Maturity Date that you’ve gone public with? If so, welcome to the 3to5Club (see earlier posts)! Describe your Mature Business and your Business Maturity Date here – let’s get moving together!

 

3to5 Club – Is there a Business Maturity clock ticking in your business?

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I know what my business looks like when it’s mature and I know to the day and hour when I plan to get there. And it won’t take as long as you think. What’s your Business Maturity Date?

What we talked about 2 weeks ago is too important to not repeat as a setup for this week’s conversation: We think our purpose in business is to make money when our purpose in business is to BUILD A BUSINESS that makes money when we’re not there. These two things are worlds apart, and almost every business owner I work with is absolutely buried in making money, which will keep them from ever making a lot of it.

Why? Because we can’t find the proper balance between the Tyranny of the Urgent – things we have to do to personally make money today; and the Priority of the Important – building a business that will make money for us w/out even being there.

We never have a problem with the Tyranny of the Urgent. Got to pay the bills – It comes rushing at us every morning like a locomotive with a stuck, screeching whistle, while the Priority of the Important (building a business that makes money when we’re not around) sits quietly in the corner of our minds, waiting to be picked up and dealt with, never screaming; just a subconscious whisper in our ears, “Deal with me now and you’ll have fewer Urgent things down the road.”

It’s immediately drowned out by the screeching whistle, so we get sucked on board and spend another day riding in circles with cranky passengers, smoke in our eyes, shoveling coal and sweating it out, and wondering how to get off this cursed treadmill-like train that just comes back to the same place every day.

Here’s how:

Pick a Business Maturity Date. It’s that simple. What? Yes. Just pick a maturity date. It will change you forever. From a hostage to someone heading straight for freedom.

Two years ago this week, March 6, 2007, I started my business with a Business Leader’s Insight lunch workshop with 24 people in attendance, with the same fear and trepidation every one of you felt the day you opened your doors and for months afterwards – it’s not any different for anyone – don’tkid yourself.

But something is different. I have a Business Maturity Date that will take me past the startup fear and right through the “languishing” that most businesses resign themselves to.

In 3 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, and 22 ½ hrs. from when I started, I expect to be done building a business that makes money when I’m not around. I’ve got a lot of work to do and the clock is ticking relentlessly, the train is screeching, belching, and going in circles, and at the same time I’ve got little time left already to build this business to maturity.

My Business Maturity Date? Friday, February 18, 2011, at 10am – 1 year 11 months and two weeks from now.

On that day I will have a mixed Stage 6-7 business (more another time on the Seven Stages of a Business) with others running the day to day and me continuing on in content development and focused delivery. I know how much money it is making on that day and how much I will take home. It is very clear to me what Maturity means to my business on that day.

At 8:30am on that morning I will have a staff meeting and turn over the business to them to run, have an early glass of champagne with them, leaving the office in good hands, and be out of the office by 10am to pack my bags. At 6:10pm that evening my wife and I will be on a plane to Auckland, New Zealand, her dream vacation, for three weeks of celebration. We land in Auckland at 7:25am Sunday morning. The trip will cost $12,380.

Does it change you a little bit even reading this? Imagine what it’s done to me, and what it will do to you when you make the same commitment. It will change you forever.

There are three steps that, when we take them, we change:

  1. Decide something.
  2. Pick a date for when we will be done.
  3. Go public.

To help us all with this three-step process in building a Mature Business, I’m starting a new “club” that is a big idea and will need to be owned by everyone involved. It will certainly end up with committed, focused business owners in cities across the world. It’s called 3to5Club. The three requirements to become a member?

  1. Make a decision that a) you will stop trying to make money and will become committed to building a business that makes money, and b) you will define and describe for yourself what a mature business means to you (it has to make money when you’re not there as a starter.)
  2. Pick a date for when it will be mature (note: this doesn’t mean you sell it that day; you could sell it, keep it and start another one, use it to fund your lifetime goals, turn it over to your kids, or keep working in it doing just the very few things that make magic for you.) And pick a time of day, not just a day – it will make a Priority of the Important Clock start ticking in your head loudly to help counter the screeching whistle of the Tyranny of the Urgent.
  3. Go public. You won’t really change permanently until you take this step.

Why the name? I’ve come to the conviction that it is normal that any business could be grown from inception to maturity in 3to5 years (investors always want their money back in 3to5), 2 to 7 in the best and worst of circumstances. That doesn’t mean you have to pick something in that range. But if you go out 9, 12, 15 years, I believe the bar isn’t high enough to create the urgency you need to be intentional every day about growing your business. It will be too easy to lapse back into making money, a deadly trap. Be ambitiously lazy, get done quicker.

I believe by using the one motivator and two bosses we talked about last week, that it is quite possible my business will be at Maturity before Friday, February 18, 2011, 10am. But what if I miss that date? How do I deal with the fear I might fail? The head starts spinning. We’ll talk about this next week, and the week after we’ll deal with the hostage comment I made at the beginning of this blog.

Are you in? Will you join me in becoming charter members of the 3to5 Club? We’ll do a website and all that crap later. Let’s get started. I’ve set up a meetup.com group for Denver (http://www.meetup.com/3to5Club/), and we’re going to have a charter meeting on Thursday, March 27 at 11:30pm at PanAsia Bistro in Lone Tree, CO. I would be happy to help you set up 3to5Club in your city as well – just leave me a comment.

I’d love to be the first graduate of the 3to5Club in 1 year, 11 months and two weeks from now, but I’m sure there will be a lot of people who will beat me to it. I hope so.

What’s your Business Maturity Date? What does your business look like that day, at that hour? Go public right here in the comments section and let’s take it from there. Speed of execution. I’m looking forward to “executing” that locomotive as quickly as possible.