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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?

The Conative Filter

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Stop Thinking: Conation, not Cognition.

Conation is one of the 1,000 most obscure English words and yet the most important business word you’ve never heard. Want to know if you’re doing well and going where you want? Filter everything through the word conation:

Conation – the will to succeed that manifests itself in single-minded pursuit of a goal.

Or my definition:

Committed Movement in a Purposeful Direction

It’s nuts that this word has been buried in the lexicon, but there was too much “doing” in it for the academics to feel comfortable, so they let the word drift into obscurity. These Thinker/Cognaters love cognition because it allows them to justify sitting around thinking things to death without taking any action. Conation is scary to them because it requires action and metrics of success, not just pontificating.

But if you bring Conation back into your life and business as your main filter, and use cognition as a faithful servant of your Conation, you’re going to be a lot more successful. Conation is way more important to your success than cognition.

The Conative Filter

  1. Commitment – Affection/Passion – are you sold out to what you’re doing? Willing to go down with the ship? Do you have “quiet resolve” to succeed no matter what? If not, your chances for success are low. Commitment, utter abandonment to the cause is the foundation of success.
  2. Movement – Activation – Doing – are you sitting around cognating (thinking) about what great things might happen if you ever did something? Or are you moving forward and figuring it out as you go? Doers get things done while Thinkers are thinking about doing something someday.
  3. Purpose – Cognition – Discipline/Plan – Do you have a plan for the highest and best use of your time (Yield per Hour)? Cognition is ONE of the things you need to be doing to be successful. It’s a faithful servant of conation.
  4. Direction – Vision – Just because you’re going flat out doesn’t mean you’re going the right direction. Do you have utter clarity about where you want to end up, exactly what it looks like, and when you want to be there? You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

Conation is all four, not just two or three. Direction, Purposeful, and Movement without Commitment will not sustain you. Commitment, Purpose, and Direction are useless without Movement. Movement, Commitment and Direction are of no value without Purpose (a plan to get there).

Want to know whether you’ll be successful, or why you’re not? Use the conative filter to see if you’ve got all four attributes going at once. If not, shore up the one that needs your attention. You’ll make more money in less time and make a bigger splash in the world around you.

People with committed movement in a purposeful direction make history. Cognating dreamers write about them later.

Committed Movement in a Purposeful Direction

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Conation

We’ve all heard that extraordinary people are just ordinary people who have made extraordinary decisions. It think it’s even more simple than that. Extraordinary people are those who understand that Movement is the Master, and planning is just its humble servant with a small “s”.

While the rest of us are building a perfect plan in an ivory tower, the successful person has already pulled up anchor, hoisted the sails and left the harbor for their rendezvous with destiny. They understand it isn’t about the plan, but about the destination, and that the plan will unfold as they go. They just need to know two things: where they are and where they want to go, and their plan is to do whatever they need to do in the middle to get there.

The rest of us just get nervous at this whole approach. In fact we’re much more comfortable with knowing exactly what the dayto-day activity is and what each day holds going forward. We’re so committed to safety, stability and a perfect map for daily life that we really don’t care what the destination is as long the journey along the way to nowhere holds no surprises.

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how I’m going to get there.”

We need to stop worshiping the planning servant and start focusing on the Master – movement.

Committed Movement in a Purposeful Direction

Just because you’re going flat out doesn’t mean you’re going the right direction.

If you don’t have your hand constantly on the steering wheel to control the helm and make ongoing corrections, all the movement in the world isn’t going to help you. It will likely just create chaos as you crash into things and bounce off of them. We need Purposeful Direction – a clear understanding of the end game (not the plan, but the end game – there is a big difference!).

Successful people get moving fast but have a very strong understanding of where they are going. They aren’t just committed to movement, but to movement in a purposeful direction. They have a clear view of the destination. But successful people focus on the end game, not on planning. They didn’t become successful by planning the whole journey out, but by simply having clarity about where they are, where they want to end up, and a complete commitment to get there at any cost.

Do you have Committed Movement in a Purposeful Direction?

Planning won’t even get you a good plan, let alone success.

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Stop thinking. Get moving.

Planning does not create success or even the best plan. It also doesn’t create action. Most planning just creates paper, spreadsheets, complexity, doubt, paralysis, and dream-dampening. There are two things that create a far better plan than planning itself.

If you believe that meticulous and detailed planning of every possible contingency is the best way to create success you won’t like this post. To make matters worse, I’m probably going to accuse you of living in a dream world.

How many SUCCESSFUL businesses were started from a highly developed business plan? Next to none. And of the very, very few I’ve found that were started from a business plan, when asked how that worked out for them, most laughed but none said that reality had followed their excel spreadsheet plan.

Yet we keep slavishly promoting an antique practice that has almost never done anything for anyone except get someone an “A” in an MBA class on how to build a business plan. Oh, and it will get you into debt, because banks are still requiring business plans so they have a teddy bear to hold while they give you money. None of those work out either, but most banks haven’t figured out there is a much better way to see if someone is going to be successful.

This isn’t a blog on the attributes of success (maybe I’ll do that one next week), but creating a 30-page business plan isn’t one of them. To the contrary, the simpler the initial plan, the better, because it’s going to change anyway.

I advocate a 2-Page Strategic Plan (never do another classic Business Plan unless you have an antique bank asking for one). A simple 2-page Strategic Plan is set up to change, adapt, and be clarified every one to three months – you know, sort of like life.

It shouldn’t take more than a few hours to do it because, again, like life, it’s going to change very quickly. The only part that is likely to not change is the objective – what do we want to see as a result? The rest of it is up for grabs – anything that gets us to that result will be added and anything that isn’t will be removed.

Once you’ve got a simple plan, the two keys to making it into a great plan are:

  1. Commitment (to the objective, not a plan)
  2. Movement (in a purposeful directions toward the objective, not “activity” based on a plan)

It is NEVER how good your plan is that creates success, but how committed you are to the bad plan you’ve got and how willing you are to get moving on it NOW. As you move with absolute commitment in a clear direction toward the objective – that commitment and that movement will work together to make your so-so plan into a world class one.

Commitment and movement create success, not a tortured 30-page document. And a simple 2-page plan will become brilliant over time if there is enough commitment to the objective and enough movement to inform you what to keep doing and what to keep changing.

Stop thinking, get a clear objective and get moving with abandoned commitment toward that goal. Use the movement to make the plan better all the time. You’ll make more money in less time by committed movement than you will by sitting around trying to figure out what might go wrong.