PetesWeekly

Your future?

May 14th, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, sovereign individual, travel

May
14

Your future is not something coming towards you faster than the bullet train. Rather it is a palette waiting for you to draw on it.

Right now, for many of us, life is more Crappe Latte than Caffe Latte. For some reason most of us are unhappy about the state of our finances, the state of our countries, and, more than ever, the state of our future.

(Despite CNN and the BBC being desperate to link my future to the recent spate of volcano activity in the pacific, lets be frank and agree that they are stretching a little. Other than the Mexican dinner I had last night those explosions have no bearing on my future.)

Each time a bump occurs on our journey through life it clouds the way we each see our future. (OUR future is different from THE future because we can only change OURS. We can choose to try and change the futures of others, or the Earth, or the Alligator Gar, but the only future we have any real grip on is OURS.)

In my experience, there is no shortage of bumps. And if there aren’t any this year, we invent some.

Which brings me to the point I really want to make. You are in the drivers seat of your own life. It is uncomfortable. That is because you must constantly make decisions. And we see decisions as fraught with the risk of failure.

We South Africans are noisy, brash, brimming with life, because we have grown up in a tougher environment. I think we are like grapes growing in rough soil, and that makes us hardy, and certainly hardier than most Europeans. Folk who read PetesWeekly do not go on strike because they want jobs. They knuckle down and create jobs, first for themselves, and then for anybody else who wants to work.

(In case you are wondering, I do not believe many Portuguese, Italian, Greek or Spanish folk read PetesWeekly, and if they do, they are out working, not dancing in the streets.)

We are ready for those decisions, and while we may complain about them a lot, we can make them. It is that facet of South Africa that I miss the most: the people.

No matter where you choose to live (and it really is your choice to make, even if you opt for your status quo) that choice is a compromise.

You can marry a Durban girl who turns out to be Norwegian and end up living in one of the top rated countries on earth. Like me, I guess. (That top rating was not based on how exciting the country is, or the sandy white coastline, or the prices, or the joie de vivre of the people, and they forgot to factor in the 8 month winters. I think SA would top the polls in all of those.)

After living in three countries outside South Africa long enough to get a very good feel for each place, I can honestly say that I have had enough of moving around.

One of our kids needs a special education, but when that is done, I plan on finding a quiet stretch of white sand in KZN to sit on all through my remaining winters. And summers, now that I think about it.

In the meantime, I plan on using this time offshore to help my clients use the web to its fullest to reach out into the rest of the world, while they’re sitting on some of that sand. And, of course, on getting back every six weeks for a Vitamin SA infusion. I feel like a little boy again I am so excited.

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I need a job.

May 10th, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, selling

May
10

Most of us lie when we say we want a job. What we really mean is that we want money, but we think that a job is the only way to get some. Lest you disagree, put yourself in the shoes of a 20 year old looking for a job. I may be out on a limb here, but if she was offered an income for the next twelve months, without the need to get out of bed in the morning, or any other responsibility, my guess is that she would accept the offer.

Finding work is easy. But finding someone who trusts us enough to pay us for that work is much tougher. There are many reasons for this.

Firstly, I think that is because we lie. We lie to ourselves, and we lie to anyone brave enough to listen to us. I have lost count of the “out-the-box thinking, focused tactician, highly entrepreneurial, action oriented” folk who have cried on my desk. (That is what they put on their CVs and then, without seeing the irony, tell the interviewer that the last time they worked gainfully was 18 months ago.)

It is not just folk looking for work. It is almost anyone selling stuff. We claim to be excellent. It would be much truer to claim that we aspire to excellence, but fall short on occasion. Sometimes. More than we want. Often. Actually, we dream of it, but we have yet to deliver it. (This outrageous claim by almost anyone selling anything makes skeptics of all of us buyers and employers.)

The next problem is that in most countries the law strongly favours people who already have jobs. Each new jobseeker is far more risk than he knows. It is the background admin, the obligations to four government departments, each operating in its own quaint fashion, on a timescale that allows them to dawdle at will, but penalises the employer for the minutest transgression. Then it is the difficulty of firing, which is a longer process, and more expensive, than divorce.

It seems that most jobseekers have no understanding of what an employer might want. Hint: We do not employ people because they need a job, need money, or have an aging mother to support.

We employ people because they will help us keep our own job safe. We employ people who add value, who make more stuff than they break, or get more clients than they lose, or who bring in more income than they cost. Yet, in all the CVs I have seen in the past few years, not a single one – not even the ex business owners – have touched on me and what I want. (In my role as employer, that is.)

The sad part is that they can find that out about me with no more than 10 minutes of online effort. (Which, frankly, since they are asking for 10 minutes of my time to read their CV, and another hour to interview, plus a lifetime commitment that exceeds what I have promised my wife, I think I deserve.) Yep, I know that not everyone is online, but anybody claiming to be an Internet genius (that is, in fact, everyone) can pop into an Internet Caffe and find out stuff about me that I have forgotten.

Just 10 minutes inside Facebook, Linkedin, and my business webpage, and they will each know more than I knew in any interview I walked into before 2000. (A lot of interviews, and the background research took much longer, and was a lot more work.)

Having said all of this, I am probably wrong, and I am probably the only person on earth who has experienced this. This must be the case because nobody is telling folk how to find a job in a way that offers more success. So, feel free to disagree, and share your comments below.

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Time flies when you’re having fun

May 2nd, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, travel

May
02

Almost 20 years ago, I was nudged out of my comfort zone (selling data communications to mainframe users) onto the path that I am currently following (helping small business owners). My business closed on May 31, 1992. I was in a pub that evening in Somerset West, and I’m not sure that I recall much. I had no idea what was coming. And, in hindsight, that was a good thing.

I’m going to be in Cape Town that week this year, and I’m probably going to find myself in a pub in Somerset West to celebrate. I don’t yet know which pub, because I cannot rightly recall which pub it was 20 years ago.

I thought about this today, thinking about the road since then. And, in the midst of all of this, just a few random events stand out.

A hot air balloon ride with Bill Harrop, and the stunning silence of being a few kilometres in the air, with no engines. An astoundingly romantic, peaceful, and joyous experience in the middle of very tough times. If you haven’t yet done this, you should.

My wife subsequently pushed me out of a small aircraft at 11,000 feet, for my 40th birthday, strapped to the front of some fellow who assured me that it was safe. All I could think of was being part of a sandwich two inches thick on the tarmac below with him impaled rather too deeply inside me. After the nightmares had receded a few months later, I suggested a nice dinner at MacDonald’s for my 41st. Uncomfortable, but certainly memorable.

My first international speaking invitation, to a group of travel agents in Mauritius. It was the first time I felt human in about 5 years after the closure of the business. By this time I was getting far too many requests for freebies, and my initial response was a polite, but brusque, no to their request that I speak gratis. It took a while for them to mention that they might not be paying the fee, but it did include a week at the Shandrani.

But, more than anything else, over the past 20 years I’ve met a group of people who inspire me intensely: small business owners. This path that we have chosen is tough, fraught with challenge, but I cannot imagine any other way to pass a life. I am told that constant mental activity delays the onset of dementia, and if that is the case, I doubt that any small business owner is ever going to suffer

So, today, may I suggest an approach to this current busy life that works for me? Each morning, before the day starts, I invest 30 minutes in front of YouTube checking out some inspiring videos from people like Brian Tracey. He is possibly the only person on earth older than me, these days. But, he is full of great ideas on meeting goals, closing sales, and all sorts of things useful to us small business owners.

Then I spend 30 minutes reading, mostly business-related marketing material. Amazon has a new way of delivering Kindle material directly to your browser, and the reading experience is awfully pleasant. Especially since my kids have commandeered the iPad.

And then it’s three hours on the phone, selling. Actually, it’s more like chatting to friends than selling, but it’s the really fun part of the day.

Life seldom goes the way we plan. But, as long as we are planning, it wobbles along in the correct direction. And that’s enough for me. It means that it’s never boring. I can’t imagine it any other way. And I cannot imagine much that is more pleasant than a short trip to South Africa. Except maybe a long trip.

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SA, Winter, and Vikings

April 25th, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, sovereign individual, travel

Apr
25

As I drove through the sleet this morning I began to realise why the Vikings were so feared. By the time your common or garden Norsk lad was ready to pillage and plunder he was, frankly, desperate. The Norwegian winter is such that nobody wants to endure it.

So, our hero Eric walked, sailed or swam off to war with visions of Valhalla. It is not that death was a noble quest. It is that death was so much better than returning home to the next winter. And death, surrounded by buxom handservants, was so much better than nine months cooped up with Ivana The Terriblesen, seven junior Vikings, five sheep, three cows, and a reindeer. All in the same bed.

As a South African I lost count of the number of Europeans (these would be recent immigrant folk from countries in Europe rather than locals prior to 1994) who assured me how much nicer SA was than France, or Germany, or even Romania (also known as the Carpathian garden). Like all other South Africans I knew they were lying. After all, these are all countries with Internet that works, and copper cables that remain attached to vital things like my router.

With hindsight, maybe they were not the big fibbers I thought they might be. I would like to share some thoughts about Norway. (Norway, of course, is not the Carpathian garden. Nor is it the Spanish smallholding or the Polish plot. It is more like the Russian refrigerator.)

It is not just the climate. Summers here are idyllic. But in some way summer here is like the enjoyment you feel when you climb out of a frozen fjord, as the goosebumps change from icicles to ice blocks and blood flows back into your dangly bits, which have spent the past while nestled tighly below your ribcage.

It is also the business climate, and a bizarre set of social engineering tax rules that make owning a home a complex dance in the sense of the Tango. Your first home will cost about 10 times your annual income, and you will often live in your parents home with your wife Ivana while you save for the deposit. It will be a small place because most get by with just one Viking offspring, despite the year long maternal leave (for mom or dad). And then, once you get that first mortgage, the interest is tax deductible – unlike South Africa. Valhalla, one might think.

At least, one might think this until one wanted to invest in a second house, maybe to rent out in ones dotage to stretch ones pension. In this case, the rental income is taxed at brutal rates, and the mortgage interest is not tax deductible. Almost the exact opposite of SA or any other country that I know.

This is why the rental market where I live is down to five homes, two of which are in the Arctic Circle, with 14,000 people needing a place by July. (Those five homes are available to rent only because their owners are off to Spain to avoid the coming winter.) The rest of us are stocking up on downfilled tents and a few reindeer to snuggle up to.

Lest you think that this is one long complaint, it is not. Balance, at least for a person thriving on the Web, is when a SA webinar delegate comments about how fast your download is (20MB) just before his signal stutters and he goes dark until the morrow. (Which is why we record the events.)

No matter how dark and long the days get, one can still find a bottle of SA wine, as long as you get it before 5pm when the state owned monopoly closes. And, of course, if they can process the wine-mortgage forms in time. (That single bottle costs about as much as an acre of the Boschendal Estate.) Failing that, diesel has become a reliable alternative, at just R20 per litre, and I do not believe that it is illegal yet.

All of which is to say, if you can’t be in the place you love, love the place you’re in. Life is too short otherwise. And, of course, buy plenty at the duty-free whenever you travel.

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Learning about Flightless Birds and Money

April 19th, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, selling

Apr
19

Some things are so obvious that we don’t see them.

A simple example: Getting a job.

There are 2 ways to get a job. The education systems approach is to expand your head with ever more stuff, in the vague hope that people will rush towards your better mousetrap.

The other, much simpler, much cheaper, and 1000% more effective, but totally ignored approach is to give you a course on getting a job. A semester showing you the process, teaching you how to sell yourself, or how to polish your CV, and so on.

But it’s the same thing with selling anything other than yourself. Twelve years of formal education and I could conduct a conversation with Julius Caesar in his home language, but didn’t have any idea how to sell a life raft to a drowning man. I feel qualified to talk about this so long after completing my formal schooling. (Lots of fun but left me quite unfit for real work.)

We learned so much unimportant stuff and so little crucial stuff. Thirty five years on, and schooling systems worldwide still leave out vital bits.

I am upset, to be honest. I know so many people who have great products and services and still struggle because they have the selling skills of Mephitis mephitis.

I think that the education system needs to take the approach of the flightless Fukarwe Bird. Every now and then this bird jumps up out of the long grass to try and get perspective as it shrieks “Where the fukarwe?”

I think it would be great if somebody in schooling poked a head into real life and asked “What the fukarwe teaching?”

We teach our kids Latin, history, geography, maths, and Lord knows what else. But we do not teach them about money, getting a job, and selling. This is not just at school. It is at every level. We graduate doctors, architects, engineers who will go bankrupt because they have no clue about running a business. We graduate a bunch of non-professionals who will need to find  jobs, but we do not teach them those skills. And we teach nobody how to manage money.

Money, it turns out, is rather important. Watch the news tonight, and count how many minutes are devoted to money. (The Eurozone crisis, stock market prices and changes, interest rate changes, taxes, company results, the budget, etc…) You cannot win this economic game and they will not let you quit, so it makes sense to get a working knowledge real fast.

What the fukarwe thinking? And why, 35 years on, are we still not teaching this stuff?

Added a little later: Ken Robinson on how education kills creativity – which is wonderful viewing, as well as very funny.

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It doesn’t work…

April 12th, 2012 | by | applied tech, entrepreneurial life

Apr
12

Every now and then, maybe every hour or so, a person will tell me that it doesn’t work. The ‘it’ might be using Google, or email marketing, or marrying a Norwegian.

What they really should be saying is something along the lines of ‘It did not work for me.’ But they don’t. They assume that their effort was the same as mine, and therefore I don’t know what I am talking about. Thank heavens I am too slow to pay them any mind. My philosophy is simple: If at first you don’t succeed, call it version 1.0. (And try again.)

So many folk have told me that email marketing, for instance, does not work that I am convinced that my bank balance is being built by littleelves who come into my workshop each night to cobble away covertly.
I began to ask them to send me their last efforts, and I am going to, if I may, share the lessons of these fine versions of 1.0. (Not the elves, silly. Those other people for whom ‘it’ doesn’t work.)

Your basic sales email has a sender (you) and a recipient (someone you want to buy your wares). It has a subject (the headline that must catch attention) and a body (the text that must grip the reader so tightly that they cannot wait to haul out that last card.) This is the card that has not yet been liberated by the footpad du jour. And, of course, in version 0.91, an email could have attachments. (That is a four letter word, right up there with ‘wart’, that we will discuss in a moment.)

Where to start? Lets start at the headline. Most are about as gripping as a rainy Sunday in 1977 when the only sound on Springbok was Kenny Rogers bemoaning his horse leaving while his woman, Lucille, stayed. (Maybe I got that wrong, but it resonates.) One opens the email just to see who died.

And then the good stuff starts. It is flagged as urgent, and you want aread receipt? For some spam? Surely you jest? (Read receipts are the best way to tell a person that you are watching them closely because you do not trust them.) This is a good way to not start a sales relationship with someone whose money you want.

That first paragraph sets a fine tone, telling me me all about you, and your experience, and how you got 4 “A”s in Matric, and how committed you are to service excellence. As does the second paragraph, all about how long you have been in business. I am going to pass on the third paragraph, if you don’t mind, and try to find where you make your point, ask your question, or otherwise tell me what you want.

Oops, looks like I missed that, because we are already at your signature.  And largewillie@hotmail sends me a clear message about how serious you are about business. Email addresses speak louder than words. As do signatures. (Do you really have all those fingers in that many strange strange pies?)

Now about that attachment. Oh happy, happy, an Excel spreadsheet AND a Microsoft Word document.  Hey, I don’t have MS Office, so lets give that a miss. Fortunately they were only 10MB each so my 3G limit wasn’t chewed too badly. (Hint: Next time a small PDF that stays on message would be a better alternative, although attaching nothing is much better on that first email.)

So, dear reader, does email marketing really not work, or did your Version 1.0 not work? I have a longstanding SA client who really did marry a Norwegian. She divorced him within hours of his arrival in Norway and ran off with an Odd Person. “Odd”, it turns out, is a popular name up north. (Version 1.0: marrying a Norwegian doesn’t work.)

Hey Boet, just wanted to tell you that you might be wrong. Or maybe it won’t work if she doesn’t take the kids on frequent holidays in Spain to visit Granny and leaves me to play by myself. By the time you get to Version 1.3 ‘it’ really starts to work!

Just in case you are wondering if the above really is true, I had to tone it down a bit because faction truly is weirder than fiction. Maybe Wilhelmina Large was not really all that well endowed, but her email address sure gave mixed signals.  Be gentle with email and it will work for you. At least, from Version 1.1 onwards.

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When is Marketing a Waste of Money?

March 21st, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, marketing

Mar
21

I am ashamed to admit that I think most small businesses deserve to close.  (I think it, but I sure don’t wish it.)

The key to success is finding enough prospects and turning them into clients. It doesn’t matter what you sell, and it doesn’t matter how good you are at making it. Success depends on closing enough clients.

Over the past year, we have generated more than 120,000 web prospects for more than 400 clients.  These clients sell in every market from ADHD to Water. The one thing that shrieks out at us is that about 80% of our clients cannot sell a life jacket to a drowning man.  Frankly, it’s scary.

As individuals we would not normally notice this.  Each of us has had some awful buying sagas, but we see them as an one-off, rather than the norm.  Not so.  It turns out that most of us in business are really bad at the coalface.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how good our marketing is or how good the flow of incoming prospects is. If we cannot turn those prospects into clients, we’re wasting our money, which we might as well blow on a weekly staff lunch at the Spur.

Here is a hint: If it’s worth investing money to attract prospects, then it’s worth putting a little effort into the way we respond when we ‘catch’ one.

If we have an e-commerce site, then that is a fine first response.  If we don’t, we must phone quickly.  Some research from the United States shows that 90% of all sales are made if the call is made within 30 min.  After that there is a huge drop off in client closure, and if we respond later than 20 hours, we can expect to be sworn at.

But it’s not just this first response that is crucial.  All of our marketing effort, and all of our sales effort, ends in a single document: The quotation.

Frankly, after looking at thousands of these over the past year, I know just one thing – most are worse than rubbish.  Most are hostile.  It’s almost as if the gentle Kahlil Gibran side of us, the person writing the sales copy and doing the talking, becomes Stephen King/Charles Dickens, writing evil stuff in archaic language.

Somehow we have forgotten that the quotation is a sales document.  It is almost as though, after months of wooing the person of our dreams, we get down on our knees to propose, and over the next hour detail what WE want, and what WE will not accept in our marriage. Hint: This a great way to enjoy a lifetime of bachelorhood. (And it is a great way to have no client support issues as well.)

I am mortified that after more than a year of begging our clients to improve their response processes, and sales closing processes, and quotation processes, we haven’t made much progress.  And a lot of people have gone out of business.

There is, however, some dark consolation in having somebody announce, as if he has just found the Holy Grail, that he tested our process last week, after having been too busy for the last 51 weeks, and he can confirm, by gum, that it works better than sliced bread!

The tragedy in all of this is that the South African service bar is so low that even if we are barely average, we stand out like shining lights, because everybody else is so bad.

If you can sell enough, you own your banking relationship, and your bank doesn’t own your business.  Much as I would love to share best practices with you, it’s much more important that you simply, tonight, re-look at your entire process for converting strangers into clients.  There is an 80% chance that it needs life support.

And if you’d like to join me on a 12 month journey working through these issues in depth, and sharing what we have learned over the past decade about Web best practices, please join us for a gratis event on Tuesday next week.

If you want to know more, please join me here at 8pm SA Time, Tuesday evening, March 27.  In order to work through this program with me you will need reasonable speed internet (better than 300K), either Windows or Mac, and the ability to chuckle a lot.

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Self Employed vs Business Owner?

March 15th, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, sovereign individual

Mar
15

I have lived in Norway for almost 3 years. I am ashamed to say that I speak Norwegian almost as well as I speak Klingon.

There are three questions that every Norwegian asks in that first conversation.

Viking: “How do you like Norway?”

Me: “I think it is a wonderful country but I am still struggling with the snow in winter.”Viking: “How long have you been here?”

Me: “Almost 3 years.”

Viking: “But you don’t speak any Norwegian?” (Which is code for “How do you earn a living or are you living off my tax payments??”

Me:  “I am a consultant on the Internet helping small business owners in English-speaking countries around the world. I speak English 12 hours each day, so there is not much time to learn Norsk.” (I throw that last word in to show them that I am not totally clueless.”)

The talking ends shortly after. Norwegians have little concept of self-employment. Having an income that follows one from country to country is utterly foreign, like the Finnish. And, I suspect, the concept of any sane person living in Thor’s own country because he actaully wants to, beggars understanding. I no longer even mention the white sand in Durban, because they start to get grumpy, as if the big five should be enough for any one country..

I don’t have a business so much as a ‘self-employment’. We tend to confuse the two terms. Business means stature. Self-employment has all the status of a Trabant. It is easy to fail in business. 96% of us do, at least once. We have looked at some of thatfallout in the past few emails.

But, self-employment, that is a different mammal altogether. Self-employment harks back to medieval craftsmen moving from town to town. The Internet, of course, means that each ‘town’ on earth sits in an Apple on the desk on my bedroom. One doesn’t ‘close’ self-employment. Rather it ends as one migrates from earthly worm to heavenly butterfly.

I closed a business in 1992. In hindsight it was never ‘my’ business. The banks and the government always had first dibs at any money that came in, followed by the staff. And since I was always more interested in the techie stuff than the money, there was never a lot of money left.

After closing, I just wanted to earn enough to enjoy life, to be able to do some interesting stuff, and to live wherever chance (or maybe a wonderful woman) might take me. My dreams came from an insightful book called “The Sovereign Individual“.

And so I slid into this zero-status form of business structure known as self-employment. Even government is not interested. They want you to employ real people, not yourself. (I think that there is no finer recommendation for any structure.)

Self-employment has very few constraints. Self-employment is something you can do in the haven of your bedroom, in your pajamas. (While on sick leave, if you really, really want to.) And my focus for the next few years was on setting up an income infrastructure that could work anywhere.

My first test into Australia was fun, but a dismal failure portability-wise. The Web wasn’t yet up to the task. (At least, that’s how I comfort myself because it was a very costly test.)

A few years later came the UK, and this was much better. At least, until some dastard stole my pass-port in Cape Town. The UK government decided that stolen documents meant that I must never have had them, and took so long to renew them that I knew it was time to leave. And so it was that the family ended up in Mrs Carruthers’ home town. This move was seamless. I had, so to speak, become a shadow of my former self.

But you can’t do this with a ‘real’ business. It is not portable. The moment it is within the governments radar, the admin load rockets. Even burying the corpse costs a chunk, and involves paper, lawyers, accountants, and courts. We self-employed simply sidle away. In our pajamas.

A few years ago I started sharing these ideas and skills with a few people who were happy to pay more money than I thought I was worth. I extended this into a new community – Global Warriors. And then, the techie demon took over and I got lost in the excitement of Google marketing. As we taught each step, we automated it. This became Marketing Motor, a great way to do marketing online, but not quite what a bunch of folk had signed up for.

I am going to fix that by offering a twelve month mentorship in an unusual way. Why?To transfer everything I know about earning an income online to you, by this time next year. There are no sacred cows, and we will discuss each aspect in enough depth for you to be confident that you can take it on. It’s all common sense when you see through the hype.

The pace will be comfortable, but over the year we will cover more than you can imagine.

The plan is, over the space of a year, to take just two hours out of your week, on a Tuesday evening, and to transfer everything that I know to you. By the end of the year you will be in the space where you know everything that you need to be able to earn enough income to survive online, and live in Johannesburg or Cape Town or Knysna, or Edinburgh, or Perth, or Oslo.

 

If you want to know more, please join me here at 8pm SA Time,  Tuesday evening, March 27.  In order to work through this program with me you will need reasonable speed internet (better than 300K), either Windows or Mac, and the ability to laugh a lot.

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Closing Time?

March 7th, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life

Mar
07

The past few articles about the fallout from closure have led to one key question being asked: When should I close?

Before we look at the road signs that you should notice, like the one that says, “Road Flooded”, lets look at the issue of quitting. Quitting is a bad, bad thing. Quitting implies that you are a yellow-bellied, chicken-livered coward who does not have the balls for the job. (How are we supposed to insult women, I wonder, when so many great insults refer to some aspect of a mans anatomy?)

Contrast quitting, just sommer giving up, with making an informed decision to shelve this project in the light of new information, robust experience, and strong economic indicators showing imminent collapse. That’s not quitting, that’s plain common sense, if only we knew how to voice it.

That’s what explorers do when they do not find gold in them thar hills. They stop drilling there, because they have proved that no gold is to be found there using their current tools, and so they move on to a new location to try again.

Not us SMEs. Having told the world that this is what we plan to do, we think that our friends regard our words equal to the carvings that Moses brought down the hill. (Your friends don’t care because they’re too busy trying to eke out their own daily crust.)

Stopping is to quitting what braking is to crashing. Stopping is intelligent.

Mentioning road signs reminds me that I once found myself driving through an awful storm outside Humansdorp. It was so bad, and I was feeling so guilty driving a nice car, that after fuelling up I collected a couple of indigent families at the roadside, intending to drive them home. (Just a few miles up this road, they said…)

This road was the one which said ‘Road Flooded’. To which they said “Nee Oom, there is no floods on this road, hey.” Anyway, a few miles turned out to be about 20, and I covered the last 10 very, very fast. Eventually, one of the families told me we had reached their stop, so we stopped. I assumed, wrongly, that this was for both. Not so. Just a few more miles, the second team told me. As I turned forward to start, I saw rushing water across the road, 30 metres ahead.  I still have nightmares about it. Hint 1: Read the signs.

I took the second family back to Wimpy, where I discovered that my blood sugar was way too low to be driving in the first place. Hint 2: Always carry chocolate.

The issue of when to close is simple and clear when you read the signs. It’s never easy to do, because in closing we have to bury that set of dreams. I no longer think of my business as a ‘business’, but rather as a project. it reminds me that there will always be another one.

The key determinant, in my humble opinion, is when you have to lend more money to the business to keep it afloat. We’re not talking about emergency bridging finance, but rather about a downturn that needs you to keep funding the business until it upticks again.

It is usually that funding that ‘forces’ you to borrow against your home, and forces you to sign the unlimited surety that is part of every business overdraft. I have lost count of the number of folk I have counselled who borrowed heavily during their last few months, using the funds to pay staff, and themselves, without realising that the ONLY reason for the firm continuing was the funding they were feeding in.

I am a great believer in Kahlil Gibran’s words. I paraphrase: “If you love your staff, set them free…” No matter what happens, no matter how Herculean your efforts, they will hate you when you have to fire them. They don’t care that you will have lost your home paying them for the next year. I mention this because it is one of the key reasons we borrow so much in the last few months. So do them a favour and help them on their way early.

This is also, for what it is worth, why I am so devoted to running a very, very lean business. Running online costs so little that my Norwegian accountant is convinced that whatever I am doing must be illegal. No business of substance has costs this low, he feels. It is also why the Internet is a fine answer for anyone who has just closed a business.  It is as close to a free startup as is possible. But more about that later.

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Money, Failure, and Cattle

March 1st, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life

Mar
01

Firstly, here is a link to Tuesday evenings webinar on surviving failure. This page will list the videos as we make them.

It was fun, the feedback was great, but the e-mails it provoked beforehand were just plain fascinating. The bottom line is that failure is embarrassing. Not just any failure, we are talking specifically about money.

We forget all of the other roles that we are called on to play.

For those of us who work from home, for instance, we forget that we are always in our children’s lives. You can’t measure that with money.

We forget the amount of time we’ve been able to live independently, not relying on somebody else for our income.

We forget the value we have added to our suppliers, our staff and their families, and the amount of money we’ve given back to the government in tax (VAT, personal tax, company tax, and the taxes that our staff pay).

We forget all of the learning, the personal growth, that we’ve achieved and that our efforts have allowed others to achieve.

We forget that, until this month, we have managed to pay for 10 years of schooling for the kids, 15,000 meals, more clothes than were needed by Caesars Roman soldiers, doctors bills, and at least three Mauritian breaks for our dentist.

We forget how much value we added to our clients.

We forget everything in the cold harsh light of this mornings bank balance when compared to next weeks bills. And in that one moment, we see just one thing: failure.

As an aside, in September, the SA government is hosting an international conference on small business ownership. It’s not for small business owners, just as a conference on farming is not for cows, pigs, chickens, or alfalfa. A conference on farming, just like a government conference on small business ownership, is about how to make more money out of the herd.

I say this because I looked at the Call for Abstracts, the kind of thing we speakers fill in to get invited to address the group. The search is on for papers about making small business ownership more sustainable for government. In concept, it’s a little like a call for papers to discuss how to get more milk out of your herd, rather than how to increase the well-being of your cows.

Have you ever felt that maybe, just maybe, you are a small part of a much bigger system that needs you to be focused on money, rather than the myriad other joyous things you could be focused on.

Maybe I’m being a little grumpy, but you can check it out for yourselfhere. And look at what they want the speakers to talk about  here. (They have already decided what is best, and want confirmation. Nobody has yet asked us cattle.)

Being alive is a miracle. In my case, it really is, because if Fred Banting had not isolated insulin 35 years before I was born, I wouldn’t be around. Each day is a bonus. But it is just so for all of us, because we forget that just 100 years ago the average lifespan was half of ours.

We are living in the best time in the history of mankind. Even the poorest person reading this newsletter lives better than a king of 200 years ago. And has more access to help, entertainment, and food than almost anybody 100 years ago. And yet we define our lives in terms of a single failing: Not enough money, right now.

I am embarrassed because for 20 years that’s the field I have been teaching in. In technical terms, a “failure” in life implies a systemic failure, another word for which is “death”. But death is a natural part of life. Nobody likes it, but we don’t think of the recently deceased as failures. Rather, we celebrate their lives. It occurs to me that this is a great balance. As our businesses close, maybe we should celebrate their lives as well?

How much money we each have really seems an appalling way to measure our lives. It seems about as relevant as basing our self worth on the number of freckles there are on the neighbours dog. And neither of my neighbours even has a dog, so what does that say about me?

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