The Correct Mentality for Small Business
Dec 2nd, 2009
One of the things that I always find interesting with my small business clients, is the attitude some small business owners have with their business. This attitude quite often becomes apparent right at the start of my dealings with them, when I am going through the pre-sales and sales stage of my offering. Very often, it becomes clear very quickly, that the business owner I’m dealing with does not approach their business with the mindset of the business owner, rather they approach their business with the mindset of someone who has a job. It is as if in starting their own business they have simply purchased a guarantee to have a job out into the future.
There is a big problem with this approach to small business. The problem here is that whether you like them or not, as a small business owner, you own all the risks and responsibilities of a business owner. You are not actually guaranteeing yourself a job into the future as your job into the future also depends upon your ability to sell. You still need to sell yourself and your services to ensure there is work there for you to do.
If you want to do a job or have a job it is far easier to be employed by someone than to prop a job up in a small business. If you want to be a small business owner is important to approach your business as if it is a business. This means you need to take risks, business risks. This means you must have a plan for the growth and development. This means you must consider advertising and other means to reach your target audience, knowing full well that the advertising may fail. If an advertising campaign fails, as a small business owner it is your job to measure the results of the advertising campaign and make the decision regarding the continuation or discontinuation of the campaign.
It is in this simple process that so many small business owners that I meet, fail. All they really want is to have a job. As such any spending on their business they see as money out of their own pocket money, that should not have to be spent, money that would much rather be spent on their lifestyles. They actually resent the fact that they have to spend money on marketing and advertising. They do not realise that every dollar they spendon marketing and advertising, could very well put three or four or five dollars back into their pockets. And this includes every dollar they may spend on their website or internet marketing efforts. As such, they have no budgeted cash flow to advertising or marketing. So when it comes to the crunch of doing something about their business and increasing their reach to more customers, they always say “I can’t afford that now I have no cash for it”.
You are in business now, you need a business budget and part of this budget must be growing your business and finding new clients using marketing and advertising techniques.
I find much of my time with new clients is spent in educating them on the simplicities of business. A website is nothing more than a medium for advertising and marketing your business and your brand. You need to be prepared to commit to the advertising campaign which means developing a website and marketing it properly in the search engines. You need to commit some of your business’s budget to ensuring that campaign is executed in a robust manner. You must measure the results of their campaign to decide whether it needs to be refined restructured or continued as it is.
If you are a business owner of a small business and you cannot commit a few thousand dollars to get a website created and marketed properly, you really should ask yourself whether you want to be in business or or whether you have just bought yourself a job. If you don’t want to be in business and just want a job, why do you want the hassle of bookkeeping, tax accounting, finding clients, GST reporting, etc, when all you’re getting for it at the end is a job. You can always find someone who wants to be in business to take care of all those administration tasks while still doing your job, so you won’t have to spend all the extra time you’re standing at the moment doing all the administration tasks in your business. Just go to seek.com.au and start applying.
If you want to be a business owner though and run a small business, run it like a business. Allocate a budget to marketing and advertising. Find the experts in the industry of advertising and marketing. Have a plan for business growth, have a plan for increasing your workforce if your business growth exceeds your capacity to match the demand on your own. Have a plan for removing yourself from the business, so you stop working in the business and rather work on the business. That is what every good business owner should do and what all successful business owners do do.