sustainable manner. But first, here, let’s confront the most basic of all decisions: the decision to succeed.
A Matter of Personal Decision
Entrepreneurial success, like most things in life, is mostly a matter of decision. A partnership, friendship, intimate relationship, or marriage that succeeds or fails, a book that gets written or remains a jumble of notes in a drawer, the garage that gets cleaned out Saturday or put off until next week—these are all the result of decision. Or, to be more accurate, decisions. Decisions, for example, of self-reliance and personal responsibility, or of not waiting for better or ideal timing or circumstances, help from others, or a muse’s delivery of just the right mood.
Dan Kennedy’s Eternal Truth #1
Every successful achievement begins
with decision. Most unsuccessful lives
are conspicuously absent
of decision.
Most people go through life making decisions by default, choosing only from narrow options dictated by others or by evolving circumstances. One millionaire friend of mine grew up in a very small town where, as he put it, there were two career options: working at the factory or raising pigs and chickens. With only a few exceptions, everybody he went to school and graduated with chose one of those two options. Stayed there, did one of those two things, died there. He left. Many people go through life as if confined by tall barbed wire fences and armed guards in whatever “place” they find themselves. Business owners do this too. They create and organize a business to be a certain thing and operate in a certain way, then act as if some law exists forbidding its change. In approaching their businesses this way, they might as well be stuck in that small town with a profound belief in only two options—the factory or the farm.
The New Economy mandates a much more willing and creative approach to constant change and evolution and reccurring reinvention in order to keep a business very specifically and currently relevant to the customers able and willing to support it. Agile businesses—run by mentally agile leaders—can prosper as never before. But domination purely by size or brand stature or longevity is entirely a thing of the past. The best recent object lesson: General Motors, a giant no longer relevant to its customers, run as if things like longevity or brand status mattered, as if size ensured continuation. Staying relevant requires constant change, and there is nothing less tolerated in The New Economy than the irrelevant. The economic power has returned to consumers and they know it. Consumers have been spoiled like indulgent billionaire parents’ prodigies with so many customized, specialized, niched choices that they now expect to get things that are clearly and uniquely for them. Satisfying them en masse is nearly impossible. But you are not locked into any business definition or model, any product mix, any pricing formula, any set of stay-inplace limitations, so if you decide to do so, you can be morphing to meet your customers’ greatest interests day to day.
I am often amused when traveling, and asked what I do, and I describe it as best I can, then I get the envious sigh, the gee-I-wish-I-could-do-that, and then the laundry list of complaints and dissatisfactions from the person about his present career or business or life. I’m amused because he apparently does not know he can change all that by decision. Similarly, when traveling and asked where I lived, and I answered “sunny Phoenix” (where I lived for over ten years), I’d often get the envious sigh, the gee-I-wish-I-lived-there-instead-of-in-X, then the litany of unpleasant things about their home city. This amuses me because apparently they haven’t noticed the highway signs in their town pointing the way out.
It’s amazing how people spend their lives in prisons entirely of their own making, the key dangling right there in the lock, no jailer in sight.
I find it very hard to work up much sympathy for most of these sad-sacks. I remember listening to a 40-or-so-year-old guy working behind the counter at a neighborhood convenience store where I sometimes stop for coffee complaining loudly, even poetically about his miserable job, low income, and lousy lot in life. I asked where he lived and which way he drove to work. After he answered, I asked if he’d noticed that everyday, twice a day he drove past the public library, a gigantic repository of help for changing your career, your finances, your life—all free. As you might guess, I might as well have been speaking Martian. If pressed, I assure you, he’d tell you he was too busy or too tired to read, or didn’t like to read, or had bad eyesight when he was in school, or some other pitiful excuse. Pfui.
Truths That Aren’t, That Hold You Back
Successful entrepreneurs learn to be much more assertive, proactive, and creative in making decisions to change things as they prefer, to make things happen. If you are to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to break free of your old reacting and responding mode and switch to the assertive, proactive mode. You have to reject the entire idea of limited choices.
As an entrepreneur you need to reject every single piece of programming you’ve ever received about limited options or prerequisites for exercising certain options. Limitations, rules, industry norms—these are for other people, but not for you. Reject any idea that removes any option from your table.
Just for example, that certain options exist only for people with particular education, licenses, or certifications. Sure, you can’t just up and declare yourself a heart surgeon or airplane pilot. But you can certainly be the CEO, and you can certainly make as much money as you choose.
Here’s a little jolt: one of the highest-paid marketing consultants and coaches working only with restaurant owners who I helped start in business, a man who is paid millions of dollars a year from those owners for his advice, has never worked in, managed, or owned a restaurant. For four years, I had the largest business training company serving dentists and chiropractors, working with over 10,000 doctors, but I am neither a DC nor DDS. The current owner of one of the most successful independent movie studios, who has prospered by bringing comic book characters to the big screen, in partnership with giants like Warner Brothers, did not work as script writer, camera man, grip, film editor, or actor, did not go to film school, did not apprentice in Hollywood before starting his movie production company. He owned a chain of dry cleaning stores. He liked comic books. And he proved adept at raising money from investors. The man who created one of the world’s largest ad agencies from scratch was a door-to-door salesman and a short order cook. Traditional qualifications matter if entering and trying to climb a ladder controlled by others inside a corporate organization but they do not matter at all in the entrepreneurial arena. Not at all. Only what you decide and do matters.
This is a very disconcerting thought for people who have gone to great pains to secure academic or other credentials, i.e. the approval of others, or to build resumes. These people hate hearing this, resent it, resist it. Still, the marketplace is unimpressed by anything but the doing.
You also need to reject limiting definitions. Single-function businesses are dinosaurs, with rare, notable, and generally unsustainable examples. Yes, there is such a thing as a gourmet cupcake bakery that makes and sells nothing but ungodly priced cupcakes—which reminds me of an old John Belushi skit from Saturday Night Live about the Scotch tape store, into which customers kept coming asking for paper clips or pens. The cupcake store exists. Let’s see how it’s doing in five or ten years. It won’t be there as is at all. It’s a fad, like the pet rock.
The most successful “restaurant owner” that I know does not think of herself or define herself that way, although it is true that she owns a restaurant. But it is merely “the Bat Cave” for an aggressively marketed private party catering business, a wine school and wine tasting society, an e-commerce business selling her recipes,
