The first purpose of a small business is to serve the entrepreneur who created it and who owns it. The business may have other purposes: to serve customers and even to serve the community. But before these, the business must serve the entrepreneur.

How does a business serve its owner? Certainly, the business should make money.* Beyond that, the business should make the owner happy: through the nature of what it does, through the things it allows the entrepreneur to do with his or her time, through the daily experiences that the entrepreneur has while running the business.

Every economist understands that if a business doesn’t succeed in its obligation to serve customers, it’s not going to be in business for long. But not everyone remembers that if a business doesn’t succeed in its first obligation to serve the entrepreneur, there’s not much chance that it will keep serving its customers well, and there’s not much point trying.

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If the business doesn’t make money, then it isn’t a business, it’s a hobby.  Or at best, an unintentional “nonprofit organization”.

Your skills and your talents are not the same.  Skills may come naturally or they may be acquired with work.  Talents may come naturally to the surface or they may need to be cultivated and set loose.

Your needs are not the same as your passions.  There may be some things that — if you don’t do them — you feel like the day isn’t complete.  You may not like them and you may not want them, but you need them.  Needs, I think, call out to you.  Passions call out from within you.

I haven’t any idea whether talent and passion are critical ingredients in a good entrepreneurial life.  Maybe skills and needs are enough.  As for the critical ingredient in finding one’s vocation or “calling” — does it matter from which direction the call must come?

A common piece advice in retail: “Differentiate yourself. Then let the market know how you’re different.”

That’s good advice, but here’s more: It’s easy to be different. It’s much harder to be distinctive.

“Distinctive” means you’re different in a way that gets positive attention.

Remember: it’s useless for a retailer to be different in a way that no one can notice.

It’s worse to be different in a way that people notice but don’t like (”Hey, we’re the only bookstore in town that plays really loud music.” Or “We’re the only cafe in town where all our staff smell bad.”)

But it’s great to be different in a way that people notice and like (”Hey, we’re the only bookstore in town that has an extensive collection of Spanish-language books and international newspapers” or “We’re the only cafe in town where all our coffees are fair-trade and all our meat and dairy products are free-range.”)

That’s distinctive. And if you do a good job of getting your distinctives noticed, you’ll soon enough be distinguished — that is: well-known, well-respected, and sustainably profitable.

“We’re more than a business — we’re a family”"I like to think of us as a family, not just a business”

I hear statements like this far too often. At best, they’re spoken by small business owners whose employees all feel a strong personal connection with each other. At worst, they’re spoken by business unit managers who erroneously assume that their 50 or 250 staff feel the same level of investment in the business that they do.

Your business is a business. Your employees have roles to play, and your job is to lead the way, and to compensate your employees for their efforts and results. If you do your job well, there’s a good chance that your employees will enjoy working with each other, will feel pride in their association with your company, and will support each other in gaining more and more success. Your employees may become friends. Your employees and their real families may build meaningful relationships outside office hours. But your company is not a family.*

“Real” families have a different set of rules.** And perhaps the most important difference for an patriarchal executive to remember is that in a family, no adult has the responsibility or privilege of directing another’s efforts or deciding how much to offer as compensation.

The 2nd-worst division VP I ever worked for often referred to our 100-person office as a family (even after I told him that I didn’t consider him my “dad”). When one of our colleagues was thinking about joining a competitor, the veep confronted him and asked him declare, “Where does your loyalty lie?” The colleague pointed to a photo of his wife and son and said, “Right there.” That’s family.

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*On the off chance your business is a real family business, with all or most of your staff related by blood or marriage, please ignore this blog post and go read one of the Family Business columns by Jim Lea, business consultant and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Flagler Business School.

**The best “real” families I know take care of their own, from cradle to grave. They share their resources. They love unconditionally. Individuals put the needs of others ahead of their own. No one gets ejected except for the most egregious of offenses. Even when families fail to meet all these ideals daily, they continue to see the wisdom in trying. This family model is self-consistent and sustainable. But it is not the model for sustainable business.

This from an academic friend who studies Japanese culture:

“In management circles, it’s said that if you give an identical problem to a Japanese person and a Chinese person, the Chinese person will be faster at figuring out a solution.  However, if you give an identical problem to a Japanese group and a Chinese group, the Japanese group will be faster to a solution.”

“Work-life balance” is an important, emerging idea in 21st century corporate life. I’m happy to see corporate America (and its citizens) asking big questions about how to make sure that our jobs don’t take over the rest of our lives.

But I’m distressed at the tag we’re using: Work-life balance.

Huhn? Isn’t work part of life? I’d hate to think we’re assuming that “life” goes on hold for the eight to twelve hours we spend doing things that have a paycheck attached.

Sure, we don’t all have the luxury of jobs that could be described as our vocation or calling or personal mission. But don’t we all have the option and obligation (to ourselves, at least) to remain human beings when we’re on the clock?

As for finding a better term than “work-life balance,” I admit that I’m still scratching my head: work-home balance? life-integration? balanced lifecard?

Feel free to suggest your own.

Meanwhile, here are a few considered articles on finding the right role of work and other things in your world, no matter how you label it.

• The Mayo Clinic: Work-life balance: Ways to restore harmony and reduce stress
• WorkLifeBalance.com: Work-life balance defined: what it really means.
• Wikipedia: Work-Life Balance

Many of my clients have “project-based” businesses like graphic design, conference planning, or even real estate development.  I often remind these clients, “before you chase a piece of business, make sure it fits your criteria for a ‘good project’.  Because if it isn’t a good project, why would you want to win it?”

How do they decide?  Here are the four “good project” criteria I suggest they start with:

Will it be profitable?  Consider your cost of acquisition for this project (How much time will it take to do the proposal? How likely are you to win?) and consider how much money it will take to do the project right, compared to how much you might be able to charge?

Will it make you happy?  Will you enjoy doing the work?  Will you enjoy working with the client?  Will you be happy with what you create?

Will it increase your value as a company?  Will you acquire a new skill, establish a new credential, or learn something new and valuable to your company as a result of completing this project?  Or is it strictly execution of something you’ve done many times before? Business advisor David Maister calls this question, “watching your asset”.

Will it fit with the rest of your current work?  On its own, the project might look great.  But given the current demands on your staff time, and given what other kinds of projects are currently on your plate (or that you want to get onto your plate), is this the right time for this project?

A good project might not get a “yes” for all four diagnostics, but a “no” or too many “not sures” are a big warning sign.  And it doesn’t take long to take a crack at answering the questions.  This investment in time is a whole lot smaller than the investment it usually takes to win and then do the project.