Your staff is well-aware that you are imperfect. So are your customers.

So stop trying to perpetuate the idea that you don’t make mistakes. Nobody thinks that about you. And stop trying to be perfect. You’re not going to pull it off.

Instead, figure out how good you need to be, and shoot for being that good and a little bit better. Ask your staff and your customers to help you be better — by providing you with feedback on how well (or how poorly) you’ve done, and for providing suggestions on how you can do better. If you get good at this, you’ll find that life is much less stressful.*

Remember that being “good enough” isn’t always about scoring 90% every time you try. Sometimes it’s about scoring 100% nine times out of ten, and getting a goose egg on the last one. Learning to identify, acknowledge, and make amends for mistakes is a skill worth developing. And learning that skill is a much better use of your energy than trying to be perfect.

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*Especially if you’re a business owner.  People who own their own stores have a particularly hard time with this kind of thing.

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”.

I’ve just discovered a surprisingly good book for aspiring entrepreneurs. In Kick Start Your Dream Business: Getting It Started and Keeping You Going, business consultant and teacher Romanus Wolter documents the process he uses to help previously untrained entrepreneurs clarify and deploy their ideas for anything from publishing businesses to juice bars.

What’s so impressive about Kick Start Your Dream Business? Here — from a sidebar in his chapter “Getting it Made” — is an example of how Wolter melds the “touchy feely” with practical and sophisticated business advice:

GO TO THE SOURCE

Sherry was producing custom gift books commemorating weddings and other special events. Her books were like scrapbooks for special events. However, she was having trouble making a profit because the covers she was using were very expensive.

I mentioned that she could save money by sending an RFQ for the covers directly to manufacturers. She asked me where she should send the RFQ. I talked to her about finding manufacturers in the library and on the Internet, and then another idea came to me.

One block from my office was a great bookstore. I suggested she go to the bookstore, use her 30-second commercial to tell the staff about her product, and then ask for contacts for book cover manufacturers. She went for it.

In less than an hour, a clerk provided her with a list of book cover manufacturers. After developing and sending out an RFQ, one of the manufacturers offered the exact covers she was using for half the price! She ended up saving over $6 per book just by asking for help.

However, Sherry did not stop there. She sent a nice thank-you flower bouquet to the bookstore clerk and mentioned that she was going to send her friends to the store. Guess what? The clerk offered to put her marketing materials in the bookstore, opening up a great marketing channel. Remember, what goes around, comes around.

This one example illustrates two of the key things that Wolter does better than most “how to follow your dream and start your business” books.

First, the “follow your dream” attitude is linked with solid business techniques. Solid business concepts like “RFQ” and “saving over $6 per book” are often sadly missing from other touchy feely business books.

Second, the business research methods are tied to dream-fulfilling work. Many “how to start your own business” books stick to standard businesses: restaurants, consulting, widget-making. Wolter shows you that he’s working with real, unique people with real, unique dreams. It’s a lot easier to believe his advice because he shows you all the places it’s getting used.

Lastly (and not illustrated in the above quote), Kick Start Your Dream Business seems to be a very well-designed and practical tool for the aspiring business person. Each chapter includes both exercises and reference information. From what I can tell, Wolter presents the exercises and information in a sequence that will really help the entrepreneur effectively explore, refine, and lock down what s/he needs to know and do.

By comparison, other books that do the “series of exercises” approach don’t seem to have the same coherence and thoroughness. While other books that use the “complete reference” approach fail to give the reader a good path for walking through and using all the information contained.

I have a new client who I think will really benefit from the Wolter approach — “dream like a child, decide as an adult.” I look forward to giving her a copy of Kick Start Your Dream Business and helping her work through it in the coming months.

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?

Tests and Measures

Some people are born knowing what they want to do, and even how to do it.  The rest of us aren’t so lucky.

…What do you want?  The majority of us go through life, often very successfully, without ever asking, much less answering, this most basic question.

The most basic answer, of course, is that you want to express yourself fully, for that is the most basic human drive.  As one friend put it, “We all want to learn how to use our own voices,” and it has led some of us to the peaks and some of us to the depths.

How can you best express you?

The first test is knowing what you want, knowing your abilities and capacities, and recognizing the difference between the two. 

…The second test is knowing what drives you, knowing what gives you satisfaction, and knowing the difference between the two.

…The third test is knowing what your values and priorities are, knowing what the values and priorities of your organization are, and measuring the difference between the two.

…The fourth test is… are you able and willing to overcome those differences?”

– Warren Bennis in On Becoming A Leader: The Leadership Classic–Updated And Expanded (2003).

It occurs to me that Bennis’s tests can take an exceptional amount of time to wrestle through.  What entrepreneur could find the time and energy (or even the wisdom?) to do these tests thoroughly and well?

I have to guess that the good entrepreneur ought expect to go through all four in repeated cycles, each time through working another layer of the “onion”, finding fresh answers with each new round of questioning.  And all the while taking care of the day-to-day — perhaps discovering over time that by refining the focus of what should be done in each day-to-day, that the fourth test becomes more readily passed.