Three Basics an Entrepreneur must not Forget

There may be very many areas that an entrepreneur must excel at. In my assignments with Founders/ CEOs/ Professionals , across India & Overseas as an Entrepreneur & Business Coach, I have observed a distinct noticeable approach which makes them stand out, successful or puts them on the path to success. This approach or rather approaches are in three areas. These have been termed by me as basics. I believe that an entrepreneur must work and build these basics consciously in to his way of doing business.

1. Successful entrepreneurs understand that making money and profits are functions of business. They focus instead on identifying the purpose of business. Essentially they create a vision for their business organization.

The purpose of business is to create & keep a customer- Peter F Drucker

An entrepreneur in Hyderabad managing a successful services Business engaged me as his coach. After 12 months of coaching, having achieved his business and personal goals signed up again for coaching recently. He had shared that coaching has transformed his thinking and encouraged him to think differently. Energized and motivated to achieve, he signed up for the third time and in the first session on creating goals, he defined his vision as “Creating 100 entrepreneurs in 3 years”. This was remarkably different from the goals he had set out in previous assignments. Another client in a start-up mode ( manufacturing) co-created the purpose of his business with his founding members. The energy during the course of creating the purpose and the plan over next 5 years was contagious. The founding members could establish linkage of their aspirations and feelings manifested in the defined purpose. Such co-creation and shared understanding manifests itself in focus & commitment to achieving the “dream with a plan”.

Jack Welch said “Good Business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision & relentlessly drive it to completion.

Research has shown that people work with you and stay with you longer when they understand your purpose and fully buy into the vision. Imagine the motivation of the person who works with my client when he realizes that his principal / employer is interested in the success of others. It creates a sense of transformational trust among the stakeholders including shareholders, clients, and vendors in addition to employees. Purpose of business allows for relatively faster and quick decision making as each member of team now is completely bought in & it is observed commitment grows.

“What is the core purpose of my business?” Each Entrepreneur who grows and achieves success has clearly a defined purpose and if one has not achieved desired level and quality of success, perhaps need to ponder on whether the purpose was defined well, shared and lived.

Making money / profits is the function of business & not the purpose. Revenue & Profits would accrue when we engage in any value generating activity. It cannot be the purpose though. Walmart established their purpose in 60s to be “To bring down the cost of living for an average American”. Even today their journey and actions stay on course and the money & profits keep flowing in. 

2. Entrepreneurs need to answer a question “How much salary will you pay to a person who does the role I am doing in my business”. If the answer suggests an amount which is lower than what you earn and take home, there are very high chances that you are an employee in your own business. You have a “job in your business”.

Successful entrepreneurs by any standards are always working "on their business" and not in their business. Working on the business allows the entrepreneur to start building new businesses too.

Business guru Michael Gerber says that chief executives should spend 90% of their time on strategic issues versus 10% of their time on tactical issues.

There are some things that only the business owner can do. Other things can be done just as well (if not even better) by a manager or an administrative employee.

In my coaching assignments with Entrepreneurs, I have observed it consistently. Entrepreneurs take on too much operational responsibility and tend to spend hours doing activities which either do not generate value or do not contribute to growth of business. With a defined purpose of business & awareness on “working on the business” entrepreneurs have scaled their business, expanded the footprint and built new businesses / verticals. Any role which has Strategy & Operations as key responsibilities would be drawn towards operational issues as they are mostly of urgent & important nature . Entrepreneurs may therefore struggle to scale their business as most of time and priorities are just around sustaining current business.

A question to ask is “How much time I am spending in “Growing” the business as against time spent on managing the business need of today?

Some solutions applied by entrepreneurs include hiring someone to take on operational responsibility to training existing team to take on additional tasks. Working longer probably is not the first solution an entrepreneur must look at. Breaking down bigger tasks in to small steps would let you allow others to do most of it , while you may retain the key parts. Training the people, mentoring and coaching them would also help you Grow your business.

The goal of business owners who work on their businesses rather than working in their businesses is to make more money in less time with fewer headaches and more harmony in the family. Think about it: the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life; it should not be the purpose of your life to serve your business. Ask yourself this challenging question: are you working in your business or are you working on your business? 

3. Entrepreneurs need to develop a balance between wok & life. They are chasing things all the time. They are making things happen. Let us face it, there is always the issue of work life balance an entrepreneur is challenged with. The defined purpose of business and working on business is the key to achieve a work life balance for an entrepreneur. In one of my coaching session with a Founder of IT solutions company in Hyderabad on “time mastery”, I asked “what is value of one hour in rupee terms”. He thought, calculated and stated a magnanimous amount.

Then I asked him “What all do you do in a day which fetches a value substantially lower than the amount you mentioned”. He smiled and understood but what he said later was interesting. He shared that by stopping doing those activities, he could easily save 2 hours each day. This time could either be put to “working on business” or pursuing some interests like walking in mornings, reading and learning to play musical instruments.

This client did few simple things; Hired a secretary – This saved him tons of time as the secretary would screen and redirect unconnected calls to other employees, saved him time in managing logistics of travel.

Peter Drucker says “We all tell leaders to start doing new things or doing it differently but we never tell them to stop doing certain things”

The trick is to understand value creation out of our time and if it does not, it must be stopped or at best delegated. These things will help you save at least 1-2 hours each day, could be more. Imagine value of this time.

Your greatest resource is your time – Brain Tracy

Go out now & begin .........2015 truly & create a vision ,  revisit the purpose of business, evaluate time spent “working on business” and achieving a work life balance.

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Note : Professional Coaching standards does not allow coaches to share the details / names of client’s coached unless expressly approved by client themselves. Hence the author has not mentioned the same.

Three Basics an Entrepreneur must not forget .

There may be very many areas that an entrepreneur must be good at. However in my stint as a coach with entrepreneurs & business people , I have noticed that there are few areas where the successful one certainly do better than those which are not as much successful. So what are those areas ?

In my opinion, there are three areas & these can be called basics, which an entrepreneur must be aware of and work consciously building them in to his way of doing business.

1. Successful entrepreneurs understand that making money and profits are functions of business. They focus instead on identifying the purpose of business. Essentially they create a vision for their business organization. One entrepreneur whom I am coaching, after almost a year of assignment signed me again recently. This time while creating goals, he defined his vision as “Creating 100 entrepreneurs”. Research has shown that people work with you and stay with you longer when they know your purpose and buy into it. Imagine the motivation of the person who works with my client when he realizes that his principal / employer is interested in his success.

Perhaps entrepreneurs need to answer the question “What is the core purpose of my business?” Each Entrepreneur who grows and achieves success has clearly a defined purpose and if one has not achieved desired level and quality of success, perhaps need to ponder on whether the purpose was defined well, shared & lived.

2. Entrepreneurs need to answer a question “How much salary will you pay to a person who does the role I am doing in my business”. If the answer suggests an amount which is lower than what you earn and take home, there are very high chances that you are an employee in your own business. You have a “job in your business”.

Successful entrepreneurs by any standards are always working on their business and not in their business. Working on the business allows the entrepreneur to start building new businesses too.

3. Entrepreneurs are always busy. They are chasing things all the time. They are making things happen. Let us face it there is always the issue of work life balance an entrepreneur is challenged with. The defined purpose of business and working on business is the key to achieve a work life balance for an entrepreneur. In one of my coaching session on “time mastery “with a Founder/Entrepreneur, I asked “what is value of one hour in rupee terms”. He thought, calculated and stated a magnanimous amount.

Then I asked him “What all do you do in a day which fetches a value substantially lower than the amount you mentioned”. He smiled and understood but what he said later was interesting. He shared that by stopping doing those activities, he could easily save 2 hours each day. This time could either be put to “working on business” or pursuing some interests like walking in mornings, reading and learning to play musical instruments.

This client did few simple things; Hired a secretary – This saved him tons of time as the secretary would screen and redirect unconnected calls to other employees, saved him time in managing logistics of travel.

Peter Drucker says “We all tell leaders to start doing new things of things differently but we never tell them to stop doing certain things”

Please write down 10 things that you will either stop doing completely and / or delegate to others. The trick is to understand value creation out of your time and if it does not it must be stopped or at best delegated. These things will help you save at least 1-2 hours each day, could be more. Imagine value of this time. Go out now and do what you wish to do but never got down to doing it.

Remember when things go wrong, it is said, go back to basics. Ironically basics are what we forget easily and soon.

So let us begin with writing down the purpose of your business.

Leaders are like Ducks!

 What is common, yet unique, among Jack Welch, Sachin Tendulkar & Google’s Schmidt?

They all are very successful

They are role models for their people and generation

They are inspirational

& you can add many more here

The one that is not likely to be added or noted is that they all have had “Coaches”

What?

Yes, they have engaged coaches.

Why would they do that?

The probability of leaders to reflect and see what behavioral changes needs to be improved upon, is not very high. Their success is measured by results & outcomes. There is no measurement of what could have been achieved by them with changes to their behaviors at work. You can’t fault them; they have been a success for so long that they start believing they have the mantra and recipe.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith in his iconic book “What got you here won’t get you there” shares twenty one habits that could hold you back from reaching the successes that you ought to. If I were to share that “Goal Orientation” behaviors could be stopping the leaders from achieving higher successes, lot of eye brows would be raised.

To be successful leaders go out & seek feedback on their behaviors. They then go out and work diligently on building new behaviors which they believe will propel the team and organization to different levels. We all know that it is quite challenging to change behaviors, not until you have feedback. So when was the last time, one has identified a behavior, which is limiting the impact or results. Even if identified how many have gone ahead and successfully changed or improved that behavior.

Feedback is just the beginning, one also needs support to break out of those habits and acquire new. This phase is daunting & challenging.  Well in case of sportsmen, beginners to icons, they have coaches till they retire. So when they face challenges at their game, they go to their coaches who work with them. The coach then observes his player in practice sessions, helping bring the desired changes. The player then moves back to playing more confident of his abilities.

When we see a MS Dhoni, a Roger Federer or Messi playing like a true artist, we do not get to know & see the time spent in practicing just to be able to stay at the top of their game. These sportsmen are akin to Ducks, a smooth performance on ground while under that cool demeanor on ground they have worked hard in practice & net sessions.

Akin to the sportsmen are leaders who need support to stay at the top of their games, consistently. They are working furiously under, like a duck, maintaining a cool and easy demeanor on top. Well interestingly some of the iconic leaders have had a coach in their professional life. In the book Dr. Marshall Goldsmith shares stories of his coaching MD, CEOs of Multi- Billion Dollar global enterprises. These leaders have worked hard on themselves, seeking help from coaches , have led admirably & attained newer heights of success for their organization, yet very few knew that they have had the support from a coach.

So the next time you are inspired & motivated meeting a leader, do ask him “Are you a duck”. If he does not understand, smile and explain. You would see him smiling back.

Mr HR Manager , There is an elephant in the room !

My own data & findings are not new. It further corroborates which most always feared was the case. Human resource function has to work more to make employees trust people and organizations.

Trust has been long been seen & believed as one key factor in helping people create long lasting and fruitful relationships. Yet we find that this subject is not being discussed by HR at senior levels. Is not building relationship between employees, organization the basis to attracting & retaining talent?

HR and HR systems are very important to the process of building trust. If we do not change the basic HR processes around promotion, appraisal, reward, leader selection and so on to reflect the importance of trust to the organisation, we are not going to get trust.” And it’s just as important for organisations that already have high levels of trust to maintain them.

Here in lies the biggest challenge for HR. HR itself is not trusted by employees.

HR is seen & perceived as siding with top management. The exercise of annual performance appraisal leads a lot to be desired and HR is seen as people & function holding back more than revealing. There association and anchoring of any right sizing & restructuring exercise in the organization also creates trust issues with employees.

HR is also challenged by behaviours at leadership level added to the fact that senior leadership teams tend not to project a cohesive picture. Irrespective HR has a role to play in building & help resolve trust issues? There will always be issues in top teams, but the more dysfunctional they are, the less people trust them. Making sure the head office works as a team and supports the organisation is something HR rarely thinks about.

Why does trust matter at all? Leaders achieve success with teams when they show
& share their vulnerabilities. The willingness for somebody to take a risk, to allow themselves to feel vulnerable, believing the other person has an attitude of goodwill towards them is all about trust building.

It is not engagement. Trust is much more fundamental. If employee just trusts his boss and not the senior leadership team, we can do masses of engagement activities, yet there shall be no radical rise in performance, as people will be viewing those activities through a lens of distrust.Trustworthiness is based on four main drivers: benevolence, ability, predictability and integrity. 

It is not easy. But then HR manager has to decide to get back the respect for his role, team and function. It will be worth the effort. Make a beginning. Make people see the elephant in the room.

Talk about Trust. Make it explicit. 

Establish the business link of trust to results and performance. 

Begin from the leadership level, help them develop self -awareness “How good are they at understanding and managing relationships from their perspective as a leader.”

Invest in training & coaching leaders. 

Help people surface out trust issues, put them on the table and discuss them. Be the facilitator. 

 The role & job is cut out. HR must lead the way and bring trust issues on the table. This “elephant in the room” can be ignored only at the cost of organizational performance in these challenging & competitive times. Begin now.

Believing you don’t have choices is the most common limiting belief.

When faced with options & yet not been able to make a choice, perhaps one needs to look at the desired outcomes or results.  Begin with end in mind, is what we have all heard. When we know our destinations, short or long, we start planning and acting in a manner to take us close & reach our destinations or outcomes. In professional lives we have our goals / KPIs which keep us focused. Thankfully someone does it for us in corporate life. When we work on our own or just purely in our personal life situations, determining what we wish to achieve in short time frames would help us think better and make great choices when options are generated or thrown at us. 

I am sharing a piece from a “coaching conversation” that may help readers in working their way up and out of confusion or dilemmas in same or similar situation. The client operates independently as a financial services professional with a very small team. In this business for last 2 years, he has had many options thrown at him to develop new businesses. He has seen them as opportunities to grow & make money.  Read on further.

Quote

Client: I am taken up by various options bordering on distractions that do not allow me to focus on my business. People in my network keep approaching me with business ideas and show their keenness to fund me and / or work with me on same. These business ideas excite me & I do spend time evaluating them. Somehow these fizzle out and / or do not meet my criteria of investment of time & money. Resultantly I spend considerable time evaluating and end up losing time for my own business. I would like to be more focused & less distracted by seemingly good business options.  

Coach: What makes you think these are options?

Client: Well, they are all part of financial services business that I have been part of past 8-10 years. So people who know me and my experience tend to approach me with ideas and options to pursue. All these are money making opportunities.

Coach: How do you currently evaluate these options?

Client: I currently look and estimate the market & opportunity size, competition and returns including time to break even. Any options that meets the criteria, I would pursue otherwise I drop. Incidentally I have not chosen any in last 12-18 months.

Coach: So, in what ways these evaluation parameters either been helpful or not?

Client: Not at all, I still get approached by people with at least one idea each week and then study and evaluate and that takes up my time, energy and effort. That is why I call it a distraction.

Coach: Which nature of options would you look forward to and is most likely to meet your evaluation criteria?

Client: Options closest to my current business of investment plans for high net worth individuals.

Coach: You seem quite clear and confident. So what is that are you doing currently to attract such options?

Client: Nothing at all. I just keep getting other options than what I really desire.

Coach: In your view what could you possibly do to attract options that you desire?  

Client: Well I guess I have to go out and offer people such options and seek their views and commitment. I can also ask the people approaching me with ideas, which I reject, to look at some ideas / options that I have. Who knows they may agree and that would be win-win.

Coach: How would you now be different in same situations?

Client: Firstly I will use filter of options offered against it being closest to my current business. If it is not, I will not even go ahead with any evaluation. Secondly I will create some ideas / options which would be offered by me proactively in my close network and seek commitments. I think these would help me stay focused. In fact I realize, I have been complacent, in I have not been going out with my ideas to sell and have waited rather wasted time.

Coach: You seem quite clear. You had mentioned all the ideas are money making opportunities. With your new approach, you are likely to reject most of them, how do you feel about it?

Client: As I mentioned, I was taking up options for evaluation because I myself was not clear on something– first being, I wanted it to be closest my current business and secondly I have much more money to make by expanding my own business line than put effort in starting a new business. I would now put a plan in place, shrug this complacency, and go ahead with execution.

I have clarity now that those options were not really the options & hence I was not making a choice among them.

Unquote

This coaching conversation (with permission) has been quoted to facilitate readers think about their situations and their dilemmas when faced with multiple options. The process of making a choice begins much before. We need to consider what options we really have on the table and which ones are not there that we need to have. Choosing among available options is not really the same as creating options that we really need to, before we evaluate and make choices.

Some questions asked here by the coach, could be applied. Coaches are trained to facilitate new & improved thinking leading to positive change in client. When reading through the conversation, one can notice that coach is just asking questions and client while responding is sharing his mind. This process itself throws up new thinking and insights for the client and therein lies the transformation and energy to act further.