Matt Blancarte dot Com Design – Business – Two Cents

If you haven’t read Part One, I recommend you do prior to reading ahead.

Be Ready To Work Hard

You must be prepared to work hard. I believe in working smart as well, but working at full capacity can be coupled with a great method to be a sum greater than its parts. If you think you can, you can find a job or build a business in a field that drives your desire to work hard. Finding motivation in business isn’t difficult (e.g., profits, personal finances, etc.), but enjoying the means to those ends is a crucial part of finding the energy to work hard. A feeling of great success and accomplishment coupled with a bulging pocket book is what we entrepreneurs are after, isn’t it? Setting yourself up in a field that you truly love can bring that extra 10% effort that can outdo your competition.

You Must Embrace Risk

You must accept the fact that taking risks is a part of being in business. Luckily, with proper management, you can prepare yourself for any contingencies that may arise.

Risk management is a vital tool to enable your business to identify, assess, and then address risks that can be foreseen. This concept will make the bounce-back from negative issues go more smoothly because you will have planned ahead, and prepared resources and strategies to overcome the issue. If your business is in its initial development stage, take heed to the potential risks of doing something new.

Let’s say you are launching a new product into a new market. What kind of risks are associated with this? Financial, operational, strategic, and compliance. If I were launching a new product, regardless of the type, I would like to at least consider these potential issues. You can get specific within these categories, but they cover most concepts. Let me give you an example in each vertical.

• Financial – Let’s say you are incurring large amounts of non-payment from your customers. Where will you come up with the capital to offset that potential loss? What should you do if your interest rates double on your long-term loan?
• Operational- How will you deal with the unexpected loss of key production equipment due to breakdown or theft? What should you do if your office building burns to the ground and you have to move your entire staff to a temporary location?
• Strategic- You are a small software development firm that has just finished production of a revolutionary product. You have carved out a completely new market and large firms such as Microsoft and Google would like to enter in as your competitor. How will you differentiate yourself to dominate the market that you created?
• Compliance- Let’s say that you manufacture small toys for children. You coat the toys in a lead-based paint because it is being supplied at a lower cost compared to water-base. Unfortunately, children have decided to chew on these toys that you manufacture. Reports start to come in that your customers are having to deal with lead poisoning and begin to complain to Congress. It has now become illegal to produce toys that contain lead-based paints. Will you be able to compensate for the rise in production costs and a potential recall?

Risk is inevitable. Take the necessary steps to foresee potential problems. I will be diving into this subject in later posts because I find it particularly interesting. ^_^

Failures and Loss

A business is considered a failure if it closes or one of its creditors ends up at a loss. There are many reasons for failure. Macro issues include things like poor planning, bad management, inattention to risks and potential roadblocks, insufficient cash flow, etc. That being said, there is a good chance that you will experience failure to some degree during your entrepreneurial career.

Let’s focus on what failure can do to you professionally and personally, and how you can bounce back to success. Failure in business can shake you up to the extreme. It can be as emotionally intense as the loss of a loved one. You might experience a sharp drop in your self-esteem and confidence. It makes perfect sense as to why you might feel this way being as that you put your entire being into becoming a business success.

So now that you’ve taken a ride down the expected shame-spiral, what on earth should you do? Well, if you had taken the advice in the previous section, you would have planned for potential failure. You are ready to pick your feet up and charge into it all again. If it is that easy for you, you sound like you have what it takes to be a real success. Let’s say that you hadn’t prepared for a catastrophe and you are blind-sided by failure. You feel like the puzzle that was your entrepreneurial career was knocked off of the table, and now you are in pieces. What to do…what to do…?

First and foremost, you must decompress. Forgive yourself for your failure, and try your hardest to understand exactly why it happened. You must rethink your strategies and then recharge your batteries for your next try. Don’t be foolish and rush into something based on your pride. Next time, you will be prepared for success, so make sure that you have all of your bases covered. Recharge yourself with confidence and vigor. When you have prepared for your next venture, GO FOR IT!