Awake at 2 o'clock?

Here is an article that was published in the newsletter of the United Sates Swim School Association last week. I slightly abbreviated it to avoid repeating a couple of things that preciously appeared in this blog.

“What makes a small business owner successful?” I’ve been asked that question in media interviews, and by hundreds of business owners seeking a magic formula for success.

When I first started seriously looking for the answer, I assumed it was a lot of different factors. Luck certainly plays a part. Natural skills, experience and education are all helpful. But the more I examined business ownership, the more I saw owners who possessed all of those things and failed; while others who seemed to have none of them succeeded.

Over the last 13 years I’ve spent almost 11,000 hours in face to face conversations with small business owners. That doesn’t include time running my business, working with employees, writing, speaking, presenting, planning or doing the hundred other things required to run a company. That is strictly time spent discussing challenges with people who sign their own paychecks.

How do you define success? I’ve fed my family. I live in a nice house and am putting my kids through college. I’d probably say that I’m fairly successful; at least if you define success to be a certain level of material comfort.

Most business owners have a more ambitious definition of success. That definition isn’t merely financial. In fact, the majority of owners I know have relatively modest monetary goals. They usually start out seeking security for themselves, their families and their employees. As time goes on, they become more concerned with their quality of life and with the success of their company, its position in the market, its reputation and its growth.

For our purposes, let’s define “success” as that point here you are no longer worried about whether you can make a comfortable living, and start defining your achievements in broader terms than just money. My analysis finally led me to the realization that getting to that level requires two, and only two, individual traits.

The first trait is creative drive. We tend to think of all things creative as related to the fine arts; but entrepreneurs create solutions, systems and structures. People who start a business create something from a vision or an idea, just like an artist. It begins with a something that only the entrepreneur can see, and he or she makes it into brick and mortar reality.

Starting your own business is more personal than almost any other endeavor. Every stick of furniture or piece of equipment is something that you picked out. You developed every policy or procedure. You probably sold the first customer, and many more after that. You hired and trained the employees. You wrote the advertising copy. You signed the loan at the bank. Compared to starting a business, building your own home is practically a spectator sport.

Almost every owner I know will admit to occasionally walking through their business after everyone else has gone home, just to enjoy what he or she has created.

Your business feeds your drive to create something. That’s why so many business owners are poor managers. After they’ve completed the creation process, they often lose interest in the mere “maintenance” of it. Many entrepreneurs continue to work tirelessly long after their financial security is assured. That isn’t because of greed. It’s their need to keep creating something new.

The second trait of a successful owner is a tenacious approach to problem solving. By tenacious I mean that business owners do not know how to stop solving a problem. If they figure out a solution, and it doesn’t work, they’ll figure out another, and then another. They refuse to admit defeat. They believe that every challenge has an answer; they just haven’t figured out what it is yet.

Setbacks are merely learning opportunities. You may not feel good about a temporary failure; but ask yourself this question. How much have you learned from your successes? When we do something right, we usually accept the result. It’s when something goes wrong that we try alternatives, and expand our experience.

A friend of mine sums it up pretty well. “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted.”

How many times have you been frustrated by an employee or a vendor who says “I tried to fix it, but it still doesn’t work?” So what? What will you try next? And what will you try if that doesn’t work? Business owners keep solving until the have an answer that works. In their opinion, stopping with an answer that doesn’t work is simply stupid.

You went into business for yourself because you had a desire to create something that was entirely yours. You stayed in business because you refused to accept failure as an option. If you think about it, that’s pretty much what separates the successful small business owner from the rest of the pack. Of course luck and talent help, but they really only affect the degree to which you are successful.

On the same subject, I found this great video on the blog of my friend Joe Zente. Joe is a sales training and assessement professional in Austin, TX. You can find him at www.zthree.com