I recieved an email from a friend asking me what I thought were the three biggest challenges when running a company. This was my reply.

1) Creating and Implementing a Plan
Its easy to dream about how your business will grow to be larger than Wal-Mart, more popular than Abercrombie, or smarter than Microsoft. But obtaining sales, marketing, and growth goals are not easy without a real plan. Running a company is like shooting a bow-and-arrow, you’ve got to have a target. Getting everything on paper allows you to have a clear plan, path, and milestones.

A business plan should be more than financial forecasts and “fluff”. It needs to have real “business plans”. This allows managers to be better decision makers for a company’s future. This is a two-part challenge. First, creating a business plan…. It’s difficult to create one but the second is implementing the plan. Its easy for managers to just set the business plan on the shelf and forget about it.

2) Recruiting, Training, and Managing Good People Good help is hard to find. If you’ve ever tried to find a dedicated study-buddy, gym-partner, or accountability partner you know exactly what I mean. It’s especially hard when you’re trying to convince people to work FOR you and not WITH you.

And when you find them, you have to train them fast. Its really difficult to put yourself in someone else’s shoes but it must be done. You have to start at “square 1″ and take the trainee to “square 100″ as fast as possible.

Additionally, you have to be able to hold on to your workers. Each person has different motivations. So, you have to find out ways to apply motivations to certain situations. You have to be stern when you need to, fun when you can, and caring at other times.

3) Day-to-Day Operations
Getting “caught up” in the day-to-day operations is easy to do. You can easily spend you entire day working on day-to-day operations and forgetting about growth, family, or finances. And although day-to-day operations are extremely important, your organization will not grow if you can’t spend time focusing on your other goals.

Lastly, it’s easy for C-level executives to get excited about new goals and visions but if you’re doing the “grunt” work, its hard to maintain that enthusiasm. But, as a small business owner, you have to maintain the enthusiasm. Wearing 20 hats is a “must” and multitasking is crucial to the survival of your business. Multi-tasking means getting the “day-to-day” operations done and leaving time for the other goals.

      

As you can tell, I’ve added a “Plazes” plug-in to my blog. This allows you to locate me at any given time… or at least my computer… or at least when I’m online.

All you have to do is “discover” (tell the program the physical address of your location) and if it ever sees you plugged into the same network… it remembers.

Plazes works by fingerprinting a network, not a GPS location. So, my assumption is that if I’m at the campus of UALR it cannot differentiate between the Library or the student center… since it’s the same network… it assumes the same location.

Also, you obviously have to run a small desktop application that returns the network information to plazes.

This is a pretty cool application and just think of all the tracking capabilities.

      

Attensa is a nice RSS-aggregator that works directly with Microsoft Outlook. I use outlook religiously and it has a setting that checks for new posts immediately. That means as soon as someone posts a new blog, news article, or event… I know about it. It’s easy to manage and allows me to store special notes on my local machine.

Oh yeah… it’s free!

Link to Attensa

      

I played football today with a group of guys. I didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know me. I’m a small guy and being small really sucks. When you’re small, you’re immediately undervalued. You’ve also got to have talents that size can usually make up for. If you’re not tall, you have to jump higher. If you’re not strong, you have to be quicker.

So, generally, if you’re small, the first 45 minutes is spent “proving your worth”. I guess an easier way to do it is by breaking out old trophies or telling them stories about my past but no matter what you do, you’ve got to have something that gives you credibility… whether its punishing someone for the first 45 minutes or telling them stories about how great you were 5 years ago.

Everything in life requires credibility. That’s why we went to college, provided a free service, or did something that took a solid week without any pay-off. So that, when we’re done, we can say, “Hey… Look what I’ve done”… It allows you to “prove your worth” without having to “punish someone for 45 minutes”… Instead, all you have to do is, tell a story.

Its easier… Try it.

One of the worst things you can do is work really hard to gain credibility and not tell a sole. If nobody knows, you have to go out and “punish people for another 45 minutes”…. each and every time you play. Have pride in your accomplishments and don’t be afraid to shout it to the world.

      

I use a PDA every day of my life. I would die without it. But, can’t someone invent a better input device than a stylus and a touch-pad? It sucks. I type a total of 4 words per minute.

      

Our new web site is at www.iProvOnline.com!

      

Technorati becomes one of the biggest threats to google. Google competes by allowing users to “signup” for new searches. Thus, allowing Google to “work for you”… like always, “ITS FREE”

RSS is the new internet… information gets delivered to you.

Classical hierachical files are dead… no more going to downloads > Music > rap > east coast > rapper X… In the future, keyword search is going to be better than ever, you’ll only see files that are relavent to the topic, and you’ll see real recommendations (not advertisements) from other users.

People’s journals (blogs) are going to remove the need for USA Today and other nationwide news sources. You’ll get RSS content through your email and phone as soon as it is released.

With sites like eBay, you’ll get better bargains on products you’ve been patiently waiting for the best deal. Software will “yell” at you when your 500 GB hard drive is priced at under $100.

Everyone will have immediate stock updates, no delays!

Kids will track their favorite movie stars based on audio, video, and news clippings.

Everyone will make appointments through the web. This may be an outlook function or another piece of software. But, soon, you will request, accept, or deny appointments on your smart phone.

Modern cell phones are eliminated. Everybody only has a smart phone. PDA applications blow up!

      

I was thinking about our many projects at iProv today during church. We’ve got a pretty solid process for managing our project but there are some hand-calculations that still have to be made.

As most of you know, the majority of my job is project management and new business. I can’t really teach you how to come up with creative solutions but I can talk just a little bit about project management. This blog entry is going to focus on proposal development, project evaluation, and break even points.

At iProv, we break projects into “days”. If your business breaks things into “hours”, you will have to do a little modifying.

Proposal Development
When you look at developing a project, use this formula

1. $ per day = (Amount of Money You Want Your Organization to put in it’s Pocket Each Day) + (Price of an Employee Per Day * Number of Employees Working)
2. Total Project Price = ($ per day) * (total number of days in the project)

Sure this is simple, but many people try to make this a lot more confusing. The “$ per day” is what the organization profits each day.

Break Even Date
After the customer agrees and signs off on the project, take a look at the start date and figure out what day the break even date is. You may tell a customer that the project will be done on January 1st. But, b/c the customer puts the project on the back burner, it won’t get done until March 1st. It’s fine b/c the customer doesn’t get mad at you but you’ve got to keep paying your employees each day. The longer the project goes on, the more it cuts into your organizations profits.

1. # of work days for break even = (Total Project Price) / [ Price of an Employee Per Day * Number of Employees Working ]

Project Evaluation
After the project is done you can evaluate the project and see what your organization made after the project was complete. To do this, just reverse the Proposal Development.

1. $ per day = (Total Project Price) / (Total # of days in the project)
2. net profit per day = ($ per day) – (employee price per day * Number of Employees)

Good luck on your next project!

      

Negativity, gossip, and withholding information are poison. They generally start out as a small problem but eventually bring an organization to their knees.

I’ve seen it happen at another organization I was a part of. It started as a simple conversation on how the boss “should” run the organization differently. The boss saw the conversations but he “turned the other cheek”.

As time went on the comments got more and more harsh. The employee that started the conversation was trying to convince everyone in the office that the boss was doing it all wrong. Pretty soon, everyone in the office had loss confidence in the boss. They wouldn’t move forward with him. When he tried to lead they looked elsewhere. The “simple conversation” turned into a revolution… a boycott. They waited for their check each week but wouldn’t put the real effort into making a change. He had the passion but he didn’t have the team. The resentment started showing, even to customers. It quickly, and I mean quickly, fell apart. It crashed and it crashed hard.

This type of behavior is famous in marriages, friendships, and businesses. Girls have a horrible habit of gossiping and telling stories that shouldn’t be told. Often, you’ll see a wife run to her mother and “sell” her one-sided story about how horrible her husband is because he’s not coming home until 11pm. She forgets to tell her Mother that her credit card bill is twice the amount of income or the mortgage payment late for the second time. This brings rise to resentment. The mother from then on out hates the husband. The Mother convinces the entire family that the husband isn’t good enough for their princess.

High school girls tell everyone at the lunch table that Suzy slept with Johnny last night. And, the CFO tells the operations manager that sales keep getting the company involved in deals that aren’t profitable. All of these things amputate the integrity of the organization. I use “amputate” because it’s a part that you’ll never get back.

So, how do you deal with poison? You have to get rid of them. Remove them completely. As soon as you see someone who can’t be trusted, whose loyalty isn’t in line with your own, remove him or her. If you are the employee who thinks the boss is doing something wrong, bring it up in private. If you know this type of behavior is going on, notify management immediately. If you don’t screech, it may cost you’re your job and your employer everything he has built.

The point is, never publicly announce your problems. Keep them private.

PS… It’s not as easy when you’re married. If you’re married to “that” girl… Well… sorry.

      

One of the biggest misconceptions of life is to think that if you continuously work hard, you’ll eventually be at the top. If you decided right now to dedicate your life to become the greatest rock climber, business man, artist, or lawyer, do you think you would eventually get there? The answer is “No”. You may learn a lot about it or be better than the next guy, but expecting to be the best is just naive. Sure life is a bunch of little battles but in the end, to be on the VERY top, you have to get lucky, you have to risk, and you have to be willing make the climb to the top. You have to realize that in almost anything, its not what you know or how hard you work, it’s who you know.

These rules apply if you want to be at the top. Its easy to be average or even fairly above average. But getting to the top takes a lot more than hard work.

• Be willing to risk it all.
• Sometimes you have to forget about the details… the devil’s in the details.
• Meet and appreciate everyone… People will always be your biggest assett.
• Realize that nothing would exist if there wasn’t a person behind the scenes.
• If you see an opportunity, take it.
• Everything is a competition. But there can be multiple winners. Bring your friends, if they’ll let you.

So, when you read a motivational book or hear a speach that makes you want to turn your life around, realize that trying hard is just the half of it. Sometimes you’ve got to get lucky.

“Don’t tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.”