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When I started out as a fishermen, I quickly realized that there were several levels of fishing expertise.
The first level of expertise I had to reach was keeping my hook in the water!
You can’t catch fish if you don’t have a hook in the water —
and lots of things happened to me as an inexperienced fishermen that kept my hook out of the water.
- I couldn’t tie a fishing knot
- I kept casting my line into the trees
- I didn’t know how to restring my rod
In other words, I didn’t understand the FUNDAMENTALS of fishing.
Your tiny business could be suffering from the same problem — do you have a hook in the water? Are you getting hung up on the fundamentals?
In my first business attempt in 2004 I
- spent 6 hours trying to figure out how to put a bill in my Quickbooks
- spent two weeks learning Photoshop to get business cards put together
- spent 1 year trying to figure out how to market my business
Are there aspects of marketing that you don’t understand that are keeping you from landing a big fish?
Hire someone to teach the fundamentals, outsource the work or stop what you are doing and get the training you need.
How many fish are swimming by hungry for your products and services while you are fumbling around with the fundamentals of running and marketing a business?
What is your advice to tiny business owners about learning the fundamentals of business? What questions do you have?
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Russ,
You outlined what every tiny business owner experiences…I must do all of this myself. My thought is that you need to know what is being outsourced but to know your “highest and best use.”
My advice is to know what your billable rate is per hour and apply that to what you do each day, each week and each month. I now go into each week knowing how many hours are spent for marketing, networking, new business development, client work and administrative work. It’s taken me two years to get to this point and there are things I wished I would have outsourced earlier in my business.
Thanks for sharing the good thoughts.
Best regards,
AMM
Great advice Ann Marie!
Are you saying that (for instance) if a billable hour for you is $125.00 — you should consider outsourcing anything that costs less than $125 per hour to outsource?