Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

A common small business start-up formula today is to offer a product or service and sell it online. If you are reading this blog chances are that describes your situation now. Perhaps you are a freelancer with skills to sell, or you decided to have a go at selling a product online, maybe through eBay or directly from a website. Maybe you quit your job or downgraded to part time work to have time to start your business, or you even attempted to do both at once - work a job and start a business at the same time.

Whatever the scenario, we all start at the same place - the beginning - and it’s at this point that we begin to take action to drum up business. Once you have something to offer, you brainstorm ideas for how to market what you do and then, finally, you go out there and “get in the face” of your target market.

During the early days you tend to do a lot of work yourself, and until you actually make sales, you are very pro-active (or at least you should be!) at chasing up more work and more sales. Generally, because the pressure to establish cashflow is so great, this stage of your business involves rapid action and you do a lot of activities that move you forward. I call this swimming.

Treading Water

As your business grows your time begins to become divided between activities you do to just keep the business going and keep current customers happy, and further activities to bring in new customers and grow your business.

If your business continues to grow, you become so busy that you no longer implement new marketing activities and you even have trouble keeping up with what you were doing to market your business previously. You have so many ongoing jobs and customers to keep satisfied, which might include customer support tasks or delivering client projects, that you simply can’t find the time to bring in new clients.

Your cashflow is much healthier at this point so the pressure is off just to survive and instead you feel pressure simply from delivering what you promised. This is called treading water.

Drowning

Many small business owners become victims of their own success. They provide a valuable service or product, but because they don’t have an ability to scale, in order to complete one task, they can’t do another. It’s very hard to market a business if you also have to deliver what your business provides. Since your time is finite, one activity tends to replace another and there are only 24 hours in the day so at some point you will have to sacrifice certain activities (usually sacrificing sleep comes first - but that can’t last forever because you need to sleep!).

The worst case scenario results in the business going under. If you struggle to deliver what you sell and you are working so hard just to keep current customers happy that you can’t work on attracting new customers, you end up exhausted and eventually with no customers.

The signs of this problem are quite obvious. If you wake up stressed and you have more issues arising each day then you can provide solutions to, then you are drowning.

Swim Again

It’s so critical that you realize the signs when you are treading water. If you tread water for too long, it’s only a matter of time until you start drowning.

I’ve treaded water a lot in my business career. At any point where I am simply maintaining the status quo and not creating anything new, I notice downward trends. As wonderful as viral marketing, word of mouth and other “tricks” we marketers have in our tool bag are, without innovation and new creation you can’t grow.

You must be out there finding new ways to attract attention and generate cashflow. If you spend all your time just keeping your current customers happy, then at one point in the future you will find yourself with no customers. No customer stays with a business forever and even if you provide the best service and/or product, at some point, you do need to attract new customers.

I watch my trends and monitor what I accomplish each day and I know when I am treading water. If I find myself spending entire days just responding to emails, or doing helpdesk queries, or fixing what is broken, then I am not swimming.

On the other hand, when I set up new joint ventures, write blog articles, organize publicity, network or complete any action that results in something new happening, then I feel a sense of moving forward again - the wonderful sense of growth.

If right now in your business you don’t feel like you are swimming, then you need to isolate what it is you do each day that is keeping you away from growth activities. Once isolated, you must implement methods that reduce or completely eliminate you involvement in that “treading water” activity. You will be surprised when you actually start analyzing what you do in a day and see how many of the tasks you choose to do that are not swimming tasks - nearly all of them are treading water tasks.

Truly successful entrepreneurs create businesses that place them in a position to spend the majority of their day on swimming activities. It’s not easy to get to that point because you can’t do it by yourself, you need systems and people around you to free up your time, and that creates complexity.

Complexity is one of the greatest causes of treading water - if things are hard or complicated, they tend to take up a lot of time, even if they are designed to free up your time (for example, training staff to take over your helpdesk).

You goal is to create a business that is simple, efficient and automated to the point that your role is defined by swimming activities that move your business forward. If right now you are treading water, you better start working on swimming, or you may drown and take your business with you.

Yaro Starak
Swimmer