What You Thought Your Business Would Be

Do you remember the time before you started your business? May be there was a time you were thinking about starting your business and you asked around for some advice. There is a pretty good chance that you heard two kinds of advice.

One was some version of "Don't Do It". These words most likely came from family and friends. They obviously were not being very helpful and encouraging. In fact, after you started your business, there is a pretty good chance that these "naysayers" around you became a pretty big liability for you as you went about building your business.

But the other advice you may have heard, in my opinion, might much more damaging and, in fact, dangerous. It most likely comes from a motivational speaker type of a person. This advice is: "Just Do It."

When I started my first business, I got that advice, too. And I took it. Now I cringe every time I hear it. Why? Think of it this way. If you don't know how to box and get in the ring with Muhammad Ali, how long does it take before the knockout? About 10 seconds? If you're lucky! That's what many of us do with starting our businesses.

You see, the reason why so many of us fail at building a successful business is very simple: We Don't Know How to Play the Game - the Game of Business-Building.

The school, the college, even our MBA degree didn't prepare us to be business owners. They prepared us to be employees: nurses, doctors, engineers, lawyers and even vice presidents, CFO's and CEO's. Nothing wrong with, except that if we expect traditional educational system to teach us the skill of business-building, we are very likely to be disappointed.

Here's what I mean. Learning a skill, like business-building, is a journey from the head, to heart, to gut and then to actions. You see, building a business is not really an intellectual exercise. It's also not just a physical or even an emotional exercise. It's a combination of it all. It's a skill. It's an art-form.

The reason why small businesses are failing is because most business owners who start their businesses are entering the business arena at the novice level while other businesses - their competitors - are playing the same game at the expert level. They are entering the tennis court without having ever hit a ball across the net and their competitors are tournament champions and trophy winners. They are entering the Karate competition at the white-belt level while their competitors are 4th degree black-belts. They have never been into a boxing match before and yet they enter the ring to fight with a heavy-weight champion.

Now, I am a realist. Working with business owners has taught me that most people who are about to start their businesses will still jump into it prematurely, regardless of what statistics say. Entrepreneurs are notoriously hard-headed. And to an extent, that's a positive quality. They will need that sense of supreme self-confidence to hack it in the world.

My message is really meant for those business owners who have been at the game of business-building for a while. They are the ones who really "get" what I am talking about here. They have experienced the trials and tribulations of building a business. That's why, they are more open to my message.

But they have a serious dilemma. Many, if not most business owners accept and recognize that they need to continue to develop their skills in business-building. But they don't have the luxury of taking two years off and disappearing onto a college campus. Even if they did, it would not help much because the world of academics is far removed from the real world.

They need to learn how to build their business while they are engaged in the process of building it. In other words, they need to bring their head, heart and hands together. They need the intellectual help - the best practices and principles of successful businesses. But that's only 25% of the way to mastering the sport of business building. They also need help in internalizing that knowledge by engaging with it emotionally, making it a part of their gut system and taking meaningful actions. As I like to say, they need to take the knowledge from the head to the heart, from the heart to the gut and form the gut to the actions.

What business-builders need is a change in the mindset, a shift in thinking. If they went from merely building a business to learning how to build one, the actual building of their business will happen almost as a by-product.

A sport I love is Martial Arts or Karate. Karate has intricately woven both the Art and the Science of the sport together in a system that could be taught and learned, step-by-step, incrementally and by practicing it. In other words, Karate is more about how to fight, rather than actually fighting.

Business-builders can take their inspiration from this model. They can treat their business not just as the means to achieve their dreams - which, of course, it is - but also as a way to learn how to build a business, by building it. When they do this, they can easily detach themselves from the act of building a business and see it as a sport they enjoy, a sport they look forward to playing every Monday morning.

At the time of this writing (September 8, 2011), a search on "business books" on Amazon.com returns 1,998,630 results! Also, the book searches on "management," "business management" and "leadership" return 660,493, 338,287 and 69,299 results, respectively. It's safe to assume that there are tens of thousands of business theories in existence, if not hundreds of thousands. The question is which theory to pick as obviously, it's humanly impossible to be an expert in all of them. Who is right? My take on it is: they are all right but they are also all wrong. Let me explain.

Most management theories are an intellectual framework. They present an excellent theory but lack the depth and breath of total human experience. Intelligence is a part of human experience too, certainly, but only a fraction. In my work with people, I have identified seven distinct human faculties. Most management theories address only one and touch on perhaps 2 or 3 more. (Please refer to my page, Management by the Way of Awareness, for more information.) What's lacking in mainstream business development approach is an integrated human approach.

In other words, it's not that we need more advice or more information. The information is all around us. What we need is ability to bring it all together. But we do need a starting point, which I have presented below.

Copyright © 2011 by Bhavesh Naik and Awayre, LLC. All rights reserved.