Small Business as Dark Comedy

The first in a short series of small business development articles.

The Dark Comedy of Delegation - Part One

Small business owners are their own worst enemy.

It’s dark comedy to watch them struggle to get it all done unless it’s affecting you (the customer, the employee, the business owner or the business owner’s wife).

I recently was dealing with a business owner who owns a vacation rental website. He’s got a great concept for his business. But I question if he’s going to make it.

I phoned to make some improvements in our advert and he may as well have reached through the phone lines with a hank of his hair.

This poor man is so stressed it even shows up in the emails that land in my computer. He’s lost perspective. He no longer grasps that it’s his role to be the intermediary between the people who have rental houses and the general public who want to find their ideal vacation. He’s got to please both.

Like lots of business owners he’s having financial problems and it’s effecting every business decision he makes. He didn’t have to tell me about his money problems. He wants to stand on “policy” instead of understanding that his job is to build a business, a business that works, a business that has a life of its own, a business that’s not sucking his life 24 hours a day.

And how does he do that?

Once you learn to do it you discover that it’s simple, it’s just not easy.

It didn’t start out like this for our small business owner. He started out as a bright guy with an entrepreneurial spark that captured his imagination. He would create a small business that would, in time, become a big business.

I’m sure for a while he felt like he was running the business. For a while it was fun. For a while he remembered he had a life.

Not any more.

Now the business is running him. Or should I say the business is running over him.

A metaphor that helps people see their business more clearly is that a small business is a snowball at the bottom of a large snow-covered mountain. The slope is high but you’ve got the time and so you start rolling that baseball-sized snowball up the hill.

It’s almost pathetic at first and so you lavish lots of attention on your snowball. Before you know it that snowball is the size of a cantaloupe and you’re seeing a steady accretion of the pure-white cold stuff.

It’s encouraging. It’s fun. You can hardly wait to get out of bed in the morning to see your progress.

Every few days it snows and every day you’re getting your share. You begin to see that this small business could be the start of something big. You’re happy. Optimistic. It makes everything better in your life.
You protect your snowball from all comers and invest your savings to help it grow faster.

Now your snowball is the size of a politician’s head. You turn around and it’s the size of the pinata at Sly Stallone’s Christmas bash. And that’s big.

One day you begin to notice that you’re tired at the end of the day and your neck is aching, but it’s all worth it.

Now your precious snowball is the size of Oprah Winfrey in the before photographs.

It’s more difficult to maneuver but you have a lot of pride in your snowball and you’re strong. It’s worth it.

Then one day you turn around to look down at the ski lodge and you turn back and your snowball is the size of a house and it takes every bit of your strength and every second of your time to just hold it in place.

There is no way to roll it another foot and what’s worse, if you let go to catch your breath or have a moment for your family or yourself, that monster is going to roll you down the mountain at a million feet per second, and your precious snowball will be smashed to pieces on the rocks below.

Does this sound familiar? Feel familiar?

I hear it all the time from small business owners:

1. If I don’t do it myself it’s not going to get done right.

2. I’ve got employees but it’s like I work for them.

3. I’ve told my employees what to do. Their jobs are easy. Why don’t they just do their damn jobs?

Your own private Idaho has turned into a prison that takes all you can do to survive.

And this process is sneaky because it happens to you so slowly that you go from hardly feeling the strain, to feeling pain, to hardly feeling.

There are lots of business owners out there that don’t own a business, they own their own job. And most assuredly there’s no slavery like the slavery in which you forge every link of the chain.

How do you know you’re a slave to your business? Do the words, “It’s no use, I can’t do it,” sound familiar? Do you daydream about getting in your car and just driving away? Are you working long hours for ridiculous pay? When someone says, “Get a life,” do you take them seriously?

I’ve been there.

So what do you need to do?

It’s not one little thing. It’s a hundred little things that each, in and of themselves, are simple.

The problem is you’re already spinning more plates than you can handle. And then there’s the fact you’re an unconcious incompetent; you don’t know what you don’t know.

So the first step before change is awareness. Once you know something is wrong, your next step is to become a conscious incompetent; to learn what you need to know to get where you want to go.

This process is like discovering you want to go to a tiny little town you’ve never heard of somewhere in Utah and you don’t know that maps exist.

Once you see the map you’ve still got to go there but you at least know the Process.

If you were already dreaming of running away to that little town there are simple tools that can help you and your business.

So where do we start?

An agreement is in order. If you’re going to transform the business that’s eating you alive you need to recognize that:

When you hear something (or read something), you’ll soon forget it.

When you see something, you’ll remember it.

It’s only when you do something that you’ll understand it.

Part Two – Tomorrow – The art and science of delegation