For small business – this doesn’t seem obvious at first.

You need to become successful and profitable NOW, not next year, and definately not ‘one-day’.

You need to make the hard decisions, make the big changes, and have your success now.

If you wait, and go slow, your life will dribble away, and your business will just be wasting your time.

So when you are planning – move the horizon to something closer, make it immediate.

A lot of this depends on the owner of the business to implement, and its the old “work in the business, versus working on the business’. I think you need 30%-60% of your time spent working ‘on the business’ – being planning strategy, marketing, and working with partners etc.

If you are a public company, you have shareholders demanding profit this year, so generally there is a mandate to get things done. If you are privately owned, you can just wonder around, with little or no growth if you don’t get stuck into the changes now.

Google talks about velocity of business.

If its worth doing, is worth planning,
if its worth planning its worth doing,
if its worth doing its worth doing NOW.

Bring those plans sooner and faster. Bring the profit NOW.

In order to achieve sooner and faster you need:
- time – reorganise your time to work on the business (see above)
- skills – for planning growth, marketing, branding, sales – perhaps outsource some of this
- motivation / inspiration

If you need motivation / inspiration, read these :

Think Big – Donald Trump

Think 10x – Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

Be passionate – Charles Kovess

Two of these guys above I wrote about here

Did you start a small business on the back of a hobby ?

Where is your business plan, and more importantly business model ?

If you setup a small business that is similar to other competitors – you are dead !

How are you going to do signficantly better in order to compete ?

You need to be remarkable (Seth Godin on remarkable) , and Seth’s book (Free Prize Inside).

I see a few people advocating ‘learn your craft’ – and whilst being knowledgeable is good, I think its very DANGEROUS.
- Christopher says in 10 secrets for 10 years – but again – I think a lot of his thoughts take you perilously too close to competing head-to-head
- this is also echoed by Malcolm Gladwell
- the worst advice I have ever heard – is to be a ‘challenger brand’ – which means you are competing head-to-head

Don’t start a business the same as someone else ….. life is just too short to spend competing doing the same thing as someone else.

Do you have the worst ever small business ?

You will find inspiration, gather learning, and derive more profit for your company.

Armed with knowledge you will have killer weapons to deliver innovation and change for your business.

You will learn to turn the mundane into success.

You will see opportunity instead of obstacles.

See through my eyes – the experiences of my small business’s.

You’ll learn from snipets of my own reading. I read lots of management and marketing, books/magazines/blogs. You’ll get an abridged version, and references to read more.

I hope to setup a forum service, that will allow to post details about your business, and allow me and others to colloborate on your business.

You’ll either already own your own business, or thinking about starting out. You’ll find references and material for both