What’s Your True Motivation for Being in Business?

We’re often inundated with endless media charter about becoming the ‘next Google’ or ‘next ‘Amazon’ business success. The perception that these reports paint can often cause aspiring and current business owners to lose their way and in some instances their personal financial viability by chasing fantasies. There are a lot of perceived reasons and technical explanations as to why this happens, but fundamentally it’s due to lack of purpose and vision for the business. Yes… it’s quite this simple. In working with and among startups and existing business owners, I’ve experienced more than enough businesses that exist for the purposes of just existing. A simple fix for vision / mission waywardness is to take time in the planning stages of the business and THINK!!! The following 2 questions will work wonders and get your creative juices flowing: What do I (we, if you have a team… which you should) want to accomplish with this business besides making a lot of money? AND Where do we want to be in 1 year? 3 years? 5 years?

Are You Sensitive and Receptive to the Unknown?

Now that you and your team have spent some time creatively brainstorming why the business exists and where the business is going, you’re ready to accept the fact that there’s still a lot about the marketplace you and your team don’t know about. Please accept this reality now and save yourself and your team the pending headache: you’ll learn more from doing than talking and planning. One of the unfortunate asides of the entrepreneurship boom of the mid 2010s is the emphasis on having a perfect business plan. Nothing could be further from the truth. I definitely recommend that you commit to writing the vision, mission, and other pertinent details of the business opportunity that you and your team are looking to exploit; however, don’t think for a minute that from all the research and number crunching you will accomplish can make up for the simple fact that business is about people and their irrational behaviors. No amount of research will ever compensate for the irrational realities of life and human behavior. The best solution for dealing with the irrational realities of the marketplace is to prepare and plan an action strategy founded on a vision of progressing towards an ideal destination and then prepare your mind for the worst. Not for a second am I advocating pessimism or doomsday prophecies for your business, but in order to prepare an effective action plan, you must constantly prepare your mind and business for the worst and have the attitude of learning and becoming a better business owner in spite of the downside risk or circumstances.