true value
Dream Time. Imagine what your “finished” business looks like. How big is it? How many employees? How are they dressed? What does the building look like? What color are the walls? Where do your customers park? What does your car look like parked among them? What are you doing on a daily basis? What new things have you added since you first started imagining this finished project? What are the sales? How are sales generated?
In your imaging of this “finished” business, you are totally unencumbered. You do not have key, but uncooperative employees; you do not have a lease that runs too long in a location that doesn’t quite justify the rent; you do not have accounting records that you have not looked at in weeks, because you were too busy running the business, and not owning the business.
You may add hundreds of topics to complete your image of the business, but when you do, make notes of what your imagination showed you. This is not a business plan. It might be called a “dream plan”.
You Can’t Be Wrong! The wonderful thing about this exercise; there is absolutely no way you can be wrong! There is no
risk. No one will tell you it won’t work. No commitments to precisely what you will do. It is your dream, limited only by your imagination. It is your private plan. Only yours, there are no limits!
It is especially important not to limit your thinking. Earl Nightingale once said, “We become what we think about most.” Limiting your thinking will limit your results. If you think you have a 2,000 square foot scrapbook store, you probably will. If you think in terms of ten, 10,000 square foot stores, perhaps “failure” will hold you to only five. Never considering the possibility, however, will hold you to one, 2,000 square foot store. Not having systems that run the stores without your daily involvement is a deal killer. Dream those, also.
The next concrete step, of course, is to start writing your dreams down on paper. Keep an eraser handy and use it often. Add to your page with passion, and adjust it on a whim. Soon, you will gain a great deal of comfort with the business you own – and what it will look like when it is “finished”.
This is the very essence of making the shift from small business thinking to entrepreneurial thinking. It is the only way to stop the insanity with which most business owners live day to day. It is the only way to obtain True Value.
For more information about the book Entrepreneurial Insanity, visit
www.ensanity.biz. To contact the author, send a message to
roger@ensanity.biz.
Roger McManus has spent most of his career as a marketing research and strategy consultant for two dozen companies in the family memory business. They called it the photo industry back then, but his unique view of monetizing family memories at retail adds a new perspective to the traditional scrapbook retailing point of view. He was the publisher of Photo Imaging Entrepreneur magazine, was an elected delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business and served on the State Board of the North Carolina Small Business Development Centers. He obtained his BA and MBA degrees from Wake Forest University.
50 scrapbook business
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