AU Blogspot

              Thanks to freeparking for permission to use this Photo.

One of the strongest characteristics associated with successful entrepreneurs is the ability to lead.  As a small business owner, it’s impossible to be everywhere at once, directly involved in every aspect of the decision making process, therefore you must be able to trust your employees to make sound decisions on your behalf.  This is one area where leadership plays such a vital role.  Your ability to communicate your business vision and get your employees to buy into that vision is deeply connected to building a productive workplace environment.  Here is an interesting podcast interview with Marshall Goldsmith, a leadership training expert who specializes in training small business owners how to be leaders and in turn cultivate leadership qualities in their employees.  Goldsmith makes some good points about common issues limiting the growth of small businesses, then prescribes concrete methods to resolve these issues.  Click on the image above to listen to this podcast.  I think you’ll learn some lessons that will stay with you throughout your career.  Take care.

Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University

              Thanks to Orin Zebest for permission to use this Photo.

When I was a small girl, my family would gather to watch The Art Linkletter Show, a television variety show which aired once a week.  

Although I have watched countless shows since that time, there is one particular segment which comes to mind when considering the many facets of starting and operating a small business.  During the segment, Art Linkletter introduced a juggler who proceeded to explain how we all are jugglers.  There are those who juggle as a profession; however, the analogy was applied to the rest of the population.  No matter your profession, age, or socio-economic status, we can all learn from the juggler’s lesson of “The Spinning Plates.” 

To offer a brief synopsis of the lesson, the juggler first began the process by placing a dowel rod on the floor and balancing a plate on top of the rod.  He gave the plate a spin with this hand and stood back to watch as the plate, balanced atop the dowel rod, would spin around and around.  As the first plate was spinning, the juggler would set up a second dowel rod and plate.  This process continued until the juggler had twelve sets of dowel rods and plates spinning.  In order to keep the plates from crashing to the ground, the juggler had to run from one to the next to keep the motion going.  Inevitably, he would be too slow to attend to all of the plates and one would crash to the ground with the plates shattering into pieces. Quickly, he would set up a replacement and run from one plate to the next spinning, spinning, running, spinning, running, spinning, and running again!  I was exhausted just watching the process.

The morale of the lesson is that no matter how wonderful you might be at spinning plates, you can only manage a certain number of plates effectively.  Add just one too many plates and they may all come crashing to the ground.  The same lesson is especially true for those of us who are business owners.

There are many aspects of your new business which will spin at the same time:  financial, marketing, sales, service, employer/employee relationships, customer relationships, deadlines, industry regulations, ordering supplies, overseeing production, submitting bids, and the list goes on!  With all of these responsibilities, it is no wonder that we find ourselves spinning and running just to keep all of our “plates” operating as they should.  New entrepreneurs are often overwhelmed with the magnitude of responsibilities created when they decided to start and operate a new business. Realizing that all of the different areas must be effectively operating at the same time can create quite a bit of stress for the new business owner.  To be successful, it is imperative that we understand our value to the new business.  The primary responsibility for the new business owner is to focus time and effort on actions which contribute the greatest value to a new business.  So what happens to the rest of the plates left spinning?  Ah, that is the portion which must be delegated to others.  In other words, the business owner should “spin” the value plates and delegate all activities that others can do.  To capitalize on entrepreneurial strengths, new business owners must learn to delegate in order to spend valuable time strategizing and leading rather than doing.  

Art Linkletter has been quoted as saying, “I’ve learned it is always better to have a small percentage of a big success, than a hundred percent of nothing.”  An entrepreneur himself, Linkletter learned early in his career that the quality of employees he hired was in direct correlation with the success of a venture.  Linkletter hired the most creative people he could find to assist with the production of his television shows, “House Party” and “The Art Linkletter Show.”  Then, he shared his success with the employees realizing that without creative employees, his ventures would not have yielded the same results.  If you were to ask the 96-year old entrepreneur his secret for success, he would tell you that he has learned not to spin more plates than he could comfortably handle.  Of the many books Linkletter wrote, it was the title of a book released in 1980 that states the fact entrepreneurs must remember, “I Didn’t Do it Alone!” 

As this article comes to a close, I hope that you also learn from the juggler’s lesson and realize that you can not possibly “spin all of the plates” found in your new small business.  Instead, learn to delegate responsibilities to others within your organization so that you can concentrate on that which brings your enterprise most value.  I’ll leave you with another bit of advice from Art Linkletter: “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out!” 

Keep the plates spinning, 

Penny Joyner Waddell
Small Business Management Instructor
Ashworth University

                      Image courtesy of jeff magnum-orange twin.

From Brian Grinonneau:

Dare to be different. A look at why advertising professionals should consider standing out from the competition, not copying them. To make your advertising work, follow the principle if your competition is doing it, don’t.  To succeed in today’s crowded marketplace where most of the products and advertising look exactly the same, a small business owner must stand out, shouting above the din with a message so clear and compelling that prospects stop and take notice. It’s a matter of business survival. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs quickly retreat to the supposed security of sameness, soon to be lost in a sea of anonymity and a tidal wave of frustration.

In effect, albeit at a subconscious level, they are saying , “I don’t want to be different”. In back room offices and store fronts everywhere, salespeople are telling business owners they should do this or that kind of ad because it worked so great for their competitor. The owners nod and sign on. It’s already proven to be a winner, right? WRONG! Change the name, background color and a font style and you’ve got sameness. Put those ads in the yellow pages, a coupon magazine or a TV commercial cluster and you’ve got advertising death. Want proof? Get the latest statistics on small business failures.

About the author: Brian Grinonneau is the general manager of McMann and Tate advertising, an agency that works with small business owners helping them stand out from the crowd.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Copyright © 1996 - 2008 Experience, Inc. - All Rights Reserved

To read more of Brian Grinonneau’s  great article, login to the Ashworth University Career Center through the student portal and click here. 

Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University

From David Askaripour of Experience:

Good question! It’s a tough one, really. I revisited this question last night when I told a fellow entrepreneur of mine to “bury your idea.”Geezzz, Dave! why would you tell her such a thing? Well, because the idea simply went sour, and it wasn’t something that she was super passionate about doing, so when I see that happening — when I see an idea sucking the blood out of someone — I try to relieve them of that burden. If I were to name the top poison pill for young entrepreneurs, it would be “ideas.” Seriously, I’ve seen ideas kill the entrepreneur.

We are like machines when it comes to ideas, and many of us never know when to just start focusing on one. We want to do it all. So what happens when we want to do it all? What happens is that we sometimes fall into a trend of focusing on “so-so” ideas that we may not really be extremely passionate about, but we push forward with them anyway. As time passes we grow more and more unenthused with the idea. It begins to become a burden. It haunts us. It keeps us awake at night. It brings tons of stress and worry. But we push on, knowing that the idea really isn’t in our hearts. We push on because we think — as entrepreneurs — that we should never quit or give up on something.

Copyright © 1996 - 2008 Experience, Inc. - All Rights Reserved 

To read more of David Askaripour’s great article, login to the Ashworth University Career Center through the student portal and click here. 

Ryan Rode
Interactive Services Manager
Ashworth University

 
          Thanks to Rob West for permission to use this Photo.

Our new Ashworth University Discussion Forum has been sparking some lively debate.  If you haven’t checked out the forum yet, what are you waiting for?—get engaged with your student community!

Ashworth University Business Student, Frederick F, states: 

I recently completed the Macroeconomics course, and all the negative things about Keynes were wrong!

I do agree with government intervention to get the economy out of recession and depression as a better solution by lowering interest rates and major government projects to get people employed and spending money.

However… I wrote projects, not programs. Programs that are started to help people don’t usually work, just enough to keep people employed and create more red tape.

As for supply and demand side economics, I side with Jean-Baptiste Say whom said “Demand creates it’s own supply”

Keynes basically said that excessive saving can lead to recession or depression, True, but today we are experiencing excessive greed which is causing our current recession. (High gas prices and the mortgage crisis.)

Ashworth University Technical Services Supervisor And Resident Economist, John Ash, responds:

Well, Keynes’ ideas look dynamite on paper, but they suffer from the minute flaw of not actually holding up in the real world. I know, I know, we should ignore that and just let the beauty of his carefully constructed theories suffer no detractors, but those of us who are actually studying economics to understand the world better and use that knowledge to improve our own lives (i.e., make more money) can’t allow such intricate economic fallacies to remain unmolested.

Keynes’ theories were gospel for the economic advisors of the 60s and 70s, and it is generally believed (among economists anyway) that strict adherence to his policy recommendations led to the stagflation of those decades (stagflation is when the economy is in a recession but inflation is increasing, two things which are supposed to be mutually exclusive by Keynesian standards). Keynes is a good starting point for understanding economics, but modern post-industrial economies are far too complex to be modeled with it. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to find one unifying principle which will explain everything; it’s never going to happen. There are a lot of variables, and usually no single one is going to accurately predict the movement of the economy. (more…)