The Biggest Impediment to Small
Business Success is the Small Business Owner
by Rosemary Davies-Janes |
Having coached over a thousand
independent professional and small business owners, the most
consistent impediment to success I have found is the small business
owner themselves. How could that be? It's a human wiring issue. You
see, for most of us, the ideas we have, when they're in our heads,
make perfect sense. When, as employees, we collaborate with
colleagues and work teams, we get to share our ideas with others,
and their objective input, suggestions and constructive criticisms
take our ideas from “free radical thoughts” to “fully baked
concepts.” That valuable exchange is often overlooked by busy
entrepreneurs and small business owners who tend to lack both
objective peers and the time that a peer review takes.
Free radical thinking that remains unexposed to objective scrutiny
can congeal into something that passes for fully baked concepts.
These ideas sit undisturbed in their creators' heads and become so
familiar that they are implemented without their shortcomings ever
being noticed. When they fail to deliver the results that were
expected, they are discarded with disappointment, disgust or even
anger. Which is really not fair, as even acknowledged geniuses have
a significant idea failure rate (Thomas Edison had a huge number of
failures before inventing a light bulb that actually worked).
So the problem is not with the person who originated the idea, it's
with their inability to be objective about it. Just think, have you
ever met a parent who described their child honestly and accurately?
Most people don't like how they look in photos or videos or sound on
the answering machine, because it doesn't fit their inner perception
of how they look or sound. So when we implement ideas that seemed
viable when we thought of them, why are we surprised that they show
up differently when they are exposed to the world?
This very human inability to be objective about “our stuff” can
really destroy a small business's marketing efforts. Small business
owners can avoid these pitfalls by creating a network of objective,
honest peers to review new ideas before they are cleared to enter
public domains.
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