Examining Your Likes

Today, I want to discuss the necessity of examining your life experiences to help you determine how to choose the right type of business for you.  After all, building a business is a huge undertaking, so wouldn’t it make sense to do something that you enjoy?

Most of us, as we go through life, realize what we like to do and what we don’t like to do.  It is a common reaction to our journey.  It is one of the things that steers us in our quest to have a good life. But have you ever really sat down and looked at all of those feeling to see how you could use that knowledge to determine exactly what business you should be in?

Transcript

Welcome to this week’s episode.  Last week, we talked about the need for you to find your Why.  If you didn’t listen to the Introduction Episode, I do suggest you spend a few minutes with it since it is the basis of all you do in the future.

Today, I want to discuss the necessity of examining your life experiences to help you determine how to choose the right type of business for you.  After all, building a business is a huge undertaking, so wouldn’t it make sense to do something that you enjoy?

Most of us, as we go through life, realize what we like to do and what we don’t like to do.  It is a common reaction to our journey.  It is one of the things that steers us in our quest to have a good life. But have you ever really sat down and looked at all of those feeling to see how you could use that knowledge to determine exactly what business you should be in?

I’ve always been amazed when I see teenagers who know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives and then go on to accomplish it.  That is probably the rare exception.  There are those that go into the family business.  There are others that find a job based on their knowledge background and are happy being a well-paid cog in the wheel. There is a great swath of the population that is willing to take any job just to have enough money to pay the rent and food bill.

But if you are listening to this podcast, then you are probably one of those people who wants to create their own path and either succeed or fail according to your own principles.  That is my mission.  To help you in your quest.

When I look back over my life, there is two overriding things that I seem to really enjoy doing: Being an educator and anything creative.   But for the first time, I have laid out a path that merges these two things together.  If I had realized this 40 years ago, well, who knows where I would be now.  But let me take some examples of my journey and maybe it will help you realize how to pull things together for yourself.

I’ve always had a creative streak, not like an artist or sculptor, but of taking ideas and then building them.  I still remember when I was five or six years old, I would take these small individual boxes that cereal came in and build model trains out of them.  I was always taking things I found and building something with them.

When I was a senior in high school, I joined a club called Future Teachers of America.  I was named the club’s historian.  It was my job to create a scrapbook that included all of the activities of the club over the course of the school year.  Well, I probably went a little overboard because I found some scraps of wood and vinyl and created a vinyl cover book with stained wooden letters on the front.  The cool thing was that at the state convention, all of the scrapbooks were presented from the various state clubs and I won the traveling trophy that year for best scrapbook.  

While that was cool, I had no idea what that achievement meant in the larger context of my life to come.  I think that is probably true of most people at that stage of life.

As I mentioned last week, I spent four years working at a supermarket in the mid-west.  And while I worked up to the third shift manager, it was really the department that I was in charge of that I enjoyed.  The displays.  In the late 70s, they didn’t have these narrow end caps you see today.  I had a table that was about 3ft by 3ft to build my displays on and some artistic displays I did make.  

If I had stayed with that company, I’m sure I would have ended up managing my own store and had a nice pension to retire on, but where is the challenge in that?

I think that needing a challenge is probably one the traits that all people that want to start a small business or manage a small business have.  I mean, when you go to work for a mega-corporation, it is usually exciting at first, but to keep it exciting you have to keep climbing the ladder to find it.   The problem is that the higher you climb the less freedom you have until you are trapped into only working for that pension.

And there were many other creative ways I’ve gone through life doing.  While in the restaurant and nightclub era, I actually designed two different restaurants which would have been pretty amazing, I think.  One was a two story Italian pizza and pasta restaurant built in an old brick building that would have had a full pipe organ in it for entertainment.  I still won’t give away my secret for making awesome pizza dough.

The other was a combination restaurant and night club with the kitchen in the middle serving both sides.  The whole thing was themed for Tolkien’s Middle Earth. 

I did the design for both in detail, but I had no idea how to attract investors or raise capital for such a venture.  There was no internet where you could learn how to do just about anything back in the 70s and 80s.  No place where you could learn how to structure a business properly.  That is still a problem, which is why I now do what I do.

Then there was the time I tried to break into the interior design world, but found that pretty cutthroat.  I tried designing websites for small businesses, but found I didn’t enjoy the business part of it.  The list probably goes on and I’ve forgotten some of the things I’ve try to make a business out of.  

But I didn’t have a Why as I discussed last week nor a mission to hang my hat on.  Like so many people I was just reacting to what came my way.  Perhaps you find yourself going through life like that.  What I am attempting to achieve this week to help you look back at all you have done so far in life and see a pattern of traits that you want to keep going forward with to determine what business would be right for you.  

That doesn’t mean it won’t change throughout your life.  It just means that you need to periodically take a look back at what you have achieved to see if you are still on the right track.   After all, life is a series of adjustments.

Back to our analysis.

You have to be careful, because not all that you like to do should be included in your decision on what your business should look like.  For example, I love to fix things. When something around the house breaks, I’m one of those people who will dismantle it to see how it works and if I can fix it.  Most people would just throw it away and go buy a new one.  

That’s a lot harder to do today, with all of the miniaturization and circuit boards running things.  People aren’t making things to last anymore.  We seem to be in an era of planned obsolescence.  

In the past, I often thought that I were to start over, I would have love to be a mechanical engineer.  I think it would be fascinating to design machines and fix what wasn’t working just right.  I could have gone to college for that instead of an education major.  Gotten a job with an engineering firm and lived a good life.  Become a cog in the wheel.

But being a little older and wiser, I see now that it probably would not have worked out, because such a path didn’t include teaching nor entrepreneurship.  It would have left me with something wanting.

Without realizing it, I brought this love of fixing things into the task of managing restaurants.   I worked a lot of different restaurants jobs, but there were a couple that really point this out.   I always seemed to gravitate to restaurants that were in trouble and needed someone to come in and bail them out.

The reason I left the supermarket job was because someone asked me if I would like to take over management of a Mexican fast food restaurant.  The owners son had been managing it and had run it into the ground.  He needed someone who knew the restaurant business to save his investment.  So I said yes.  I love a challenge after all.  I love to fix things.  

And I did.  So much so, that the company that sold the franchises offered me a job going around to the other restaurants that were having problems and help restructure them.  I turned them down.  They wanted me to put thousands of miles on my own car and not really pay very well for being on the road all the time.  It was one of those things where you wonder where your life would have gone if you had said yes.

Then there was the steak house that was in trouble.  Two months after I took over the silent partner came in to eat with his entire extended family.  After dinner, he called me over and said to me - I’ll never forget this - “I thought that only Jesus could perform miracles, but you have done one with this restaurant”.  That was probably the highlight of my ten years of off and on journey in restaurants.

Here is the problem I had applying being a fixer to the business world.  Once you have something fixed and running smoothly, the day to day operations become boring.  So you are then always looking for that next challenge, that next thing to fix.  It took me a long time to learn this.  So my fixing is now relegated to my DIY projects around the house.

What I am trying to get at here is that just because you really enjoy doing or are passionate about something doesn’t necessarily mean it belongs in your business plan unless it is part of the overall long-term picture.

I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that my other passion is teaching and I have several opportunities to do that throughout my journey through the corporate world.   I’m not talking about hiring someone and teaching them how to do a task.   I am referring to the type of teaching that gives people the knowledge they can use to change their lives for the better.

Most of what I have talked about in this episode I didn’t really understand until I took a fork in the road 23 years ago and began doing tax returns for small business people.  I found that to do the best job for my clients, I had to learn about all of the legal formats that you can form a business in.  I had to learn the tax implications of the business decisions that were made.  I had to learn the proper way to organize the paperwork involved to make sure you aren’t leaving profits on the table.  

Theses are things I had never learned through my years of trying to build my own business or managing others.  And as I learned all of these things, I began to see all of the mistakes I had made over 30 years.  I learned how to teach other small business owners what they needed to know to restructure their businesses and make them more profitable.  

At some point in the last decade, I decided I wanted to get this information out to a larger audience.  Not in a technical sense, but in everyday language that anyone could understand.  I first built a website that had a huge amount of articles and classes that would really have helped people.  The problem with that is when something is free, people perceive it has no value and it got no traction so I took it down.

As I mentioned last week, I believe that things solidified when I learned about the three ways that people learn, reading, listening and watching.  Which is how I have restructured things for myself.  Writing books, creating a podcast, and video taping an online course.

This works because it incorporates the two major things I love to do: teaching and creating.  It also satisfies my mission of improving the lives of others and making the world a better place to live.

So…last week I talked about the need for your Why.  

This week I talked about the need to examine yourself.  You may even find that if you already own a small business, It doesn’t really fulfill what you really would like to do.

Next week, I plan to delve into how to use this information to create a business and the steps you need to take to hit the ground running.

Coming up in the future, I’ll be discussing the various type of businesses, changes in  tax laws you need to know and a whole lot more.  I’ve even got some guests coming up that hopefully will teach you a thing or two.

If you would like to take a look at my book, you will find the link in the show notes.

Until Next Week