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Spring Cleaning For Small Business? Yes! In December!

December 1, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

Whether it’s a year where something we once knew as “normal” was part of our reality, or during an unprecedented and unimaginable year of a global pandemic, the abiding management question for all small business owners is always valid: “What’s the best use of my time right now?” And at no other time of the year are we more time-management challenged than in December.

The twelfth calendar month is the only one where two powerful imperatives converge against a hard stop, each demanding a full measure of your time, attention, and resources:

The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible, while
Simultaneously taking steps to set the business up for a fast and clean start when the New Year dawns on January 1.

Pardon the football metaphor, but in the marketplace game your business plays all year, December is the two-minute drill of your fourth quarter. And in this tight transition period, that fierce competition for precious time and resources requires discipline and devotion to fundamentals.

Our grandmothers practiced the fundamental of spring cleaning when the weather broke warm. In the marketplace, in order to kick off the New Year right, your spring cleaning should happen before then. There are many targets for a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started. [Continue Reading]

Entrepreneurial Intangibles Are Essential To Tangible Success

November 20, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

Now in my fifth decade as a business owner, this Baby Boomer has been reflecting on what’s been learned that would benefit the next generation of entrepreneurs.

It’s understandable to focus most of our attention on the many hard fundamentals of how to sustain a successful small business operation. But after logging many hours in that tangible mode, you’ll discover that it’s just as critical to respect the softer entrepreneurial intangibles that tend to be the human being behind the venture. And those who recognize and incorporate these in their approach to ownership are more likely to achieve that elusive holy grail of human intangibles: happiness.

In that spirit, allow me to offer two intangibles that are just as essential to business success as cash flow and profitability: [Continue Reading]

On Veteran’s Day, We Should Recognize All Who Served

November 10, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

Veterans Day, as we know it, has its origins in Armistice Day.

“To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory.”

That was the 1919 acknowledgment by President Wilson on the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI “in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.”

Congress made Armistice Day a federal holiday on November 11, 1938.

But after World War II, Alvin King, a small business owner in Emporia, Kansas, had a problem with the narrowness of those honored on Armistice Day. [Continue Reading]

Patience Is Not Standard Equipment On Entrepreneurs

November 5, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

One of the markers of American culture is the “sticker” on the window of a new car. This document reveals to shoppers a listing of standard equipment and options, plus, of course, the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, or MSRP.

But what if someone is shopping for an entrepreneur to work for? That may sound silly, but prospective employees increasingly do it all the time out here on Main Street. Yes, the money comes into play. But these days, it’s the list of “equipment.”

A prospective team member would be justified in expecting the list of entrepreneurial standard equipment to include characteristics like courage, creativity, perseverance, and adaptability. Innovative, creative, and visionary are other important line items. One of the newer expectations increasingly prominent here in the third decade of the 21st century is values. What are the values of this prospective entrepreneur/founder/employer? What do this business and its founder stand for?

But there’s one trait that’s historically not itemized on an entrepreneur’s standard equipment list: [Continue Reading]

The Quest For The Essence Of Entrepreneurship

October 29, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

Ever wonder what’s behind an entrepreneur’s decision to take a risk? There is a spectrum for this, with the calculation and reasoning of due diligence on one end, foolhardy on the other, and a variable called faith that lives in the middle.

We’ve all heard stories about the legendary entrepreneur’s hunch. But without some foundation of facts and reasoned assumptions supporting a financial projection, a hunch is the equivalent of a belt without loops. And everybody knows what you call trying to hold up pants with a belt that’s not connected to anything – foolhardy.

Still, that foundation you seek is challenged by the truth that the most important decisions are powered by their own urgency. The time will come – usually sooner than later – when an entrepreneur must take action without the benefit of all the answers; when the fog hasn’t yet lifted on your quest for clarity. And in that moment of not knowing, but going forward anyway, we find the quark of entrepreneurship, identified by the paradoxical twin emotions of apprehension and exhilaration.

These emotions presage possibility: [Continue Reading]

It’s the Digital Age – Ethically Speaking, Things Here Are Different

October 20, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

As arrogant occupants of 21st-century Earth, who can rightly boast of creating exciting innovations, like the computer, talking paint, and the margarita blender, it serves us to believe we’re also the more enlightened generation.

But honesty demands an acknowledgment that contemporary applications of wisdom, morality and ethical behavior are in fact derivative of concepts first proposed long ago by the ancients.

Consider the 10,000-year-old Chinese wisdom, I Ching, The Book of Changes. Then there are the 5,000-year-old Upanishads from India. And of course, the new kid on the block, the four-millennia-old Mosaic Laws (Thou shalt not …). Indeed, no wisdom is handier than that of King Solomon, from the first millennium BCE in Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the Psalms.

It must be noted that much of this awesome introspection and self-awareness was first contemplated at a time when receding Ice Age glaciers were still carving Scotland’s Loch Ness and the Great Lakes of North America, on the threshold of the written word.

Alas, ethically and morally speaking, we moderns are merely the new models, not necessarily the better ones. Hold that thought. [Continue Reading]