We small business owners have a problem. Each time we make a business decision, our entire business rests on that decision. Since we do not have the financial backing the most corporates have, the punishment for a bad decision is swift and often severe. As a result, we make as few decisions as we can.

The reason business managers make more good decisions than we do, is simply that they make lots more decisions than we do! The simple law of averages predicts that even if their percentage of good decisions to bad ones is the same as ours, they will inevitably make more good ones then we do. If it's important to you, they also make more bad decisions than we do!

Why is it important to make more decisions? Where we are today is the result of all the decisions we have made in the past. Where we go tomorrow will be the result of the decisions we make today. As long as we delay in making today's decisions, our future is on hold.

I believe that our main reason for procrastination has to do with risk. The average manager has very little personal risk associated with any business decision, and can make lots of quick ones. The average small business owner, by comparison, knows that the decision he makes now could well close his firm. And this typically means that his firm will fire him - all at least the liquidator will. Which leads to the challenge of having no income. When combined with the probable loss of his home and insurance policies as the sureties are invoked -- it's a wonder that we make any decisions at all!

If we can reduce the personal risk component in a business decisions, surely we can make more of them, more quickly?

Most of us small business owners do not leave the "business" at the office when we come home. Nor do we leave our personal affairs at home when we come to the office. It simply doesn't happen. You cannot take out half of your life and hide it away while you're doing something else. Which means that when your business strikes too many challenges, chances are that your personal life is going to enter a rough patch. And if your personal life goes into crisis mode, chances are strong that your business will soon follow suit.

A small business is NOT a little big business. Almost all the formal business training available teaches us about big business -- listed companies and corporates. That same training assumes that your personal business is simply a smaller version of a listed company. We're taught the same techniques for financing and managing as are used by the Anglo's and Liberty's of this world. For what it's worth, very few of the business owners I meet aspire to listing their companies at some point in the future. Most of us simply want to pay the bills each month and save enough for a good break every now and then and for a decent retirement. And it seems that most of us aren't getting close enough to that.

Apart from the occasional mention of some of the personal stresses, I am not aware of any SME training that talks about the cold sweat you break into at 3 AM in the morning when you've got bills to pay tomorrow and your bank has just pulled your overdraft. I am unaware of any training on the softer issues of personal business ownership. But surely that is just as important as the technical and formal skills?

Forgive me if I am waxing lyrical at this time, but I'm sitting at the East Head Caffe' eastheadcaffe@cyberperk.co.za - [nope - that's really the way they spell it] in Knysna and looking at a business owner carting a few tourists around on his yacht -- plying them with champagne and oysters -- and wondering which of my bad decisions led me to working onshore rather than sailing offshore!

Just a few thoughts worth sharing, I hope.

© Peter Carruthers, www.petesweekly.co.za

Back to www.bizland.co.za