After awhile, I get the message

I would go to business mixers and explain to small business owners what I did. That my job was to make them great CEOs of their companies... to teach them how to mine their business records for critical data they could use for making better decisions. Everyone I talked to said, "That's great. I really could use that. But I don't think I am big enough to need that yet." That translates into few if any people hiring me to work for them.

So literally yesterday, I figured out that I was trying to sell services that 99 per cent of the people I was talking to were never going to buy. I was fighting a losing battle. In this environment, people are doing their best just to survive and keep their doors open. Money is tight. Consultants like me are going to have a tough time convincing most businessmen that there is a compelling reason to hire a productivity consultant, at least for now.

My getting the point yesterday is one of those "I've got good news for you and some bad news for you" situations. On one hand, the whole marketing approach I worked out for my business has proven to be a bust. The wrong product at the wrong time.

The good news is that when I go back to the drawing board, I can rethink and reinvent my company yet one more time. I now know that I need to identify a product or service small business owners will buy and which they feel will provide a compelling benefit for their companies. And then I will need to rewrite my 30 second elevator speech and refine it.

I classify this as a mid-course correction. I cannot begin to enumerate all the things I have learned about building a company over the last 8 to 9 months. This just proves that learning never ends. The only difference is that the most important learning we do is probably not going to be in a classroom. Even if we never will earn a degree from the University of Hard Knocks, the curriculum is ever so compelling. I feel so much smarter than I did last year and a lot surer of myself than I did then.

So day to day experience has been sending me a message. Apparently for awhile, I wasn't listening very well. I am told that as we get older, we learn to do a lot more listening than talking. Even if we sometimes forget to listen all the time to some inner voice that tells us we are veering off course, sooner than later we will receive the message loud and clear. Hopefully, the message will arrive before we leap off of a cliff into the abyss. .

This is not like falling off the horse and having to get back on. Far from it. It is more about letting the horse take off in a different direction and not reining in the animal. So there it is. I get the message and I have to put on my CEO hat and my marketing hat. Time to revise my working strategies. Time is a'wasting. Cheerio.

Howard Fireman