Simple Small Business will, from time to time, review a business book that we think is worthy of your consideration. I think that it is only fair to warn you that I have spent most of my adult life studying business related books and I find that over time I am drawn to Biographies and Case Studies rather than non-fiction, strategic or instructional types of books. When you are first beginning the journey of entrepreneurship, instructional books are necessary because we lack a foundation of solid technical knowledge. After the framework has been developed, we will need guidance from someone with more experience. This guidance comes from actually listening to people who have done it. Understanding their struggles and how they overcame them can be extremely enlightening.
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“Four Seasons” is a book written by Isadore Sharp, the founder and CEO of the highly regarded Four Seasons Hotels. It is a forty year summary of his life and the evolution of the Four Seasons name.
In the introduction he begins by humbly admitting that when he started he knew nothing of the hotel business or any small business for that matter. His parents were poor immigrants from Poland and Isadore spent some time explaining how his family arrived in Canada and how his father wound up in the building trade. This was during the depression and as a small boy he would spend the day helping his father by carrying bricks or plaster, digging ditches and putting in a good hard days work. It becomes obvious that Isadore’s values came from his upbringing and it is important in understanding his philosophy in his dealings with businesses and with people today.
I read a story about Ray Crock, the founder of McDonald’s (in the book “Focus”). Mr. Crock was with a bunch of young business college students one day when Ray asked them what business he was in. They said the hamburger business. He said “no, real estate. McDonald’s owns more valuable real estate than anyone else in America. Hamburgers were just a reason to own the real estate”.
Another question I read was how many people think that they could make a better hamburger than McDonald’s. Almost everyone raised their hand. Then, the speaker asked, then why aren’t you rich? It is because it is not about making the best burger. It is about perception, trust, speed, cost and other factors. It took me a long time to come to some simple facts of life and manage a simple small business. Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to understand. Humans naturally want to think that everything is too complex. For example, the most powerful way to be successful is to know what you want. The problem is that most people don’t really know what they want and what they are willing to do to get it.
Summary: Go to the portable applications website and download their free portable apps suite plus any other programs that you may need to run your business. Stick them on a 4 or 8 gigabyte thumb-drive and run your entire business from any computer anywhere, any time. Save a ton of money and feel secure that no lost or stolen computer, computer crash or disaster will bring your simple small business to a halt.
I am a big fan of portable applications. If you are not aware of what that is, portable applications are small programs that reside entirely on your USB thumb-drive. These are the programs that you use every day on your computer like word documents, spreadsheets, graphic programs, etc. They take up no space on your hard drive, they don’t fill your computer with a bunch of garbage that slows your computer down and the icing on the cake is that most of these are open source and completely free.
To become familiar with what is available I highly recommend that you take a jump over to portable apps to see what they offer. There are other portable apps available from different sources, but this is a great place to get started. Imagine being able to run your whole simple small business using the thumb-drive on your key chain or in your pocket. If your computer crashes, quickly buy or borrow another computer and in minutes you are up and running. Someone breaks in and steals your equipment or a fire destroys your office, no problem, you have got it covered. You are on vacation and there is an unexpected business emergency, use the hotel computer and jump in and get your company back on track.
Regardless of what simple small business you are in, you MUST be a seed planter! Planting seeds is basically laying the groundwork for future business. EVERY business must do this. Most of the time the seeds that you are planting today will not bring any fruit until six months or a year from now. So you must be continuously planting seeds.
There are two common problems that simple small businesses have with seed planting. First, when you are planting seeds you are not bringing in any income to pay the bills. Cash flow is the blood that keeps a small business alive. Oftentimes, a simple business is a one or two person operation. The second problem is just the reverse of the first. If the entrepreneur is busy generating income, then they are not planting seeds.
This is the catch 22 that destroys most small businesses and the worst thing is, like a silent deadly disease, the entrepreneur never even knows that it is at work in the organization until it is too late.
“Four Seasons” is a book written by Isadore Sharp, the founder and CEO of the highly regarded Four Seasons Hotels. It is a forty year summary of his life and the evolution of the Four Seasons name.
