Heart of Business

My good friend and co-collaborator Leif Hansen, passed along an article from the Harvard Business Review on 37signals.com (who created the award-winning app Highrise, which we use religiously).

Here’s the gist of the article, quoting founders Jason Fried and his colleague David Heinemeier Hansson:

“No, less is less—because more is not better! Everyone tries to do too much: solve too many problems, build products with too many features. Our goal is to do less, to build half a product rather than a half-assed product. So we say ‘no’ to almost everything. If you include every decent idea that comes along, you’ll just wind up with a half-assed version of your product. What you really want to do is build half a product that kicks ass.”

The article doesn’t specify which of them said that glorious quote, but it doesn’t matter, there’s a whole lotta truth in it.

I wrote about how Productivity Contributes to Global Warming and Debt, and here’s a super-successful company, one for which we’re raving fans, who shows you how to be sustainably successful by doing less. Much less.

Are you able to resist the urge to do more, be more? Can you be less than all you can be, and be happier as a result? Tell us about your next project/product/offering your business is making- do you have an idea of how you can make it less, and thus make it more successful?

In great big, sluggish, behemoth businesses the term “capital investment” refers to buying great big things, like buildings. The term is “fixed assets” and covers things like buildings, machinery- stuff that’s going to be around for awhile.

The trouble for most personal-sized businesses is that revenue- if you even want to use that word, I just mean what cash comes in– tends to go directly into one of two places: day-to-day things that just need to happen like getting biz cards printed, or the phone bills, or what have you, or it gets shovelled over, sometimes in a panic, to cover personal expenses like the mortgage and the grocery bills.

Would I be speaking from personal experience? Maybe…

The thing is that even teensy weensy small businesses, the kind called “personal-sized,” still need fixed assets. You need a computer. You might need audio equipment. Or a projector for presentations.

Where does that money come from, if you haven’t had an income spike this month? Especially since those purchases aren’t usually planned-for- they just happen. When the hard drive crashes. When the presentation comes up and you need something in a hurry.

Here’s my two questions for you all:

- Do you plan ahead for capital purchases- like computers and other kinds of equipment?

- Do you save money aside in some way to be able to pay for those purchases, without needing to take a big bite out of your day-to-day expenses?

My co-blogger Arianna Huffington (I loved writing that, even though I’m a bottom-rung blogger for her gig… ;-)) quoted what President Charles DeGaulle’s said to his aide Jacques Soustelle when Jacques complained that all of his friends were bitterly opposed to the government’s policies. “Changez vos amis.” (”Change your friends.”)

The context here was Arianna’s latest post on Barack Obama’s campaign. Her message to Barack: “Don’t pander to conventional wisdom, stay true to yourself.”

It’s the Same in Business.

The conventional wisdom has it that your business needs to deliver what people want and need- and that’s true. If you aren’t fulfilling basic wants and needs of people, chances are your business won’t really take off.

However, there is another side of this- showing leadership. Sometimes people don’t know what they want. A clear example in our business is that often business owners want to rush into getting something done- they want to jump into action.

And yet, before you can get into action, you have to have clarity. Without clarity- clarity of heart, clarity of purpose, clarity of who you’re serving- your actions may well be totally useless. I sometimes have to reign someone in, and help them take a look at something more internal, or more profound, or more challenging to look at than usual.

That’s the case with the upcoming course Heart of Money Transformational Journey. Money is a HUGE topic- and yet many business owners never really face their doubts, fears, assumptions, and beliefs about money. Which makes it very, very hard to be successful, no matter how many “right actions” you may take.

It’s not always fun, but it is incredibly liberating and effective, and I wouldn’t be showing leadership if I didn’t cover this territory.

Are you letting your friends change you?

Are you Jacques Soustelle or Charles DeGaulle? Or Barack Obama? Well, maybe you don’t want to be any of them.

But here’s the real question: are you being you? Are you being true to your vision, are you planting your flag? Are you leading the way in your business?

Basically, I disappeared for three weeks, since my last post. Let me give you the bullet-point update:

• We’re in the process of adopting a child. We had a 2, TWO, almost-adoptions in the last month, and it really spun us emotionally. We’re okay, but it took up a lot of my creative/thinking space.

• We had to let our last assistant go, for a variety of reasons (she’s a fabulous person, don’t get me wrong- just a bad fit.) Emotional-overload PLUS too many details to handle PLUS going through interviewing and hiring again.

The bottom-line lesson? Life is lived in the physical world, not on my blog. I want to show up here, as long as I can be of service, and meet good people. But, when my head gets turned around with these kinds of things, the blog tends to drift out of my consciousness.

Here’s my hope: 

Once we hire our new assistant and get her up to speed (all of the successful applicants, the ones who made it to the interview stage, are women), I’ll have more creativity and spaciousness.

In the meantime, I highly recommend an article I published last Wednesday to my email list:

The Curse of Professionalism In Your Business.

The one thing I AM good at is responding. So, if you have a question, insight, or comment about the Curse of Professionalism, you’ll hear from me.

So, thank you for your patience. I’m still alive. Just a little underwater.

I was just reading an interview with Wendell Berry in this month’s issue of The Sun Magazine, and he was quoted as saying:

“Art is a way of making, and science is a way of knowing. You’re never going to escape the need for either one; you’ve got to have a certain amount of knowledge, and you’e got to have a certain amount of art. You’ve got to know how to make a thing - whether it’s a crop or a novel - and you’ve got to have a way of making it.”

He was discussing farming with the interviewer, about how a farm can be a very conscious imitation of the diversity of nature.

This struck me in that it’s a way of looking at your business, too. You can learn about business, and if you want your business to thrive, you need to learn about it. You can’t succeed without it.

And yet, you also need a way to apply that information. You need to approach the making of your business as an art form. The learning is the science, and the application is the art.

What happens in your heart and your perspective if you give yourself that spaciousness between learning the structures and strategies of holistic business, and the messiness, creativity, and irregularity in the diversity of making your business?

It’s Wednesday morning, and a stack of to-do’s in your business await you. You need to get on your marketing, you need to deal with the bookkeeping, and those pesky clients keep needing things from you. ;-)And you don’t feel like doing any of it. Instead, you want to just read a book.

So, what do you do? Is it better to apply discipline and push through, or do you ‘go with the flow’ and go settle in with that book and a hot cuppa?

For clarity’s sake, I think I need to dig a little deeper into what we’re actually talking about.

What is ‘discipline’?

Well, the Oxford American Dictionary says, among other things, that discipline comes from the Latin root meaning “instruction, knowledge.” And, our modern meaning states “an activity or experience that provides mental or physical training.”

Think of the word ‘disciple.’ Broadly speaking, it’s an attempt to follow what’s true, through learning.

Okay, so what is ‘Flow.’

One definition of flow is to ‘circulate continuously within a particular system.’ When we say “go with the flow” we general mean: “accept the situation as is, rather than trying to alter or control it.”

The state of flow is often flung about as an ideal place to be in business. That you should feel an continuous feeling of ease and movement from one thing to the next.

That’s nothing to complain about. However, it does require a certain level of discernment.

Professional Wrestling: Novel and Tea versus the To-Do Army.

You’ve still got that bunch of stuff to do, and you still want to just flop out on the couch. And after reading a buncha word origins from the Latin you’re no closer to choosing. The couch feels shnuggly, but a cop-out, and the tasks feel oppressive.

Sounds like it’s time for a little discipline.

The Sufi Teaching on Discipline

The spiritual path is hard work. It just is. But, not in the way you might think.

The hard work comes in being vigilant about the ego. The ego is crafty sucker, always trying to get control, impersonating God, and a variety of other slippery things.

Discpline is required, but not blind, unthinking discipline. It’s the discpline related to learning, to being a disciple. And this learning is about being able to discern between the voice of the ego and the voice of your heart.

Because, you see, there are no hard-and-fast-rules. The ego could be telling you to push through your to-do’s, and your heart could be guiding to relax with a novel and tea. Or vice-versa.

The outer circumstances will give you absolutely zero clues on which way to go. It’s unfortunate, but true.

And, the inner landscape can be a little tricky. As a client asked in the Opening the Moneyflow course: “Whenever I ask in my heart, I hear something like: ‘that’s a lesson for you.’ Is that really a message of the Divine?”

After I asked I few more questions, nope, it sure wasn’t. So how do you discern? And, you don’t have all day to do this- the minutes are ticking by alarmingly fast, and you still haven’t decided: tea or tasks?

Well, quick! Let’s take a look.

Keys to Discerning Heart from Ego

• First, take the time to ask.

The fact that you’re even wondering whether you should work or flop on the couch is a great first indicator of becoming conscious. There are many times when one might make that decision without any consciousness whatsoever.

So, take some time to really ask about the decision. Only, I wouldn’t ask: “Which should I do.” I would take a few breaths, put both alternatives aside, and rest into my heart.

Then, I might ask something like this:”What is my heart’s relationship both of these options?”

• Second, when you ask, then listen.

How many times, when you ask for guidance, do you take the time to really listen for a response?

I was talking with someone recently, and just as they were saying something, a lawnmower started up, and a loud truck went past. And I’m all like: “What? Huh?” She had to repeat herself.

The Divine is patient, and knows you might have trouble hearing that ’still, quiet voice’ in your heart. Take time. Ask two or three times, taking the time in your heart to listen.

So what if it takes five or ten minutes to get clarity? It’s better than doing something for an hour or more, and feeling rotten about it.

• Thirdly… And how do you listen?

The Divine is not a Magic Eight Ball, that will give you a “Yes” “No” or “Ask again later.” response. If you can bring a sincere willingness to be surprised, you may get something different.

For instance, when I ask the question “What’s my heart’s relationship to reading a novel and drinking tea, and what’s my heart’s relationship to getting work done?” This is what I get right now:

“My heart is longing for a certain spaciousness that the novel and tea are reaching for, but what would work even better, is to take 15 minutes and go out into the backyard, and breathe in the air. Listen to the birds. And on my way out, set the tea water to boiling.

Then, my heart is longing is to show up and do the work in front of me. I can take my cup of tea, and pick the three most alive tasks, and get to work on them this morning.”

You see- the answer was neither a novel nor piling through tasks. Instead, my heart guided me to access spaciousness, and to connect with what’s alive in the work.

The real discipline came in being willing to stop the train, taking the time to ask and listen in my heart. And my heart put me into a completely different system of circulation, beyond the choices my ego was contemplating.

This does take time, effort, and discipline to achieve. But, it’s far less exhausting, and far more satisfying than the alternative: letting the whims of the ego run the show.

And, you just may find yourself being a lot more effective in your business.

How about for you? What’s your relationship to discipline and flow in your business during an average work day?

It’s no joke, many small businesses end at a young age. Their owners, burnt out, broke, or simply preoccupied, give them up for good.

It can be a long, winding, rough path to get a business going. I’ve heard the same stories you have about the overnight sensations. But, for the vast majority of small business owners, it can take a lot of elbow grease and a lot of time before there seems to be any solidity.

When someone does move the sewing machine back into their home office, dusts off the resume, and heads back out into the job market, sometimes my heart aches for the missed opportunity and broken dreams. Other times I just nod, thinking it’s the best choice.

When is it which? And, more personally, how do you know whether you should stick it out and keep pushing, or give up?

A baseline assumption before we begin.

There are obvious questions: Are you providing a quality product or service? Do people need, use, and pay for things similar to what you’re offering? I’m going to start with the assumption that these are already established.

The real issue is that business comes, but not easily. You’ve been working really hard at it, and you’re exhausted and wondering if you should give up.

What does it really take to raise a business?

It doesn’t take an MBA from Harvard, or anywhere else. It doesn’t take spiritual enlightenment (although a grounded spiritual practice helps tremendously). And, it certainly doesn’t take a once-in-a-era miracle.

But it does take certain qualities. Five of them, in fact.

The Top Five Qualities

Everyone I’ve seen who’s gone from struggling to successful in business has been able to access these qualities, perhaps imperfectly and inconsistently, but they’ve got ‘em, and they cultivated them. And it pays off.

1. Vulnerability.

It’s okay to take off that armor, Lancelot. It’s too heavy and hot, anyway. Vulnerability is when you are open to letting things in. Want more money? You need to be vulnerable. Need help from others? Vulnerability. Learning about your blind spots, or something new about marketing… yup, vulnerability.

It’s the ability to say “I don’t know.” It’s the willingness to risk falling in love, and opening your heart. It’s when you say: “I can’t do it on my own. Can you help me?”

On this entire list, I rate vulnerability as the single most important success indicator for small business owners. Without it, you’re alone in the world, and can’t receive what you need. And, it’s hard to access the other four qualities without it.

2. Creativity.

Here’s how I define creativity: the ability to see how unlike things go together. Kinda like Sufism and Business, right? Creativity isn’t the power to create something out of nothing- it’s the insight to see what odd, strange, unlike things can be combined to be useful.

This helps in creating unique offers. This helps in finding a place to fit your home office when there isn’t a spare bedroom. This helps in spotting opportunities and niches.

It’s actually a poetic quality- and successful business owners cultivate this ability to fit odd pieces together in (sometimes) useful ways.

3. Trust. (or Faith.)

The stereotype is working seven days a week, late into the night, getting it all done. Yet, you can’t work ten to twelve hours every day and be truly productive. Things start to break down. You miss opportunities, fall blind to miracles. You need spaciousness.

And to get that spaciousness, you have to have trust. Without the deep trust in your heart that you are going to be okay, you can’t wrestle your to-do list to the ground and leave things, sometimes important things, undone, so you can access your creativity and aliveness.

4. Sovereignty.

You are in charge. It’s important, with vulnerability, to get advice, to learn, to let other sources of wisdom and experience guide you. But, when it comes down to it, you set the course.

Your business is a precious being, a vehicle for hopes, dreams, and transformative work in the world. It can provide a living for you, and perhaps others, and can help many people with some problem that’s creating struggle for them.

Finding inside yourself the willingness to act, sometimes with less care and more boldness. To take actions and make decisions, even if they are at times messy and imperfect. To be the captain of your ship. Without Sovereignty, you don’t have a business, you have a job.

5. Patience.

Wait for it… wait for it… Actually, the quality of Patience isn’t about waiting for your ship to come in. Patience is described by Sufi author and scholar Neil Douglas Klotz, in his book The Sufi Book of Life, as a pathway:

“This pathway can also help us work with projects or relationships where progress is likely to be slow, over a long period of time. The heat of patience and discomfort may, like a cooking compost pile, produce amazing future effects, ones we couldn’t dream of…”

You aren’t going to make (six figures, a million, insert your lofty goal here) by New Year’s. Or by next New Year’s. But maybe three or five New Year’s hence, you just might. If you have Patience.

Can you order these Qualities on Amazon?

Uh… no. You can’t. That’s the troubling thing with these kinds of intangibles, you can’t buy them, you can’t create them, you can’t quantify them.

So, how do you get them? Let’s do the quick one-two-three.

Keys to Cultivating the Top Five Qualities.

• Start with Vulnerability.

As I said above, the keystone quality is Vulnerability. Although all the qualities tend to help develop each other, that initial willingness to open up and let things in is the first step.

There are many ways to cultivate that vulnerability in yourself and the most effective I’ve found personally is some kind of spiritual practice, because it connects me to a larger Reality.

Whether it’s devotional prayer, silent meditation, study of sacred texts, yoga or other movement, connecting to Source is a wonderful way to soften your heart, without flopping over and collapsing into powerlessness.

Our free workbook, Getting to the Core of Your Business, involves a simple, powerful, ancient Sufi practice called Remembrance that can be done in moments.

• Identify the quality you’re needing in the moment.

Rather than trying to get them all at once, all the time, notice what you’re trying to do, and see if you can use the vulnerability of “I don’t know” to ask your heart which quality is really needed in the moment.

Your heart may surprise you- you may have thought you needed Sovereignty to force something through, when in fact you needed Patience, or Trust. Identifying which Quality allows you to proceed with focus and intention

• Bring that softness of heart to the Quality in question.

We tend to have assumptions about what ‘creativity’ or ’sovereignty’ really is. And those assumptions come up most strongly when we are needing them and wishing we had them.

By bringing Vulnerability to your approach of Patience, for example, you can ask in your heart: “Please help me experience Patience in this situation. I’m curious what it looks like here?” Again, allow the vulnerability and a willingness to be surprised.

These Qualities are intangibles and hard to grasp mentally, especially when you’ve got a long a to-do list and you feel stuck. And yet, by giving them some attention and space, rather than trying to to push through anyway, you’ll find that you begin to cultivate them, and your business will start to shine with success, too.

And you?

What’s your experience with cultivating these qualities?

I want to riff off of the post I put up the end of April, How Productivity Contributes to Global Warming and Debt. The issue, as I was talking about then, was capacity. And yet, there’s an awful lot of things to get done in business.

This week’s article addresses the myth that I also touch upon on my website proper: The Most Dangerous Myth. Many people, when they go solo in business, think that’s it: “I’m solo in business.” Amelia Earhart flew solo, too. She may have accomplished a lot, but I don’t want you ending up where she did.

Take a gander at the article: The Myth of Being Successfully Solo in Business.

This myth is dangerous, is powerful, is alluring, and it will kill you and your business, quicker than almost anything else will. It’s a hard one to shake, I know because I was caught in it for years longer than I needed to be, so let’s talk about it.

What’s your heart telling you? Are you flying solo too much for your own good? What do you need to break your solo-ness?

Hey folks, I’m just super excited- I’ve been accepted as a blogger in the business section of The Huffington Post.

It’s a big deal- whether or not you agree with the politics (it’s a very progressive-leaning publication) it gets a LOT of views. The connection happened by magic, and I’m excited, as I said, but also feeling vulnerable. It’s a big stage to be on, even if it’s just a small section of it.

Here’s the post: How Productivity Contributes to Global Warming and Debt.

My request, dear Heart of Business readers, is if you’re willing- please go to the article, read it, and comment on it right there on the HuffPost site.

And, if you like what you read, click “I’m a fan.” I’d love to pick up followers and popularity there, so I can stay.

Thanks for celebrating with me. It’s very wild.

I was watching a video that Presentation Zen was highlighting. It was David Heinemeier Hansson who was presenting on how to make money online. I found the video is worth watching, simply because what he’s saying is so obvious, and he’s being a bit rude and tongue-in-cheek about it, in a nice way.

I’ve had many clients come to me over the years, and all they want, they tell me, is to get to $1500 or $2500/month in client fees.

Now, I’m not knocking those as goals- they are very worthy goals. You can eat and pay rent making that much. No caviar, and no big Hawai’ian vacations on that amount, but you can make it.

Don’t blink, ’cause you’re going to $4000.

Most of the folks I’ve worked with who put the various structures, strategies in place, with heart and sincerity, go right past that number. In fact, I’ve seen many people blink twice, and suddenly they’re at $4000/month, or more.

For some, that seems like a lot of money to bring in, and it’s not just a hill o’beans. And yet, let’s think about it.

What does your average service provider charge? Let’s not even get into products, or group rates, or packaging your services. Just good ol’ fashioned price-per-session.

$70? $90? Something in that range?

Now, let’s say you have 10 clients/week. That’s two days of seeing three clients, and one day of seeing four clients, with two days to do marketing and business, and you still get the weekends off.

Well, 10 clients x $70= $700. $700 x 4= $2800. Voilá! There you go.

But you don’t even need 40 clients.

10 x 4 = 40 clients. However, if you’re really honest with your heart, and with your clients, you’ll realize that most people really do need to see you more than once a month, if they are going to make real progress in the way that you help them.

Let’s say they see you twice a month. So instead of needing 40 clients, you need 20, that see you twice a month. And let’s say an average client sticks around for three months, although truth be told, it’s probably longer than that.

20 clients every three months= 80 clients per year.

Okay, now, let’s say you live in a semi-urban area, with an average population of 50,000 people. Do you think you can find 80 people a year out of those 50,000 people? Or how about if you live in a small city, where there’s 100,000, or 250,000?

It’s not like falling off a log, but it’s not so hard, really.

It’s not hard- unless.

The numbers work out. Our clients tend to get there.

But what does make it so hard? What do you think? Why are so many people struggling to have enough clients? I’ve got my thoughts, but I’d like to hear from you.