MGIF

Every Monday morning, I make a weekly agenda for myself.  Nothing extensive…just a few important items on which to focus for the week.  Every Friday, I am discouraged at the fact that so few items are crossed off of the list.  It seems like my weekly agenda rarely changes.  This is a problem that many self-employed people or small business owners experience.  While most workers embrace the notion of TGIF, small business owners live in the notion of MGIF, My Goodness It’s Friday!

As a small business owner, my number one priority…day in and day out...is the development of new business.  New business keeps me in business and assures that I can make monthly payroll.  A few core products or services will keep the doors open, but only new business can contribute to expansion or growth.  I am certain that any business owner or commissioned sales rep can sympathize.  As such, our daily grind includes cold calls, lunches, meetings over coffee and evening networking events.  It is a 24 hour a day task chasing down leads and possibilities.  I love it.  But what happens to everything else?

It is common to wake up on a Saturday morning and realize the phone bill was due on Wednesday.  Often we are responding to last Tuesday’s emails while we drink our Sunday morning coffee.  And, how many of us are up proofreading proposals at midnight while Jay Leno makes jokes in the background?  I also teach college courses two to three nights per week, coach my daughter’s softball team and play guitar in a local blues band!   Enterprisers have to live this way.  It is our nature.  So, good enterprisers must develop strategies to avoid the MGIF trap.

First and foremost it is critical that enterprisers hire opposites.  They say in relationships that opposites attract.  I have learned that in business only opposites survive.  When I first started hiring employees and consultants, I had a tendency to hire people just like me.  We ended up with a bunch of scouts trying to defend a fort!  Nobody was taking care of the day-to-day operations.  I learned over time to seek out people who like to do the things I do not like to do or simply do not have the time to do.  Now, I look for investigative characters, people who like to mull over data and think about daily problem solutions.  I seek out conventional workers, who are organized and very systematic; they are critical to new projects because they take care of all the nuts and bolts. 

A lot of my thinking was based on a career development theory set forth by John Holland.  Holland broke down the world of work into six categories: Realist (hands on workers), Investigative (thinkers), Artistic (creative people), Social (those who help others), Enterprising (leaders & risk takers), Conventional (organized and systematic.)  Using these definitions, I thought about which were most like me.  Knowing myself better than I did before and recognizing my deficiencies has helped me better identify opposites.  I am very Social, Enterprising and Artistic by nature.  Therefore, when organizing a training or taking on a new project, I seek out those with the opposite characteristics.  It is a work in progress, but I find business slowly becoming more efficient and effective having deployed this hiring strategy.  I still experience those MGIF moments.  Still, I did find time to write this article on a Friday morning.