The primary indicator of a successful business is rarely discussed: The enduring passion of the owner for the purpose of the business.
Only the owners enduring passion for a business can pull it through every obstacle of the difficult journey of conducting a business. Without passion, the business is doomed from the start; regardless of whether the business idea is good or not.
I created this business vetting mindmap for my wife. She has lots of business ideas and I wanted to give her a way to vett any business in 10 minutes or less. To accomplish that I needed the tool to be visually exciting. The goal is to channel initial excitement into discovering whether excitement has the potential of turning into an enduring passion.
The Roots of Business Failure
There are many (Mostly owner-related) reasons a business can fail:
- Inflexibility
- Inability to work with people
- Cheap when should be generous
- Wasteful when should be frugal
- Inability to delegate
- Poor administration skills
- Poor marketing & Sales skills
- Poor financial skills
- Not a large enough market for the product
- Strong competition (Without the above handicaps)
We all have weaknesses in some of these areas. No one person has all the skills necessary to run every facet of a business. That’s one crucial reason why the owner must have an enduring passion for the purpose of the business: To be motivated to overcome or compensate for their own business weaknesses.
An Extension of Purpose
Discovering the right business for you is as hard and easy as living a purposeful life. Your Optimal Business is an extension of your own unique purpose. You could go through the yellow pages all day long and not find it because the discovery is an inside job.
By the way, your purpose doesn’t have to be grand; It just has to be yours.
Whether you love being behind your own bar and talking with the customers, writing a book about plants, flying an airplane or taking care of your family while working with your hands . . . it’s all up to you. Frankly, I don’t think any purpose is better than another in the grand scheme of things. They all fit together in a worldwide mosaic with everyone providing for each other’s needs.
It’s a matter of knowing yourself, knowing the people in your world and asking the question, What can I do to help?
Ideally, you want to live and run your business in a way that, even if you’re only mildly successful from the worlds point of view, you wouldn’t have it any other way.
Employ Yourself
Working for a “Company” is new thing from an historical perspective. Before the industrial revolution people just provided for themselves as best they could. Your “Job” was everything you did that day to provide for yourself and family.
As more “Companies” go out of business there are less “Jobs” in the modern sense. However, there is plenty of work to be done.
You might call this article the small business companion article to Jobs For Hard Times. See that article for an extensive list of business oppurtunities that will always exist in good times and in bad.
Download the Mindmap
The Business Vetting Checklist is meant to be viewed as a Mindmap. To do that you’ll need to download the MindManager Viewer. View the mindmap starting at the top right and go clockwise around to each question.
The mindmap download, below, has been formatted into PDF form:
