I recently spoke with one of my readers about his small business, when she all of a sudden declared she felt like a business failure. I was somewhat surprised by her statement as I thought she had established a nice little business, was making enough money and had a good work/life balance. She explained that someone had started in her line of business and his business had grown faster and she felt she could not compete with this business, she still worked form home while this competitor had already opened the third shop in the the state. She almost declared herself a failure. I asked her what her intention had been for her business when she started.

She began to explain, that she wanted to work from home since she wanted to be home for her child and still have an income and not lose touch with the work she loved. It was always clear to her that she could only spend about 10 - 20 hours of work per week, but that would give her the income and the professional life she needed, while getting her work/life balance right.

As she was telling me about her business, she began to lighten up - as she realized she had done exactly what she set out to do - far from a failure she was a success. She had made the same mistake we all make from time to time, she had compared herself to a business that clearly had different goals. Sometimes our ego gets the better of us or in cases like this the worst of us, which is why I believe it important to write your goals down on a piece of paper and look at it each week, to help you to focus and realign your actions with your goals.

Any business is only a failure when it is literately failing, like running out of money failing, if that is not the case you are a successful business. Looking at the competition is all about seeing what is happening in the market and learning from the comparison how to achieve your vision and goals, not to limit yourself to what your competition is doing.

The vision for your business should go beyond comparing yourself to your competition, comparing yourself will often limit your vision. — ST.

When my wife went to university in London in the eighties one of her professors was of the opinion that the education was wasted on women, since they would leave university, get married and have children. While nobody says these things anymore in public, we still seem to have the same mentality.

Today I travel around the world and speak with all kinds of people about micro-business, like home-business. Often the conversation includes the so called “skill shortage”, felt especially hard in Australia these days. When I question this alleged shortage, I’m always surprised about how little consideration is given to well skilled and educated parents - mainly women - sitting at home looking after the family.

After one of these conversations today, I was reminded of this professor and began wondering if he was right with his opinion in the final analysis? Trivially, his assertion that educating women is a waste, is completely nonsensical, but the final result to the economy seems to suggest his analysis could be right. How else can it be explained that we ignore this massive “skills resource” sitting at home.

The technology we at WinWeb have developed allows for work from anywhere at anytime, others have done the same in other areas? Where is this “skill shortage”? The truth in my opinion is more the fact that we often block this remote working possibility from our minds, but why?

If you consider the skills potential of parents, if each parent would only contribute one hour on average per week to their learned professions. This would be a staggering number of man hours per week.

The benefits for the home working parent would be very tangible too. They could show a almost uninterrupted work history, stay in touch with their profession and would therefor find it much easier to get back into full-time employment after the kids have grown up.

To often my conversation partners look somewhat bewildered at my initial suggestion, but then often admit they had never thought about this possibility.

It is not a waste to educate women or any parent, it is however a waste to treat parents as if they do not exist in work terms. I consider it an insult to each parent and unbelievably damaging for our economy. — ST.

According to a Staples, the office supply people, survey of 300 small business owners, 51% dream about their business. Seventy per cent of these “dream-workers” reported that they get ideas and find solutions to their small business problems, while dreaming.

Dreams - alpha brainwaves - can allow us to learn while we sleep. This is especially true if we can become “lucid” during our dreams, which means we know that we are dreaming.

In 2003 the British bank NatWest generated a different survey, in which 72% of 1,000 respondences had work related dreams. 48% reported waking up in a cold sweat - not surprising really, must have been a dream about banks!

This gives new meaning to, “It’s all in your dreams!” ST.

What is business success? I guess it can be different things to different people, for some it may be the big pay day when they sell the business. For others it may be getting your business to tick over, generate a good income and still have time for your family. Have you asked yourself what business success means for you? It is a question worth asking and answering for yourself!

It occurs to me that being successful in business, whatever your precise small business goal may be, means one thing - Leadership! The simple fact however is that leaders will fail more often than others, so failure has to be part of your way to success. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you will get there.

        Success Is A Staircase of Failures.

Failure is a prize you need to pay for being successful, a leader will know that. If you look at what leaders do, you will understand that failure is an essential part of the course and not such a big problem as society at large will have you believe. The reason for this is quite simply the fact that any problem, in this case being successful, has not a single simple answer. Different strategies will have to be tested and some will not work. This is where you see the difference between a gambler and a leader, or risk-taker.

If you are running a small business, home business or any other micro business, you are probably already successful. Because, here is the thing, it is not the big pay day that is your success, but what gets you to your big pay day is success.

Being a successful small business owner requires commitment, passion and risk-taking, or as some would call it a pioneering spirit. So, don’t complain if the stepping stones to success bruise your feet. Have a great weekend. ST.

A few days ago a colleague sent me a newspaper cutting from the The Times, a piece written by Sathnam Sanghera, his title for this piece

Remote Working? It’s expensive, it’s lonely and there is no going back.

He is talking about remote working, so not quite running you small business from home, but the point he is making is just as relevant to the home business owner. I have written about this before and I absolutely disagree with his conclusion:

“…. But the truth is that remote working has driven me insane. And my advice to anyone considering it is to resist. Avoid Starbucks, avoid the Business Lounge, avoid home. Work in the office like normal people have done for decades. Otherwise you will end up like me, writing this at 2am, dressed in furry pyjamas, a pair of bunny ears flopping dementedly about your head.”

I have now been working from home for over eight years and so have all my colleagues, it certainly has not driven any of us insane and we show non of the other symptoms either. What really worries me about this is the question are we really that dysfunctional? Do we really need an office to have a social life?

When you look at the fact that humans have been working from home for thousands of years, you realise that working from home is the norm, not working from an office. ST.

As a European it is not always easy to understand that Thanksgiving is the biggest holiday in the U.S.. While today is the “Thanksgiving Day“, in reality the celebrations go on until Monday when everyone is back at work - it is by no means a one day affair.

Having had the pleasure of celebrating Thanksgiving with a friends family in Massachusetts in the late eighties, I have always been a little jealous when my U.S. friends and employees leave on wednesday by saying “Happy Thanksgiving”. Because I know the scenes around every small and big dinning-room table, with good food and the much needed family time - especially in todays fast living society.

Thanksgiving is now an almost four hundred year old tradition in the U.S. (1619 - Berkeley Plantation in Virginia), and the holiday was first established by President Lincoln, with specific reference to giving thanks to God. Today however it is widely regarded as a secular and quintessential American holiday.

For many small business owners this will be a time to take stock, it may be the first Thanksgiving, since you started your business. There may be worries about the future, or cause for celebrations. Whatever it is, today of all days, look around yourself and realize how fortunate you are to have family and friends to share this day with. Todays work/life balance should be 100% on the side of life, OK maybe 99% - after all you are reading this.

Happy Thanksgiving from across the pond to all my readers, my friends, my employees and all your families. Stefan

Just got this question, I know there are others questions I have not yet answered, and I have already written my “The Week Ender” post for the week, what the hell, but I’m in the mood to have a go at “The System” again. I think I’ve mentioned before that blogging is therapy for me, and I’m sure some of you might even think I should be in therapy, so there you are.

I’m going to expand this question “slightly” into - I hope Walsh does not mind:

What are some of the social, political and economic issues small business face?

I should remind you that when I talk about small business, I mean 1 to 5 people businesses, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professionals, contractors, freelancers, self-employed, sole-traders and virtual assistants.

Social issues are clearly centered around the work-place, work life and private life. To many work is the central activity in their lives and the stresses and pressures of todays workplace are enormous, overtime, project pressure, sales targets, travel to and from the place of work, to name but a few. This all causes tension in a partnership, family and leads often to a dysfunctional family/private life. For example, we need dating agencies and web-sites to find partners, because we are too busy to find a partner in what used to be a “normal way”, and in this sense we have to be thankful for the service dating agencies and web-sites provide. These issues are prevalent in the group of small business owners too.

Striking the right work/life balance has become a personal choice item, with the advent of home businesses. Businesses run by entrepreneurs, often unhappy with the traditional choices in the work place, who have decided to set their their own work/life balance and run a business, not to grow and dominate the world, but to earn an often higher than average income, while retaining a certain amount of freedom and flexibility in their private lives. Parenting people often see a home business, as a way to have a family and stay active in their chosen field of work.

The growth in these kinds of businesses is explosive, while our society is technologically perfectly capable of sustaining this trend, our social work infrastructure in many cases is not.

This brings us to the political issues these micro and small businesses face. The fact that our society is wholly unprepared for this revolution in the work place and small business environment, has to do with the fact, that governments often receive no advice from actual participants in this new home based micro business economy. Current advisors are from big business, with virtually no experience or knowledge about micro business issues.

Of late universities and other institutions have started to produce a vast amount of valuable data, about micro businesses, which is often meaningless to the political elite in the western world. It is, in my opinion, wrong to expect our politicians to guide us into this new area of explosive micro business growth. Experience tells us that any decisions made will be often too late or even counter productive, market forces are much faster and more targeted to help these growing sectors develop.

In my discussions with politicians, civil servants and often big business, the term “Small Business Infrastructure” is rarely understood. The best we can hope for is the insight that less red-tape is going to help, for some politicians this is a frightening thought.

Economically, I feel we are at the beginning of a truly “golden age” of entrepreneurship. Our technical infrastructure, the internet, powerful micro-computer systems and mobile technology have helped to transform our way of doing business. The last piece in the puzzle was the advent of the software as a service industry, which took longer to develop than I had foreseen. With an almost transparent internet and IT infrastructure, the focus is getting back to the business objectives, even in very small businesses. If this is extended by a “Small Business Infrastructure“, which includes 24/7 technical and customer support, additional service offerings like bookkeeping, telephone answering, and similar services, the survival rate of small business startups, vastly improves.

If small business owners use outsourcing and bootstrapping techniques as a matter of cause, the fixed cost (over-head) structure in each of these micro businesses can lead to super efficient and hyper valuable home or micro businesses. I believe you can start a business with $20/£10 a month and grow your business, risk free (without loans) on the side, while still in employment, until the turnover is big enough to justify quitting ones day job.

You may feel about a business on the side as you will, the fact remains this is going on as we speak, trends we see in the online usage patterns of our OnlineOffice, certainly support this theory.

At the same time business failure is far less an issue, as the risk associated with these ventures is very small, with the right mental attitude of the entrepreneur towards failure, the learning effect of a failure can be enormous. Especially in Europe the old-fashined anti-risk strategies only serve to leave us further behind the other global economies in terms of technological leadership. The U.S. is testament to what an economy with a “normal prospective on business failure” can do.

Emerging economies like China, India and some others are learning from the U.S. and will outstrip our economies within the next decades, unless our politicians, will finally stop putting barriers up for micro businesses.

Last and by no means least, the positive ecological impact of a largely home based economy can not be underestimated. Endless hours of travel to and from the work place, meetings, office heating, and so on could be a thing of the past. Rural economies will be revitalized, multi-generation household will no longer be a thing of the past, this all will have a tremendous positive impact on our social infrastructure, child-care, crime and drug abuse, to name but a few.

While I have often quoted this in the past “it is not the answers that are the problem, knowing the question is”, I’m often left feeling with politicians it is both, not only do they not know the question, they don’t know the answers either. While I accept it is easy for me to sit here and say this, it does not alter the fact that it is only too often true.

It is almost the weekend now, and I’m off to see 10cc, or what is left of them. ST.

Now that I given you a recommendation on a book to read over the weekend or made you ponder your time management, you may also just consider having a nice weekend with family and friends. That is exactly what I’ll be doing - it is firework & bonfire night or Guy Fawkes night in the UK - this guy tried to blow up parliament, he did not succeed, that is what is celebrated here. I’m often a bit fuzzy about it all, since Halloween gets mixed in with this - but I don’t really care either-way.

We have a family tradition, that we invite all our friends to join us for this evening every year. We learned that Christmas & New Year are often difficult times to meet with everyone, so we have chosen to meet on a “lesser” occasion during the year - and it works out great every year. So I will be spending my time with friends and family - I may only see once a year, and I’m looking forward to it.

What are you doing this weekend? Why not pick up the phone right now, and get some family and friends together and celebrate Guy Fawkes capture - I’m sure you can come up with a story why it might be important to you, even if you live in the US, Canada, Australia or India - it will be total BS, but who cares?

Even better is when you don’t need a reason, just get together and have a nice weekend, I know I will!

Have a nice one, Stefan.

How often do we sit in front of our TVs or computers and see people in need, or the environment in trouble, and many more distressing things. Every-time, I wish I could change it all, the truth is I can’t - but we all can help.

The type of help I’m referring to here will not make the headlines, will not get you noticed by everybody, but it will help. I’m talking about pro-bono work, or sponsoring an organisation with a service or product you offer. I believe it can be better resources or money spend, than doing google ads, it is a good bootstrapping technique - and a win-win situation for you and the sponsored organisation.

For example, the College StartUp blog has an article today about “5 ways to get “paid” for pro bono work“, they talk about the marketing benefits you may gain by doing good. Every small business or start-up business, like SOHO-, SME, SMB-, Micro-, Lifestyle-, Home-, DIY-, Hobby-, Boomer- or Personal business, like professional, contractors, freelancer, self-employed, sole-trader and virtual assistants has something to give, which could make a difference.

You may not be able to change the world, but if we all did our bit, we could make a hell of a difference. ST.

Anja Merret is hosting the “Blog Carnival of Observations on Life” and it seems to me some of the articles in there are really good, so go and have a look and see what takes your fancy.

The Next 45 Years blog is hosting the “Personal Development & Happiness Carnival“, and talks about how to grow your “Relationship Bank Account“, which makes for great reading and many other very interesting entries.

Don’t bother clicking on my entry, if you have been reading my blog, you will not have missed this entry. ST.