When I was young I hated rules and in a funny way I loved rules. I hated them because they were limiting and I was creative and "innovative" as a child. Not a characteristic every parent longs for in their offspring. I eventually realized that I loved rules and structure because they allowed me to understand the boundaries of where I could go and be successful. Just like in any game I couldn't win unless I knew the rules. Once I learned the rules I then was free to create my own path. One of the Keys to business and wealth, and I don't mean being rich as much as I mean having more than you need, starts with knowing that there are actually rules that can help you be successful. They are there to point out the order of things not the limitations.
One of the keys to business and wealth is discovering the rules and then following them. If you do, you can grow into being successful and if you master them then you will thrive at business and thrive financially. If you strive to master the rules of business and finance you will also avoid a lot of pain in life. But let's back up a minute. You might be asking, "do the rules really help me and not slow me down?" Well if you're like me you want to know how.
The rules we will talk about can help you get to where you're going faster, safer and more efficiently. One way our business would have grown much faster is if we had actually invested money in marketing and sales for ourselves. We always thought that we didn't have the time or couldn't spare the money. The truth was that if we had taken the time to plan, execute and invest the money we could have cut the time it took to get profitable by at least half, if not more. We also would have saved tens of thousands of dollars. Think about it like priming a water pump. It takes a minimum amount of water in a given period of time to prime the pump and get a vacuum that brings all the water you need out of the well. If you don't put enough water in or you don't commit enough water in time then the water is wasted and you can't prime the pump. So in your business and mine the water is the money. Here is how that played out for us.
Kathryn and I were always afraid of more debt and wasting money so we would just bleed enough money into the business to survive instead of thrive. We didn't fully realize that if we had spent the money up front instead of over a year or two then we would have increased our customers and our profit and gotten above critical mass faster. We didn't know the rules about priming the pump. Needless to say there was a lot of stress and pain that didn't have to be and all because of fear and lack of knowledge. We didn't have anyone telling us what the rules were and we didn't know how to find them. Yeah, we knew a lot of rules from life but we didn't know all the rules of business. We didn't even always know what we didn't know. We didn't know the difference between a good investment in council and education and a bad one, so fear took us buy the throat and we just did the best we could. If we had a rule book and a Mentor/Coach then we would have been able to go a lot further, a lot sooner but we didn't know how to find that either. Needless to say, knowing the rules and having a mentor are invaluable to all of us no matter what our sex, age or skill level.
So if I have your attention then stay tuned. Coming up... some really great rules.
