If you run a small business, your life is ridiculously busy. And if you have a significant other, spouse, kids or anyone else that deserves a chunk of your time, well then your life is probably almost impossibly busy. However, that doesn’t mean your business has to suffer for it. And if all you’re managing to do every day is just take care of clients, put out fires, and handle the day to day tasks of running your business, trust me, it is suffering.
A while back, my hubby and I were on our way back from one of my speaking engagements, and decided to pick up dinner to go. So we called one of our favorite teriyaki joints (Seattle’s Best, on 1st Ave S), to place an order. Since it’s a little out of the way for us normally, we hadn’t eaten there in a while. So we were rather excited to have it conveniently located on our route home. Then life got even better… The woman who took my husband’s order asked if we’d like brown rice instead of white!
My next door neighbor is always talking about leaving her job. She’s very artsy craftsy, and had been making all kinds of different knit, sewn and stitched items—from hats to little beaded bags, to funky zipper pulls. Each time she starts work on a new type of creation, she says “This is gonna be the one that lets me quit my job.” Here’s the thing though…
In business, we learn through everything we do and it influences all that we try and repeat. When something new comes along, we tend to view it with either enthusiasm or skepticism, or in some cases a bit of both. Such is true with the advent of Social Media.
These days, "attraction" is a huge buzzword. If you're in business, you've probably already heard of attraction marketing, wealth attraction, client attraction, business attraction, the law of attraction, and there's even something called success attraction. That's a lot of attraction to keep track of!
So here’s the deal…After 16 years and six business, I’ve learned a thing or two about what it really takes to build a successful business. And I’ll tell ya, most of what my Mom told me—and most of what I believed going into the first four—turned out to be dead wrong. In each of my early businesses, the busier I got the more of my life I gave up. Soon I was working ridiculous hours but I didn’t have a whole lot in my bank account to show for it. I was basically chained to my computer.
Perhaps one of the greatest rewards for any company is when they can unleash the power of their customer's imaginations. Our imagination is a supremely powerful human gift. Imagination drives everything that is wonderful about human culture. Every achievement we've made, every piece of art ever created, every book written, all comes from the same wellspring - our imagination. We are never more completely, uniquely, wonderfully human than when we are imagining.
In a previous post, I cataloged the many challenges of Walt Disney's career. It seemed to everyone, including his brother Roy, that just when things were going smoothly, Walt would find a way to court disaster yet again. Adversity became a way of life for Disney studio's. It they weren't struggling, they (and I use the collective team advisedly - I actually mean Walt) weren't happy.
In the Disney Theme Parks, two of Walt's great loves are on open display. The first comes from Walt's inherent gift for storytelling. Most Disney rides are more than just a jolt of adrenaline. The thrills are seamlessly integrated into a story. Whether it's Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain, The Tower of Terror or Indiana Jones, there is a distinct storyline to each ride, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Walt was, at his core, a natural born story teller.
If you set out to entertain families, you have an inherent challenge in front of you. Successful family entertainment has to appeal not just to one one person, but a group of distinct individuals. In the average family, you have several demographic and psychographic divides to bridge: males and females, age groups ranging from grandpas and grandmas (or great grandpas and great grandmas) to newborns, different education levels, different areas of interest, different levels of patience, different tastes in humor, different thresholds for motion sickness.
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