Are you one of those business owners who’s not tracking your business activity, tracking your marketing or recording how you spend your time each day working on your business?

If you are – you’re certainly not alone. Very few small business owners are measuring their business activity these days – especially on the internet. And even fewer – way fewer – have an established system for tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of each of the most important parts of their business.

This is a HUGE MISTAKE!

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George Bernard Shaw once said:“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

If Mr. Shaw is correct (and I think he is) then all progress – hence all success – happens when you adapt your surrounding conditions to meet your specific situation.

Think about what that means in your business.

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As small business owners, we tend to make things so much more complex than they need to be.

Think about it. If you run a small business, where do you usually put the majority of your focus? Marketing? generating revenue? Your work with you clients? Things like this?

So often the question you have about your small business deal with how or what, right? You know – how do I generate more revenue or what do I need to do to get more from my marketing? Aren’t these the questions you most often find yourself asking?

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Running is a small business is as much an art as it is a skill – perhaps even more so.

Certainly you can approach your business as though it’s a set of skills you learn and then implement. Yet I’ve found, for myself at least, that running my business like this has no life. You can create success and make tons of money, but what’s the end game?

For me, having my own business is about living life. I utilize my business to aid me in creating the lifestyle I want. My life is not, however, my business just as my business is not my life. What my business gets me is an opportunity to live the life that I – and my family – want. And for us, that’s the end game.

So I tend to approach business as being from part of my lifestyle. Which means I bring everything I know into my business. Certainly that includes marketing strategy, business development, and sales. Yet it also means I look at business with an eye toward spirituality, life purpose and philosophy.

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I’ve always been a do-it-yourselfer. I’ve taught myself a great many things by taking this attitude.

When I bought my first house, I completely gutted it – down to the timbers in most rooms. In other places, we removed and moved walls. For instance, I created a large, walk-in closet in our huge bedroom where there was once a little coat room.

When it came to moving plumbing, rerouting and adding electrical, drywall, replacing subfloor, moving my toilets and bathtub drains – I basically did it all. And in most cases, I took to each project never having done it before.

But at some point, you have to live in  your house. And that means it has to get done – as my wife might say, “be livable.”

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Is your business feeling the crunch of a slow economy?

Last week a client of mine, Kim (name changed to protect the innocent) told me that her business had slowed almost 40% over the past 18 months. As we talked, she explained that she’s doing nothing different with her advertising and marketing – “what worked 18 months ago just isn’t working as well now,” she said.

The reason, Kim felt, is that people have less money to spend.

That certainly makes sense. All our living expenses are on the rise. Groceries cost more, utility bills have increased – in some places dramatically – and the price of a gallon of gas is through the roof. So it only makes sense that consumers have less to spend on what they may perceive as ‘non-essential’ services.

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I have a friend, Larry, who’s a pretty amazing woodworker. Larry apprenticed with a woodworker in Seattle for seven years and then struck out on his own. As Larry had an eye for detail the master woodworker he apprenticed with convinced him that he should build highly customized, one-of-a-kind kitchen and living room tables.

Larry’s work was extraordinary. But while he managed a few customers in those first couple of years, he was barely making a living. It was just too hard to find people who really wanted a custom table.

Yet, for Larry, his heart wasn’t in it. He enjoyed the design and the crafting of these pieces of art, but he wasn’t sure this was his calling.

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