It’s Monday. No coffee. Office phone started ringing at 7:30 in the AM. That’s nothing compared to last week.

Last week was brutal. In fact beyond brutal. Could not get a single person to commit to moving forward.

So was this morning a good sign?

You bet ya. Aside from the coffee, the phone was ringing at 7:30 AM. That means people want to talk to me. When you’re self employed, that, my friends is a good thing.

No matter what last week dumped on you. Monday is the opportunity to start fresh. To make THIS WEEK, the best it can be.

“Monday is the key day of the week.” – Gaelic Quote

Do you dread Monday? Or do you look forward to the exciting things a new week brings?

It was friggin’ cold yesterday morning. Like “who turned off the heat?” cold. When I woke up the thermostat read 62. Way too cold for a dude who recently cut all his hair off. Like any self respecting, warm-blooded person, I turned on the heat. Nothing. Nada. Uh-Oh. And I say Uh-Oh because for anyone who knows me, I am not mechanically inclined in the slightest (I can already feel my man card being pulled).

So I pretend like “I’ve got this”. Head to the basement, proceed to open up the furnace and go to work. I pull at this, tugg at that. Even kicked it a couple of times. Felt pretty good with my diagnosis. Our furnace needed replacing. Of course it did, because if I couldn’t fix it, it was done, kaput. My wife however wanted a second opinion. Smart lady she is (a saint too).

Company guy comes out looks at the furnace, checks the gas. Operational. Check. He heads upstairs to look at the thermostat. First thing he says is “who installed this thing”. I look around for someone to blame. The dog was close, but the guy wasn’t buying it. We proceed to have the following conversation:

Him: Did they have a more complicated one?
Me: Yep, but it was the next one up.
Him: This one may be overkill for what you need
Me: Yeah, but it’s got a touch screen and stuff…

To summarize the rest. He basically said replace the thermostat and we were good to go. As he proceeds to write up my $59 bill. I take one more look at my super cool, touch screen stat. I see something blinking. What is that? It couldn’t really be that simple, could it? Oh yeah, it was. It was the change battery light. So I pull out the pliers, drill, and hammer. Remove the battery cover. Drop in a new AAA battery. And….of course you know the rest. Installed my $60 battery.

I don’t know if I can do it. What if I fail? What do I know about starting a business?

Sure there are lots of questions you need to ask when preparing to start a business. But if you find that the majority of the questions keep you in a state of inaction, maybe you just answered your own question about starting a business.

Certainly there are things that can be taught and learned. The ability to fall on your face and repeatedly get up, it gets easier the more you do it. Sure, by owning your own business you may get your teeth kicked in. In the long run that sense of ownership, the freedom from conformity, the ability to do what you love. They all outweigh the negatives.

There is no time like the present to take that leap of faith. With unemployment in the teens and countless other employed on pins and needles, you have the opportunity to write your own ticket. How can this be bad thing?

Winston Churchill once said “I never worry about action, but only inaction.”. Ever been in a conversation with someone who said “if I had only…”. What goes through your mind? After several conversation, ending the same way, don’t you think “why don’t you just do it?”.

Just do it. Make it today. Let tomorrow take care of itself. It’s by falling that we learned to walk. By walking, we learned to run.

If you’re serious here some great resource for getting started:

Business.GOV

Startup Nation

Entrepreneur.com

If you’re in Michigan:

Michigan Business One Stop

Start a business, register for sales tax, permits, etc…

I am a man-child. Yes I said it…MAN-CHILD. I want to grow up. I want to be better, I really do. Why the sudden self-realization? Well, my better half recently pointed out that my brethren and I seem to be set off by the silliest things.

While watching the Redwings playoff game at our fav watering hole, a gentleman dropped his balls as he was headed to the table (get your mind out of the gutter, pool table balls). The bar owner proceeded to point out that he had lost his balls. This set off a five minute whirlwind of ball related jokes.

I felt a disclaimer was in need. That I needed to explain how as guys, we tend to revert to child like behavior upon certain key words. And losing your balls, is too much to handle. Don’t those melons look good?

I’m going bonkers this morning. Maybe I’ve always been bonkers, we’ll save that debate for another day. Why am I grumpy this morning? An hour and a half of sleep last night. Sucks for sure. Put in to context, I slept so little for a good cause. Every year, for one week our church hosts MCREST. What is MCREST? The Macomb County Rotating Emergency Shelter Team ( MCREST ). It is a group of participating congregations that agree to open up their facilities and their hearts to the homeless community. They provide temporary emergency shelter for the homeless community.

I did an overnight stay on Sunday and another one tonight. (maybe that explains my inability to be productive this week *sigh*, I digress). In spending time with the 30 plus men who are currently without house or home, it put my current situation in perspective. Some of these men have no where to turn, no one to call. Some have jobs, but for various reasons they have come upon hard times.

My main business is automotive related, it sucks right now. Not just a little, but a lot. The challenges facing small and large manufacturing related business in Michigan are sizable to say the least. There are days where I wonder what the point is. Why I’m working for free (not really, but it feels like it). Yet on my worst days, my life is still full of love. Full of people who care what happens to me. I still have a JOB. I still have my HOME.

As men what we do, what we have, seems to define us. When you take that away….

What is amazing about getting to know these men, is their resolve. Their inability to allow their circumstance to taint their outlook on life. That every day is a new day, with a fresh start. Another opportunity to be better than yesterday. And if the least of us can do it, by God so can I.

Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down. ~Charles F. Kettering

Sales is an interesting occupation. There are those who believe in the science of selling and those who believe in the art of selling. I am part of the group that lies somewhere in between. If you’re yawning already, I know it sounds like start of some long, drawn out rant. It isn’t. In fact just the opposite. It’s just that something happened today during a sales call that wanted to share.

First let me ask a question…are you most likely to buy from a salesman you don’t know, or a friend? I know silly question. 9 times out of 10 it’s going to be the friend.

Right, so whats my point? I had an enrollment for a recent case I had closed. While in that meeting my new customer informs me that Jackie (names have been changed to protect the innocent : ) had just purchased a plan, but ours looked much better. Jackie comes over, starts asking questions about the plan. I start answering questions, when out of the blue my new customer starts selling all the features, benefits, pricing, etc for me.

What did I do? Did I cut off my customer so I could be the one explaining everything? Heck no, I shut up is what I did. My new customer did all the work for me. I jumped in where needed, kept silent when not.

It’s not always easy to just be quiet and listen, after all we want to sell. But if you haven’t heard before, you’re going to hear it know. Telling is not selling, and by not being quiet at the appropriate times we sometimes end up buying back what we just sold.

It’s no secret that the automotive industry is struggling, that manufacturing in this country will never be what it was in it’s heyday. Why am I discussing the state of the automotive/manufacturing industry? Because my business is directly affected by it. What I do is tied directly to how the A/M sector is doing. As you can probably gather, business ain’t good. But it ain’t good for a whole lot of people in this industry.

So what do you do when things aren’t going well? I suppose there are a couple of options:

1. Stick your head in the sand – This would be the “pretend it’s not really happening method”, not highly recommended

2. Take your lumps and fight through it – This would be the “tough as nails approach”, this is highly recommended.

The two options given are definatly extremes of one another. Yet in reality, while we try as entreprenuers to be highly upbeat and postive. The law of averages states we can’t maintain that all of the time (although some people beat those averages on a regular basis).

In being real as the tag line states, I found myself in a funk wondering, “what the hell is going on here?”. I had quite a bit on my plate, no sense of where the bottom was, or how to fix it. At the same time, I found myself surrounded by some very upbeat, positive, and supportive people. My theory is that even when things are bad, they aren’t bad for everyone at the same time. I suppose this is the Law of Large Numbers in work here.

In surrounding yourself using the Law of Large Numbers, you quickly realize to get your stuff together and not dwell on how bad things are. The easy thing is to complain, to quit. Even the best of friends is only going to give you so much ear for complaints. You’re on your own after that.

When things are going bad, it’s easy to be paralyzed by the fear of uncertainty. But, come on, didn’t we jump right over that when we took the leap into self-employment? Something to think about…

Living well despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Biography

I rode the Canadian train system from Vancouver BC to Montreal one summer. I’ve done the math and choose to rent. My dream house is a yurt. The word “Knowing” is painted on my living room wall. My Aspie son teaches me more every day than my undergrad degree did. Trader Joe’s rocks. I’m part of a 30-day intention group that has been convening every day for more than a year. Thrift stores are treasure troves. Organic food is just another name for what we all used to eat 150 years ago. But they didn’t have internet then, so I’d rather be living now so organic could be invented.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking

…Anita Roddick