The Reluctant Entrepreneur: Turning Dreams into Profits

PUSHING HARD FOR PROFITS

Some years ago, when I was still actively running several businesses, I decided to review a month’s worth of my daily task lists. I was immediately struck by how much of my time was spent prodding people. I was supposed to be an idea man. Yet, by memo, meeting, fax, e-mail, and phone, more than half of my working hours were dedicated to poking, urging, encouraging, bothering, badgering, and sometimes threatening perfectly good and competent managers.

There’s a good reason for that. No matter how good your ideas are, if you don’t stay on top of your people to make sure they’re put into action, your business will not make as much progress as it could.

Even now, as a consultant, pushing is a big part of my job. Today, for instance, I sent out, for probably the twenty-fifth time, a memo on a multimillion-dollar product idea. This idea has been bandied about for three or four years. It’s a Big Idea and a good one. Its implementation is, admittedly, complicated. But it’s an idea that can be (and should have been) implemented. Because this particular idea is complicated (even messy), there has been a tendency to put it on hold. To incubate it.

Sometimes that strategy makes sense. Especially when the idea is fresh and poorly analyzed. In the rush of a first thought, important considerations can be overlooked. If you set aside brand-new ideas for a few weeks or months, you will often discover that they are not as good as you once thought. And so you don’t go forward ...