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GO IT ALONE!

As you start to set up your business, you must be able to identify the central metrics that will determine your success or failure. This is critical for several reasons:

  • If you can’t yet identify these points, you’re not ready to start the business in earnest.

  • Prioritizing your time and energy is of major importance. You will not have the time to constantly examine every cost and every relationship, so you must have some highly reliable quick measures that tell you how the business is doing—and serve as early warning signs of trouble. You are far more likely to spot a building problem faster through one of your metrics than through the overall profit measures you use.

  • If you don’t get the metrics right, there’s a good chance you’ll lead your start-up to ruin. In Why Smart Executives Fail and What You Can Learn from Their Mistakes, Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business Administration, found that one prescription for disaster is company executives who consistently look at the “wrong scoreboard” and emphasize poor measures of success.

  • You need to get the right focus. By understanding the physics of your business, you are likely to spot the places where you can apply your energy and have a major impact on your profits.



MAKE TIME WORK FOR YOU INSTEAD OF AGAINST YOU

“Once we became profitable, we were no longer fighting time. We turned time to our advantage,” says Inder Guglani, CEO of the company now called Guru.com. He believes that “Most

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GO IT ALONE! Copyright 2004 by Bruce Judson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.