Martial Arts World News Magazine - Volume 22 | Special Edition

EXTRAORDINARY MARKETING
The Great Fallacies When You
Start Your Business (Part 1)
By Grandmaster Stephen Oliver
When you first become self-employed there are often a series of fallacies that creep
into your thinking without even being recognized or questioned.
The following is far from an exhaustive set of these fallacies—
but, clearly some of the major ones. To those of you who have
been self-employed for some period of time — I apologize for
belaboring what may appear obvious to you from your experience.
1. Now that you are self-employed you get to “set your own
hours.” There’s a joke. Once you become truly self employed,
the first indication may be that queasy feeling in the pit of your
stomach that is your payroll, home payment and lease payment
all coming due at the same time. My first time — to the best of my
recall — was when suddenly I had $35,000+ due at
the beginning of the month with about $4,000 on
hand five days before. I dare you to put in your
40 hours when you are trying to make payroll
and insure that the lease is paid on time. The
reality, of course, is that as they transition
from employee to business owner then to employer,
most small business owners find that
they go from a relatively fixed time schedule,
guaranteed income and the ability to “turn-off”
their work when they leave the office, to
100 hour weeks, getting paid last,
if at all, and being mentally “on”
24 hours per day, seven days
per week.
2. Adding employees
means I have to do less
myself. A great quote, which
I’m afraid I can’t remember
where I got it from, is “Always
inspect what you expect.
That’s the way you get respect.”
Obviously, one person cannot
do everything, and the only
route to growth is adding additional people. That being said, sometimes
the added value of the person is outweighed by the amount
of supervision required to insure that individual’s productivity and
contribution. There are two truths of employees:
A. An owner will ALWAYS care more about the results than an
employee.
B. Without aligned purposes and proper supervision — any
employee (with rare exceptions) will ultimately detract from rather
than add to the quality of your operation.
3. I’ll build up my business then have an asset to sell. Sorry
about the wakeup call — but who are you going to sell it to? I’ve
been approached to buy schools and seen desperate owners try
to sell their businesses. You know the reality is you can only sell a
karate school to a karate instructor — and that usually that means
a Black Belt or employee in your school. If you are lucky enough to
find one with a “burning desire” and a huge nest egg, more power
to you. More likely, when you decide to move on, you may be
able to slowly turn the school over to an employee with a monthly
payout. However don’t be surprised if they can’t run it as well as
you do. And, what looked like a good deal for you changes rapidly
when their finances are on the ropes and they are on the verge of
eviction. I’ve accomplished this successfully, as have several of my
friends — we’ll review this more later — but it’s really harder than it
may seem to be at first.
4. The staff will run the show. I’ll just stop in and make the
deposits and keep my own training high. First, see point #2 above,
then realize that running a school profitably is difficult enough. A
poorly-trained volunteer or poorly paid staff is highly unlikely to
keep things running Everything I Wish I Knew When I Was 22 at a
level to support your lifestyle and to keep the school running at a
high level. If they are running it really well, then their compensation
and lifestyle better reflect their skill set pretty quickly, or they just
may end up doing extremely well — across the street from you!
More to come next time....
GRANDMASTER STEPHEN OLIVER, is a 9th degree black belt and is the founder and CEO of
Mile High Karate schools, and founder of the Martial Arts Wealth Mastery Program.
70 MARTIAL ARTS WORLD NEWS VOLUME 22 | SPECIAL EDITION