In Small Business You Must Persevere Relentlessly
By Stuart Livesey
For over 20 years I worked as a field officer in the New South Wales Sheriff’s Office. Part of my job was to serve and execute court process in various country towns around the State. In those 20 years I had contact with a thousand or more small businesses and usually that contact was at times of crisis.
When a small business had reached a point where it couldn’t pay its bills I was usually the first one there with court process to start recovery action. When the small business owner had gone beyond the point of no return I was usually the one there to sell up their stock and evict them from the business premises.
Sounds a wonderful job doesn’t it … but it had its good points and not every small business that fell into debt sank to the point where there was no way out but to be sold up and evicted.
Sadly though there were plenty of small businesses that did reach the point of no return and after just a few years it seemed that I could tell from the moment I walked into the business those that would survive and those that would not. It was almost as if they had the scent of death about them right from the start.
Perfect examples were a young mechanic who ran his own business repairing cars in a workshop attached to his house and a much older car salesman who had a business selling one of the leading brand-name cars in Australia. He was the only dealer for that brand in a small but prosperous country town.
The young guy was working in conjunction with his wife who handled all the banking until one day she left him with the kids and took all the money that was in their bank accounts. I thought he was guaranteed to end up out of business because his his wife hadn’t been paying the accounts for months but, even though things got very tough for him, he recovered and there was always something very positive about him.
The older guy ran into some problems when his wife became very ill but his business looked very sound and I couldn’t understand why there were so many negative vibes about him. It didn’t surprise me when, a few months after I first had contact with him, I put the locks on his door. He had a great business but when the going got tough he folded.
Toni and I were talking about that yesterday after we were reviewing some of the contacts that we’d had this week. One couple we talked with just had that air of negativity about them. They’d done a lot of market research before they set up their small business but they’d still managed to make some serious mistakes and they’re on the slide. They did have an opportunity this week to turn their business around but they didn’t take it.
So why do some small business people survive while others have the scent of death about them?
John Wooden - the well-known American basketball coach - seems to have summed it up quite well in his Pyramid of Success. One of the fundamentals in that pyramid is Intentness and what he says about it is so very applicable to small business.
“Stay the course. When thwarted try again; harder; smarter. Persevere relentlessly.”
Your small business does not have to have that scent of death about it if you are prepared to persevere relentlessly.
