I enjoy pulling information from outside the printing industry into it.

As in, how can we apply what’s being done elsewhere to shop owners. There’s so many good business books including Traction, High Output Management, and one I’ve recently read, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

The last one was written by Ben Horowitz who’s a 1990’s internet entrepreneur. He’s an internet cowboy who’s grown companies, lost it all, and done it again.

His book has wild stories about lessons learned and trend spotting, but I pulled 4 quotes that had a direct impact on us a small business owners:

“I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.”

• Having a sense of intensity and sharing that with your team can go a long way
• Artificial deadlines for us as owners, helps prioritize tasks that actually need to get done or not
• For the 10 things that come up everyday, are they “important” or a “urgent”? Important drives the business forward, “urgent” tends to be a distraction hidden in “importance”

“A few things about struggle: Don’t put it all on your shoulders, get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats. If you play long enough and you might get lucky. Don’t take it personally. – Everybody makes mistakes. Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes.”

• We let our ego of working more to fix problems drive us crazy. An issue came up? “I’ll just fix it.” “I’ll just work more.” “I’ll just do it”. Let your team in and struggle with problems too.
• Turns out, there’s many people who enjoy handling the problems you don’t like, and get excited by them

“Withhold any new job postings/hiring until a manager has developed a training program.”

• I envisioned a day where I wouldn’t need to be present when a new hire started. It’s not always practical, but it was my motiviation when making a new hire training program.

“The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas, and chronic frustrations.”

• Regular 1-on-1’s are important with staff to keep them engaged and improve the business from the inside out.
• It’s time consumer but has a strong ROI
• Here’s a list of 1-on-1 questions Ben Horowitz recommends you can take:
  • If we could improve in any way, how would we do it?   
  • What’s the number-one problem with our organization? Why?
  • What’s not fun about working here?   
  • Who is really kicking ass in the company? 
  • If you were me, what changes would you make?   
  • What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on?   
  • What are we not doing that we should be doing?