If there is one thing that any small business owner is familiar with, it’s chaos. No matter how organized you are when you start a new business, you wind up as a victim of entropy pretty quickly. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to handle every task that needs to get done and those that don’t quickly pile up into a mess, whether that mess is actual or simply emotional. Good small business owners find ways of handling the chaos, prioritizing what needs to be done and essentially riding the wave. The same chaos shuffles out the business owners that just can’t hack it.
Clate Mask and Scott Martineau co-founded Infusionsoft, a company that sells email marketing software. Their business started out with just the two of them, struggling to support their families and handle the chaos inherent in a small business. Since then, Infusionsoft has boomed and Mask and Martineau have codified their approach to cutting through the chaos in a new book: Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business without Going Crazy.
Handling the Chaos
One of the points Mask and Martineau work hard to drive home is that while chaos may be a natural part of entrepreneurship, you don’t have to put up with it. Chaos can quickly consume a small business owner: between the drive to get everything done so that you can actually pay your bills and support your family at home and the stress of being ultimately responsible for everything that does (and doesn’t) get done, stress seems to be a constant companion. The feeling that we should be hard at work every moment of every day isn’t far behind, either.
These stressful situations are almost the exact opposite of why many entrepreneurs go into business. We want the ability to control our own lives, reduce our stress and accomplish something with our businesses. When chaos invades, though, it feels like none of those things is possible. The fact of the matter, though, is that it isn’t impossible to get control of the chaos. There are many ways to do so, but simply getting things under control is the most important part.
One Approach to Chaos
Within Conquer the Chaos, there are two key strategies: automation and list building. List building may be a marketing strategy — and it isn’t particularly surprising that two guys who built a company based on email marketing think list building is important — but it does have an impact on the overall structure of your business. If you have a list, after all, you handle marketing and making sales in a very different way than if you’re out beating the pavement and looking for new clients every day. The approach is one that Mask and Martineau have found very successful in creating a stable business with enough income to let them focus on handling chaos through other ways. The other key to their strategy is automation — getting as much of the business running without your attention as possible.
Image — Wiley Books
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Tags: book review, chaos, management, productivity
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