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Issue 7 > Business will blossom if you answer these ten questions now.

Business will blossom if you answer these ten questions now.

Samantha Hartley helps discover the secrets your business is holding for you.

For many small business owners, the frenetic pace of working in their business makes it impossible to work on it.

That's like a gardener who spends all her time sowing, tilling and harvesting without ever standing back to look at the garden and wonder. Look at all this beauty! A tiny seed became this cucumber! I'll never be able to eat all these tomatoes. Why don't my peppers look like the ones in the store? Evil bugs ate all my zucchini! [Sigh. That's pretty much the actual monologue from my first home gardening experience.]

Not everyone is cut out to be a gardener, or a business owner. A key ingredient is the willingness to learn and change. To do so, it's important to step back regularly and examine the business, to see where we can improve.

Otherwise, we never notice that the tomato harvest exceeds our expectations, while the peppers do not. We keep feeding our zuke to the bugs, without experimenting with ways to keep them away. In short, we stay 'unconscious' about information that's right there waiting to be gleaned and acted on. Maybe it's safer that way.

Deepak Chopra says: '90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday.' Ninety percent! Consequently, are 90% of the actions we take the same? I don't want my business to stay at status quo. I want to blossom!

Habits, ruts, patterns and comfort zones: they keep us small. The questions below can help us discover the secrets our business is holding for us.

Let's be clear on the intention for this exercise. It's not to feel regret or guilt, or place blame. It is to mine the gold nuggets that might otherwise be lost. It's to save time reinventing the wheel by repeating things that work. Fortune 500 companies can afford to make the same mistakes over and over again. Small business owners have to learn quicker.

The intention for this exercise is to learn lessons—both positive and negative, theoretical and practical, sophisticated and banal. Then, we may move ahead and turn our attention to creating a new and improved business.

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