"I will show people anything you want to do, do it. Don't listen to anyone. Chase your dreams."

That's advice from a guy who tried to run on water in the contraption pictured above from Florida to New York. But he washed ashore 30 miles SOUTH of his starting point and the Coast Guard has to help to make sure he was safe. He was.

This was his third attempt. in 2014 he had to be rescued from a similar contraption near St. Augustine, FL and in 2016 he had to be rescued again near Palm Beach. All this from an article in the BBC.

It's nice to have dreams but to accomplish anything you have to wake up.

What Can You Control?

On the road of business (and in life) there are things you can control and things you can't. I recently found out about Steve Jobs' approach to this dichotomy.

When he promoted someone to VP, he gave them this little speech. Janitors, he said, are allowed to have excuses. If the reason they can't accomplish something is beyond their control, the reasons matter. But somewhere between the janitor and the CEO reasons stop mattering.

When an employee becomes a vice president, he or she must vacate all excuses for failure. A vice president is responsible for any mistakes that happen and it doesn't matter what you say.

Certainly there are reasons for why you didn't get your results. Some of them are beyond your control. But at the VP level and above, the reasons don't matter. You must see them not as excuses, but as obstacles that it's your job to predict, avoid, and if necessary overcome.

The article where I found  this story has more examples of how this works in practice. But there is one element that's missing. And that is your goals. What you want FROM your business. That's why when I start with a client, I start with my 20 Questions exercise. That gives us a clear description of what success looks like for them.

What Are Your Goals?

Steve Jobs was famous for wanting to put a dent in the universe. My goals have always been more modest. I've wanted someone to love who loved me back, time with my family and to travel, fun work to do, and financial independence. I mostly reached those goals in my 40's and 50's. If I'd known then what I know now, I might have reached them even sooner. But isn't that how life goes?

When you reach your goals for your business, instead of seeing those blocks on your road as either obstacles or excuses, you can turn off the business road entirely and take the path through the woods or up the mountain or head to the beach. 

But until then, my question for you is what things do you treat as excuses and which ones do you treat as obstacles?

In other words, where are you on that continuum from janitor to CEO?

The picture is my son, Jamie overcoming some obstacles on his 30th birthday when he and I went camping in Vedauwoo, Wyoming. 

A mission is the reason that a company exists. It doesn’t have to be worthy of a nobel prize. “We make the best damn pizza in town!” is an acceptable mission. The problem comes when companies try to encapsulate their mission into a statement. And the problem gets compounded when they hire consultants to help them do it. I say this as a consultant.

I was recently in a grocery store in California — using the bathroom actually. The bathrooms were located upstairs in the employee area so I got to photograph a poster with their mission statement on it. I’ve blocked out their name because I didn’t ask for permission to use it. I took the picture because it represents the worst example of a mission statement: something everyone can agree on but has no defining characteristics. It says nothing about the company, what it does, or really why it exists. The only worse ones maybe HERE.

The funny part was, as soon as I got downstairs there was another poster right by a table of stuff for sale. The poster did a much better job of defining this company’s mission.

See what I mean? Now you know a whole lot more about the company and why it exists.

Two More Things about Mission

Thing One

As CEO, you probably know why your company exists. You have a vision for where the company can go and what it can do. The definition of leadership is to inspire people to follow you. The thing that all leaders have in common is they do this by telling people where they’re going. Share your vision. Explain your mission. Over and over and over again. Explain how it informs your decisions. Spotlight others who do a good job of working to achieve the mission. Just don’t stick it on the wall next to the bathroom.

Thing Two

Your company’s mission (or reason to exist) needs to be adapted and adopted for each department so everyone knows how their job fits into the big picture. In the second poster, it’s easy to see how the buyers or even the stockers fit into this store’s mission. But what about the janitors, the IT department, or the people who do payroll? As a leader, be sure everyone knows how important their work is to supporting the over-all mission. That’s critical.

[This post also appeared on Medium.  Thanks to Sebastiaan Shepers of Bannerconnect for reminding me about adapting the mission to every department.]

The first question (always – about almost anything) to ask is why do it at all? Presumably you’ll enjoy a vacation for personal reasons. Your business should be in service to your life, not the other way round. But there are business reasons to take a break. They include rejuvenating your energy, getting a new perspective, and detaching to let your non-conscious mind work on stuff.

Another business reason is that the prep you do might just change how the company works even after you return.

How?

Step 1 – Replace Yourself.

Too many entrepreneurs I know think things will go to hell if they leave. And too many are right. So the first step is to figure out what you do that can’t wait while you’re gone, and train someone else to do those tasks. I said train someone, not just dump the responsibility on them. Most of the time, you only have to do this with tasks that are non-CEO tasks: stuff you’d hire someone else to do if the company were 3 or 4 times the size it is now.

CEO Tasks can usually wait till you get back, because they tend to be non-urgent (though very important). So this becomes a good opportunity to take stock of the many hats you wear and get some people cross-trained. If they do a good enough job, you might have them continue to do it after you get back – and free yourself to do more CEO related activities. Who knows, they might even do a better job than you. And that’s a good thing.

When you get back – don’t just jump into the same old routine. Maybe someone who took over some of the outputs you were responsible for should continue doing so. This will ratchet up your company.

Step 2 – Communication While You’re Away

If you need to check in regularly (and sometimes you do) set specific times that you’ll be calling in. Tell people who you want to talk with, in which order, and what you want them to be prepared with.

Decide what can’t wait. Winston Churchill was famous for taking naps, and he told people not to interrupt him unless it was an emergency. But then he was clear to define what he considered an emergency (the building being on fire or the armed invasion of the British Isles). I suspect your definition will be different. I usually say don’t call unless there’s fire or blood. But whatever your criteria are, be sure to let people know in detail when to interrupt you and when not to. This exercise might be something you can carry on after your return.

Step 3 – What to Tell Your Family

Before you leave, tell your family (presuming you’re vacationing with them) when you’ll be checking in with work so they can plan when you won’t be available. Then STICK TO YOUR PLAN!. Don’t tell them you’ll be on a call from 10-11 and have it stretch out till 11:10 or 11:15. Better to under promise and over deliver. Also let them know ahead of time that there might be an emergency, so they don’t feel betrayed if one comes up. If it does, explain what happened and why it was so urgent. It’s been said that vacationing with young kids is a trip, not a vacation. Your Mileage May Vary.

Capture Your Ideas

With your conscious mind focused away from work, your non-conscious will likely come up all kinds of ideas about your business (and other things). Most of them won’t be great but some will. (The way to have more great ideas is to have more lousy ones  – and more in general). Don’t judge them. Just figure out a way to capture them and get on with your vacation. I suggest recording them on your phone, or keeping a pencil and notepad handy at all times. Ideas strike while driving, in the shower, as you fall asleep, whenever. You want to be ready to capture them without interrupting your flow.  Then schedule some time to review them afterward. This review is a great use of your CEO time.

Plan While You’re In a Good Space

I got this idea from Denisse Montenegro who took her first vacation after a couple years of a very stressful business acquisition. The idea is the vacation environment destresses you and gives you a better foundation from which to make some positive changes in your life. She decided to get back into yoga after vacation, for example. I agree that it’s better to make those changes when you’re feeling good then when you’re stressed out. Just one more benefit of getting away.

As a CEO, your water is time. It’s the thing we swim in, that surrounds us so completely that we don’t even realize it exists. Because we don’t often pay attention, it carries us along and we must function within it. It flows along at a constant rate regardless of our actions.

Not considering time (like the fish don’t understand water) means that time often pushes us along. The way this usually plays out is something comes up and you respond. The phone rings and you answer it. An employee comes in with a problem and you deal with it. Something breaks and you jump in to fix it.

However if we pay attention to time, we can put it to our own use. Before you respond to those things do you think about time? Do you consider how long it will take and whether that time could be put to better use? In financial analysis, this is called the opportunity cost. We are so immersed in time, there is no corresponding word for “cost”.

The immediate is the enemy of the future.

Often I hear from business owners that they don’t have time to plan or build for the future because there’s so much they need to do right now. Of course there are consequences if you don’t respond right now. But if responding right now means putting off building for the future, there are consequences to that too.

If you want to act like a CEO instead of just a business owner, you must consider the consequences of each and determine which is more important to your ultimate success.

I find that most critiques of “Lean Startup” are actually critiques that don’t understand what Lean Startup really is OR critiques of what people do when they misinterpret what Lean Startup really means.

My biggest critique is that Eric Ries did a lousy job of naming his concepts – he picked names that are too easy to misinterpret.

The “lean” in Lean Startup means starting a company with as little waste as possible. The biggest waste is often spending time and money building things no one (or not enough people) want to buy. So the Lean Startup techniques are about how to learn what people want to buy as fast as possible. Even Sharkey would probably agree that’s a good thing. If people mistakenly think that means building features not products it’s not a fault with the techniques.

MVP is also misunderstood. It’s the least amount of “product” you can LEARN FROM not the least you can sell. And I put “product” in quotes because an MVP you can learn from is often not a product at all – it may be a link on a web page or a set of drawings of proposed screen shots or the famous Drop Box Video. Yes it can be an A/B test – but no one is suggesting that you waste a rock star developer’s time. If you don’t know what product people want to buy, perhaps it’s too soon to bring on an RSD (did I just make RSD the new cool acronym? sorry.)

I agree with Sharkey that most of the things he’s complaining about are bad things. I just don’t think they are what “Lean Startup” is really recommending. 

So if the reason you’re spending money is to help move the company forward, there are 2 ways to do it. In my experience, business owners are really good at the first way – so good that it gets them into trouble when the second way should be used.

Here’s the first way – be cheap.

Let’s say you need a computer.

As I write this you can buy an old computer running Windows XP on eBay for around $100. Don’t laugh. I have a 22 year old company running on XP and we’ve bought a couple of these as backups because we know if we upgrade any part of our system (printer, operating system, custom database, QuickBooks etc.) We’ll have to upgrade it all and we don’t want to do that.

You can also buy a decent Windows 8 computer for between $300 to $500. Or you can go all out and spend over a thousand for the top of the line.

The way to buy a computer is to figure out what you need and see how little you can spend to get it. OK let’s call it being frugal not cheap. Cheap would be buying less than you need to save money – which usually costs you more in the long run. That’s why you don’t buy a delivery van that’s so cheap it will break all the time, but you don’t spend for fur lined seats either.

You get the point. Like I said, entrepreneurs are usually good at this kind of spending. Spend as little as possible to get what you need.

The other kind of spending is different.

Suppose you had a chance to buy $20 bills for fifteen bucks – and it was legit. How many would you buy? If you try to spend as little as possible in this situation, you’re crazy. You want to spend as much as you can. Mortgage your house, sell the car, cash in all your stocks; buy the twenties and then buy all your stuff back and pocket the extra money.

It’s a completely different mindset. “Of course it is”, you say, “because it’s fantasy”. Well sort of. Nobody is literally selling twenty dollar bills for $15. But the thing that makes a successful entrepreneur is that we can take what’s not valuable to someone else and make it valuable.

The trick is knowing when to be frugal, and when to spend money on the best. Why do super stars in movies and sports get so much money? Because they bring in many more dollars than they cost. You spend tens of millions more on a superstar and bring in hundreds of millions more. It’s a bargain. Ten to one – that’s even better than the 15 to 20 I was talking about before.

But you’re probably not in the movie business – or sports. I don’t think Mark Cuban reads my blog. But what about sales people? The best outperform the good (not the mediocre – the good) by way more than they cost. Same is true with computer programmers and others in creative work (yes programming can be creative). They can cost twice as much but generate ten times the productivity. It’s often true of consultants (something near and dear to my heart).  They key is finding the best, and being willing to spend for it because it will be like buying a twenty for fifteen.  

[UPDATE: This isn’t just true in “creative” fields. Costco and The Container Store are two retailers that pay more than minimum wage. Full time sales employees at The Container Store make close to $50K per year. Both companies feel this expense is a boost to the bottom line.]

 A good entrepreneur is adept at both kinds of spending – and knows when to use each.

Let me give you an example: Steve Jobs. He never made cheap stuff. He spent money on design, materials and function because he knew that’s what would allow him to sell at a premium. But when it came to components, he got what he needed at the best price he could.

Takeaway:

• When it’s time to spend money you need to know whether to be frugal or go all in.

I think it’s because entrepreneurs are intuitive. We know instinctively how things should be. Like a chef that can make a great meal by tossing in a handful of this and a pinch of that and cooking it at just the right temperature till it looks the way it should. It may be a wonderful meal, but that chef will never get out of the kitchen. If he or she didn’t care about quality, it would be easy to let someone else do the cooking. But we do care so we cook.

But there is a better way – well, let’s hold off on the judgment – there’s a different way. It’s only better if you really want to get out of the kitchen, if you want to build a business that works even when you’re not there. Some people don’t and that’s their choice.

But if you do, you need a special tool. It’s called a recipe. That’s how the famous chefs get out of the kitchen. How they open up more than one restaurant. Some even write books and star on TV shows. And, at the low end, that’s how they serve billions and billions of hamburgers that all taste the same year after year no matter who’s working what shift.

A recipe is a way to take the intuition, and wisdom, and experience you’ve gained through long hours and hard work, and put it into a form that others can use. Even if they aren’t as smart as you, or haven’t been at it for so long, or don’t care as much as you. But here’s the thing – not every recipe is the same. Some are so simple even a caveman could do it (presuming he could read). Others require more finesse, skill and even creativity to apply.

Consider the Blue Man Group. If you haven’t seen them; go. They are a wonderful show. It’s three guys all painted blue – faces, hands, bald heads – and they act on stage without any words and no plot. They make music, they throw (and spit) paint around, they flash lights and make amazing sounds. It’s lots of fun and very funny. The music has no written score.

At first it was the same 3 guys doing every performance six days a week for three years without a break. But they wanted to expand. As I write this (June 2013) they perform in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando, Australia, Berlin, Brazil, they tour the US and perform on Norwegian Cruise Lines. No way 3 guys could do it all. To keep the consistency, they needed to write something down. According to Rob Walker “[What they wrote] is not so much a how-to manual as a why-to manual; it’s not about stage directions, but rather tells the story of the show step by step, from the point of view of the Blue Men.”

But I digress. My point is this. Entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go, not because we want to hold on – but because we don’t know how to translate that stuff we know intuitively into tools we can use to train and monitor and ultimately trust others to do it right.

And that’s the good news. Because learning how to take wisdom and turn it into processes and procedures and training etc. that just requires learning a new skill – or hiring a ghost writer or consultant. Turning a control freak around – that’s a bigger problem.

How to Get Started

First pick a platform. I suggest something electronic that lives on a server or the cloud so everyone can access it. Google docs is a good example.

Second pick a simple place to start. Don’t try to make it complete or even systematic. Just start somewhere. The beauty of electronic documents is you can search them – they don’t have to be organized the way paper does. Just make sure each section, or task or “dish” (to keep with the cooking analogy) has a name, a description of  the goal or purpose and a name and date of the person and time it was last updated.

Third write a checklist. Take a simple task and start enumerating the steps, in order that need to be done. You may think this is too simplistic for people. But it’s not. Pilots use check lists. Doctors in ICU’s are starting to. It frees people’s mind to not have to remember all the details.

When a checklist is too simple, describe the parameters. This is often the purpose of what you’re trying to accomplish, or the qualitiative measures – like with Blue Man. It’s a way to set the boundaries of quality that you’ve learned over the years. This may be the hard part for you because you tend to “know it when you see it”. But work with someone on describing what you see; why one thing is “right” and another isn’t. Imagine you’re explaining it to a person who’s unfamiliar with your industry.

Rinse & Repeat. Keep on adding to the list. Change things as you need to make them better. You’ll end up with a document that’s often called Policies and Procedures or as I’ve sometimes called it The Big Book O’Wisdom.

Then use the document. Use it for training. Refer to it when people have questions. Make it a living document.

It will allow you to give up authority, and trust that things will be done the way you know they should be. What will you do when you can get out of the kitchen and know the food is just as good as when you’re cooking?

Learning about success comes from understanding the difference between successes and failures. Unfortunately, in business that comparison is rarely done. Largely because it doesn’t make an entertaining speaker series, or an easy to write article. And because business failures tend to disappear and not subject themselves to scrutiny. 

The term for the logical failure in this is called “survivor bias” and if you don’t think you’re guilty of it – you better read this article.

You’ll also learn why these things are true:

• “A stupid decision that works out well, becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight”
• “If you group successes together and look for what makes them similar the only real answer will be luck.”
• “Luck is actually a pattern of behaviors that coincide with a style of understanding and interacting with the events and people you encounter throughout life.”

Like most people, you turn around. You don’t say “Well I’ve invested an hour in this road, I’m going to make it work. Commitment to my goal will get me there.”

Let’s say you paid for tickets to the theater and the afternoon of the show an old friend from out of town shows up and wants to buy you dinner. You’d rather spend the time with your friend than at the theater. What will be the financial difference to spending time with your friend vs going to the show?

It makes no financial difference at all.

Yet, most people find it emotionally easier to give up the wrong road than to give up the money spent on tickets. Why? because emotionally we don’t understand sunk costs. It gets worse.

Let’s say you invested $20,000 in a machine to make widgets because you want to add a line of widgets to the framuses you already sell. Then you find out that people who buy framuses don’t want widgets. And you realize you might have to spend another $50,000 to find widget customers – and maybe more. Besides that, even if you find them, widgets aren’t as profitable as framuses. What should you do?

Don’t Succumb to the Sunk Cost Fallacy

That’s the voice in your head that says “I can’t stop now or everything I’ve invested so far will be lost.” The truth is it’s already lost. Losing more won’t bring it back. You spent an hour going down the wrong road. Going further won’t get it back. You spent the money on the theater tickets. Depriving yourself of time with your friend won’t put the money in your pocket. Same way with the widget machine.

It’s hard to do emotionally but consider this. Only future costs are relevant to an investment decision. This includes investment in time as well as money. Only future costs. Past costs are sunk. Don’t let them become an anchor.