Small business owners come from various fields with many different skillsets, but in this role they are all tasked with wearing far more hats than it’s reasonable to expect expertise in. Unfortunately the amount of time spent wearing each hat tends to be proportional to the amount of experience a particular business owner has in that area. Thus some small businesses have amazing tech, some have impecceable books, and others have brilliant marketing. Just as true is that some don’t take advantage of technology, some use napkins for bookkeeping, and others were built “expecting walk-in traffic”.

It’s not reasonable to expect to be able to ignore the facets of business that you don’t know much about and hope to compensate with a really great product or strong marketing. A great business succeeds in many areas because the owner(s) have taken the time to learn the additional skills or find great people who have them. It may seem like a daunting learning curve to start picking up accounting and marketing, but this is actually your opportunity to repeatedly increase profits, save time, and eliminate many levels of stress.

I was in high school when I first became interested in owning a business. I knew a lot about computers. I could fix them, build them, and make them do my evil bidding. Unfortunately I knew nothing about running a business so my computer sales & repair venture didn’t go very far. I progressed onto other ventures and after aquiring my fair share of lumps I developed more respect and seriousness for the business side of business. I started reading about marketing, business management, and more marketing. I expanded my horizons gradually to improving my sales skills, networking, and accounting. I can only say that each time I wished I had learned sooner and faster as the techniques I’ve picked-up have doubled and tripled my profits over and over again. Certainly worth the time and the learning materials cost, both of which are trivial compared to the rewards of knowing what you are doing.

As Tilted Pixel’s plans to grow into an office and fulltime staff begin to come to fruition I will now be shifting more time to learning how to be a great boss and revisiting the strategies of How to Bag an Elephant. With every stage in the life of a business there are new and exciting things to be learned and mastered.

When starting your business, regardless of what background you come from, take the time to fill in your skills gaps. One of the advantages of starting a business with somebody rather than hacking it alone is that you can find a partner or team whose skillsets are very different from yours. In fact if you are looking for serious VC funding you are going to have well-balanced management team whose competencies sum up to a great business mind. If this is a solo venture then don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by new areas. I always dreaded learning accounting, but now I can do my bookkeeping on my own and could even survive without accounting software doing the calculations for me. These skillsets can be picked-up in various ways. I’ve learned a lot from university courses, speakers, online resources, and books. They all have their place in the learning process so I wouldn’t recommend limiting yourself to one resource.

Some of the books that I’ve found particularly useful are:

• Bag the Elephant: How to Win and Keep Big Customers
• Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
• Getting Things Done
• Selling 2.0

Reading is key to having new ideas to fuel the expansion of your business. I currently have 30+ unread business books that I’m slogging through, many of which have provided me terrific ideas to utilize in my business. Sometimes I come across a book that I feel is worth mentioning on this blog, and having read Bag the Elephant by Steve Kaplan I can happily say that this is one of those books.

The book is all about the dream of many small business owners - bagging that large corporate customer that will provide steady revenue and skyrocket the growth of the company. Through 200 well-written pages Kaplan presents a practical plan for doing just that. He demystifies the process involved from start to finish in a blueprint that any small business owner can follow, spelling out the big and small points of interacting with a giant company and its bureaucracy.

What really sold me on this book and the techniques inside is the practical approach it takes. Kaplan has bagged his own elephants, with the first ever being Proctor & Gamble. He draws on this experience heavily within the book, with the Proctor and Gamble account being the focal example as Kaplan lays out his plan. In addition to the usual high level business recipes that business books love to provide, he shares indispensible tricks that he picked up along the way such as the time he got his status upgraded from supplier to contractor to get his own security badge (allowing him to setup and attend meetings far more easily than the competition).

It goes without saying that a truly large contract is a breakthrough for a company and properly managed it is the start of a truly booming business. This plan provides an amazing playbook to draw from to accomplish this and to do so without collapsing the company along the way. Kaplan makes sure to cover how to manage the relationship and the critical mistakes people make that could cause the deal to destroy them. Everything within the book is highly readable too, making it one of the scarce non-fiction books that are hard to put down.

I highly recommend picking this title up as I can’t imagine any business owner not being able to learn a significant amount from it, whether you are eyeing your first elephant or are looking to expand your impressive client list.

Two months ago I was introduced to a fascinating technique called Mind Mapping. This is a rather unique way of arranging ideas visually which makes it very easy to understand, work with, and expand on complex data. I have been using it extensively in business planning and software design, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg for a technique that can be used to take effective notes in class, plan events, manage your personal life, plan out a resume or novel, organize feedback, create documentation, establish goals, and so much more.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s an actual mind map:

Click for a larger version. This is a sample map of the college application process, courtesy of the Mindjet mind map library.

Mind mapping is very simple and has the following general structure:

• Start with a single central topic.
• Create topics around the central topic and connect back to the central topic with lines.
• Each topic can have its own topics branching out.
• Symbols and images provide additional information.
• Notes can be added in a callout balloon form or another technique you prefer.

Doing this on computer is great because any good mind map program will continously re-arrange the map to fit all the topics that you are adding. If you are drawing it then you have to make sure to leave enough space to come back and fill in topics. Mind maps are highly visual so having an aesthetically pleasing technqiue or a highly graphical program is a tremendous bonus.

So What’s So Great About This?

Mind maps make it mentally easy to work with large sets of information. Rather than presenting a linear list (which creates a false hierarchy between items on the same level), it creates a balanced set of topics with only their real hiearchy represented. Other articles can do a better job of explaining the scientific theory behind this, but from personal experience I can attest that this is a far easier way to ingest the information presented.

This non-linear representation also applies to how a mind map can be filled out. Topics can be added anywhere as the map grows, creating a wonderfully flexible system for brain storming, taking notes, or creating outlines, all of which are processes that the brain doesn’t perform linearly. To see the difference try out mind maps then try using lists in a word processor for another exercise.

The freedom to add images, icons, and notes allows a single topic to be assigned significant meaning. In the case of computer software, topics can contain entire paragraphs tucked away behind a “has a note” icon, provide links to web pages, and even contain checkboxes to indicate completion. It’s a very flexible format that encourages creativity.

The Business Advantage

Mind maps can be applied in many business scenarios since they are perfect for mapping out a thinking process. From effectively organizing information in a meeting, finding the right vendor, or mapping out the company vision, the technique works. It’s no wonder that the commericial mind mapping applications are so expensive. Customers are corporations that can afford the price tags thanks to the benefits that the technique provides and a lack of lower-priced competition with the same additional features.

I have a lot of gripes with the traditional business plan, including the very structured and linear nature of the usual template. A huge mistake is trying to fill this thing out directly, and having attempted this many times I’ve decided that it’s just not possible to do so in a way that has substance. Such business plans are really just the executive summaries of a long process. It’s what you show to potential investors or your banker. So how do you actually put together the information that will eventually be placed in the Generic Business Template? Mind mapping is one such effective way.

It’s not difficult to imagine how you would layout a business plan with a mind map. Your central topic is your company name, and the next level of topics are all the usual business details:

• Values/Mission
• Product/Service
• Market Research
• Competition
• Marketing
• Sales
• Operations
• Human Resources
• Financials

Each of these would then have as many of their own topics as necessary to map out the business plan outline. You can attach notes and images as you see fit to create a meaningful outline for yourself. You can then turn it into a traditional plan for your banker, but feel free to refer back to the map itself for your own planning needs.

Note: I would attach a vision statement of the business directly to the main topic as a sort of subheading, since everything that branches out from the main topic is being driven by this statement.

Mind Mapping Resources

To learn more about the technique visit some of the links below:

Wikipedia Article: good overview and contains a great list of available software.
Innovation Network: article that demonstrates mind map technique step by step.
Mindjet Library: tonnes of sample maps. Requires the Mindjet software, but the reader is available free. This is a great place to get ideas on how to use mind maps.