Local Business Blogging

I'm a big fan of community, and happened to find one just my size. today.

It's called All Business.com, and it's an advice site for small businesses. Blogs are key components of All Business, and right away a post caught my eye that we've been talking about.

You Can't Measure Everything, So Don't Even Try.

Kevin Stirtz uses the example of a bowl of stew to explain the importance of intangibles. Maybe it's how close it is to dinner, and maybe it's the cleverness of his example, but I was drawn in.

A few weeks ago I made a huge pot of beef stew. Or maybe it was soup. (I can never tell the difference!) Either way, it was a hearty combination of beef, vegetables, rice and seasonings all cooked together in a steaming hot (and delicious) medley of a meal.

When I enjoy a bowl of this stew, I enjoy it as a whole. Sure, I enjoy the various ingredients. They each stand out in their own way. And, if I neglected to include one I would miss it. For instance, it wouldn't be as good without the carrots. And I'd certainly miss the rice.

But I find it hard to imagine I could assign a specific share of the flavor to one ingredient.

Let's see, if I assign a value of 100 to the entire experience of enjoying a bowl of this stew then I need to break out the “experience value shares” of each ingredient. Of course there are things that went into the stew that are not ingredients, like heat and time and how the vegetables for cut and the quantities used."

Tasty. The point of Kevin's column is that far too many business decisions are based on their ROI. In running a small business, Franki and I can't afford to allow money issues to guide our decision-making. The joy of running your own business has to outweigh the stress of running a business. Maybe that's an emotional ROI, but when we go through planning sessions, the final question we ask is "Do we want to do this?"

It doesn't matter what the money is and it doesn't matter what other benefits are involved - we are learning to chase our passions in our business development and tap our joy in our solutions for clients.

Maybe that makes us money foolish - and certainly we don't work for free - but if we wanted to just make money, I'd still be recruiting and Franki would be working inside a corporation with a good dental plan.

Our goal is to enhance our personal lives with our working lives.

Anyone who can measure that has never had a spoonful of my all-day beef stew.