Stumble It!
I got to looking back today and noticed that I haven’t been very good at posting as often as I should (or at least as I might like.) Sadly, I don’t have a single post for the months of July and September. While I did spend that time actively making money for DakotaDN, that’s still not much of an excuse for my lack of dedication.
Which bring us to this post and the question du jour. Namely:
Are you treating your business like a hobby?
Well, let’s examine a few of the differences between a business and a hobby. Surprisingly, at least to me, there is little surface difference between the two.
First point of discussion is:
What’s the difference between the required dedication to a hobby and the necessary dedication for operating a successful business?
I’ll skip over the required dedication to operate a failure as a business. I’m willing to guess that most of you aren’t interested in my thoughts and advice on how to fail at your venture. - KO
Dedication to a hobby is transient and intermittent. It can afford to be flexible and loose without risk of poor ROI. Take as examples my interests in Neverwinter Nights, amateur woodworking, and tropical fish keeping. If I neglect any of them (and arguably have done so for NWN) the worst that can happen is some dead fish and a loss of current knowledge on a subject.
Neglect in NWN only lessens my credibility in the forums, leads the people who have downloaded my custom content to wonder if I’ve dropped off the face of the Earth, and leads to me having to remember how to do and make certain things happen in the Aurora Toolset. But none of that will really cause me to loose sleep over lost opportunities.
Neglect in my amateur woodworking only leads to me feeling guilty for having a garage full of tools that don’t get used enough.
Neglecting my fish will at worst lead to the death of my fish - something that would be horrible, costly, and a setback of my fishkeeping ego, but also something that isn’t likely to happen since they’re sitting in my office. As an aside, apparently they’re getting just the right amount of dedication and interaction considering I’ve been successful in getting them to breed. So much so that I’m about to need to find an outlet for my guppys.
Anybody know someone who might be interested in some tropical fish in the Rapid City, SD area? - KO
In sharp contrast to these hobbies, dedication to a business must be structured and rigid. Neglect in business has considerable consequences. The addage, “Ignore your customers long enough and they will go away” is quite appropriate here. Lack of dedication may cuase you to lose out on both customers and an income stream.
So you’re ready to give the business the required dedication, then welcome to…
In business as with hobbies, you must be willing to sacrifice to be successful. That sacrifice is your investment of either time or money or both. In hobbies, the investment is usually small and isn’t spent with expectation of anything more than the enjoyment of the activity. In other words, the ROI expected from a hobby is the pleasure of the hobby itself. That may make you think that the investment in a hobby can’t by definition be a sacrifice. But I would beg to differ since anything that vies for your resources in competition with anything else is what I consider to be a sacrifice.
Contrast the investment sacrifice of a hobby to that of business, where the investment can be large (although we advocate small investments untill some measure of success is realized) and is always expected to provide some return. But expectation of the return is what drives the desire to sacrifice the investment. Without sacrifice of investment, no return can be expected.
Wow, I think I just defined another first business principle. Was anyone paying attention? - KO
That investment is a demonstration of…
Defined as the act of binding yourself to a course of action, commitment is critical to success. The binding that ties you to the course of action is the investment that you’ve sacrificed as dedication to an expected return. And that’s where the real line between hobby and business becomes more clear. Where the previous discussion points were vague and could apply equally well to either business or hobby, commitment is what designates the divergent paths of the two.
For the hobbiest, there is little binding you to the course of action. Why? Because success isn’t tied so intricately to sacrifice. The expected return from your hobby requires very little input to acheive the output. Whereas in business, the return is so critical, that commitment is almost a crucial requirement of success. The inputs are so vital and key to the outputs that failure to commit to their sacrifice is a recipe for possible failure.
That is of course unless you have so many resources to throw at failure in order to stumble blindly into success. Not really something I’d advocate. - KO
So how do we assure that we’re not treating our business like a hobby?
We commit to dedicated investment in the business. We force ourselves to look at all our transactions with the business through the lens of ROI. Be they time or capital or skill, we invest these things with an expected return. We spend no capital without some sort expectation of gain. Doing so will help us make better decisions.
Technorati Tags: business, hobby, dedication, sacrifice, investment, time, money, principle, commitment, ROI
