Great people decisions. I guess that’s it. 

Not a great idea, not lots of capital, not a genius founder.

All above things surely help at the beginning but later on it is about the people in the company and overall company culture.
Success of your company is directly linked to people decisions you make.     Cost of bad people decisions is not only salary you pay but also opportunities lost and damage to your company culture.

Here is what I have learned during my years in business:

i) Hire slow, fire fast
More difficult you make it for people to get in, the better choices you will make. It is worth to spend your time on designing good process for hiring people.
With non-performers or people who don’t seem to fit to your company culture it is not good to spend too much time trying to improve what can’t be improved.
I don’t believe people change, so this is just waste of time and energy. And pain for everybody involved.
Whole process we use for hiring and firing people:                                                         Hiring and Firing I and  Hiring and Firing II.

ii) Fish rots from the head                                                                                                    You are setting the standards in everything. Whole company culture, the way company operates, the way your employees treat customers – it is all directly linked to you. If you skip deadlines, everybody does. If you don’t care, nobody cares. If you don’t work hard, guess what… nobody does.

Once you choose your senior people to lead others – they start representing company culture and its values. Here you must be very careful with people decisions as their standards will slowly within their teams replace yours.

iii) Values over performance
I prefer to hire people with values that fit to our company culture vs high performers. So far, we have been able to turn all people with right values into high performers but failed couple times to turn high performers into people that would fit into our company culture and strengthen us as a team. This said, you need to be clear on your values and values you want to instil into your company culture.

Related posts: How To Build a Great Business;

Everything has it’s pros and cons.

Some people tend to see positives in things and in situations, some focus on negative side. Regardless of how you see things, pros and cons are still there, they don’t disappear. You just don’t pay attention to them, but they still there.

Entrepreneurs are seen to have great lifestyle – making money, doing what they like, when they like with whom they like.
What is not often seen and visible is hard work, risk and responsibility.
Like it or not, it is part of the package.

We would love to be cherry picking. Getting to NBA without all those hard, long practices. Being great investor like Warren Buffet without reading financial reports for 6 hours a day 45 years straight. Building a company that would give you money and freedom ideally on a part time basis with no stress and no debt.

I would love all those things as well, but it’s not possible. It’s all a package.
So far, I didn’t find package that would only have positive and easy things. There are always pros and cons.

It is same with people. Nobody’s perfect. Everybody is a package.
Great salesman, not so good in his time management.                                                   Great with people, missing results.

What do you focus on? Is it holding you back? Is it important?

Everything and everybody is a package with pros and cons.                                        No need to be changing it.
Good enough to remember it and accept cons with the pros.                                         Will make your life much easier.

During my years in corporate and entrepreneur world I encountered                               many kinds of  “life strategies”. These three stood out.

i) live now
I don’t really care about what I do and how much it pays as long as it gives me enough money to pay the bills and have time for my hobbies (my real passion in life). Mostly people with little ambition and drive towards career advancement.

Eg. I somehow survive in the office during the day, what is important for me is to get out there at 4pm with clear head and have free weekends so I can go fishing, surfing, taking pictures (fill in for yourself).

Many times in this case you combine both work and hobby eg. I work in bicycle shop and love biking.

Benefits:                                                                          Drawbacks:
– lot of time for your hobbies                                        – financial struggles later in life
– not much stress                                                             – life wasted surviving time working Continue reading …

“I want to quit. I will pay you back your investment and it’s over”.

2 years ago my friend and co-founder came to me with this proposal.
I talked him out of it.
Gave him advice I tend to give many people who are not sure if they should start or quit their business.

Advice is very simple: give yourself time and money budget.

Give yourself half a year and half a million.
Whichever you run out first, this is where you make final decision.
If extra half a year of your effort or half a million extra don’t help, then quit.
You gave your best, you tried. Don’t suffer any longer than necessary.

What happened to our business that was about to close?
Monthly revenues increased tenfold (!) since that moment and still growing.
Very impressive result of my co-founder as it was 100% his effort.

You may ask what happened. Tenfold increase in revenues in two years.
Again, answer is very simple.
He put in more effort.
More hours, more thinking, more ideas, more passion, more energy, more focus.
More of everything that matters, more of everything that helps build the business.

This is something many people just don’t get.
You can’t reap benefits without sowing hard work.
You can’t have company up and running, sound and profitable giving it a part-time effort.

It’s OK to quit, but quit at the right time – once you did all you possibly could to succeed. Not less.

Related posts: Hard Work; Pay The Price

No time for getting things done?

Imagine you would have one hour extra every day.
That will give you 365 extra hours a year.
This adds up to 15 extra days!
Imagine what you can accomplish in two weeks!

Sounds like a good deal? OK, here is how to get it:

1) Wake up one hour earlier every day.
2) Cut on watching TV
3) Move closer to where you work
4) Facebook and other mindless internet browsing
yes, I know you don’t spend hour there. you only spend 5 minutes – 12 times a day 🙂
5) Look at things you do, way you live and I am sure you’ll figure out one more

Obviously, if you’re not clear on what you want to do during that one extra hour,
don’t even bother.

Related posts: Goals; To-Do List

Community and volunteer work I consider a must in everyones’ life.

I am happy I can spend part of my and Chefparade resources (time, money, facilities) for things that don’t bring us money but let us help people and organisations that need it. When we think about supporting some project, we tend to consider these three things:

i) system vs hands-on help
Let’s say, you want to do something about dog poo on the streets of your community.
What you can do is organise group of people or your friends / family every Saturday morning and clean it up.
That would surely help, but I believe it is important to know “why”.
Why is so much poo on the street?
Maybe you would realise, there is no help for dog owners to clean it up.
So, in case they forgot their “poo bag” they will simply leave it as it is.
Should you work with local council and put stands with “poo bags” and containers on the street and places where people with dogs go, you would solve most of the problem.

Build a system that helps prevent the problem vs try to get rid of results of a problem.

ii) scale
Think about how many people you can influence with your community work.
If you mentor somebody 1 – 1 you are helping 1 person.
If you do the same for group of people on some conference you are then helping tens, maybe even hundred people.
If you create a blog where you share your knowledge, you can help thousands, even millions of people.

It requires bit more time and effort to do, but the impact you make is tremendously bigger.

iii) multiplication effect
Creating a social enterprise company may help some cause and also employ some people. Thing is, if you’re good at it and you would teach 10 people how to create social enterprise company that would result in more causes helped and more people employed. Multiplication effect of your work would have much bigger impact than running your own social enterprise.

Should I have co-founder in my business? Questions I am asked many times.
My response in 99% of the time is NO. Here is my reasoning:

i) different views
Even if you discuss same idea at the beginning and you seem to agree on everything, later on you may find that you are wasting enormous amounts of time and energy on discussion if this button should be red or green. We all see world differently and last thing you want is to spend energy persuading you co-founder about your point of view.
If you need feedback and advice, have your circle of friends help you. You don’t need co-founder for that.

ii) working ethics
Everybody has different levels of what I call “working ethics”. That means how hard and consistently you work. When you are more into your project you may realise that working ethics of your co-founder(s) is much lower than yours. Which is not good. You want to work with people with equal or higher working ethics so you learn from them or at minimum they are not slowing you down.

iii) sharing the burden
People like co-founders because they feel it will be easier, that there will be someone to share burden of starting company with. Which may be true. However, if you skip above points than mostly co-founders are excuse and reason for a) not getting things done b) not taking responsibility and c) not making decisions. If you are by yourself, it’s all up to you. There is no-one to blame, but you. And because there is nobody else you are simply forced to do it.

Starting company by yourself is much harder than having co-founders. At the same time, you learn more, you experience more. It makes you much stronger and develops you as entrepreneur and person much faster.
At the end, also the reward is much higher.

BE NICE TO THE WORLD AND WORLD WILL BE NICE TO YOU
(MAYBE NOT BUT KEEP ON TRYIN’)
Nepalese are the nicest and most hospitable people I have ever met (obviously except…fill in your nationality). Starting from such a small things as greeting you with smile with their “Namaste” (which literally means “I salute God within you”), through pointing you into right direction when they see you are being lost a bit, all the way to cooking a meal for you in their home once you mistaken it for a local restaurant (you only realize this when you have to baby-sit while mom is cooking). Already after couple of days all this and much more makes you feel good and you become nicer to people, more tolerant and compassionate. This is definitely one souvenir you want to bring home with you and pass it on.
On top, Nepalese are very educated people. They all claim they know where Slovakia is and with English you are better off there than in France.

WE KNOW WHAT WE HAVE ONLY WHEN WE LOSE IT
Having a hot shower after couple days of trekking is considered a small luxury in Nepal’s Himalaya, having light (electricity) is a luxury, having and extra blanket for cold nights is something that fills your heart with joy, drinking water that you don’t need to treat with iodine – dream came true (the taste is unbelievable). Fried rice twice a day for three weeks – yummy. After couple of days in this environment (one of most beautiful in the world and full of smiles) your mind starts focusing on what you have, instead (as usually does at home) on what you don’t have. No need to say how good and grateful it makes you feel about your life. Unfortunately, all these things you take for granted once you’re back home and you only realize their worth once you lose them again.
(No need to say same applies for people in our lives but this would be topic for other reflections)

WE ARE WHO WE ARE AND IT’S NOT GOING TO CHANGE
Any longer stay in “spiritual” country like India, Tibet or Nepal makes people expect you to come back as completely different person. Some expect you to come back enlightened or at least walking on water. After no more than 10 days of being there and observing myself in different situations and different environments there was one thing I was very clear on – we are who we are and it’s not going to change. Those who already had a chance to meet me after I have returned home know exactly what I am talking about… Obviously, we can alter (change) our behavior for some time (sometimes for whole life) based on some values / principles we accept as right but deep inside we are who we are and this is not going to change.

YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU CAN’T HIDE
Going for 25 days trekking trip to Himalaya it was very naïve from me to think that I can run away from problems I am facing, from things that need to be solved, from responsibilities I am maybe trying to avoid. This I have realized very first morning waking up in Kathmandu. This was then the case for the rest of my trip no matter how far or how high I went. I could run but I couldn’t hide and towards the end of my trip I did not even wanted to.

EVERY MAN IS AN ARCHITECT OF HIS LIFE. HE IS A CAUSE OF HIS OWN HAPPINESS AND MISERY
This was the motto of “Forward Academy” – school in Kathmandu I have visited and there is nothing I can agree more. My trip gave me a lot of time to think providing me with new perspectives on events in my life and things I have been through. At the end it all boiled down to one thing which would be best expressed by words of Sheldon B. Kopp: “It is enough if a man accepts his freedom, takes his best shot, does what he can, faces the consequences of his acts, and makes no excuses. It may not be fair that a man gets to have total responsibility for his own life without total control over it, but it seems to me that for good or for bad, that’s just the way it is.” Or as one of my best friends is saying: “It’s up to you”

LIFE IS SIMPLE (WHEN YOU’RE HUNGRY EAT, WHEN YOU’RE TIRED SLEEP)
When trekking in Nepal you may find that your life is reduced to waking up at 6am, walking for 4 hours with all your belongings in your backpack, having lunch (plate of rice) and then 4 more hours (sometimes more) of walking, dinner (another plate of rice), bit of reading and writing and going to bed at around 7pm. This goes on for days and weeks on end and only thing left for you to do is to think. At the end, all problems (pardon, issues) start to seem very simple and not that much important, somehow big stuff is reduced to small stuff and it all boils down to one thing: Life is simple, don’t sweat it looking for explanations and answers. Life is simple; when you’re hungry eat, when you’re tired sleep.

Start Early
If you get to office by 7 you have 2 quiet hours till 9 when you can focus on things that are really important. Nobody will disturb you at your desk, nobody will call. If you don’t open your email, that will not distract you either. In these 2 hours you will achieve more than you usually do in half a day. Once people will start arriving to office you will feel like day should be over – so big your feeling of achievement will be.

To Do List
You will hear this from me over and over. If you write down your to-do list the evening before it will save you minimum of 1,5hours in your working day. Not to mention clarity on what you should do during the day. I wrote about to-do list here.
Please note, no point in starting early if you don’t have your to-do list ready the day before.

Work In Blocks
It is good to have blocks of un-interupted time. It should be 60, maximum 90 minutes, as you can not focus for longer period of time. After that, take a little break. Walk around the office, get yourself a coffee, chat with people for like 10-15 min. Get back to work afterwards. Your to-do list will tell you what to do.

Batch your tasks
Phone calls, email reply, invoicing… It gets faster and easier when you are repeating similar tasks, so it’s good idea to batch them together. Having similar tasks spread throughout a day means you not only have to spend energy on doing it but also on re-focusing on every single tasks. While if you do it in batch, you are already “in it”.

Energy
Dont’ manage your time, manage your energy. Do most important things at times when you have most energy. Usually 7-9 if you start early or 9 to 11 if you start later. Don’t spend your most productive time on meetings or phone calls. Do those in your low times instead. Don’t schedule tasks that need thinking and creativity for the end of the day or after lunch.
Use your energy levels to your advantage.

Have a productive day!

Related posts: To-Do List; Morning Life Hacks;

To have right things at the right time at the right place is one of the cornerstones of productivity.

Here are couple examples how I do it:
I need to take my pills daily. I now have pill at every place where I can be in the time when I need to take them or where I may get reminded to take them.
For example:
next to my toothbrush (reminds me to take them in the morning and before I go to bed)
at my office table (when I go early to work I tend to forget taking pills at home)
in my bag (when I travel)
in my car (just in case I get stuck somewhere)
in my travel hygiene bag (just in case we travel, not to forget them while packing)
if all above doesn’t work I go home and find them in my kitchen drawer 🙂

Similar thing I have with pens as I love taking notes and thinking on paper.
I buy pens in bulk and then have them everywhere. One always in my pants pocket.
In my bag I have 4 of them, just in case I lose one, I still have 3 left.

Notebook charging cable – I have one at home, one in the office, one in my bag.
Charging cable for mobile – home, in the office, in my pc bag and one in my car.

I do realize this can’t be done with everything but if it can be I will do it.
Even small things can ruin your day and your productivity and if I can avoid this by having spare cable with me or in my car I definitely will.