Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy

Described with stories and examples anyone running a small business today will recognize, Conquer the Chaos shows you how to break free of the chaos and conquer it with six key strategies:

1) Build your emotional capital. Emotional capital is the currency you use to wake up every day and fight the battle. It’s the passion, enthusiasm and positive outlook that propel you through your day, keeping you driven to achieve your goals. It’s the balancing of work, family, and emotional and physical health. When that runs dry the longer you cope with chaos, the more it wears on your ambition and enthusiasm. Do you jump out of bed, excited about the new day or are you dreading it? Do you get ready for work in the morning, thinking about the opportunities, the challenges and the exciting work ahead of you?

2) Practice disciplined optimism. If you are going to survive the chaos, and survive it well, you must be prepared to handle all the pain and unpleasantness that comes with running a small business. It starts with (1) an undying belief that your small business will achieve the success you have envisioned, while at the same time, (2) confronting the brutal facts of your current reality, and (3) attacking those brutal facts because you want to, not because you have to. Business owners must confront and attack the brutal facts.

3) Assert your entrepreneurial independence. You decide the fate of your business. Conviction is essential to making things happen. If you don’t believe something is going to work, no one else will either. And as you navigate difficult decisions you will be tempted to question just about everything you do. Self-doubt leads to seeking approval and advice. At some point the entrepreneur must believe and trust their convictions and that means not asking for so much advice. One of the reasons business owners seek additional input is because their objectives are not clear. If you haven’t decided the direction you want to take your business, figure it out.  And figure it out fast. Otherwise, the opinions of others will blow you around like a leaf in the wind. 

4) Centralize and organize your stuff. As an entrepreneur, you have an especially complicated situation. In addition to keeping up with the tasks in your personal life, you’re trying (in many cases single-handedly) to run a business. Corporations have hundreds, even thousands of people to do the same job you’re trying to accomplish on your own. You’re the boss, the sales team, the marketing department, tech support, customer service and the janitorial staff. Unless you’re supernaturally organized, you’ve got information, reports, records and financial statements everywhere. What if you decide to take a vacation or you’re sick? To build a solid business foundation and get one step further out of the chaos, you’ve got to centralize your operations.

5) Tap into the magical power of follow-up. The moment Mask and Martineau realized how important follow-up was to their business was the magic moment that accelerated their move out of chaos and quickly transformed their business into a multimillion-dollar company. When you fail to follow up, you’re losing out on incredible opportunities and causing yourself more pain and frustration. You’re stunting your growth and prolonging your partnership with chaos. 

6) Burn the to-do list and move from manual to automated. Automation is the key factor to saving you time, money and manual labor. But automation also tends to be the one principle that is missing from most small businesses. Automation is intentional and purposeful and it will propel the entrepreneur out of chaos into liberation. With automation, you get the benefits of achievement without activity, productivity without busy-ness. Big businesses have learned to automate everything possible. But most small businesses are havens for manual, grunt labor that wastes time, costs money and enslaves the business owner to the business.

“Conquer the Chaos will fast become the go-to guide, the holy grail of entrepreneurial success—more money, more time, more control, and more purpose. Highly recommended.”
—Michael Port, New York Times bestselling author of Book Yourself Solid