If I had to start over…

Sometimes at the end of a long day my mind wanders, and I think about what I would do differently if I was starting my company today. It’s a tool for reflection, and a little bit of self-congratulation as I recognize some of the things I’ve learned in the past ten months or so.

But not everything in my list is based on what I know – there are a lot of items about getting help from specific sources.

Here’s a fun fact: every once in a while I talk to another business owner, and I want to help, I want to share, so I mention some big innovation that I just came up with. And the look I get back is priceless. It’s like the look you’d get if you told an Olympic athlete that you’ve been thinking about taking up running, and you’ve figured out (shh!) that regular workouts are really helping your time improve. New to you, incredibly obvious to everyone else in the field.

This kind of conversation happens almost every week for me.

So the great news is, I’m picking up new strategies and frameworks at an increasing rate, and it’s making a big difference to my business. The bad news is that most if not all of my sparks of brilliance aren’t big enough to light a cheap firecracker. But hey, they’re my sparks and I’m very proud.

(By the way, it’s not like I haven’t studied insanely hard for years, and I’ve actually implemented some of these ideas for clients in the past – it’s some weird mental block I seem to have applying them to my own stuff. Not sure why yet, but if you know, please drop me a line, it’s bugging the crap out of me!)

Anyway, knowing what I know now, if I was to start over I’d plan my desired outcomes a whole lot more clearly, and then I wouldn’t just plan backwards to figure out how to get there. That’s what everybody seems to teach. No, I’d take rough chunks of that plan and find people who know how to implement them – people who’ve already “invented” the magic steps that I need to figure out.

Now here’s the fun part of that “what would I do differently if I was to start over” exercise I mentioned at the beginning of this: what’s stopping me from acting as if I’m starting over?  You know, keeping the core business as it is but figuring out who can get me past the hurdles that I’ve managed to identify.

And for that matter, what’s stopping you?