A friend was once refused the budget for a project that was assigned to him by his boss. Later, when asked what sort of progress he was making on the project, he replied, “Well, not very much, because the budget hasn’t been approved.” His boss quickly responded, “That’s no excuse.”
At first glance, this seems like an unfair situation, and certainly without any additional communication, it may very well be unfair. But there is also a lesson here for every entrepreneur: There are no excuses.
Everyone hits roadblocks
When you are running your own business, you will hit every brick wall possible. Your suppliers won’t deliver on time. Your customers won’t pay on time. Your contractors will be late. Your developers will underestimate what it takes to get a job done. There will be bugs in the software. The network will go down. At one time or another, the excrement will hit every proverbial fan in sight.
Excellence is always expected
Despite the problems you may encounter, your customers will still expect you to deliver on time and within budget and have a smile on your face. This is why one of the most important skills for an entrepreneur to have is persistence, quickly followed by resourcefulness. For every roadblock you encounter in any project, you have to learn to come up with another way to accomplish the goal.
Success is not optional
At first, it will seem like an impossible task. But once you’ve done it a few times, you will begin to recognize the patterns of risk associated with each task. You will learn what works and what doesn’t. You will learn how to organize yourself and your company so that projects run a little better each time.
This constant improvement is similar to the flywheel effect in Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. With each “turn” of the flywheel, you see the positive results and those positive results generate the excitement and desire to make them happen again…and again…and again.
In order to get there, though, it requires hard work, persistence, and the ability to execute on a project no matter what the odds. No excuses.
What excuses have you used recently? What are you going to do about it?
photo credit, MR38
