As you know if you follow me I love a good debate. Well last week I had one with Michael Gerber because we were promoting alternative facts about why so many small businesses fail to scale.
It started when I sent him the draft of my weekly blog. In which I slated him for promoting the wrong fact that the simple fix for small business ruin was that they should only be started to sell them. Not only that I made out I had a better fact and that was they should only be started to make a difference and not just a profit.
Suffice to say that things got some what heated from the start and ran on for a few days in that vain. With both of us briefing our alternative facts.
I'm delighted that by Thursday we agreed we were both right and they were not alternative facts. Largely because we agreed that there are great businesses out there that don't actually make a direct difference by what they deliver, such as Cocoa-Cola. They are great businesses because they employ a great number of people pretty well.
I believe the reason why Michael was quite rightly passionately defending his fact from the outset was because he thought I was missing the key point of it. Being that it's all about engineering your business from the START to enable you to work on it and not JUST in it. Otherwise you end up like 60% of small business owners just surviving. So I suspect he thought I was coming from the 'Lifestyle, hippy, lovie' perspective. Well I'm not as I hate the concept of a lifestyle business. I love the concept that a business should create a lifestyle for the owner and all stakeholders.
So I had a great weekend believing that my hero Michael Gerber and I had totally agreed on a fact of how to fix all small businesses.
You must ONLY start a business to sell it to make a lasting difference and not just a profit.
That's pretty awesome. But it leaves me wondering how many people were are at his inauguration, but then can I be bothered?