Professionally Speaking » Meeting Report: Success Secrets for Small Businesses

Past NSA Northern California Chapter President Rick Gilbert presented ‘Mind-Blowing Success Secrets for Small Businesses’ at the Saturday Chapter meeting.

Back in the 1980’s Rick quit his job in Silicon Valley to found Power Speaking, an organization that delivers transformational workshops and executive coaching to turn people into world-class speakers.

His 2014 guest posting in this blog outlines many of the successful techniques he shares with middle managers who want to learn avoid common pitfalls when presenting to the C-Suite.

Rick shared the lessons he learned over the past 30 years, building his company from the proverbial Rolodex in the bedroom in 1985 to a company with 35 employees and a world-wide footprint. He found that much of the standard small business advice was not helpful. Such bromides as “winners never quit,” or “work/life balance,” or “have a positive mental attitude” are, Rick claims, mostly useless nonsense.

His uncommon strategies to help build a successful small business include:

There’s no such thing as ‘work/life balance’ and women who want to be successful business owners will need a supportive partner and plenty of help.
Avoid the wrath of the IRS and State Tax authorities and make everyone you hire a part-time employee rather than a contractor.
Think more like a a jazz musician than a classical musician and be willing to improvise.
Understand your strengths and weaknesses and build partnerships to compensate. Rick developed an idea that in the speaking business people are either a ‘Greek’ or a ‘Roman’. Those who are Greeks care about passion and poetry while the Romans are all about power and money. Greeks need to partner with a solid Roman to succeed.
Kill PowerPoint. Rick recommended Whiteboard Selling: Empowering Sales Through Visuals, by Corey Sommers as a more effective approach.
Being a quitter and a pessimist is good for business. Rick substuties ‘Insanity’ for ‘Success’ in Winston Churchill’s statement that “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Know when to quit.
Every small business owner should be slow to hire additional staff and quick to fire those who don’t work out.
It’s essential to take calculated risks to succeed. He quotes Orville Wright who, in 1910, took his 82-year-old father on his first and only flight. As Orville gained elevation, his excited father cried out, “Higher, Orville, higher!” Taking no risk is the biggest risk of all.

If you’d like to read more of Rick’s wit & wisdom I highly recommend checking out the social commentary and writing on his blog. After all, it’s not often an NSA member happened to be in Golden Gate Park one day in 1966 to take an incredible series of black & white pictures of the legendary Janis Joplin:

Meeting Report: Success Secrets for Small Businesses

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