1. Manage your costs.
Financial management skills are necessary to a business's continued operation and survival. You burn through capital without anything to show for it, you might as well have set your money on fire. A business can't survive without money -- that defeats its purpose.

• First you have to have money to start a business in the first place : a bankroll, start up funds, inventory purchasing, tools and equipment, or web-hosting costs, site design, advertising, etc.
• Then to keep it running (operational, labor and overhead costs) until it starts making money, and until it reaches the point of sustainability
• Then there are things to consider like market research costs like trend analysis and forecasting, and the work needed to gather and act on customer feedback in order to be competitive.

Luxury brands can keep their margins high because their exclusivity and craftsmanship practically guarantee that the people who can afford their products are those in their target market. Other brands make their money through sheer volume (think Forever 21). And that's just for physical goods. Digital goods are another kettle of fish entirely...with the speed of their transmission, generating buzz, viral marketing, and social media marketing are just the tip of the iceberg. And doing all that takes time and money.

Market savvy in relation to sourcing, costing and pricing (material goods and their production), value and pricing again (e-commerce) is a very real edge in business. You need to find the sweet spot to profit, and to produce the things your market buys from you..


2. Constantly check yourself.
Without intervention and direction people plateau, and so do businesses. Can you imagine peaking in high school? Or hearing that you made it on the list of a "Where Are They Now?" gossip session? Time passes for everything, and in order to be relevant today and tomorrow, you must be able to still connect to the times and with the times.

One way is to watch the market you occupy and adapt before you're flattened by change. Kodak, once the world leader in photography and film equipment, wasn't able to adjust to the digital revolution, and is still struggling to get to its feet in the aftermath. For a business to last, it must find ways to stay relevant to the times, and that means numerous adjustments to stay on course.

For instance, who would have thought you could still make a living making seals and signet rings? You'd imagine a tiny, crotchety old guy crafting shiny silver thingies in a small store somewhere, but no, these craftsmen advertise on the internet and are quite active in their respective fields.

• Ward Dunham and Linnea Lundquist of Atelier Gargoyle
  
• Dominic Chaine of Engraving Dominique CHAINE
• Man Chung Chu of Stone Seal Engravings
• Neal Oliver at the Sealmaker

Who will diversification help?

• Anyone trying to run a business and grow his customer base.
• Anyone who is juggling responsibilities with marketing, billing, customer support and product services with not enough time to attend to all of them properly, and wants to focus on only doing a few things--key things--effectively.
• People who don't want to waste their energy or their time on doing things that don't work, and especially want to make their time work for them.

What will diversification mean for you?
It means splitting up your focus among a few select methods to be more mobile. It means casting a wider net to get more of what you want and filter out what you don't want. It can mean outsourcing certain things to give you more time to do what you're good at.

You establish more support anchors through diversification, and when one method misses or no longer helps, you can get a new one to replace it while the others will help carry the load.

Wise diversification in a nutshell: Do less stuff to be more successful? Yes, just make sure the stuff you're actually doing is actually working for you.

To illustrate, the difference between hitting the bulls-eye and scatter-shot effort is practice and focus. You don't want to waste your efforts, you practice and learn until you can make sure that you hit what you're aiming for, instead of firing and hoping to nick something. That's one.

On the internet, making a splash is a way of getting attention. And while it's great for getting the spotlight focused on you for the moment,if you don't do anything with it, it's a dead end.

Making a splash is only one way of getting attention. You also have to keep that attention, and you can do that through other means. If you only focus on getting attention and publicity but not trading on it, earning from it or connecting with it, all your efforts go down a bottomless hole with nothing to show for them. You need reliable results.

That's two.

The reason the analogy about 'not putting all your eggs in one basket' works is because it's perfect. If you do put all your eggs in one basket and you drop the damn basket, you have nothing left. That's why you need to diversify and be smart about it. Remember focus and reliable results? Focused efforts lead to desirable results.

Why do you do the things you do? You have your own particular interests, goals and desires. You believe that what you're doing with what you have right now is the best option you have to get you most of what you need, and at least some of what you want.

What makes you do you do the things you do in a particular way? Your personal history, character and experiences: each of us have our own preferences, dislikes, abilities and priorities, which affect how we carry on with our lives. Energy levels and moods can influence us as well.

When you take the time to think about it, what are you actually building with your chosen actions? A safety net, a solid foundation, a launch-pad towards a better future...or maybe something to do to get by until a better option comes along? All those things are different ways to describe you growing your life, really.

Life isn't never as neat and easy as 1-2-3 or A-B-C. We do stuff, and stuff also happens. X, P, Q and T get thrown in unexpectedly. Someone throws in (x-y)3 over (y+r) and screws up the nicely plotted equation for yourself that meant X years at Y job equals OK, or Z months doing PX90 equals YOWZA. Aside from that, you juggle a lot of plates, all depending on the roles you occupy in your life. Dad, student, CEO, teacher, aunt, cousin, friend, mentor, leader...

Simply put, we do things our own way for our own reasons. The commonality though, is that we all do things to gain or build something: A sense of security. An emergency fund. Feelings of victory, meaning and accomplishment. Financial ease and freedom. You work to improve your skills and better your circumstances. A lot of times it's to explore your passions. These actions layer on one another much like different colors in a painting, or the myriad pieces that complete a mosaic. Take a few steps back and get a good look: Are you okay with the bigger picture?

It's funny how hearing a little soundbite on the TV about presidential fashion can turn into an in-depth analysis on the power of routines. I mean, President Obama always wears classic suits when he attends official functions, and yet I never really noticed they were always blue or gray. Intrigued, I looked it up online:"Obama, style, blue suits."

The search lead to to a Vanity Fair article from where I take the following quote (with emphasis added):

The president does pick out his own clothes. But the president tells Lewis he sticks to wearing blue, gray and black suits not out of a lack of style or adventure, but to save his mind for other decisions. The president laments the fact that his life no longer has any spontaneity, but says he’s adapted. "My wife makes fun of how routinized I’ve become,” he says. "It’s not my natural state.”

Here's this one passage as well:
You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. "You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. "I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

Do you have the appropriate apps on your smartphone? Maybe you got one of those little doohickeys that track your steps, or signed up for a service that sends you reminders throughout the day. Perhaps you do it old-school, with pen, paper and a big wall-calendar, those of the month-at-a-glance types.

Whatever method you use, it's obvious then that you have a system in place to help keep you on your toes and (mostly) in charge of your days. You're a busy person, with things that need to be done and goals to meet, and you do what's needful to see that happen.

Tracking progress has the following side-effects:

• It makes you pay attention - Time-tracking software and browser extensions came into being for a reason. We are usually poor guesstimators when it comes to determining our productivity, and the real-time monitoring these things do help give us an accurate picture of where and when we spend the bulk of our time when we say we're working. The shock may be enough to get you to work on yourself
• It keeps you motivated to do one better - You can't improve what you don't measure.
• It engenders a feeling of satisfaction at the progress you're making - Admit it. There's a sneaking glee in earning a gold star and rewarding yourself. Not to mention you're getting to know you're capable of getting better.
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Anyone with any experience at all in project management and calendar-fu knows the importance of having short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. That's how you get things done. By breaking things down into their smallest action units, you make the work-load lighter, especially when it's spread out over time. It also greatly simplifies your thinking process when you see your action items, time-line and priorities laid out in black and white.

But have you every really though about how you look at your time, and not just the way you use it? How long is your short-term? What about your mid-term? What does long-term mean for you?

The issue here is perspective -- time perspective. That's how far you project into the future when you decide what you are going to do or not do today. As you think, so you act --and move--in time.

• If you think you have all the time in the world to do something, you can bet you'd take your sweet time doing it.
• If you believe you only have this much time to finish something before the opportunity to use it is gone forever, you'd act a lot differently.

I've been in a rather grey funk lately. A family member had to be hospitalized earlier in the year, a big bill just came in (it was expected, actually, and we'd saved up for it, but it still bites, you know?), that damn ache in my knee came back, the politicians are still pointing fingers....I mean, all at once would have been overwhelming, but over time? Over time, things can just just grind you down. Your field of vision gets narrower, until it's all you can do on some days to put on foot in front of the other and just keep moving.

Then there are the days when it takes everything you have just to stay and not say, "That's it. I give up." At those times, I think I'd rather throw the dice than throw in the towel. I give up, things stop. Nothing changes.

I throw the dice, I make an opening for something else to happen.

So-oo.... how are your New Year's resolutions going? Good, bad, so-so?
What about the important personal goals you drew up, right around the promise of twelve brand new months to fill? Did any changes stick? I mean, we're far enough into the year to make a fair assessment on any appreciable progress you've made since then.

• Have you seen or felt any tangible results from working towards your goals? What have you learned about yourself in the process?
• How are these commitments working with the other responsibilities you have? What adjustments did you make to accommodate these changes?
  

Have you looked at the patterns of your life that aren't working in your favor and addressed them? You know what they are:

• The ones you tolerate because it would take too much effort to fix right now.
  
• Or you're just waiting for a better time to fix them. Or more money to come in. Or for a current issue to blow over.
• Or because ''it's not that bad...anyway. Much. Anyway, it could be worse, you know."

It's a pain to be so confused about important things, right? You had goals, you have a brand new year to see them through, you had months, and yet, and yet...You were supposed to be somewhere, making something happen by now. Where did you go? What happened?

When it comes to making sure I stick to my goals, I tend to visit blogs on the areas I'm struggling with. The advice that really resonates with me come from people who've lived through the same issues that I'm currently facing, and were able to articulate how they found their way though. These people have been there and done that, and I get read their 'shirts' for free, so to speak.

So it was a nice coincidence that just when I was getting ready to give up on an important personal project (out of frustration at how slowly things were going), I remembered "My Resolution Revolution" on The Simple Dollar.

In this excellent article, Trent Hamm presented a well-reasoned argument about why so many New Year's resolutions fall by the wayside. Many big goals are presented in a way that's inherently unattainable because they're stated in a manner that is absolutist, and so don't factor in our very human natures, and how time affects that. Stark goals like:

• "Lose 100 pounds." Or "Gain 25 pounds of muscle."
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In a world with uncertain economies, shifting social changes and powerful, ubiquitous technologies, you may think that you're doing all you can to protect the tiny economy of your own small enterprise.

You see, when it comes to running your own business, the sheer number of factors beyond your control --the down market, political infighting and indecisiveness, new tech demanding immediate mastery-- demand that you bite down and focus on the essentials first before attending to the lower priorities. It's basic self-protection. Survival first.

But life is more than just survival. If you'd just take a minute, just one, to watch the video in the linked quote below, it would help give you a background to this article.



You got into business for a reason, or several reasons. You're making it thrive despite everything that's happened in the world. Looking back at where you started, do those reasons still apply? Or have you forgotten them in the daily crunch of running your little empire? Is what you're doing right now -- and plan to do for the foreseeable future -- giving you what you need and want? Are you doing things with your purpose in mind?

This is where cultivating the habit of mindfulness kicks in.