Ecommerce Advise: "And" Is Not Your Friend

and is not your friend

If you hear yourself say I am running business X AND business Y AND on the side I am also involved in project Z, you are stricken with the “AND” syndrome.

I felt compelled to write this topic because many entrepreneurs are proud of the fact that they can handle several businesses  at the same time, especially us women. Not only are we guilty of taking on too many tasks, we’re also proud of our multi-tasking abilities. C’mon ladies, you know who you are. Confession: I am guilty of this too.

I was at a conference not too long ago and at the luncheon, when everyone was introducing themselves, they started mentioning all the businesses and projects they were involved in. I noticed that there was a pattern amongst the introduction and it dawned on me that not only are entrepreneurs slammed with the responsibilities of running one business but we take it upon ourselves to repeat this mistake in several businesses. If I recall correctly, there was one woman there who was involved in 6 different businesses and they were all active.

Now I am not saying that it’s impossible, but you gotta have an incredible team in place to pull this off successfully, and there lies the real question. Is she successful? Can one juggle that many businesses and be successful?

AND is not your friend. In fact, multi-tasking is the enemy of focus. I realized this several years ago when I was still running my retail/wholesale business while running 2 separate ecommerce websites at the same time. I was stretched pretty thin, cranky all the time and if you add the home aspect to the mix, it was very stressful. I can only imagine that this is not an uncommon story. We’re all overloaded, over committed, unwilling to shed some of these activities because either we feel compelled to do it all, or we’re scared that if we don’t do it all, we will fail.

If you catch yourself saying or whining that you’re “wearing too many hats” this is the same problem as well.  Big companies are not immune to this multi-tasking disease. This is evident in their job postings that they prefer individuals with multi-tasking skill set.   

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So, how do you fix this dilemma, especially when most of us are responsible for so many parts of our business? I remember years ago reading Michael E. Gerber’s book Emyth, why so many small businesses fail and what to do about it. Gerber’s book basically explains that there are several types of entrepreneur and the most common one that people default to is the “technician” or he would also sometimes refer to it as the “do-er”. In fact I have the pleasure of meeting Michael Gerber several years ago and in the workshop I took, he basically called me out and said, “Shirley – you’re such a doer and you will keep on being the doer until you learn to prioritize and truly understand what it is you really want in life.”

Wow, I was floored … I was up until that point very proud of being a “do-er.” I even brag about “you want it done, give it to Shirley” … or I used to think, if I want it done right then I have to do it myself or I get into my martyr state and start feeling sorry for myself because I was “doing it all.”

So, the one thing that I changed in the way I was running my business was creating business process that we also use as employee training tools. This made the world of difference and it changed our business from being run by 5 people to 30 people. Sure some days, it was still chaotic but it was run better than if we didn’t have a system in place.

In summary, I encourage you to think about how you’re currently running your life as a whole. What do you really want to achieve, what are the 3 main goals? It doesn’t mean that you have to give up on your bucket list, but it does mean that if you want to have a meaningful experience, you must re-evaluate your priorities and FOCUS on achieving a smaller set of goals at a given time.

 

Written by: Shirley Tan

 

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