In this interesting article from Inc. Magazine, Jason Fried of 37 Signals encourages entrepreneurs to get lazy. By lazy, he means that they should stop worrying about tomorrow, next week, next month, and certainly next year. And stay focused on today.

Instead of spending your time worrying about what could, might, or may happen, spend your time on what matters now. Are your customers thrilled with your service today? Is your inbox flooded with word-of-mouth referrals today? Do your employees love their jobs today? Can people find what they’re looking for on your website today?

To read the full article, click here.

The band became notorious for a clause in its touring contract that demanded a bowl of M&Ms backstage, but with all the brown ones removed. The story is true — confirmed by former lead singer David Lee Roth himself.

Another example of peculiar rock-star behavior? Not so much. Keep reading.

Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read “like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.” A typical “article” in the contract might say, “There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.”Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126. It read, “There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.” So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. “Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,” he wrote. “They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.”

In other words, Roth was no diva. He was an operations expert. He couldn’t spend hours every night checking the amperage of each socket. He needed a way to assess quickly whether the stagehands at each venue were paying attention — whether they had read every word of the contract and taken it seriously. In Roth’s world, a brown M&M was the canary in the coal mine.

It’s strikingly brilliant, don’t you think?

So what’s the brown M&M in your business?

From my experiences and research, these four concepts are critical to the planning of a successful business. Overlook them early, and you’ll likely face their challenges sooner or later.

Unique

This doesn’t mean that your business needs to be one-of-a-kind, with no competition because it’s so unusual. It means that your product or service should have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP), some distinguishing characteristic that makes it different from and better than other similar products. I would not suggest proceeding past the planning stage without being able to communicate your USP simply and concisely. A great resource for this topic is Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson, particularly chapter six.

Niche

Unless you’ve just won the lottery or inherited a fortune (and probably even if you have), you’ll want to eat the elephant one bite at a time. That means starting with a small niche and expanding from there. In this age, there’s probably no such thing as a niche that is too narrow. Resist the temptation to be all things to all people, even if the opportunities look promising. In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins shares the insightful wisdom of David Packard, cofounder of HP: a company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little.

Testing

This lesson is often learned the hard way, and I can speak from experience. It is tempting to presume that our own desires and preferences extend to others, and that presumption probably leads to the majority of business failures. With an open mind, patience, and just a few dollars, you can boost your chances of success exponentially. As with the USP, I would not recommend moving past the planning stage without testing the commercial viability of your products or services. Chapter ten of The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is hands-down the best resource for how to do this. It walks you through the process step-by-step and provides detailed information on the resources you’ll need.

Enthusiasm

Building a business can be extremely fun and rewarding, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. One of my business partners and I always remind each other that “every day is a Saturday, and no day is a Saturday.” On those days (or weeks, or months) that it feels like you’re walking in the mud, you better have some passion and enthusiasm to fall back on. To test this, I particularly like Gary Vaynerchuk’s suggestion in Crush It: make a list of 50 things. If your project involves writing, make a list of 50 sub-topics. If your project involves internet marketing, make a list of 50 things you can do to promote it. If your product requires direct sales, make a list of 50 people to contact. If you can’t count to 50, you may not be passionate enough.

What are your thoughts? Did I miss any other critical planning components?

As a contributor to the Untemplater blog, I’ve put together a post that outlines a framework for thinking through your business opportunities. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, take a look at my post: Building an Untemplater Business.

I’d love to hear your comments here or on Untemplater. What do you think? Did I miss anything crucial?

For many aspects of our lives, growth is a measure of success. We celebrate growth in learning, growth in our fitness level, or growth in our careers. Many of us view business in the same way. There are even awards specifically for business growth, like the Inc. 500.

But it’s also important to keep Packard’s Law (named after David Packard, cofounder of HP) in mind and remember that a great company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little. So here are a few questions to ponder as you consider whether your business is ready for the growth you envision.

Why do you want to grow?

Oddly enough, this one can be a stumper. For many people, growth is the default. It is important to pause and consider why. Are you looking to increase your profits? Do you want to serve more customers? Do you want to be able to grow your team and the number of people you employ? Do you want to make a larger impact in your community? No one answer is necessarily better than another, but it is important to have an answer. As you face the challenges that come with growth, you’ll want to remember your “why” and focus on the results you were seeking when you chose this course of action.

Is your team ready for growth?

In his book How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins argues that the biggest mistake a company can make is to grow revenues faster than it its ability to get enough of the right people on board to implement that growth. Picture a bus. How many key seats does your company have? How many of them are filled with the right people? What are your plans for increasing that percentage? What are your backup plans in case a key person leaves?

Do you have good feedback mechanisms in place?

With growth, there is inherent risk. Successful companies don’t bury the bad news; they dig and dig to ensure that they uncover it as soon as possible. You can’t make a course correction if you don’t know that a problem exists. It is essential that you have developed systems and monitoring tools to navigate your company.

If you can answer these three questions in the affirmative, you will have dramatically increased your company’s chances of successful growth. For additional reading on this topic, we recommend Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, and The E-Myth Revisited.

There are plenty of articles out there explaining how to keep a tighter rein on your money. But few point out that your time is just as valuable.

The wisest among us know a secret: they effectively trade their money for their time.

They realize that they maximize their effectiveness by identifying the tasks only they can complete, those high-value projects that make the best use of their skills and experience. Then they identify the low-value tasks that many others can complete – and they delegate them. Examples of these types of tasks often include filing, bookkeeping, database entry, website maintenance, basic correspondence, and research.

It may take a bit more time on the front-end to build your system and your team, but you begin seeing the benefit of the delegation as soon as the project recurs. Let’s say you spend an hour a week on basic bookkeeping and it takes you three hours to train someone else to handle that task from now on. By the fourth week, you’ve achieved a positive in the time bank – and you’ve regained an hour each week to focus on a much more important aspect of your business.

Just as you monitor your car’s dashboard to stay on track, you can design a similar system for your business.  Here are the three steps you need to get started.

1. Identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).

For your car, this is the equivalent of knowing how fast you’re going and how much gas you have in the tank. Many business owners immediately think of their sales figures, and that could be one of the KPI’s. But it might also be something more fundamental such as the number of customers or the number of sales calls completed.

Cash is also important. In fact, many would argue it is the most important. And checking the bank balance online doesn’t count. You’ll need an accounting system that accurately monitors your cash level and upcoming obligations.

2. Figure out how to monitor them on a weekly (if not daily) basis.

Timely feedback is essential, and information is worthless unless you can act on it. For most businesses, this means that you’ll need to speed up your feedback loops. Gather your team and brainstorm ways you can track your KPI’s on at least a weekly basis. They may be very basic and manual at first. That’s ok. Just get started and modify as you go.

3. Build a simple spreadsheet to help you monitor trends.

Once you’ve started the information flowing, you’ll need a simple way to organize it. We recommend starting with a basic spreadsheet. Google Docs are a great solution because of their sharing functions. For example, multiple members of your team could enter key data daily or weekly, and then you can access the file and view the information.

If you’d like some assistance with creating a dashboard for your business, we’d be happy to help.

Yes, we’re CPA’s. But we didn’t stop there. Our public experience and corporate executive backgrounds have shown us the nitty-gritty insides of dozens (if not hundreds) of businesses. From furniture stores and restaurants to doctor’s offices and manufacturing companies, we’ve learned the characteristics of businesses that are successful over the long-term. And we can help your business develop those characteristics as well. Contact us to see how.

If you’re a business owner, here are a few options you might consider.

1. QuickBooks Online

With packages ranging from $9.95 per month to $34.95 per month, QuickBooks Online has re-emerged as a prominent solution for small businesses.  The online solution includes automatic backup and all of the features of the desktop-based software. And with the added benefit of accessibility from any computer (or mobile phone) with internet access, it can easily support multiple locations or a distributed workload.

2. FreshBooks

Perfect for freelancers or service providers, FreshBooks offers a great solution for those that are not fond of traditional accounting systems. It offers four packages at a price point less than $40 per month and a tremendous amount of integration with other tools such as time trackers and customer relationship managers.

3. NetSuite

An early leader in online accounting software, NetSuite has continued to evolve and add features. If your business has outgrown QuickBooks or needs enhanced functionality for inventory or detailed CRM, NetSuite may be the perfect fit. With as much horsepower as GreatPlains, SAP, or MAS, NetSuite offers a modular approach and intuitive user interface that keeps the implementation costs as low as possible.

If you’re ready to give your accounting system an upgrade, take a look at these three solutions. If you’re not sure which option would be best, we can help you decide.