I want to tell you here about someone I have known for years. He is an acquaintant of mine. I am not calling him a friend because we are so far apart in our attitudes to life and everything else really, so we keep falling off over anything!
He used to owns a small business , but before that we used to work together about 10 years ago for a very large investment bank. He was my boss, and was quite a nasty one. You know the kind of bosses who would time every second you go out for lunch. Count the number of times you went to the toilets. Made you miserable by staring at your screen whenever he was passing by. It was horrible, so I never took any liking to this guy. Anyway, I was working in one of the off-shore branches and it so happens that the branch got shut down because it wasn’t profitable enough.
We were all 20 something and very eager to climb the corporate ladder, but since the place we used to live at the time was very small there weren’t many opportunities. So many of us opened our own businesses, basically doing what we used to do on a consultancy basis.
I moved to London and continued working my way up the corporate ladder in other large corporations. But this guy stayed there and opened his own financial consultancy firm. Initially, he did very well for himself. He got his old connections back and advised his old clients for a couple of years. This got him floating quite nicely, but then there was a serious decline in his business and he was about to go broke. He failed to recruit new clients, he was running out of money very quickly and had to fire his old friends who worked as his office manager and a fellow consultant. He was there on his own, probably very frustrated and clueless.
Last year I went back there for a short holiday, I was shopping for new sunglasses and when I was about to pay, I looked up the cashier and there he was! embarrassed and smiling. “You haven’t changed a bit” he said.
I felt for the guy, after all, he used to be my ruthless boss and now he is there taking my money while I was shopping for my Gucci’s. It was early evening, so I waited for his shift to end and we sat down for coffee. I genuinely wanted to know what went wrong.
And! as it turns out, this guy did everything wrong. He made many mistakes that small business owners make, and the inevitable consequences have emerged as expected. He was so immersed in his work and his clients that he never had the chance to look at the business and where the business was going. He never even had the time to sit down and think about his business model. What his unique selling point was and how he was going to increase profits and get more clients. He had no online presence at all. There he was trying to run a business and had no website to begin with. Literally!,every mistake in the book! His excuse was…”I never had the time”…
Well, you know what I always say, make the time, automate your work, it will repay itself many times over. Get yourself a professionally designed website. Get yourself noticed. Don’t just expect work to turn up out of the clear blue sky. In nowadays, you really need to have the complete package to succeed. The alternative is just not there if you are working for yourself. There is NO alternative.
With this in mind, we decided at iQ Desk, to offer our readers a complete package of a professionally designed website through our parent company S-Development with the iQ Desk automation software. These package should really give you the edge to compete in the 21st century. We truly want all of you out there to succeed.
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