Don’t let personal flaws turn your business into a train wreck. 

By Geoff Williams

If you have a business or plan to start one and there is a day in the distant future when you have to call it quits, you may accept your defeat graciously if a nationally known competitor the size of Rhode Island were to move in across the street and, despite your best efforts, clean your clock. Likewise, you may not blame yourself much if your business were to go south because a tornado carried your entire company due east.

But if your business goes up in flames someday and you know you were the one who inadvertently lit the match— because you were financially inept, or because you took too many vacations, or because you worked your body and mind into oblivion—that’s going to haunt you, probably even long after you’ve packed it in and entered a nursing home where your days are spent watching reruns of Gunsmoke.

Unfortunately, entrepreneurs are often their own worst enemies. Maybe they have the vision but lack the capacity to figure out the details. Maybe they excel at raising money but not spending it.

“The biggest challenge I see business leaders facing is that our very strengths and behavior patterns, which contribute to us becoming successful, actually shoot us in the foot later if we’re not able to adjust our behavior in other, less familiar settings,” says Dennis LaRosee, senior vice president at PI Worldwide, an international management consulting firm in Wellesley, Massachusetts, that specializes in helping people utilize their strengths (see “Searching for Insight,” right). In theory, if you’re frequently using your strengths, you’re able to avoid showcasing your weaknesses. As LaRosee observes, “The more we know about ourselves, the more we understand the connection between ourselves and others in the workplace, [and] the more control we have.”

Read on to find out how three entrepreneurs tackled their bad habits—and helped their businesses succeed.

A Little Understanding
Lara J. Kisielewska wishes she had understood more about her weaknesses before she started her company. She is 33 now, but when she was 20, she was a whiz kid who graduated from college early, even while holding down a full-time job, a part-time job and a 50-hour-a-week gig at her student newspaper. She aspired to be an art director at a magazine. In figuring out how to do that, she searched for ways to make money and thought up a business—New York City-based Optimum Design & Consulting—where she would do graphic design, pre-press work and Macintosh-based computer consulting. Her parents—teachers who were in awe of their overachiever—lent their daughter $85,000 from their savings to help get her business off the ground.

And before Kisielewska even opened her doors for business, she spent every last cent of it.

As her bankbook dwindled, she didn’t think she was being foolish. She took on an expensive three-year lease on a 665-square-foot office in Manhattan. “I fell in love with the place,” she admits, but she now concedes it was more space than she needed. She bought two $10,000 printers—she wanted the best—hired some students who would work part time for $6 to $12 an hour, and bought all new office furniture.

All along, Kisielewska had planned to work a full-time job in the production department of Scientific American magazine while running her side business. What she didn’t plan on was having to take another full-time job creating presentations at night through a temp agency to help pay her employees’ salaries, the lease and her debts, and to keep her business going. She was soon reduced to working at her other jobs from 11 in the morning until 2 a.m.; she would then go to Optimum, where her life was anything but.
She kept a sleeping bag and an alarm clock in her office. After more than a year, “I realized this was nuts,” says Kisielewska, who finally quit her other jobs and focused on Optimum full time. Today, her business has eight employees and revenue is approaching $1 million.

Kisielewska is on the road to recovery because she took a long, analytical look at her mistakes. She came to realize that frugality is a good thing when it comes to business. “I didn’t know what working capital meant at all,” says Kisielewska, who now makes business purchases only if they’re going to bring in income for the company.

Kisielewska also learned not to rely on a handful of large clients. Several years after she started her business, three of her five biggest clients coincidentally left in a matter of one month, and not surprisingly, Kisielewska’s company took a big financial hit. From then on, she started diversifying who she was serving to make sure that even if a handful of clients happened to leave at once, her business wouldn’t be greatly impacted.

But Kisielewska didn’t find all the answers to her problems by herself or because she was crushed under the weight of her own errors—she also opted for outside help. In the early days, she couldn’t afford to bring in a professional to assist her with budgeting, so she began joining organizations like the New York City chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners. It wasn’t a perfect fit at first—Kisielewska was younger than the other members and intimidated by them, but eventually, she realized: “The best way to get help is to be honest about your problems.”

Heal Thyself
Curtis McClees, 45, president of Winning Concepts USA, a political and business consulting firm in Orange Park, Florida, knew he was in trouble shortly after moving his business from his home office into a commercial building. He and his partner and vice president, Bill Hopkins, 60, had transported all their paperwork—their “mess,” says McClees—into the new office, which was three times the size of the home office. Pretty soon, they had three times the mess.

“The offices were filled to the rim with papers and promotional materials,” says McClees. “In the filing room were stacks of paper, just piles and piles of stuff.” McClees and Hopkins were routinely losing the very work they needed to keep their business humming. “I remember trying to find a catalog to show a customer,” says McClees, “and I’d get so frustrated. I’d know that I had seen it, but I just couldn’t locate it."

McClees concluded that he needed outside help, so he hired a professional organizer. “She was there for two weeks, just going through everything, creating a system for our paperwork, getting our catalogs in order and filing them from A to Z,” says McClees. “We have more than 1,000 catalogs at any given time from manufacturers. It’s made our lives 10 times easier.” And the business has grown in the wake of the change. McClees and Hopkins now have seven employees, and Winning Concepts currently generates $500,000 in revenue.

Indeed, there’s no shame in asking for assistance when trying to change your habits or fix your mistakes. Jack Perry, author of Jack, You’re Fired, a book about the way sales professionals self-implode, muses: “There’s a point where every entrepreneur has to ask, ‘Am I really the best person for this particular job, or should I have somebody else run this?’ Look at it this way—a heart surgeon, no matter how skilled, doesn’t operate on himself.”

Looking Inward
The trouble for bad-habit-prone entrepreneurs is that they often don’t know they have bad habits. Sometimes you can get too busy running the business to notice you’re running it into the ground. “I think people need to look at themselves,” suggests Beth Silver, managing director of Doubet Consulting in New York City. “Everybody has something holding them back. It could be time management; it could be that you’re not getting enough sleep; it may be that you aren’t responding quickly enough to your clients—or yourself. If you don’t feel like you have enough balance, then you have to figure out what’s in your way. You just have to be open to seeing what needs to be tweaked.”

Or what needs major surgery. Sue Murray, 52, is president of EduCorp Training and Consulting in Grapevine, Texas. Like many people, she likes to look for the best in others, so she didn’t run credit checks on several companies for which she consulted. Because these businesses did a lot of work for a large household-name corporation, she assumed that her new clients were trustworthy. “This big company was paying them, and I figured, they’ll pay me. I didn’t know that instead they were paying for Mercedes [Benzes] and second houses.”

Not only did Murray’s company do a considerable amount of work for three particular clients, but she also willingly extended their credit and kept providing her company’s services. But when the three clients went bankrupt before paying EduCorp what they owed, Murray’s business lost $750,000.

“I had to have a long heart-to-heart talk with myself,” says Murray, whose four-employee, $6-million firm now makes every client go through a credit check before it takes them on. “I sat down and said, ‘OK, this is one of my failings. I’m too trusting, and I didn’t do the things that I should have done.’ I vowed to change, and I wrote down what I planned to do for the company, and that helped.”

Murray hasn’t completely changed. She’s not confrontational and she still hates to ask clients for credit checks—so she has her accounting manager do that. “It doesn’t bother him to do that,” she says. Yes, entrepreneurs can take comfort in knowing that if they suspect their bad habits are ingrained, there is always a chance they can avoid the problem by having somebody else make up for what they are lacking. Delegating is, after all, a big part of an entrepreneur’s job.

But only you can determine what your bad habits are and whether you’re willing to keep the worst of who you are away from the company. From disgruntled employees to brutal competitors, there will always be somebody only too happy to help you go out of business. The last enemy you need is yourself.

Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio. Contact him at gwilliams1@cinci.rr.com