Small Biz Survival

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Jumpstart your stalled business

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How’s business? If it has stalled out, or if you just aren’t satisfied, you may be ready to reexamine your passion.

From Entrepreneur.com, brought to our attention by Be Excellent.

The first step is to sit down and determine your “best and highest use” or BHU. Your particular BHU stems from your unique talents and passions, the things that set your business apart and translate into the distinctive solutions you can offer your customers. Determining your BHU will connect you to the passions and purpose that led you to start your business in the first place.

Best and Highest Use manifests your preferences and talents in ways that fill needs in the marketplace:

  • Your best represents your preferred choice among all the things you do well;
  • Highest represents that which is most valued by customers, suppliers, employers, or partners; and
  • Use is the actual, essential value you provide to others.

Unless you have all three elements, you and your company will eventually experience boredom, dissatisfaction, mediocrity, chaos, or feeble sales and frail profits. Best and Highest Use begins in passion (the owner’s), is refined through need (the customer’s), and ends in satisfaction all around. When the marketplace says, “Yes, that is what you should be doing to give me what I need!” you have found your BHU.

Author Andy Birol walks you through a six step process to refine your focus:

  1. Document your successes.
  2. Consider the importance of fun.
  3. Discover what clients, customers and staff like about you.
  4. Distill and simplify.
  5. Know your blind spots.
  6. Synthesize, apply and focus.

It’s a good article, and Birol has an excellent point. Your passion is only one part of success. You must connect that passion to a need and a use. This is just a critical for a small town small biz as it is for the next billion dollar biz.

About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.

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