People often ask what was behind the creation of Opportunity Matrix – this video helps explain why:
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Why I created Opportunity Matrix
Posted Jan 2nd, 2011 By Andrew Horder in Business Strategy Coaching, Clarity & Focus With | No Comments -
Are you a Protopreneur?
Posted Dec 21st, 2010 By Andrew Horder in Business Strategy Coaching, Decision Making With | 1 CommentWhat is a protopreneur?
We’ve all heard of entrepreneurs, haven’t we? And most know what a ‘micropreneur’ is. And a ‘solopreneur’ too. Even ‘Mumpreneurs’ (and ‘Dadpreneurs’, according to Rachel Elnaugh). But what’s a ‘protopreneur’? It’s a made-up word, just like all the rest. Well, apart from entrepreneur (which, according to Dubya, is something the French don’t have a word for
).It comes from the Greek ‘prōtos’ (first), which itself comes from ‘pro’ (before). Proto- tends to mean the form immediately before something emerges. For example a ‘prototype’ is the nearly-finished product, from which the final item that goes to market is developed. And ‘protoplasm’ is the earliest form of living matter, from which emerges all living organisms. ‘Proto-’ means the very start, the point just before the actual thing itself is born.
OK, so that’s the derivation. But what actually *is* a ‘protopreneur’? I use it to describe a person who is standing at the brink of entrepreneurship – still in a job, but somehow certain that you should be doing doing something for yourself. You may even have an idea what you’d love to be doing, yet something’s holding you back from taking that first step – keeping you at the ‘protopreneur’ stage, right on the cusp.That hesitation, that niggling doubt, that obstacle to just taking the leap of faith, could just be nerves. Or it could be something more, it could be your intuition telling you that something’s not quite right, that for you this isn’t quite the right time, that there’s a fatal flaw in your plan. And the trouble is, it’s very hard to tell whether you’re holding back through procrastination or perceptiveness.
And you don’t have to be still in a job to be one. A lot of people remain in the protopreneur stage for quite some time after they leave employment, as you try to work out exactly what it is you do. In fact, from my experience, I’d say a good half of the people you meet around the networking circuit are in the protopreneur phase for a maybe a year, even two, as you try your hand at various things that seem like they’ll be fun or they’ll make your fortune, before finding that one thing you can stick at.
I’ve been there, I’ve been that protopreneur, on both sides of the employment divide, and I’ve seen it so often in others, I’m now on a mission to move protopreneurs on, to help them find their laser focus, to see them set firm on a course that will take them where they want to go.
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Shortcut or direct route?
Posted Nov 14th, 2010 By Andrew Horder in Business Strategy Coaching, Clarity & Focus, Motivation & Management With | No Comments
Life PurposeLike many of us, I’ve spent a fair chunk of the last few years looking for that elusive short-cut to wealth & success. In a conversation last week with one of my more enlightened clients,
Malcolm Tullett, it came to me in a flash: if you’re taking a short-cut, by definition you’re off the path.I’m as keen as the next person to achieve my goals as quickly as I can, so I’m kind of opposed to anything that makes life harder. I don’t hold with the view that fulfillment comes only as a result of hard work. In fact, my whole premise is that life should be easy, if you’re on the right path. So surely taking the most direct route should be a good thing, shouldn’t it?
I believe that there’s a path we need to tread in order to get the learnings we need to be truly fulfilled. They’re probably different for each of us – after all, we each apply a different set of filters to “reality”, based on our experiences, beliefs and values. So what is a useful direct route for one person may mean missing something important for another – a short route cutting out an essential learning.
What would you say is the difference for you between taking the most direct route and taking a short-cut?
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No Regrets!
Posted Sep 26th, 2010 By Andrew Horder in A Better World, Clarity & Focus With | No CommentsI seem to be in mismatching* mode these last few days – here’s another old saw I don’t agree with.
I guess it depends what you understand by “regret”. I define it as wishing I hadn’t done something, or had done something differently. So it seems rather foolish not to regret some of the stuff I’ve done in the past – coasting my way to a 3rd class degree, thinking I could get past the muppet turning right against my motorbike, taking that job … the list is endless! Did I learn stuff from those mistakes? Absolutely! Which is why I now wish I hadn’t done them. To me, refusing to regret things that I’ve done implies refusing to get the learnings from them.
There’s a big difference between regretting stuff I did (or didn’t do for that matter) and worrying about stuff that others did that harmed or hurt me. I rather wish certain women had treated me differently. It would have been nice if certain bosses had recognised my enormous talents. And it sure would have been nice if the muppet in the Citroen hadn’t decided to turn right across my path that December evening in 1978. But I can’t regret any of that – you can only regret your own actions. The equivalent to regret when it concerns other people’s actions is resentment. That doesn’t help me grow like the learning experiences I regret, it eats me up by placing the cause of my success or failure outside of myself.
And the biggest danger of all is if I start to beat myself up about the things I did to myself. That serves no purpose at all – if resentment against others poisons the heart, resentment against oneself is corrosive to the very soul.
So yes, I regret loads of stuff – but I resent nothing.
*Mismatching is a concept used in NLP, to indicate someone who automatically disagrees with whatever you tell them. Mismatchers can have great value if they are conscious they are doing it, because they challenge assumptions that others may simply accept. Where it has become automatic, personally I just find them annoying. -
Do what you love and the money will come!
Posted Sep 24th, 2010 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Loving your Work, Motivation & Management, Sales and adding value With | 1 Comment
What a crock of ****!I love sitting around in beachfront bars, sipping a cold beer, occasionally glancing up from some esoteric tome to observe the passing totty. Regrettably, I can’t find a way to “monetize” that. I also love talking to people about their aims and objectives, and asking awkward questions they don’t want to confront. I have found a way to monetize that. It’s all about picking the right things that we love – the ones that answer my two “Big Business Questions”:
- How much do I want to do this?
- Will I make any money at it?
I’ve managed to monetize my passion for what I call “inquisitive analysis” – by a lot of bloody hard work, and by doing some stuff I would really rather not have to. I’ve studied successful businesspeople, trained in NLP and communication, created a rather nifty analysis tool … and left the suburban comfort of my home office and started selling to people.
It’s only fairly recently, largely through the excellent work of one of my mentors, Nick Heap, and also of my coach Jules Cooper, that I came to realise that if I wanted to have a successful business, then I’d have to do some things that right now I’d really rather not do. Asking people to hire me for a start. Expecting them to pay for the time I’d been giving away for free. Or selling them my products. Even cold calling!
Of course, we can all point to examples of successful people who say their work is their passion, and they’d do it even if they didn’t get paid. And I believe we *can* all achieve that blissful state. But not by just ‘doing what we love’. When you look at some of the most famous successful work-lovers, we can detect a common theme. They all identified what they needed to do, so that they could be successful at what they love. And got on and did it. Top personal development trainer Chris Howard talks about how he grew his business after he learned to love cold calling. Chris says that we’re told that successful people are the ones who are willing to do the things that others won’t, when in fact it’s that successful people are the ones who learn to love the things that others hate.
Bill Gates loved computer programming, but he recognised that he needed to get good at selling, marketing and putting deals together. Pretty soon he was more about doing the deals than writing the code, and appeared to absolutely relish creating them. Warren Buffet hated speaking in public, yet he recognised that he needed to present his vision for his companies, made himself do it, and eventually became an entertaining speaker who appears to have great fun on the podium. Oprah’s passion is as a broadcaster and presenter, yet she has created for herself a love of running a business such that she is involved at every level of Harpo Productions.
So it’s not a case of successful people do what they love, and the money magically comes flowing in. They work out how to add value doing what they love, and what things they are going to have to do, to deliver that value. And then they learn to love doing those things too.
So it’s not “Do What You Love” – it’s “Love What You Do”
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We get paid for our filters
Posted Jun 18th, 2010 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Sales and adding value With | 1 CommentThere’s far more information out there than we could possibly cope with, so we use our filters to sort out the information we actually need. These filters come from our beliefs and values, our culture, our society, our personal experience, our learning … in fact pretty much every around us right now, and that we’ve been exposed to in our past. And it’s our filters that create our version of reality, how we see the world we’re interacting with.
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Our greatest fear …
Posted Oct 14th, 2008 By Andrew Horder in A Better World With | No CommentsQuoted, I believe, in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Marianne Williamson famously said:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Actually, my greatest fear is not that I’m powerful beyond measure – I know I can be; we all can, if we’d just let it loose. My greatest fear is that I’ll miss the opportunity to use that immeasurable power to create a better future for mankind. That scares me beyond measure – so every day I’m guarding against it. Sometimes I get it wrong; mostly (I hope) I get it right.
What’s your greatest fear, and what are you doing about it?
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How much time are you wasting?
Posted Jun 15th, 2008 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Time Management With | No Comments
Opportunity Matrix™ – how NOT to be a Busy Fool
Time IS Money
Now, I’m not talking about the time you spend gawking at the goggle-box (though that really is a complete waste of time), and I’m not talking about the time you spend wading through spam e-mails. I’m not even talking about the time you spend on the web using online networks (or whatever).
The time I’m talking about is the time when you’re working hard, but you’re working on the wrong things – on sub-optimal opportunities. OK, what do I mean by sub-optimal?
Experience has shown me that the business owners that really succeed do three things well: they focus, they are passionate about what they do, and they understand viability. The reasons Focus is important, I covered in two recent blogs (So why is Focus important to success? and Focus, potential and performance); Passion and Viability I will cover in a few days. What I mean by sub-optimal, are those “opportunities” where you aren’t really fired up by them, and/or they aren’t really viable.
The trouble with these sub-optimal activities is that they don’t just affect you by wasting your time. They also affect your efficiency and effectiveness in doing the things you should be focussing on, because a part of your attention is always on them, even if only slightly. And each time you shift focus from a good opportunity to one of your sub-optimal ones, it take you a while to get back into the swing of it. In extreme circumstances, they can affect your whole attitude to your business – if you’re wasting time on things you’re not really enjoying, or that are harder than they should be to make a success of, it’s easy to get dispirited and disheartened.
I’ve been reading a lot of biographical material lately – people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Oprah Winfrey, Carlos Slim Helu (“Who he?” I hear you ask; the second richest man on the planet, according to Forbes), Branson, Trump. And what shines through in all of it is focus and passion – they do what they do because they love doing it, and they focus on what they’re good at. They don’t get distracted by stuff they don’t enjoy – many of them say outright, something like, if it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
If this has already made you think about how you’re spending your “work” time, that’s good. If you still need a bit more motivation to stop wasting time on your “sub-optimals”, click HERE to try out my opportunity cost calculator to work out how much money that wasted time could be costing you!
What time management and/or prioritisation methods do you use, to make sure you’re spending your time on the stuff that really matters to your business success?
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Focus, Potential & Performance
Posted Jun 4th, 2008 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus With | No Comments
Opportunity Matrix™ – how NOT to be a Busy Fool
I saw Marcus Alexander of Confidence Plus give a talk yesterday at the Surrey Business Club, and he used an interesting formula¹, that gels with my post last week about the importance of Focus. The formula goes:
PERFORMANCE = POTENTIAL – INTERFERENCESo if we can reduce interference, performance should go up. Marcus was using interference to mean all the routine stuff around a business, or the stuff that we don’t really want to do. So the trick, he said, is to reduce interference by outsourcing where that makes sense, either for financial or operational reasons.
I think the formula works just as well when talking about the distractions that come from having too many things on the go at once, trying to spread ourselves too thin. By allowing every sparkly new idea, or ‘fantastic’ new opportunity to distract our focus from what we’re really good at, and what we really enjoy doing, we create interference that reduces our performance, or results.
Sometimes it can be hard to stay focussed on a small number of things – that’s one of the reasons I always recommend focusing on things you enjoy (more on that later). And when you think about how much you need to earn in profit each and every day if you’re going to achieve your income targets for the year, then you start to realise quite how much money you’re wasting by not staying focussed. I find that rather focuses the mind!
¹ The formula comes, I think, from Timothy Gallwey’s “The Inner Game of……” books (not that I’ve read them, that’s just from Google)
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For civilisation to make progress …
Posted May 9th, 2008 By Andrew Horder in A Better World With | No Comments
Opportunity Matrix™ – how NOT to be a Busy Fool
…. each generation has to do better than the last one”
That’s a quote from a TED talk by Hector Ruiz (CEO of AMD), talking about the ’50×15′ initiative.
It struck me as very true, particularly as Ruiz’s father related it not to “civilisation” as a whole, but to him as an individual – telling the young Hector that he had to be a better student, husband, father etc than he himself had managed. That personal responsibility is very important IMHO, as it stops us relying on ‘the others’ or some amorpohous thing called ‘society’ of which we’re a sort of part, but we’re not sure what we can do to affect it.
That made me think: overall my father did better than my grandfather. Granddad was a good husband to my Gran (even though she could be a bit of a cow) for over 50 years. He was a successful shopkeeper, much loved by the community and pretty much universally respected for his kindness and courtesy. And he was a good father to my Dad, but his sphere of influence was pretty small. My Dad was married to my Mum for over 50 years too, before he died. And he was a good father to his three sons – pointing us in the right direction, but letting us go out and make our own way in the world. And baling us out when we got it wrong. He was a senior executive in a big conglomerate, and he was a dedicated lay preacher in the local Methodist church, so he was able to spread his influence much wider than Granddad did.
So what of the next generation? Leaving my brothers out of it (though neither has achieved what Dad did, or Granddad), I’ll consider myself. I got a third at Durham, aftert a pretty idle 3 years; I used to think that was progress compared to Dad – he didn’t go to Uni at all – but in reality he’d studied really hard for his accountancy qualifications and passed with flying colours. I did my MBA later on, of which Dad was inordinately proud, so maybe I eventually scraped through on being a better student. Husband? Well, I’ve been married to Daniela for over 13 years now, and she’s showing few signs of getting fed up with me, so I might scrape through on that one. Except this is my 3rd attempt, both the previous goes ending in divorce – so at best a shaky start with a promising end on that score. And I haven’t had children, so I don’t score too well on that one either.
So, have I failed in my responsibility to do better than the previous generation? Absolutely not! I’m only 48, I’ve got as long again to make my mark; it’s just that I’ve had a slow start, so I’d better get my finger out! I know what I’m here for (Encouraging Potential) and I have some ideas how to do it for greatest effect – hence my interest in AMD’s plans for the developing world, and charities like PennyOn.
How are you going to make sure you do better than your previous generation?
Opportunity Matrix™ 
