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| © 2006-2010. Sigrid Caroline Schroder. All rights reserved. CORNER OFFICE CONFIDENCE® FOR ENTREPRENEURS  Situational Crisis Individual Guidance Organizational Dynamics Conflict Resolution Transition Succession Exit Next Act BALANCE YOUR BUSINESS IN THE WORLD. FIND A PERSONAL PATH THROUGH BUSINESS DILEMMAS.
IT'S NOT EASY BEING LEAN You can be a roaring success, and somehow it still feels as though you are running all the legs in a relay; running full out, you look around, and there's no one there for you to hand off the baton. When you're the founder, you're not only the ultimate point person for everything which gets decided, you're right in there juggling all the roles, hands on. It's not a mere race: it's the steeple chase. Exhilirating it is to win,  but after one of these 90 hour weeks you feel as though you have crashed through the gates not cleared them --and have been trampled in the stream. You know pretty much what you need to win this race; it's a question of getting it all in place and wrestling the world out of the way. You do your best to be prepared for what you need to do next and prepare against the risks, and yet there always seems to be something new crashing in from out there. You remind yourself that you do know where you are going, but some days you lose track of why. If the outside world would just quiet down, you could get to what you need to get done. Exhausting, success is.
Image©John Rich.iStockPhotos.com BUSINESS IS A RACE
You work flat out, running 85, 95 hours per week. You would not sleep, if you could. You had an idea, you hit the ground running, and then you hurry up and wait. Still waiting for development, production, lending or buying to catch up, you watch the customers' market nervously for technology which makes yours obsolete, for technology which makes yours incomplete, for the first counterfeits of your technology. technology. Still learning how to balance inventory and need, you worry schedules and shipments, delays and supplies. You don't have enough people or skill sets and now you don't have enough sleep. Ever. Let me help you think and worry the crisis when you overdrawn at the energy bank or are in transit between two places and should be in three. Image © Saniphoto.Foltolia
 IT GETS BRUTAL
Did you know the competition could be so brutal? Speak the idea for a new trademark at lunch with a friend and by dinner you will have lost it to a fast filing and a designer. Competitors you once knew as friends will mix up the market for your product with a social networking tool or two. All's fair in entrepreneurship? They will try to take your product and reverse engineer it; they will try to obsolete it before your patent application is dry upon the page. Stop the counterfeit at the border, have it ordered destroyed, and the next shipment will still get through. Meanwhile, staff churns, partners defect as success remains elusive. Even as success is at your door with production and contracts, lenders, landlords, lawyers and suppliers will only give you the merest of leeway. Glean real success through commercial production and contracts, and the lawyers and the (i)bankers, and the accountants will be pressing you with assurances of idle-rich wealth via an IPO. Let me help you cut through the machinations, the overwork and the overload of opinion and demand. However long you have been at this, you need a break. Image © Damien Bert.Fotolia FIND THE PATH
Where two paths have diverged in your yellow woods, let me help you choose your path. Trends and economic cycles drive opportunity in new directions, even as you yourself age and your own goals and perceived capabilities change. Research may point in conflicting directions. Business and family may press cross-demands and leave you torn. Or can you can no longer see the forest for the trees? Are there are far too many trees and and no clear paths through the forest? Regulatory caprice and political whim take their toll. What once worked no longer does, and one feels lost. Suddenly perhaps you don't want to work 95 hours a week for whatever potential payoff by IPO. Whether you find two paths diverge in the wood or are lost in a confusion of trees, I can help you make sense of the choices. My clients have been there, I have seen it. I can help you sort through what you do want and what you don’t, what works and what doesn’t, what is worth working for and what is not. Image ©Malewitch.iStockPhoto OUCH. IT ENDS RIGHT HERE.
Sometimes you have the way all prepared; the model is there, the business is there, the team is all assembled and has every capability of getting this done--and then won't. Don't go to all this effort without knowing that this is in your future. Sometimes it is an investor who pulls the plug; most often it is a joint inventor or co-owner who suddenly, mulishly, says "no." Anticipate this, understand the motives, understand how you as the driven entrepreneur sound to the engineer, scientist, artist or risk averse controller of the purse. And speaking of purse, don't tie its strings so that you impoverish the efforts and cause the team to walk. Free labor and sweat equity can come with their own cost: sometimes it is refusal, taking the technology or torching the model. Image © Clarence Alford.Fotolia NEXT STAGES
Whether it's getting on to the next level or getting past barriers in product development or legal protections and permissions, getting over the wall can be a draining, time consuming and multi-attempt process. Meanwhile your burn continues and the extra work begins to consume you. Sometimes you need handholding just to go forward, and other times you need handholding to confirm the value of waiting and watching and trying again and again in order to go forward. You need independent help in judging the size and the durability of the wall, hoping as most entrepreneurs do that they can just break right through it. For some it is very tempting to go around it but that way lies loss and legal perdition, if you, say, go around to infringement or conceal conditions of default. (And you certainly would not be the type.) Let's look at your wall and see what extra strength and direction you need. Image © Margo Harrison.Fotolia MOVING ON
Entities are perpetual. People are not. Eventually everyone has to move on. For some it comes with the scent of the next start-up and for others with sickness, age or mortality. Many at some point simply realize that it is time to move on and leave the business to succession, whether of heirs apparent, peers or a new generation, or a succession of management brought in by merger or sale. Whichever it is, you need a plan in advance, a plan with alternative scenarios and insurance against the potentials for sickness and mortality. The plan can change. It is not written in stone. Times change, tastes change, appetites change for risk and workload. Your plan can change too. But let's build a plan. Image © Guillermo Perales.iStockPhotos  THE ENTREPRENEUR AND THE "F" WORD
Failure. It happens. The entrepreneurship mavens quote a figure that 80% of new businesses fail within the first two years. Of course old businesses are known to fail too. Businesses fail.In times like these businesses are failing for reasons far beyond the entrepreneurs' realistic control. However it happens, failure may come. The model may be broken, the tide of disparate threats in a harsh business climate doom it. Sometimes, just as a path runs its course and it's over, your product may only go so far. It may be obsoleted, forgotten, or stolen and discounted from China on the Web. You may cross the infringement radar of a rhino and be squashed like a bug. Suddenly there seems to be no new path. What can you do? Let's sort through what there may be to salvage, turnaround or revive. Let's calculate how you fare should you sell, merge, or close up shop. Whether the forces of economics or technology were against you, you worked hard and lost. You have to walk away, but let's make sure that you do so without being ruined or typecast for your next act. Think it through. Image © Igor Sokolov.Fotolia
 Sigrid Caroline Schroder (877) 462-4035 Unlike other consultants, large and small, I don't slide you off on staff or a network. Who you meet is who you get. What Can I Do For You? Clarity at the Highest Levels® Critical Guidance Corner Office Confidence® See Around Corners Reconnaissance Relativity & Revival® Develop Your Model Clear Counsel® Special Notes for Counsel I KNOW WHAT WAKES YOU UP AT NIGHT, . . . OR WILL. Crisis Command  ©Anthony Collins.iStockPhoto | |
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