When a recent visitor to Paradise Palms wrote to the website asking if she could book a big event there, my reaction was, “Hell, yes!” The garden is amazing. I have zero doubt that anyone who had an event there would be anything less than thrilled – and it would help pay for the $600,000 a year it costs in upkeep.
Then came another opinion: “We are not ready to handle big events. We need a professional event organizer at the very least. We’ve discussed this with you before. We’ve outlined the problems.”
It reminded me of a course I took in “leadership styles.” We learned that some people are directors, some people are analysts, some people are counselors, and some people are communicators.
I’m a director. And the greatest pleasure directors get from their work comes from seeing the work get done.
The person that disagreed with me is an analyst. And the greatest pleasure analysts get from their work comes from solving problems, getting the machine running smoothly, and making workers happy.
Both personalities are important to a new business. But because analysts spend so much time trying to fix problems they foresee before the business even gets launched, nothing gets done unless a director is in charge.
I wrote a book about starting and building multimillion-dollar businesses: Ready, Fire, Aim. It was a bestseller. And it continues to generate at least one email a week from folks who have used it as an instruction manual.
In Ready Fire Aim, I laid out my thesis that there are four stages of development and that every stage has one primary challenge and one primary opportunity. In Stage One (the stage we are in with Paradise Palms), the challenge is initiating positive cash flow before you run out of money, ideas, faith, and endurance. The opportunity (the way to solve the problem) is to discover what I call the OSS (Optimum Selling Strategy).
Here’s the thing: You will never know if your business idea works until you are making sales and bringing in new customers. And even then, you are working against two timeclocks: One is about how much capital you have to spend before you are cash positive. The other is about how much faith and energy you have to keep going.
And here’s the question: Do I have what it takes for Paradise Palms?
