{"id":1602,"date":"2013-10-28T10:16:26","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T17:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/?p=1602"},"modified":"2013-10-28T10:16:26","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T17:16:26","slug":"think-like-a-business-owner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dierschow.com\/wordpress\/career\/think-like-a-business-owner","title":{"rendered":"Think like a business owner"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you may know, my “day job” is being a coach for small business owners here in northern Colorado.\u00a0 I just passed my third anniversary with Small Fish Business Coaching<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s an interesting setup, because I joined Small Fish as a franchisee.\u00a0 In a very real sense, I am my own business owner, acting in partnership with a larger company which owns the brand I operate under.\u00a0 I make my own business decisions taking into account my partners’ needs.\u00a0 The most recent example is when I launched my Values-Based Business blog<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

But I can trace my roots as a business owner back to 1992, when I took over managing a software product business inside HP.\u00a0 This was my first opportunity to operate quite independently, because I was controlling a little-known product with exactly 27 customers around the world.<\/p>\n

My organization reporting was within R&D, but I was able to have a number of marketing people (product marketing, documentation, and product support) attached to my team.<\/p>\n

Now this is where it really got interesting for us.<\/p>\n

Because this was such a tiny product, we weren’t given a whole lot of support or direction from the larger organization.\u00a0 So I decided to run this as its own little independent business deep down in the bowels of HP.<\/p>\n