Small business owners should do these four tasks as soon as possible in the new year...getty
Owning a small business is daunting, even for people with loads of management experience. Suddenly finding oneself “where the buck stops” can be anxiety inducing. The consequences of failure for some mistakes can affect more than just you (e.g., your staff or even your family) and can be expensive and time consuming to fix.
Whether you are a brand new business owner or someone who has had their business for a while but is constantly gobsmacked by the amount of administrative work that piles up when you are working on other tasks, Ronnie Goode—CPA-owner of Rhythm Accounting in Richmond, Virginia— says that taking some time in January to mark the following four items off of your “to do” list will reap rewards when it’s time to file your tax return.
1) Close Your Books For 2022
One of the first tasks small business owners should do (especially those who manage their own books) is to close their business books:
Categorize Transactions: Sort expenses into the proper accounts. It’s OK if you aren’t sure to use the “Ask My Accountant” option but try not to overuse it. If you have multiple income streams make sure that bank deposits are also coded by income stream so you can determine your business’ most profitable income sources.
Reconcile Bank Accounts: This task is often skipped by business owners who don’t have outside bookkeeping or accounting help but it is one of the most important year-end tasks to ensure balance sheets and other financial reports are accurate.
Generate Financial Reports: At a minimum your tax preparer (even if that is you) needs a detailed profit and loss statement (P&L) and, ideally, a balance sheet. If you have a CPA they will help you interpret your financial results. If you provide them with the necessary information early enough in tax season, they may even be able to help you with some last-minute, after year end tax planning.
2) Issue Forms 1099-NEC To Contractors And Subcontractors
If you paid more than $600 to a contractor or a subcontractor you have until January 31, 2023 to issue them a Form 1099-NEC. If you haven’t already received Form W9 from your contractors you will need to contact them to have them provide you with the form or the necessary information. Adopt the best practice of having new contractors complete their W9 before they begin work.
Make it a requirement for accepting the contract! It’s even a good idea to ask your regular contractors to complete a new Form W9 at the beginning of each calendar year just to make sure their business and contact information is up to date. Goode reminds business owners that the W9 is not necessary if the payments were issued to a corporation (e.g., the big box store from which you purchase your office supplies).
3) Issue Forms W2 To Employees
If you had any employees in 2022 you must issue their W2 on or before January 31, 2023. Goode notes that the simplest way to accomplish this is to use payroll-specific software or a payroll provider. Now is also a good time to check and make sure all payroll tax forms (Forms 941 and Form 940) have been or will be filed promptly and that all payroll taxes have been or will be paid.
4) Make Your Final Estimated Tax Payment
Goode reminds business owners that their final estimated tax payment for 2022 is due on January 17, 2023. He notes that the amount of estimated taxes you are required to pay is based on last year’s numbers. Sometimes, however, those numbers aren’t accurate. Adjusting quarterly estimates is one area where hiring an outside tax and accounting professional can really help taxpayers avoid problems.
For example, if a taxpayer has a bad quarter, the professional can help determine a lower estimate or if the business had an exceptionally good quarter the professional can determine if making a larger estimated payment will help avoid a nasty surprise come filing time.
Even if you are managing your own books, resolve to learn how estimated payment calculations are made and to look at your profit and loss quarterly to ensure you are not overpaying or grossly underpaying your estimated taxes. Finally, Goode reminds small business owners that “From a financial perspective, businesses have cycles that dictate not only how to move, but when to move.
Understanding these cycles can help [business owners] create a routine and a [financial] system for their business” that helps the business maximize profits while planning for the taxes. Remember, it’s never a good idea to spend money to save money on taxes. Spend money to make more money and plan for the taxes as you go!
I own Tax Therapy, LLC, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I am an Enrolled Agent and non-attorney practitioner admitted to the bar of the U.S. Tax Court. I work as a tax general
The ancients were fond of an expression: Character is fate. It means that character is deterministic, that who you are determines what you will do. Self-discipline is one of those special things that is both predictive and deterministic. It both predicts that you will be great, AND it makes whatever you are doing great. It is not a means to an end.
It is not just something we value until we get something we think we might really value—this job title, that amount of money, winning the biggest game, landing the best opportunity. No. Discipline is the win. When you are disciplined about your craft…you win. When you know you put your best into something…you win. When your self-worth is tied to things you can control (effort, for example)…you win.
This is what I mean when I say, as I titled my latest book, Discipline is Destiny. Who we are, the standards we hold ourselves to, the things we do regularly—in the end, these are all better predictors of the trajectory of our lives than things like talent, resources, or anything else. So here, adapted from my latest book, Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, are 25 habits that will put you on the best trajectory possible.
1. Attack the dawn. The morning hours are the most productive hours. Because in the morning, you are free. Hemingway would talk about how he’d get up early because early, there was, “no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.” Toni Morrison found she was just more confident in the morning, before the day had exacted its toll and the mind was fresh. Like most of us, she realized she was just, “not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.” Who can be? After a day of banal conversations, frustrations, mistakes, and exhaustion.
2. Quit being a slave. On an ordinary afternoon in 1949, the physicist Richard Feynman was going about his business when he felt a pull to have a drink. Not an intense craving by any means, but it was a disconcerting desire for alcohol. On the spot, Feynman gave up drinking right then and there. Nothing, he felt, should have that kind of power over him. At the core of the idea of self-mastery is an instinctive reaction against anything that masters us. We have to drop bad habits. We have to quit being a slave—to cigarettes or soda, to likes on social media, to work, or your lust for power. The body can’t be in charge. Neither can the habit. We have to be the boss.
3. Just be about the work. Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end—the Netflix special, selling out the stadium, doing this, getting that. “No, no, no,” he said, “I get to do comedy…I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work. I’m on house money, full time.”
4. Manage the load. “Absolute activity, of whatever kind,” Goethe said, “ultimately leads to bankruptcy.” No one is invincible. No one can carry on forever. We are all susceptible to what the American swimmer Simone Manuel has helped popularize: Overtraining Syndrome. Even iron eventually breaks, or wears out.
5. Do the hard things first. The poet and pacifist William Stafford put forth a daily rule: “Do the hard things first.” Don’t wait. Don’t tell yourself you’ll warm up to it. Don’t tell yourself you’ll get this other stuff out of the way and then…No. Do it now. Do it first. Get it over with.
6. Keep the main thing the main thing. “I wish I knew how people do good and long sustained work and still keep all kinds of other lines going–social, economic, etc,” John Steinbeck once wrote in the middle of the long grind of a novel. The truth is, they don’t! It is impossible to be committed to anything–professionally or personally–without the discipline to say no to all those other superfluous things.
7. Make little progress each day. One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder).
8. Be kind to yourself. The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes was once walking through the streets of Athens when he came across a man berating himself for some failure. Seeing how upset he was, Cleanthes–normally one to mind his own business–could not help himself but to stop and say kindly, “Remember, you’re not talking to a bad man.” Discipline isn’t about beating yourself up. There’s a firmness involved, for sure.
Ultimately, after a lifetime of study of Stoicism, this is how Seneca came to judge his own growth—“What progress have I made?” he wrote. “I have begun to be a friend to myself.” It is an act of self discipline to be kind to the self. To be a good friend. To make yourself better. To celebrate your progress, however small. That’s what friends do.
9. Bring distinction to everything you do. Plutarch tells us about a general and statesman in Greece named Epaminondas who, despite his brilliance on and off the battlefield, was appointed to an insultingly minor office in Thebes responsible for the city’s sewers. In fact, it was because of his brilliance that he was put in this role, as a number of jealous and fearful rivals thought it would effectively end his career.
But instead of being provoked or despairing at his irrelevance, Epaminondas took fully to his new job, declaring that the distinction of the office isn’t brought to the man, the man brings the distinction to the office. With discipline and earnestness, Plutarch wrote, “he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honor, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of dung and the diverting of water from the streets.”
10. Practice. The wonderfully curious economist Tyler Cowen has come to ask greats of various fields some version of the question: How do you practice your scales? What drills or exercises make you better at what you do? If a person wants to get better, wants to continue to develop and polish, they must know the answer to that question.
11. Be hard on yourself. “Take the cold bath bravely, ‘’ W.E.B Dubois wrote to his daughter. “Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.” By being hard on ourselves, it makes it harder for others to be hard on us. By being our own tyrant, we take away the power of tyrants over us.
12. View everything in the calm and mild light. George Washington had a mantra that always calmed him down when things seemed to be at their absolute worst. In a single two week period in 1797, Washington included it in three different letters. And later, in Washington’s greatest but probably least known moment, when he talked down the mutinous troops who were plotting to overthrow the U.S government at Newburgh, he said it, as he urged them away from acting on their anger and frustration. View everything, he liked to say, “in the calm light of mild philosophy.”
13. Stay in the saddle. There is an old German word sitzfleisch which means basically sitting your butt in the chair and not getting up until the task is complete. Even as it goes numb, even as one by one, the people around you call it a day. Showing up yourself, day after day, until your back aches, your eyes water, and your limbs turn to mush. Many a great conqueror in the days of horseback were called “Old Iron Ass” for their ability to stay in the saddle.
14. Get back up when you fall. It’s wonderfully fitting that in both the Zen tradition and the Bible, we have a version of the proverb about falling down seven times and getting up eight. Even the most self-disciplined of us will stagger. Marcus Aurelius said it was inevitable to be jarred by circumstances, but the key was to get back the rhythm as quickly as possible, to come back to yourself, rather than giving in.
15. Find your comrades. The Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus introduced the common mess hall and required that all citizens eat together. It was harder to eat more than your fair share, more than your healthy share, when you were surrounded by your comrades in battle.
16. Be a little deaf. We have to develop the ability to ignore, to endure, to forget. Not just cruel provocations from jerks, but also unintentional slights and mistakes from people we love or respect. “It helps to be a little deaf,” was the advice that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was given by her mother-in-law. It helped guide her through not just 56 years of marriage, but also a 27-year career on the court with colleagues she adored–but surely disagreed with on a regular basis.
17. Speak little. Robert Greene puts it perfectly: “Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.” They have the discipline and this discipline creates a powerful presence.
18. Focus. Ludwig van Beethoven was known for drifting off in social conversations. Are you even listening to me, a friend once asked. Sorry, Beethoven replied, “I was just occupied with such a lovely, deep thought, I couldn’t bear to be disturbed.” They called this his raptus. His flow state. His place of deep work. His profound concentrated periods of focus. The source of his musical greatness. We can all develop this skill. As Steve Jobs, speaking to his top designer Jonny Ive, would explain, “focus is not this thing you aspire to…or something you do on Monday. It’s something you do every minute.”
19. Delegate. Delegation is not cheap but it affords you the most expensive thing in the world: time. Not just any kind of time, but time to reflect and to think, a precious commodity to say the least. We need this space to learn, space to plan. An opportunity to examine what is important to us. To step back and look at how we’re doing in life. And when necessary, as we said above, to get back to keeping the main thing the main thing.
20. Hustle. “There’s no excuse for a player not hustling,” Lou Gehrig would say. “I believe every player owes it to himself, his club and to the public to hustle every minute he is on the ball field.” I’m not just about running, exactly, but about maximum effort. In any and every situation.
21. Slow down. There’s a difference between hustling and hurrying. They like to say in the military that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. The saying in the ancient world was festina lente. That is, to make haste slowly. Energy plus moderation. Measured exertion. Eagerness, but under control. “Slowly,” the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez would say, “you do everything correctly.”
22. Be strict only with yourself. It was said that the true majesty of Marcus Aurelius was that his exactingness was directed only at himself. He found a way to work with flawed people, putting them to service for the good of the empire, searching them for virtues which he celebrated, accepting their vices, which he knew were not in his control. Tolerant with others, he reminded himself, strict with yourself.
23. Get the little things right. Dating back, perhaps to time immemorial, is the poem and proverb about a horse. “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost,” it begins. And then because of the shoe, the horse was lost and because of the horse, the rider and because of the rider, the message and because of the message the battle and because of the battle, the kingdom. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. Because of poor discipline, everything was lost. Save yourself. Save the world. Get the little things right.
24. Beware perfectionism. As Churchill said, another way to spell “perfectionism” is p-a-r-a-l-y-s-i-s. Again, it’s good to have high standards but all virtues become vices if taken too far. An obsession with getting it perfect misses the forest for the trees–because ultimately the biggest miss of the target is failing to get your shot off.
25. Do your best. In an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover for a chance to join the nuclear submarine program, a young Jimmy Carter was asked how he ranked in his class at the Naval Academy. “59th in a class of 840 sir,” Carter replied with pride. Rickover followed up with, “Did you always do your best?” Carter began to instinctively answer that of course he always did his best, but something inside of him caused him to pause and reconsider. “No, sir, I didn’t always do my best.”
Rickover didn’t say anything and just looked at Carter for a long time. Then he stood up, asked one final question, “Why not?”, and walked out of the room.The Stoics believed that, in the end, it’s not about what we do, it’s about who we are when we do it. They believed that anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble or impressive, as long as it’s the right thing. That greatness is up to you—it’s what you bring to everything you do.Temperance, as Cicero claimed, can be the fine polish on top of a great life.
It’s not a palace or a throne that makes someone impressive, the Stoics would say, but kingly behavior that does. It’s discipline, self-control. He wasn’t after power or status, he said, but, “perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy or sloth or pretense.” He was after becoming the best version of himself possible, putting a fine polish on top of everything he did, no matter how humble or impressive.
The aim of Discipline is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control, is to teach you how to harness the powers of self-discipline. The Stoics believed that we are all born to fulfill a great destiny. And while not everyone’s destiny is the same, everyone’s destiny is achieved with self-discipline and self-control. Discipline is Destinyis a book that will help you fulfill yours.
Key success factors (also known as competitive emphasis or strategic posture) state the important elements required for a company to compete in its target markets. In effect, it articulates what the company must do, and do well, to achieve the goals outlined in its strategic plan. Examples would include agility, reliability, diversity and emotional connection with clients.
Key success factors are one of three elements a company’s management team must articulate as part of its strategic planning process, with the others being its strategic goals and its strategic scope. The decisions the management team makes about key success factors:
Directly addresses competitive forces (factors in the marketplace that can reduce profits)
Set direction for the behavioral expectations of the employees
Inform the knowledge, skill and behavioural requirements for a company to succeed
Provide the decision-making boundaries for execution plans, including organizational structure, sourcing,manufacturing, marketing and sales, tools, technologies, etc.
A strategic plan is a document that summarizes how a company plans to operate and grow over the next three to five years. It describes the business opportunities the company will pursue and how it will do so, presenting the decisions made by management in three areas:
Strategic goals—the financial and non-financial targets and expected results for the coming years
Strategic scope—the products and services that will be offered, to who and where
Key success factors—the important elements required for the company to achieve its goals
Strategic plans are important because they:
Set the overall direction for the company, allowing all employees to work toward common goals
Drive priority setting, resource allocation, capability development and budgeting activities
Shape all communications with internal and external stakeholders
Form the basis for marketing, operations, IT and human resources plans for the coming years
Guide management decisions as new opportunities and threats emerge
The content of a strategic plan is usually derived from an assessment of a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis).
Way back in 2014 I wrote about a growing movement among entrepreneurs. In 42 cities across the world founders would meet for “F***Up Nights,” which are just what they sound like — an opportunity for those on the difficult path of starting a business to share their biggest flops and failures. Since that story, these nights have spread to 185 cities.
Sharing your most embarrassing stumbles doesn’t immediately sound like buckets of fun, so what’s behind the unlikely popularity of these events? Community is certainly part of it. Failure feels worse when you think you’re uniquely prone to it. But so is learning. There are few better ways to learn than trying, falling on your face, and vowing to never do that particular thing again.
The unexpected popularity of F***Up Nights demonstrates the immense potential to learn from failure. But science shows that most of us miss out on a big part of the benefit of our inevitable screw-ups. Research from Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach of University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has shown that, even when the incentives are high, people have a tendency to put their heads in the sand and not learn from their mistakes.
Thankfully, the pair’s work also highlights ways to avoid letting your ego and emotions get in the way of learning from failure. UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center recently dug deep into these findings, which show both what blocks people from making the most of their missteps and how to overcome these common mental blocks.
1. You make it all about you.
Ego is the enemy of learning. Admitting you’re wrong hurts your sense of yourself as competent and smart, but it helps you correct false beliefs, seek out novel information, and expand your horizons. So how do you ensure you don’t let your ego get in the way of self-improvement? One technique is to try and put some mental distance between yourself and the error you’re trying to learn from.
“This involves thinking of your personal experience from the outside perspective of a neutral third party, asking, ‘Why did Jeremy fail?’ instead of ‘Why did I fail?’ While that might sound cheesy, it seems to work,” explains Greater Good. You can read more about the science behind this strange but effective technique here and here.
2. You keep them to yourself.
“People tend to hide their own failures, out of a sense of shame,” observes Greater Good. But one of the best ways to learn from your mistakes is to turn them into inspirational stories for the benefit of others.
Just like inspirational speakers spin past mistakes into motivational gold, framing your errors this way turns miscalculations into useful life lessons, research shows. “High school students who shared failures with middle school students went on to get better grades than those who didn’t reframe their failures; middle schoolers who gave advice to elementary school students later spent more time on homework,” reports Greater Good.
You don’t have to be a formerly struggling student to put this insight to use. Events like F****Up Nights formalize the process, but even just informally sharing your hard-earned lessons with entrepreneur friends (or online) will help you tease out and solidify the lessons learned from some of your most challenging experiences.
3. You repress your feelings.
Does failing feeling good? No, it feels awful. That’s not fun, but it is necessary. Pain is nature’s way of encouraging us to learn not to do something. So when you repress the pain, you also repress the learning. Letting yourself really feel your failures is essential if you want them to make you wiser in the long run. So no running away from your feelings or dulling them with substances or distractions.
“Sadness seems to improve memory and judgment, which can help us to succeed in the future; regret can actually sharpen motivation,” Greater Good points out.
4. You forget your why.
When you make a mistake, it’s easy to get caught up in a loop of beating yourself up and second-guessing each step you took. Reflection and unhappiness is part of the process of coping with failure (see above), but an obsessive focus on the details of your screw-up doesn’t actually help you pick yourself up and apply whatever you’ve learned from the experience.
What does? Focusing on why you put yourself in a position to fail in the first place. “Holding a clear long-term goal in mind — such as becoming a doctor or learning to sail — can help us to tolerate short-term failure and override information-avoidance,” explains Greater Good. As Simon Sinek might remind us, understanding your why is a great way to increase your resilience in the face of life’s many inescapable setbacks.
5. You beat yourself up.
Again, failure isn’t supposed to feel great. But as explained above, beating yourself up about your missteps is demotivating and distracts you from extracting valuable lessons from failure. Sure you should reflect on what went wrong, but you shouldn’t waste energy ruminating endlessly on your shortcomings.
Instead, research suggests you should try some self-compassion. “Many recent studies suggest that you’re more likely to grow if you speak kindly to yourself, as a loved one might speak to you, in the wake of failure,” claims Greater Good.
Also, rather than viewing failure as a testament to your personal weaknesses, remind yourself that error is a human universal. “It’s not a question of if you’ll fail — it’s when. The only real question you need to answer is what you can learn from the experience,” the article sagely notes.
A F****Up Night is designed to transform failure from an isolating and shameful instance of personal weakness into a community-building learning opportunity. But you don’t need a group of like-minded (and equally fallible) founders to view failure this way. You just need the research-backed mindset adjustments and simple techniques mentioned above. After all, failure is a terrible thing to waste.
Failure can trigger a torrent of painful emotions—hurt, anger, shame, even depression. As a result, most of us try to avoid mistakes; when they do happen, we try to sweep them under the rug. This natural tendency is heightened in companies whose leaders have, often unconsciously, institutionalized a fear of failure. They structure projects so that no time or money is available for experimentation, and they award bonuses and promotions to those who deliver according to plan.
But organizations don’t develop new capabilities—or take appropriate risks—unless managers tolerate failure and insist that it be openly discussed. The psychologist Carol Dweck identified two basic mindsets with which people approach their lives: “fixed” and “growth.” People who have a fixed mindset believe that intelligence and talents are largely a matter of genetics; you either have them or you don’t. They aim to appear smart at all costs and see failure as something to be avoided, fearing it will make them seem incompetent.
A fixed mindset limits the ability to learn because it makes individuals focus too much on performing well. By contrast, people who have a growth mindset seek challenges and learning opportunities. They believe that no matter how good you are, you can always get better through effort and practice. They don’t see failure as a sign of inadequacy and are happy to take risks. When making hiring and promotion decisions, leaders often put too much emphasis on performance and not enough on the potential to learn.
Over time, Egon Zehnder, a global executive search firm, had developed a sophisticated means of evaluating candidates that considered not only their past achievements but also their competencies. However, it found that in numerous instances, candidates who looked equally good on paper performed differently on the job. Why? A partner at the firm, Karena Strella, and her team believed the answer was individuals’ potential for improvement.
After a two-year project that drew on academic research and interviews, they identified four elements that make up potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. They developed interview questions to get at these elements, along with psychometric measures applied via questionnaires. This new model now plays a key role in the search firm’s assessments of job candidates. Egon Zehnder has found that high-potential candidates perform better than their peers with less potential, thanks to their openness to acquiring new skills and their thirst for learning.
It is common for people to ascribe their successes to hard work, brilliance, and skill rather than luck; however, they blame their failures on bad fortune. This phenomenon, known as the attribution bias, hinders learning (see “Why Leaders Don’t Learn from Success,” HBR, April 2011). In fact, unless people recognize that failure resulted from their own actions, they do not learn from their mistakes. In a study we conducted with Chris Myers, we asked participants to work on two different decision-making tasks spaced one week apart.
Each task had a correct solution, but only a few people were able to identify it. We found that participants who took responsibility for doing poorly on the first activity were almost three times as likely to succeed on the second one. They learned from their failure and made better decisions as a result. Leaders can use the following methods to encourage others to find the silver lining in failures, adopt a growth mindset, focus on potential, and overcome the attribution bias.
When it all comes down to it, what is a business? You are an organization that has identified a pain point that people are experiencing. In order to remove that pain point, you are offering a product in exchange for money. It sounds so simple. In the startup world, we often talk about painkillers versus vitamins. You wouldn’t pause your favorite TV show, get in your car and drive to the pharmacy to buy vitamins. You’ll make do without for a couple of days.
If you have a headache, you’ll go out of your way to pick up some headache tablets, however. The difference is the sense of urgency and need. That is where storytelling comes in. When you think about it, every aspect of your company is about storytelling. Hiring your first employees into a startup is storytelling: You are spinning a story that contrasts their steady, reliable job at an established company, pitching it against taking a chance on your startup.
Acquiring early customers fall in the same category: Why should they trust you over a larger, more established competitor? Marketing? Same. Advertising? Same. Raising investment? Oh boy — definitely an exercise in storytelling.
Telling the origin story of your company is part of the culture that underpins everything. It drives who your customers are. It influences who considers taking a job at your company. It informs how your employees think about problems and the types of solutions they offer.
Storytelling is the linchpin of everything you do. It’s the logo your company uses, it’s the design language you use, it’s the words you use to make the points you make.
Some CEOs are natural storytellers — and that’s a crucial function of their job in those companies. In fact, I would argue that in slightly maturing companies, it’s a fourth of the role of the CEO:
You hire the right people.
You create the right culture.
You make sure the company doesn’t run out of money.
You tell the story.
But what about companies that don’t resolve pain points?
“But Haje,” you shout at your screen, “some companies don’t fix pain points — they just cause pleasure. What about Pixar, for example?” Excellent point. Many companies don’t reduce pain, but instead cause pleasure. These companies are plentiful and extremely varied. Coca-Cola, for example, isn’t primarily a thirst quencher (water does a much better job at a far lower cost).
Pixar’s films don’t resolve pain directly, but they do reduce boredom and cause excitement and entertainment. (Pixar also has a pain reduction element: For many parents, putting on “Cars” buys a 90-minute break they can use to get some chores done or make dinner.)
The head banner for the Coca-Cola website tells the story — this isn’t about a tasty drink, this is about happy people enjoying life. That’s a conscious story-telling device. And, if their $41 billion annual sales is anything to go by, it’s working pretty well.
These companies are, often, the ultimate examples of storytelling. What is Coca-Cola’s product really? It’s a lifestyle brand. Look at the adverts and the way Coca-Cola markets itself. It’s extremely rarely about how tasty the products are, but instead about how much fun the people in the adverts are having. They’re adventurous, young, full of life and enjoyment.
That is what Coca-Cola is selling. Sure, the company has a huge, global operations and supply chain organization, but the reason that Coca-Cola is so valuable is almost exclusively its storytelling.
Isn’t this just marketing?
A lot of companies decide to leave their entire storytelling efforts with the marketing team. I think that’s a terrible shame, because most marketing teams focus exclusively on how you can reach potential consumers. The storytelling element runs much deeper — and it’s about learnings that go far beyond just getting products into the hands of consumers.
At all of my companies, I’ve run behind-the-scenes blogs, and it’s a practice that has led to unpredictable results. For example, we discovered that our “unlimited holiday” policy backfired — it had the opposite result of what we intended. We wrote about it, and became the center of a media storm. Then we wrote about how that happened.
At all of my previous companies, I’ve been the de facto storyteller, and often we ended up writing about things that have little to do with the core business. Want more examples of folks who do it well? Buffer runs a fantastic blog, embracing radical transparency in an effort to tell the story of what happens behind closed doors.
The company also doubled down and published a number of books, and “it doesn’t have to be crazy at work” is a bit of a masterpiece that no doubt helped a lot of people who wouldn’t have learned about Basecamp otherwise find out about the company. Some people call it marketing, but I believe it is something far deeper than that.
By telling the story — successes and failures alike — companies are able to open up a more genuine conversation with their customers. It’s part marketing, part branding, part doing the right thing. The business logic is simple: If your customers are able to follow along on your journey, they’ll trust you more. They’ll feel your pain. They’ll cheer you on. It makes you human, and I’d hazard a bet that when the time comes to hire, it helps you attract better, more engaged staff.
You don’t have to go all-in on radical transparency, of course. That isn’t for everyone — and it’s not the right approach for all companies either. But try and lift the veil every now and again — it’s incredible what opportunities arise as a result.
The fact is, at any company, you invent new things, you run into new problems and you come up with new solutions. Every single day. (If you aren’t, perhaps close up shop and go do something else.) All you need to do is keep half an ear out. Who is doing something awesome? What led them to those conclusions?
The story of your startup is far more than the sum of your successes or the graphs in your KPI dashboard. Dissect the challenges. Celebrate the solutions. Tell the stories.
Smart contact lenses promise to bring data directly into your field of view
Imagine you have to make a speech, but instead of looking down at your notes, the words scroll in front of your eyes, whichever direction you look in. That’s just one of many features the makers of smart contact lenses promise will be available in the future.
“Imagine… you’re a musician with your lyrics, or your chords, in front of your eyes. Or you’re an athlete and you have your biometrics and your distance and other information that you need,” says Steve Sinclair, from Mojo, which is developing smart contact lenses. His company is about to embark on comprehensive testing of smart contact lens on humans, that will give the wearer a heads-up display that appears to float in front of their eyes.
The product’s scleral lens (a larger lens that extends to the whites of the eye) corrects the user’s vision, but also incorporates a tiny microLED display, smart sensors and solid-state batteries. “We’ve built what we call a feature-complete prototype that actually works and can be worn – we’re soon going to be testing that [out] internally,” says Mr Sinclair.
“Now comes the interesting part, where we start to make optimisations for performance and power, and wear it for longer periods of time to prove that we can wear it all day.” Other smart lenses are being developed to collect health data. Lenses could “include the ability to self-monitor and track intra-ocular pressure, or glucose,” says Rebecca Rojas, instructor of optometric science at Columbia University. Glucose levels for example, need to be closely monitored by people with diabetes.
“They can also provide extended-release drug-delivery options, which is beneficial in diagnosis and treatment plans. It’s exciting to see how far technology has come, and the potential it offers to improve patients’ lives.”Research is underway to build lenses that can diagnose and treat medical conditions from eye conditions, to diabetes, or even cancer by tracking certain biomarkers such as light levels, cancer-related molecules or the amount of glucose in tears.
A team at the University of Surrey, for example, has created a smart contact lens that contains a photo-detector for receiving optical information, a temperature sensor for diagnosing potential corneal disease and a glucose sensor monitoring the glucose levels in tear fluid. “We make it ultra-flat, with a very thin mesh layer, and we can put the sensor layer directly onto a contact lens so it’s directly touching the eye and has contact with the tear solution,” says Yunlong Zhao, lecturer in energy storage and bioelectronics at the University of Surrey.
“You will feel like it’s more comfortable to wear because it’s more flexible, and because there’s direct contact with the tear solution it can provide more accurate sensing results,” says Dr Zhao.
Despite the excitement, smart lense technology still has to overcome a number of hurdles. One challenge will be powering them with batteries these will obviously have to be incredibly tiny, so will they deliver enough power to do anything useful? Mojo is still testing its product, but wants customers to be able to wear its lenses all day, without having to recharge them. “The expectation [is] that you are not consuming information from the lens constantly but in short moments throughout the day.
“Actual battery life will depend on how and how often it is used, just like your smartphone or smartwatch today,” a company spokesperson explains. Other concerns over privacy have been rehearsed since Google’s launch of smart glasses in 2014, which was widely seen as a failure. “Any discreet device with a forward-facing camera that allows a user to take pictures, or record video, poses risks to bystanders’ privacy,” says Daniel Leufer, senior policy Analyst at digital rights campaign group, Access Now.
“With smart glasses, there’s at least some scope to signal to bystanders when they are recording – for example, red warning lights – but with contact lenses it’s more difficult to see how to integrate such a feature.” Aside from privacy worries, makers will also have satisfy worries over data-security for the people wearing the lenses. Smart lenses can only fulfil their function if they track the user’s eye movements, and this plus other data could reveal a great deal.
“What if these devices collect and share data about what things I look at, how long I look at them, whether my heart rate increases when I look at a certain person, or how much I perspire when asked a certain question?” says Mr Leufer. “This type of intimate data could be used to make problematic inferences about everything from our sexual orientation to whether we’re telling the truth under interrogation,” he adds.
“My worry is that devices like AR (augmented reality) glasses, or smart contact lenses, will be seen as a potential trove of intimate data.” For its part, Mojo says all data is security-protected and kept private. Additionally there are concerns about the product that will be familiar to anyone who wears regular contacts. “Any type of contact lens can pose a risk to eye health, if not properly cared for or not fitted properly.
“Just like any other medical device, we need to make sure the patients’ health is the priority, and whatever device used has benefits that outweigh the risk,” says Ms Rojas, from Columbia University. “I’m concerned about non-compliance, or poor lens hygiene and over-wear. These can lead to further complications like irritation, inflammation, infections or risks to eye health.” With Mojo’s lenses expected to be used for up to a year at a time, Mr Sinclair admits this is a concern.
But he points out that a smart lens means it can be programmed to detect whether it’s being cleaned enough and even to alert users when it needs replacing. The firm also plans to work with optometrists for prescription and monitoring. “You don’t just launch something like a smart contact lens and expect everyone’s going to adopt it on day one,” says Mr Sinclair. “It’s going to take some time, just like all new consumer products, but we think it’s inevitable that all of our eye wear is eventually going to become smart.”
Morgan, Philip B., et al. “International Contact Lens Prescribing in 2010”. Contact Lens Spectrum. October 2011.Agarwal, R. K. (1969), Contact Lens Notes, Some factors concerning patients’ motivation, The Optician, 10 January, pages 32-33 (published in London, England).Sokol, JL; Mier, MG; Bloom, S; Asbell, PA (1990). “A study of patient compliance in a contact lens-wearing population”. CLAO Journal. 16 (3): 209–13. PMID2379308.
“Compare Contacts & Glasses”. ACUVUE® Middle East. Retrieved 22 November 2021.“Contact Lenses for Keratoconus”. National Keratoconus Foundation. 21 February 2018.Heitz, RF and Enoch, J. M. (1987) “Leonardo da Vinci: An assessment on his discourses on image formation in the eye.” Advances in Diagnostic Visual Optics 19—26, Springer-Verlag.
Robert B. Mandell. Contact Lens Practice, 4th Edition. Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, IL, 1988“Contact Lens for Eyes Now Common; It is Used as Substitute for Spectacles.” Nashua (IA) Reporter, 28 April 1937.Gyorgy, Salacz (January 2001). “Dr István Györffy, 1912–1999”. Contact Lens and Anterior Eye. 24 (4): 180–182. doi:10.1016/S1367-0484(01)80040-0.Contact Lens History: How Contact Lenses Have Developed Through the Years. EyeHealth Central. Retrieved from https://www.contactlenses.co.uk/education/history.htm
U.S. Patent No. 2,510,438, filed 28 February 1948.“The Corneal Lens”, The Optician, 2 September 1949, pp. 141–144.“Corneal Contact Lenses”, The Optician, 9 September 1949, p. 185.“New Contact Lens Fits Pupil Only”, The New York Times, 11 February 1952, p. 27.Rosenthal, J. William (1996). Spectacles and Other Vision Aids: A History and Guide to Collecting. Norman Publishing. p. 379. ISBN978-0930405717.Smith, William D. (18 April 1971). “Soft‐Lens Clamor”. The New York Times. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
Small business owners should do these four tasks as soon as possible in the new year...getty
1) Close Your Books For 2022
Make it a requirement for accepting the contract! It’s even a good idea to ask your regular contractors to complete a new Form W9 at the beginning of each calendar year just to make sure their business and contact information is up to date. Goode reminds business owners that the W9 is not necessary if the payments were issued to a corporation (e.g., the big box store from which you purchase your office supplies).
For example, if a taxpayer has a bad quarter, the professional can help determine a lower estimate or if the business had an exceptionally good quarter the professional can determine if making a larger estimated payment will help avoid a nasty surprise come filing time.
