Adrian G. Simmons

You’ve seen those car commercials: the sleek, sporty car expertly threading through rural roads as it speeds its way towards bliss. And along the bottom of your screen in small print: “Do not attempt – Professional driver on a closed course.”

Man, what a let down. 😉

I’m here to tell you that value pricing is like that – if you’re not an entrepreneur, do not attempt. Value pricing is not in the professional mainstream yet (though one day will be), and you could wait for the rest of the herd to move before re-examining your business model (though realize that strategy comes with its own risk too).

But if you’ve decided to become a ‘professional driver on a closed course’ (a.k.a. an “entrepreneur”), I’d like to provide a little lay of the economic landscape to help inspire you on your journey.

Read More →

I wonder if you’ll allow me a few moments for some experimental thinking — to explore with you an idea: what is the price of profit? (it may not be in the way you’re thinking.)

In a previous post, I ruminated on a different way to view what CPA firms do: we sell access to emotional, intellectual, and creative capacity. What this means to me is that we have care, smarts, and the ability to imagine, and that’s truly what our customers want from us. This is how we help them. These are not unlimited resources, however. We have only so much emotional capacity. You know what I mean if you’ve ever had that morning customer situation that completely zaps your energy for the rest of the day. We have only so much intellectual capacity. Has anyone out there been able to keep up with changes in all the dimensions of accounting, much less the other things we have to know to run a business? And we have only so much creativity capacity. The juice it takes to rollout new products, or help customers imagine solutions to their situations, can only run so long before it needs to be replenished.

From a business model standpoint, our goal is to optimize the long-term yield on this emotional, intellectual, and creative capacity.

But we generally don’t have this type of “yield” mindset. And we usually don’t have a way to judge yield or keep it in the forefront of our minds.

Read More →

“The pathway to your greatest potential is through your greatest fear.” -Craig Gristle

This is where it gets real. The blog posts are one thing. The conferences. An inspiring TED talk or coffee exchange with a peer. But eventually it all comes down to you, and the action. And the fear that’s present in that moment.

I’m convinced that facing fear is perhaps the biggest skill we can develop as business owners. Heck, as human persons. To me, here’s an example of human business, and how developing this skill in business, can actually feed back into our life outside of business. And vice versa. I know it has for me.

Herewith, five steps for facing fear, from facing my own fears:

Read More →

Commerce. Hubbub. The noisy marketplace. The tens, hundreds, and thousands of small exchanges. In the store, online, over the phone, from an airplane. It’s like an ecology, the ecology of the economy. The creation and shifting of resources from one area of the ecology to another. All voluntarily. All based on what we value, on what we think is worth the expending and spending of resources. The values, where do they come from?

As entrepreneurs, we design “the value exchanges:” those interactions that bring together buyers, workers, suppliers, owners, and indirectly, their surrounding environments. If we’ve done our job well, each party leaves the exchange with greater value than they brought to it. In a very real sense, they are affirmed in that value through their interactions with the others. The whole process is a way of cooperating to make the imaginary real, the potential actual, the unseen seen. It also transcends the laws of matter: while the physical matter doesn’t increase, paradoxically the whole enchilada just grew, because it grew in a non-material dimension: in the minds and souls of the participating parties.

“The value exchanges” are preceded by a decision, and the savvy entrepreneur is really a decision architect. She’s created the exchange, but the decision is what gets the movement of the exchange activated. Architecting that decision is really a matter of leadership, of presenting the decider with their freedom. The frame of the decision proposes a truth about reality, what makes reality better, and how the exchange brings about that reality.

Read More →

The world is a wild and wooly place. Grappling order out of chaos, or introducing chaos into order, is a messy business. Which is why neatness is not the aim of business, even though we may sometimes consider it the aim of accounting.

In our efforts to come to terms with our reality, mental models can be very helpful. The concept of business as a ship, navigating uncharted waters, in search of undiscovered lands. Or that of climbing a mountain, catching glimpses of the peak, pressing on, but enjoying the journey. Or as we like talk about in Thriveal, cliff-jumping, blowing stuff up, and lab experiments on our way to making a new firm. These can help give us the clarity and impetus to act because we have a way to understand our movements in the broader story.

Conversely, mental models can also be very harmful. The idea of time as money. That monetary profits are the sole purpose of business. That perfection of the system is the goal (thus people become cogs in the machine). That leaders are all-knowing and inerrant. These are among the models that can increase our friction as they under-equip us to deal with the realities we face.

Our ability to evolve and change is usually the result of adopting a new mental model and/or letting go of an old mental model. They’re the brain pathways that sit just underneath the surface, often out of view to us. They’re the pattern molds we’re subconsciously using to make sense of and interpret the experiences we have each day. You can see how powerful they are to our life. It’s why I take issue with the phrase “perception is reality” and prefer to replace it with “perception shapes our experience of reality.”

Read More →