Are you passionate about your business?

Are you passionate about your business? Like most businesses, we’ve been faced with a variety of challenging circumstances over the years, and particularly so in the last year or so as the fallout from the GFC creeps quietly through the business community. As a consequence we’ve been more focussed on short term goals and less so on longer term strategy. However, we’ve got around to a strategy review in recent weeks after the end of the financial year, and along with reviewing the facts of where we’re at and how we are tracking, there’s a natural tendency to think about personally why we’re doing what we’re doing.

For me, along with financial goals and various benefits of controlling your own destiny, the thing that I keep coming back to year after year is the passion I have for the business we are in, the fabulous changes that technology can bring to how business is conducted, the enjoyment of working with a team of like minded people and the achievement of enabling other businesses to use technology successfully. Without that passion, I don’t really understand how business owners can withstand the knockbacks and difficulties that are part of any business.

I read an article recently about passion in business and it recounted the story of John Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson Vacuum Cleaner, this is the last paragraph…

James Dyson loved tinkering and inventing. One day he grew frustrated by a weak vacuum cleaner that seemed to lose suction. So he got to work and five years later he created a vacuum cleaner that would one day turn into a $6 billion company. But he could have quit 5,126 times (BusinessWeek.com, 7/14/06). That's how many prototypes it took to build the first bagless vacuum cleaner. Major manufacturers rejected his technology because they made money on the bags. Dyson was anything but discouraged. He persisted, and today James Dyson is worth an estimated $2 billion. "Enjoy failure and learn from it," Dyson once said. "You can never learn from success."

I’m not entirely sure anybody enjoys failure, but we can sure as hell learn from it, and you certainly need a passion to keep pursuing a goal relentlessly for as long as John Dyson did. Are you passionate about your business?