Celebrating the Small Stuff

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I kid you not, we didn't realize we should have the attendees' badges ready before the conference started. So the time comes for attendees to check in and we are standing there without their badges. But the attendees (who were largely our subscribers) ended up helping us. It was 2001, and the collegial spirit for a New York company in the wake of September 11 must have spurred them to lend us a hand.

In 2002, we were talking about where to hold one of our conferences, the Auto Finance Summit, and someone offhandedly suggested Las Vegas. I had never been there, so I figured, why not? The conference went on to become the largest in its sector in the nation.

What a Letdown

The takeaway is not just that you stumble into successes, or that the decisions that lead to them are often nothing grand or brilliant. I find that much of the "action" in business is quite mundane. Just recently we completed the publication of the premier issue of Reverse Mortgage, a new magazine we're publishing in partnership with an industry trade group. We put out what I thought was a smart, beautiful magazine, and on a very tight deadline. But when we finished the premier issue, my conversation with Alex, our designer, couldn't have been more ordinary.

"Is that it? No more edits?" I asked.

"I think that's it," he said.

"Well, I guess we can send it to the printer then," I said.

"OK." He paused. "Talk to you later."

If someone had overheard the conversation, it would have sounded as significant as a moth being shooed. The truth is we worked so hard to get to that point. We are 10 people in Royal Media, and each of us put every ounce of our creativity into making Reverse Mortgage happen. Did we celebrate? You bet.

You May Already Be a Winner

It makes sense to think big about small things. I am no management guru, but I like the idea of Six Sigma—a company should try to continuously refine its actions and operate with the fewest errors possible. If you think about it, Six Sigma celebrates the subtleties of work life. It's hard to get worked up about reducing an error rate to 1 in 2664, from 1 in 793, but that's exactly what should happen. Each little thing done right makes a company better. Why not party a bit when that happens?

Look, it is hard to be an entrepreneur. You live and die by your next sale. You never know whether the whole thing is going to turn on you, which is why you should just enjoy the little things. If you find cheaper paper clips, pat yourself on the back for saving $3. If you finally get that big company to call you back, allow yourself a wahoo. Whatever your business, whatever the thing you did, realize that you just got closer to your ultimate goal. In other words, you've just won.

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—As told to Stacy Perman