Finding the Sweet Spot

I‘ve spent most of my professional life helping entrepreneurs succeed. After I’d worked with over a hundred, I began to notice something special about a small number of them. Their people smiled all the time. They loved their work. They didn’t work especially hard. Their customers loved them, so much that they rarely had to do any marketing — word of mouth was enough. They were partnerships of equals, working together, with no ‘boss’. They had few or no debts, and were beholden to no one. They were connected to, responsive to, and responsible to, their people, customers and the communities in which they worked. They were environmentally sustainable and economically resilient, not vulnerable to vagaries of the market or economy. They had created the kind of workplaces that made you say “Boy! I’d love to work in a place like that!”

So I studied them, to try to find what made them special, different from all the rest. I found they had mostly done six things differently from all other entrepreneurs. When I looked at these six things, they seemed obvious to me, until I realized that none of these things is taught in business school, and none of them is the “conventional wisdom” of what starting your own business is about. So I decided to write a book about them, in the hopes that others could use this “formula” to escape from wage slavery and create their own responsible, sustainable, joyful enterprises — what I have come to call Natural Enterprises. Chelsea Green agreed to publish the book under the name Finding the Sweet Spot. Here, in a nutshell, are the six things these remarkable entrepreneurs did differently: They discovered what they were meant to do. The work they do is in the “sweet spot” where their Gifts (the things they do uniquely well), their Passions (the things they love doing), and their Purpose (the things people in the world really need, that these entrepreneurs care about) intersect. This “sweet spot” is Area 3 in the three-circle chart above