When I say fearful I mean a business where you’re worried about one or more of the following:

• other companies copying what you do
• other people using your strategies
• employees robbing you blind
• outside consultants using your watch to tell you the time and charging you through the nose
• your best staff being poached
• your best and most loyal customers going across the road
• your manuals and training materials stolen and copied by others
• your delivery routes used by competitors
• being the last to hear of a new and cheaper way of creating your product or service
• overpaying your suppliers
• underpricing your products
• that people will find out you’re just “pretending” to be a good business

Over all the years I’ve worked as a consultant I’ve come across all of these fears in a number of the businesses I’ve gone into. And do you know what’s worse?

When you don’t have those fears.

Because what happened if any of them actually happened?

Face The Fear

The best way to get rid of a fear is to face it and deal with it.

The problem is if you’re a fearless entrepreneur you’re not concerned with fears. But that doesn’t mean they might not happen.

So all you fearless entrepreneurs out there list all the fears that you think other people have about their business. Use the short list I gave before as a starting point.

Now when the fearful and fearless entrepreneurs have got their list of fears lets deal with it like this:

Step 1: Look at each fear and decide how much of an impact it would have on your business.

Step 2: Assign a number from 1 to 5 (5 being most impact and 1 being least) to give the impact figure

Step 3: Assess how likely it is for each fear to happen

Step 4: Assign a probability from 1 to 5 (5 being most likely, 1 being least) to give the probability figure

Step 5: Multiply the impact figure by the probability figure to give an assessment figure

Step 6: Rank each of the fears by their assessment figure (25 being maximum and representing most impact most likely to happen)

Step 7: Work through each fear and decide what you would need to do to reduce the fears’ impact and/or probability

Step 8: Write down your reduction strategy/tactic for each fear

Step 9: Starting at the top implement the strategies and tactics to reduce fear levels in your business

Step 10: Keep the list and review it, add more fears as they occur to you and use the same process to rank them