I’ll be honest it’s been a frustrating month. Not for me or my own business you understand but because of the number of members who I have had conversations/meetings/phone calls with who are singularly failing to grab their business by the horns and define their own destiny.
We had a couple of really difficult Mastermind sessions with a couple of people for whom what they should be doing was made crystal clear to them almost six months ago now and they have prevaricated and procrastinated and, found all sorts of reasons and excuses as to why they can’t do it.
On the flip side, there have been two or three notable successes, i.e. people who have actually made their big breakthroughs, grabbed the bull by the horns and are now starting to make it happen and, are reaping the rewards as a result.
Then I opened my newspaper and read all about Mike Watts.
You might have heard of him because during August he became something of a national hero. You see, Mike was faced with the indefinite closure of a key local road in Somerset whilst it is mended following a big landslip during the April storms.
It means that he and all the people in his village and surrounding areas have to take a 14 mile diversion whilst the Council repair team sort it out at the speed of a glacier.
Mike took matters into his own hands. He didn’t write angry letters or campaign for something to be done. No, Mike, a 62 year old father of four, borrowed an adjoining field from a farmer friend and, at a cost of £150,000 to himself and his wife Wendy, built his own road, bypassing the closure and, to recoup his costs, is charging grateful drivers £2 to drive on it.
“I had to do something. People were going crazy” he says.
Without his ingenuity, the closure of the road that he and fellow villagers normally use for their 8 minute, 3 mile commute to Bath (where he and his wife run a fancy dress and party shop) would mean a twice daily 14 mile traffic jam on the A4, the extra journey time for which could be as much as 80 minutes each way and its petrol bill is going to more than double each month.
The knock-on effect of the road closure meant that villages as far as 12 miles away were becoming clogged up with up to 7,000 diverted cars.
Frustrated commuters were trying to find shortcuts and turning one track roads into rat runs and, when locals were told that the road could be shut for as long as year, Mike decided to act.
He mapped the route out in his battered old Ford Transit camper van, typed “how to build a toll road” into Google and got on with it.
It took three men from a local building company to build it with a digger, a roller, a caterpillar and 3,000 tonnes of hardcore.
Within three days they had carved out the route.
The whole job was finished in ten days and Mike’s version really is rather splendid as toll roads go. He’s got toll booths, CCTV, security systems, two lanes, road markings, big signs, portaloos and a cabin with tea and coffee making facilities and 24 hour staff.
In total, the road is just over 400 yards long and he needs 1,000 cars a day to use it in order to recoup his costs before Christmas.
This pioneering free market spirit is exactly what our country needs and I have reached out to Mike and invited him, as my guest to the National Entrepreneurs Convention at the ICC later this month. I hope he is able to come.
And I wish we had more people like him in our country, don’t you?
Hey, why don’t you be one of them?
You know there are things that you’ve been thinking about/wishing/ planning to do one day that will make a big impact on your business or your community. Do it now.
One member I was talking to this month had big expansion plans to open a new retail outlet but the manager that he appointed quit after three weeks and he was genuinely, seriously thinking of not bothering with the expansion.
What, because one hire went bad? Seriously? That’s the extent of your moral fibre?
Our job as entrepreneurs is to solve problems.
The quicker we solve them and the better our solutions, the more success we have. There will always be problems so don’t worry – just solve the ones that make the biggest difference.
He needs to expand into two or three stores, so he’s got two or three managers hired – that way he’s got resilience if one of them leaves (oh, and in his case, he’s got a manufacturer who is paying for all his shop fits, so he really should be exploiting this!)
I bloody love what Mike Watts did. He recognised that the mantra “If it’s to be, it’s up to me” (check out NBTV ep. 51 from New York City in 2012 on exactly this topic) and he embraced it. Fully.
Too many of you reading this article will be nodding and broadly agreeing with everything I’m saying. But only a few will do something about it.
Life is precious. Our time on this earth short. What we do with it really is down to us and that starts with your agenda tomorrow. You know you’ve got the equivalent of a toll road that you could build. Here’s your permission to go ahead and start….
Good luck.
