Work on it, Not just in it

from Style of Wight Issue 80 January / February

The Importance of Making a Will

BUSINESS MENTOR AND CONSULTANT By Dale Howarth

Photography by Dean Drobot

Working ‘in’ and ‘on’ the business has been part of business vernacular ever since Michael Gerber coined the phrase in his book The E-Myth Revisited. This is a principle that is arguably more important today than it was when the book was first published back in 1985. Experts suggest that business owners should regularly spend 20% of their time working on their business rather than in it. The Pareto Principle supports this, suggesting that 20% of our activity generates 80% of our results. Research also confirms that not spending sufficient time working on the business is one of the underlying reasons for business failure. In simple terms, working in your business is spending time managing your business day-to-day, often undertaking tasks that could be assigned to someone else. Whereas working on your business is investing your time to develop the strategies, plans, and activities that will help grow and develop the business to be more successful in the future. When was the last time you dedicated time to working on rather than just in your business? It may sound simple but, as everyone in business Dale Howarth is a Business Mentor and Business Growth Consultant. Working with individuals and companies to make the business leaders and businesses successes of tomorrow. To find out more visit www.dalehowarth.com will know, it’s not easy when you are on the merry-go-round of being busy, rushing from one task to the next with little time to consider the bigger picture. It forces you to spend considerable time and long hours working as an hourly employee in your business instead of acting as the CEO - just to have a business at all. Does that sound familiar to you? Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr said: “So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.” How many times throughout the day do you hear yourself saying, “If you want a job done right, do it yourself”? When running a business, it can often seem that you have no other option but to take on a mountain of tasks to just keep the business moving. Unfortunately, taking on too much can prove to be a major distraction from the important job of growing a business. To grow a business, you need to know where you are going, why, and how you get there, so you can make the important strategic decisions and create the high-level plans to get there and overcome the barriers you will face along the way. The fact is, whatever business you are in you need time to focus on the business, learn how to delegate non-critical tasks, and eliminate tasks that are simply low or no-value distractions. Working on, not just in, the business is about how you spend your time and about working hard on the right things. It’s about creating a business that doesn’t depend solely on you to get things done, a business that can generate results without you having to make things happen personally. It’s about a shift in perspective.

Dale Howarth is a Business Mentor and Business Growth Consultant. Working with individuals and companies to make the business leaders and businesses successes of tomorrow. To find out more visit www.dalehowarth.com

Barnett Meyers

The Walking Stick & Umbrella Maker with Grand Plans for Ventnor

Words & Research by James Rayner With Special Thanks to Lesley Telford

The moment Barnett Meyers stepped aboard a ship bound for the Isle of Wight in the early 1850s, the future of Ventnor would change forever. This wealthy Jewish entrepreneur would fall in love with the town, soon buying up huge swathes of land sloping down to the sea and formulating grand plans for its development. Over the following decades, he helped transform Ventnor into one of the finest and most fashionable summer resorts of its time, though today you’d be hard pushed to find someone who has ever heard his name.

Some of Barnett Meyer’s elaborate designs for Zigzag Road, which never quite materialised

Born around 1814 in London’s East End, Barnett was the son of Kaufman Meyers — an umbrella and parasol maker from Germany. Initially working with his father at a Whitechapel warehouse, he began to forge his own path at the age of 25, setting up a new (but similar) enterprise and marrying Isabella Solomons at London’s Great Synagogue in 1839. Whilst his early days in business remain hard to uncover, it seems success came quickly, with Barnett soon styling himself as a ‘cane and walking-stick manufacturer’, moving his premises westwards to London Bridge. He invented a new and improved ‘walkingstick gun’ in 1854 (apparently with a less ‘inconvenient change’ between walking aid and firearm) and, together with Isabella, the couple relocated their home from the gritty East End to 17 Crutched Friars, in a wealthier neighbourhood close to the Tower of London. It was around this time that Barnett and Isabella first made their way to the Isle of Wight, checking into The Royal Hotel and finding themselves so captivated by Ventnor that they decided to invest in it. Overnight they became one of the largest landowners in the town, their property stretching from the heady heights of Gill’s Cliff Road, right down to the salty sea air of the Esplanade and Undercliff House (now the Spyglass Inn). Spades and pickaxes were soon breaking new ground as Barnett laid out the winding curves of the recently renamed Zigzag Road. He marked out the building plots, installed benches in ‘convenient recesses’, and constructed the flights of public steps that still climb up between the houses today. In 1864, work began on four villas in Zigzag Road and a number of houses in Newport Road, though building was halted briefly after workmen discovered a complete male skeleton whilst digging foundations (the victim supposedly killed by a boulder which was still sat on his broken ribcage). Back in London, the couple’s main residence, business continued to boom. Barnett’s company now manufactured everything from walking sticks to sword sticks, fencing foils to gold-mounted riding whips. His premises moved yet

again to Southwark Street, and he was now wealthy enough to donate 6 acres of land at Lower Norwood to build a new ‘Jew’s Hospital’. By the 1870s he had become one of the city’s most respected Jewish businessmen, rubbing shoulders with the Rothschild family and hosting the President of Brazil on a visit to the Central Synagogue. Home for Barnett and Isabella was now 9 Chester Terrace in Regents Park, their most lavish yet, set in a string of magnificent Regency houses (which today can sell for up to £15 million). Returning to Ventnor, often staying at the Marine Hotel, Barnett worked on a new phase of his plans, including the construction of Alpine Road. Initially a private street with its own lighting, Barnett later offered it to the town in 1885, on the condition that the council finished the road surface. When they refused, he blocked the street with a barrier, causing quite ‘some excitement’ amongst the inhabitants of Ventnor. By this time Mr. Meyers was ill, a throat condition preventing him from making his usual visits to the Island; his benches were disintegrating, and his streetlamps remained unlit. When he passed away in 1889, he was thanked for the roads, paths and steps he’d built as well as the thousands of trees and shrubs he’d planted, giving the west end of town a scenic leafy character. His land, now known as ‘the Meyer Estate’, had been transformed almost beyond recognition and locals understood his attractive alterations had helped the town become the popular destination that it was. Isabella continued to donate six guineas every Christmas to the ‘aged poor’ of Ventnor but could no longer visit as regularly as before. When she died in 1898, having no children, the estate passed to Mr. Meyers’s niece and by 1900 all the land, properties, and remaining plots had been auctioned off in lots by local estate agents Sir Francis Pittis & Son.