“Give a man a fish, and feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.” 

This simple proverb has been used by people from all walks of life to justify everything from the need to do your chores to the need for more education spending to welfare reform. We’re not here to discuss the applicability of the proverb in those instances; our ambitions are far more modest.  Our argument is merely that the smart small business owner is the one who eschews “fishing lessons” in most cases.

In the old days, when economies were less specialized and people were more self-sufficient, the whole “teach a man to fish” thing made sense.  If you were, say, a frontiersman with a hankerin’ for some fish, your best bet would be to take a pole out to the closest stream and get to fishing.

Laura Ingalls

Then this lady wrote a book attacking you for not sharing your fish

Things work a bit differently these days, though. We’re willing to bet most of you reading know little to nothing about fishing (outside of “put worm on hook, throw hook into water”) and yet, shockingly, most of you have probably eaten quite a bit of fish in your lifetime.  How’d you manage that?  Because we live in a wonderfully specialized economy: someone else gets really good at fishing and catches way more fish than he’d ever be able to eat (maybe he even catches too many fish, although that’s an issue for another day).  Meanwhile, you go out and get really good at something specific—like accounting, or baking, or gambling—and you make money that you can use to buy fish.  Now, if you want fish for dinner, what do you do?  Assuming that your only objective is to get a fish for the lowest price possible (in other words, you’re not going fishing for the love of fishing) then you’re dragging your butt down to grocery store to buy a fish.  Why?  Because those other guys have gotten so good at catching fish (and you’ve gotten so good at whatever the heck you do) that the work that you didn’t get done while you were out trying to catch a fish would cost you more than it would cost you to buy a fish at LeeLee’s.

When you’re running a small business, it’s easy to feel like a frontiersman.  You have to wear so many hats (manager, salesman, accountant, HR rep, etc) and your budget is so tight that it seems like the cheapest (and maybe the only) way to get things done is to do them yourself.  That’s why those commercials offering software that helps you do things like design your own website can be so tempting.  In truth, though, there’s a vast, skilled, and largely untapped workforce out there just waiting to be leveraged by a wise small business owner (we would, of course, be remiss if we didn’t point out the pool of capable workers registered on our own site).  Considering the time it takes to, for example, learn how to put together a serviceable website from scratch (even with the aid of software) a savvy business owner would do well to ask herself if she can afford not to hire somebody to do it for her. 

If you give a man a fish, you may feed him for a lifetime.  But if you show a man where to buy fish for cheap, he’ll get a helluva lot more done.

 

Be Sociable, Share!