Many people in society – from business owners to sports stars to school students – say they want to be the very best at what they do. Achieving the best – from products and services to athletic ability to final exams – involves equal parts acknowledgment, approach, and engagement of the resources at your disposal.

Resources are more than just money and raw materials. Resources are also people, your colleagues, and your employees – the work force.

"A man's got to know his limitations" - Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan in Magnum Force, 1973.

My favorite quote in the history of film-making is applicable to all walks of life, and it is particularly useful in business – when developing a plan, procuring funding for that plan, and obtaining a team of employees that puts that funding in motion and brings that plan to life. Acknowledgment is as much for your understanding of what you immediately have and can immediately accomplish . . . as it is for those who would fund you, collaborate with you, or work for you.

While funding sources tend to come in two flavors – silent investors or business partners – the most successful money-seeking presentations are developed with a partner in mind.

The partner, of course, is the person or group potentially making an investment in you, your concept, and your company. Such a partner is going to want – and will deserve – an objective dossier of your immediate limitations, your long-term risks, and maybe . . . even your personal debt to income status and credit history.

The value of being able to borrow money from others – in this economy – has become invaluable. Borrowing money, in recent times, has been viewed as a right as long as certain basic financial requirements have been met. It is in danger, however, of permanently becoming a privilege that must be earned through much more stringent requirements. When the borrowed amount is significant, a responsible business owner understands full disclosure of personal and business plan limitations may be necessary.

While circumstances of late would dictate that all business owners take a more respectful stance towards investment monies being sought, the current trend is alarming at best – with money seekers developing a 60-second pitch for what they hope will be a money lender with an extremely short attention span and no interest in details. Short-term mobile businesses thrive under this approach, but those seeking fulfillment of long-term requirements must show more substance through a more responsible approach.

It is a rare business owner, indeed, who is still willing to establish a well-defined, multi-tiered business plan – from A to Z, reasonably identifying all core goals, legitimate risks, and specific contingencies – before breaking bread with a potential funding source. A multi-tiered plan supports a one-size-fits-all strategy, and it can be delivered to an audience as one of multiple components or a complete robust solution . . . targeted at attention spans, interests, or level of involvement.

A 4-Tier plan, for example, could be presented in the following manner:

Tier 1 – Bottom line silent investor.
Tier 2 – Long-term business partners and executives for your management team.
Tier 3 – Production level middle managers.
Tier 4 – Trench level product developers and quality assurance specialists.

All tiers can, of course, be presented together at the request of the curious and diligent investment party.

While some businesses aim to acquire personnel after securing funding, other businesses take the proactive – but not aggressive – measure of interviewing and meeting with team member candidates before and during the process of obtaining funding.

The development of your business plan, acknowledgment of your limitations, and procurement of your funding will directly assist in the development of the personnel roster you may be pursuing to support your business goals.

A proactive approach towards potential personnel can allow a business to hit the ground running with that investment money far sooner than the competition. An assumed NDA will also allow a more robust engagement process where appropriate details of your business plan can be shared with a candidate, encouraging valuable feedback towards that person’s future role with a business.

Being proactive with your potential personnel resources can also simply be about better identifying the types of personnel you need to approach – sharing your plan and product barriers with them and, in turn, determining how their goals and interests align with or contradict your own.

After all, some candidates – no matter how brilliant their appearance or their level of educational achievement – may simply not comprehend your plan, what would generally be required of them or what it is you would specifically be asking them to perform. Others may very much understand your mission but are simply more interested in supporting their own goals.

You are, under most circumstances, ultimately dealing with limitations in your potential resources - in comprehension of your plan, level of interest, or your own inability to articulate that plan – rather than a complete lack of traditional resources. Communicative limitations such as these can render even the largest stockpile of raw materials or financial resources ineffective.

Your available resources in a team setting, for example, are always handcuffed by your weakest link. The greatest irony in product development – in any industry – is how you can add as many resources as possible to a development effort and the deficient results of just one person can halt progress dead in its tracks. Success is still achievable, in this case, if that weak link is not the business owner.

Nonetheless, while business owners must be careful, of course, with what category and depth of information is being shared with team member candidates, there is no law – other than that of personal discomfort – against doing so.

There is nothing preventing a business owner from acknowledging to a candidate the limitations, or boundaries, towards the reasonable and maximum success of the business. There is nothing preventing a business owner from approaching a candidate with a constructively honest assessment of the business. There is nothing preventing a business owner from engaging a candidate based upon mutual information sharing to establish a more accurate and beneficial role within the business for that candidate.

It is acknowledged that the larger a company becomes, the more homogenized information sharing / acknowledgment of limitations becomes with your resources – investors and employment candidates alike. Annual reports and stock data should not, however, get in the way of sharing core goals, raw material boundaries, standard operating procedures, product development philosophies, and ideal profit targets. Even if you have hired an experienced lieutenant to run a business for you, planning and instructions for that new business chief - that new resource - no matter how simple the guidelines, begin with you.

Business owners have bypassed these steps – of acknowledgment, approach, and engagement – with their available and potential resources for hundreds of years, but the reality has always been one of paying now or paying later. Most business owners eventually have to pay for the part of the resource methodology they skipped . . . in order to finally bring their businesses across the threshold of success or to stave off failure.

You should always make the effort to acknowledge your limitations rather than risk your resources. Your efficiency is their efficiency.