Small business owners, managers challenged to ask for help when they need it

CEDAR RAPIDS - Veteran business adviser and consultant Garrison Wynn has spent a lot of time studying behaviors that distinguish successful businesses and their leaders.

Wynn discussed dozens of them Tuesday during two speeches at “Cedar Rapids Prevail,” but he offered one with a very specific example for several hundred small business owners and managers in attendance

“Asking is the key to success and survival,” Wynn said during a speech at Theatre Cedar Rapids. “Successful people ask for help when they need it.”

Wynn urged business owners to get help from case managers at the Business Success Initiative, a Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce unit that sponsored Prevail Cedar Rapids with financial support from four flood-affected businesses.

For 90 minutes, Wynn hammered his audience with humorous anecdotes illustrating the behaviors of success. He said the bottom line is the importance of influence.

Wynn said leaders often undermine their influence by unnecessarily voicing judgments about the people who work for them, or criticizing their ideas.

Employees will seldom follow the ideas of a leader when times are good if their own ideas have been criticized when times were bad, Wynn said.