Play to Win

Play to win.  

This is different than playing not to lose.

You can’t win with great defense alone.  You have to score some points.

Go on the offense.

Have a sense of urgency

A sense of urgency is different than being in a hurry.

For leaders, it often means that you waste no time getting to your Highest Value Activity, and when it’s done, getting to the next one after that.

It means no wasted time in having important conversations and steering the team’s attention toward what is most important now.

It may look like you are working calmly, but you aren’t wasting time on low-value activities and you are moving on what moves the needle – now.

Is that you?

Shorten your timeline

If you feel you have all the time in the world, that’s how long it will take.

When you shorten your timeline (deadline) things speed up.

We have done incredible things in short periods of time when we had to.

Nothing like a pending event or release date or rollout party to get things moving faster!

Make it so!

Faith raises your frequency

Faith – let’s call it believing. 

When you believe in a positive outcome, you shift from doubt to positive expectation – you see things you didn’t see before.  

You act and think in a different way, and that different way often is the difference between success and failure.

Do you believe you can do this/fix this/accomplish this/be this/have this?

Make your job smaller

The next classic idea from my School of Entrepreneurship is the antidote to the problem that “you don’t scale”.  If you work 12 hours a day and still feel like you can’t get it all done – you are doing it wrong.

You have outgrown your winning strategy of working harder and longer and doing “anything” to succeed.  That’s for year one – and you are past that now.  You need to live.

The business should serve your life, not be your life.

If you are the central communication switch for everything and everyone, you are going to wear yourself out. 

Why did you start this business?  To have a better life in some way, right?  Well if it’s making your life worse, you are doing it wrong, and you need to learn how to own and operate a business that serves your life.

What you need to do is make your job smaller, so you can do it very well in (40-50) hours a week.

How?  Hire some people and delegate and empower them to each run a part of the business.  Pretend you are trying to make your job obsolete.  Cut off chunks of it and give it to others.

This is just one post.  I can’t give you the full lessons here.  But I bet you’re saying something like – “I can’t find good people”.  There are millions of good people out there, they just aren’t working for you yet.  You have to make the kind of place and be the kind of person others want to work for.  You have to compete with other employers and win.

You might also be asking “I can’t afford to pay anyone”.  Well raise your prices or sell more so you can.  

“I can’t raise my prices”.  You have to add value so you can.

“I can’t sell more”.  Become a better marketer and sales organization.

“I can’t”  (you mean you won’t)  If that’s true, then get into a different business – or close up and go get a job where you can do what you do best and not have all this responsibility and risk.

You can.  You just have to learn how.  It may not be easy, but you signed up for this, and you must do it.

Other people who are making it aren’t better than you, they just know things you don’t know yet.

thesoe.com

Don't grow a broken business

Another idea expressed in the emotional story in my book “The Highest Calling”, is that you don’t want to grow a broken business; you want to fix it first, then grow it.

Many seasoned business owners don’t want to grow.  Why?  They have “all they can handle” now.  They have problems and feel that if they double their business they will double their problems.  And they are right because they aren’t fixing the problems they have now in a way where they won’t come back tomorrow.

We all know you can do lots of sales and make no money.  Why would you want to double the top line if the bottom line of zero will double too?  Why would you want to double your business when you are working 60 hours a week and still can’t keep up? 

You’ve got to do the leadership job differently.  You’ve got to think differently and act differently.

Of course, you are doing the best you know how now.  If you knew a better way, you’d do it, right?  So how are you supposed to do it better if you don’t know how (and swear you are doing it the best way)?

The answer is to admit you are at the limit of your leadership ability, it’s not enough, and you need help.  You have to put your ego aside – (and many are not willing to do that and they remain bound). Then get the help you need by tuning into the right voices of value to learn how to think and act differently.

thesoe.com is one place, but there are so many others customized for your industry.  

To set things right…

The next classic Contractor Nation School of Entrepreneurship idea is this –

To set things right you have to see things right.

How many times have you made a wrong decision because you didn’t have enough information or you jumped too soon?

You hear a case made by one person and you make a fast decision to fix it, thinking you are doing the right thing…but you acted on information by someone who didn’t have all of it, or who had an incomplete context or worse, a hidden agenda.

Before you make decisions, pause and be sure you have all the information you need to get it right.

Now this caution could lead to its opposite disease, paralysis of analysis.  But many entrepreneurs are type A, check-the-box, fast decision-makers who are not at risk of this problem.  If you are a slow decision-making analytical person, be sure to include what people are saying and not just backroom analytical rigor,  and build a bias for faster action.

To set things right, you have to see things right.

Compexity doesn't scale

Another idea we teach in my School of Entrepreneurship is that complexity doesn’t scale.

If your business is complicated it’s hard to teach to others.  It’s hard for anyone to understand.

Instead, make simple models that you can draw out on one sheet of paper to show how your business works, what the key functions are and just one or two numbers you measure in each key function (department) to set goals and determine how things are going.  Then people know where they fit it, what their part is, and what needle they are trying to move.

Keeping things simple means that mission creep is avoided, and your team only has to get really good at a small number of things.

In our case, we created a simple functional model, a simple financial model, and a physical model (what does it look like).  With these three, it’s simple, and we have full control as we can see what is most important to work on at any given time.

Is your business simple?  Do your people think so?

You Don't Scale

I have been in business 40 years now.  I’m still learning and getting better all the time.

I spent 3 1/2 years writing and delivering content for the Contractor nation school of Entrepreneurship (thesoe.com) – the only complete business school for home improvement and repair contractors ever created – and it’s online. 

This week I will share some of the classic ideas from my school with you.

I’ll start with this one – “You don’t scale”. 

This means that you are one person.  You can only be in one place at a time.  Your mind can only do one thing at a time.  You only have 24 hours in a day, and many of those have to be spent sleeping, bathing, eating, etc.  If you let business time crowd out your family or recreation time, you’ll wind up unhappy – and so will your family.

You only have so much time to make it work and be successful in.  You don’t scale.

So many entrepreneurs start as solopreneurs.  You don’t own a business – you own a job.  And when you stop working, you stop getting paid.  So you develop a strategy of working harder and linger to “get ahead”.  But you meet that limitation rather quickly, and after a little while you are worn out and unhappy.  You can never do enough.  You don’t scale.

The only way your business can scale is through other people.  Now your job is much different than you thought it would be.  You are a recruiter/leader/ manager – in charge of building the team.  

If you do not like or accept this job or you don’t learn how to do it well, you get stuck again – with people problems – and you will probably blame them for your malaise.

Sound about right?

Stay tuned….

Designing your "Machine"

Your business is perfectly designed to get the results it’s getting now.

Think about that.

What different results do you want?

This is your experiment.  Does it end here?

What changes do you need to make?