From the Inner, the outer

Thoughts are the seeds of what will happen next.

Thoughts are caused by what you are exposed to – read, watch, hear, learn, environment, people around you…

Master your mind.

Manage your thoughts – they are the preview of coming attractions.

Solitude

A leader who is stressed, tired and confused is not helping the team.

Get your head clear.  

Get clarity.

Working 75 hour weeks.

That is 12 hours a day for six days, and three hours on Sunday.

That’s fine to get a key project done or in a short-term crisis.  But only for one week.  

Here’s the test.  Are you loving it?  That’s the point – to be happy.  What is it doing to your family?  Your health (Mental and physical).

Despite the legends of young programmers in Silicon Valley sleeping on the couch, working 60-70 hours a week not good for you or for your business.

Define your job correctly.  Make your job fit into the number of hours you want to work.  For me, it’s about 52 hours a week. (Think Daily is what throws me over 48!)

Make the work fit the hours, rather than the hours fitting the work.

Entrepreneurship – the power to create oneself.

No other endeavor in the world’s history has allowed and challenged a person to create a life of their making and become a better person like the path of entrepreneurship in a free society.

A life of leisure will not challenge you to become the best person and use as much of your potential as being responsible for a team and its forward motion in service to voluntary customers.

It comes with great responsibilities that must be met.  

It comes with the challenge to learn much, change your habits and way of showing up each day, to understand and work with people, and become a new and better person.

If these challenges are met with persistence and time, the rewards can be great.

Chief among these rewards – who you have become by successfully meeting the challenge.

Talk to your prospects.

Those you sell and those you don’t.

Find out why they buy from you – and why they don’t.

The answers will help you change your offering to something they can’t resist.

Do higher level work.

Work is not all the same.

Some work is of much higher value than other work.

Entry-level workers can’t do the work of the leader.  But leaders can do any work in the company, and might get drawn into lower-level work because they know how to do it, it needs to be done better, or it just feels comfortable and makes them feel like an expert.

You are the leader.  Nobody else can do many of the leaders’ truly important tasks and make important leaders’ decisions but you.

Don’t fail to do the leader’s job well.  The business will never outperform its leadership.  That’s you.

Do what matters more effectively, and eliminate what is not to be done by you at all.

The Role of Patience

“You are not patient enough.  Your lack of patience and your need of things is killing you.” – Gary Veynerchuk

When we expect things to happen faster than they are, we get frustrated and think something is wrong.

Building a great company takes time, even if you make all the right moves.  But you can’t make all the right moves because you don’t fully understand what they are.

You have to learn (from others and) by making some wrong moves, which will set your timeline back.

Don’t suffer over the time it takes.

Just keep learning and becoming the kind of person/leader who can get the results you say you want.

Get better everyday, and build a better team everyday.

Be patient.  Don’t suffer over the time it takes – enjoy the experience.

In the end, you will come to understand what this was really all about – you getting better.

CEO Responsibilities

1) Vision – what are we trying to make happen short and long term?

2) Money – Prices, P&L (profit), Balance Sheet (assets and liabilities, debt), cash flow

3) People – team, culture, capabilites

How are you doing on these things?

Four simple questions about your business

Who do you want to buy from you?

What must happen to cause them to buy?

What must happen to keep them coming back?

What could happen to stop them from buying?

The answers to these four questions can guide your positioning, strategy, marketing, sales, and service.

What are your answers?  

Profit = Unspent Revenue

To make money there has to be a gap between revenue you collect and expenses.

If you are not making money, you have to figure it out, or you are out of business, and everyone goes home.

To make a profit you can increase revenue or lower your expenses.

It’s the leader’s job.

Figure it out.