Modeling Respect

When a leader respects EVERYONE on his/her team, it shows through in words, voice, acknowledgement, listening, caring, and training.  When the leader respects others, all the employees know it – and tend to respect each other.

Being a leader is not just weilding the power to make the big decisions – it’s setting the culture by who they are being every day.

Who are you being to your people?

Gross Margins

You can do all the cost cutting you want, but if your gross margins are low, it will be difficult to make a profit.  If they are too low, you just can’t make it up on volume.

What is your profit percentage after the actual direct costs of making and delivering what you do?

Do different products and services have different gross margins?

Where are you going?

Businesspeople who are stuck, think and act primarily on what they have to do today.

Businesspeople who grow, think about how they want their business to be in a year, and work to make it so now.

What do you want your business to be in a year?

Bias for Action

A good leader doesn’t wait around worrying forever if a new idea will work.  They don’t develop new strategies in endless committee meetings.  They don’t analyze models forever (using assumptions they don’t know are correct). 

They try stuff.  Now.  They learn fast, and get onto the next generation ideas and the next, and the next – quickly.  This bias for action leads to mistakes, yes.  But it also leads to workable innovations and solutions quickly.

Do you act quickly so you can learn quickly?

Be intentional

What ARE YOU going to work on, fix, or accomplish today?

Don’t be casual, accidental, or timid.  Be intentional.

You and your team – parallel growth

If you’re goals and expectations are low, most any employess performing in most any way will do.  But when you raise your expectations and aspirations for your company, you can now see that their performance is no longer accceptable if these new higher goals are to be met.

Clarify your thoughts first.  Then communicate your goals, tell them what you expect, give them the tools to succeed, train them often, and measure results.  That should work.  If not, you’ll have to replace the employee with someone who is capable of contributing in the way that is necessary for a high performance team to accomplish its goals. 

How many people do you know?

Unsuccessful people don’t know a lot of other people.  Successful people know lots of other people.

How many people do you know?

Expand your network.

How do you see your problems?

How you percieve a problem invariably blends with how you try to solve it.

If we can see a problem differently, we can see new paths to fixing it.

Can you look at your problem differently – and see new solutions?

Your Niche Marketing

You can’t afford to market to everyone.  What sub-group, or sub-sub-sub-group of the population needs to know that you exist and why they should do business with you?

How are you getting this message to that group?

Failure comes with it

I have failed at several businesses.  They did not work out like I had thought or hoped.  (Hope is not a viable strategy).  But when you try things you learn deep.  Those failures were necessary for me to build the great busineeses I have today and be smart enough to not screw them up.

Experience counts – even bad experience; if you learn quickly, don’t give up and apply what you learned to get it right.

Failure can be an early sign of success if you make it so.  Have you seen your sign?