Where the Rubber is Supposed to Meet the Road

You can’t live without a heart, lungs, a stomach or a liver. Every business function can be called “essential,” but without sales, you’re toast.

And the quality of those sales and the size and frequency of them is the propulsion that determines the speed your business goes.

Is your business focused on where the rubber meets the road?

Be an Attractive Brand

Don’t underestimate people wanting to do business with you because of who you are. Sure, there’s the product and the offer, but do they like YOU?

Leader or Boss

Leaders bring out the best in others, share their knowledge, care about others, and find a way for others to succeed.

Bosses force others in line, continually point out others’ weaknesses, and judge others’ behavior as right or wrong.

Leaders are respected and followed.  Bosses are feared and left.

Are you a leader, or boss?

Power mongers at work

Some people on your team want to “be the boss” of others.  Not leader – boss.

They want to show how they are experts by pointing out how others are not.  They crave titles and like to hold others’ destinies in their hands.  This is not good for team building.

You don’t need this in your business – do you?

Take a chance

The desire for safety and fear of loss stands in the way of every business NEVER created.  It’s easy to start a business when you have nothing to lose, but then we get to a certain level and stop taking chances.  We might lose something.  And without risking, we can’t grow – personally, professionally, at home, or in our businesses.  And without growing – we surely will shrivel.

Be smart.  But don’t stop taking some chances.

What are you going to try?

The change agent who wouldn’t change

You think about change.  You talk about change.  You tell your people they should.  And sure, you’ve done a lot.

But your failure to continually redefine your role, your routine, your comfort zone (as wide as that may be) is likely the biggest problem that creates your organizations biggest problems.

Lead.  Then lead some more.

The "resistance" in you

There is something you are fighting.  You make excuses, you justify your position – yet you struggle with it.

Why are you resisting the solution?

How much to charge your friends

When your friends expect you to provide your product or service to them for (next to) nothing, explain to them that you have to charge your friends or your company would go bankrupt.  This is because none of your enemies are doing business with you.

"It works. Big deal"

You can’t impress a customer by the fact that your product works, or by the technical competence of your people relative to your product or service.  Why?  They expect that.  If they didn’t think it worked, or thought your people would be lucky to know what they were doing, they’d not have hired you, or would have been very upset if they found out those things weren’t the case.  “It works” and “We know what we are doing” are the price of entry.

So, how can you impress your customer?  Courtesy, personal attention, timeliness, going the extra mile, delivering that more and unexpected bit, and with the elegance and grace of how it’s all “packaged” and delivered.

Are you relying too much on “it works”?

"I have a dream…"

A vision for how you want it to be is important.  But these kinds of dreams aren’t the ones you have at night that you can scarcely remember the next day.

These are the kinds of dreams that pull you…that you work each day to bend into reality. They are the kinds that you formulate and decide upon while wide awake and clear of mind.  Goals that reconcile with who you really are and that your gut tells you are right, worthy for you, and why you were put here now with these talents.  There’s nothing dreamlike about a good dream.  You’re clear.

What’s your dream?