What’s your bread and butter?

Of everything you sell, what do you love to sell the most?

What’s that thing that gives you the least problems, great profit, and most customer delight?

How do you sell more of that?

What are you optimizing for?

What are you optimizing for?

Top line sales?

Bottom line net profit?

Customer satisfaction?

Employee engagement and satisfaction?

Pick one.

Make big decisions with clarity

I have done some stupid things.  But in the beginning, I did not know they were stupid; otherwise, I wouldn’t have done them.

But in looking back, I blinded myself to the warning signs.

I think we all have done things where we look back and can see now that it was a bad idea from the beginning.

We need to make big decisions without emotional influences.  

Too much fear and we don’t do anything (maybe ever).

Too much optimism and hope, and we do things we shouldn’t.

Being emotionally neutral is best.  Stop and look at the facts without emotions coloring your view one way or the other.  

Then choose.

Say YES to less things

The less things you say yes to the better you can do what you do.

Is there an endeavor, event, meeting, thing, etc. that you said yes to that you wish you didn’t?

What do you need to say no to now?

How good are your managers?

As a business gets bigger, THE leader has less to do with the culture/performance/and employee experience in a department than before.

A good manager can create a culture that is better than the rest of the company and have a higher-performing department than the rest – or vice versa.

Do you try to hire the best managers?

Do you train your managers?

Sometimes managers are managers because they have been with the company the longest – but that is not the right reason if they can’t bring out the best in others while accomplishing the goals of the organization.

Is there one who needs to be upgraded?

Your business teeters on what happens on a sales call

If your company doesn’t do sales calls, then it teeters on what happens at the point of sale – retail store, website, dining room – wherever.

What does happen?  Do people say “I want it!”

How good is your offer?  Your salespeople?  Your communication?

Do you create “psychological safety”?

Have you lead by fear and control, or by trust and openness?

Do your people feel safe taking risks, speaking up and being honest?

If not, your team is playing small and you are not getting real feedback.

No matter what you do, you serve people.

I tell my team, we are not servicing a house, we are servicing a person who owns that house.

No matter what you do, or service, you are serving a person.

Ask questions, listen, build a relationship, and please or thrill that person, and they will come back and bring their friends.

The long road of business.

An entrepreneur doesn’t get paid in tidy little one-year taxable packages.

Being a business owner is a cycle that pays (or not) over ten or twenty-year cycles – and that’s IF you don’t quit and IF you get it right.  Those are big IF’s.

An entrepreneur spends the first part of their career desperately underpaid, in hopes of spending the last part of their career wildly overpaid.

Here are some reasons why – 

In the beginning, you have no resources.  You have to invest in everything.  Equipment, software, facility, paper clips – all of it.

In the beginning, you don’t have any employees who know exactly how to help you and how to do their jobs well.  You hire people and invest in their education.  Some don’t work out and leave.  You start all over again.  Some make mistakes you have to pay for.  They are always less productive and inefficient in the beginning.  And new employees take more management and oversight.

You have to invest in marketing.  At first, your marketing doesn’t work as well since it is new.  Besides you figuring it out and becoming a better marketer, it’s cheaper to remind people who you are than to educate them in the first place.

You don’t have referrals or repeat business.  You have to pay for each customer.

You have to invest in inventory.  You have to make a profit to buy stuff that people have not bought yet.  No money for you.

You have to invest in receivables.  Some people won’t pay you right away.  Heck, some won’t pay you at all.  No money for you.

Let’s say you stick with it for 15 years.  Then all the above is paid for, and you start making a profit.  Is that profit from the activities of that year, or from all the years before it?

Of course, money is not the only result we are looking for or only benefit we can realize.

When you start a business, you have to buckle in for a long ride.  Is it worth it?  It can be.  That’s up to you.

Don’t hire salespeople with RBF.

Don’t hire salespeople who have to overcome their natural vibe.

People buy from people they like.

Are your salespeople naturally “likable”?

When people meet them do they decide they like them in the first 60 seconds?

Do they still feel that way after 10 minutes?