Ok, you’ve heard about this leadership thing, and maybe you have thought, “Another fuzzy word that I can’t really identify with. I mean, really! Leadership? Why would a small business person like me need that?”
Here is the down & dirty, there’s a saying that I know you’ve heard before: ‘No one succeeds alone.’ Yeah, you can have some nice successes with just you, but nothing like if there were 10 of you! Take a second, and think about that for a minute, what kind of results could you turn out if there were 10 of you on a team? What kind of house could you now live in, what could your family have that they don’t have now?
Or, you’re someone who already has some people working for you now. Yeah it’s better than before when it was just you doing everything, but you know, there are those days… when you’d sell your business for a nickel, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes.
Now imagine a different scenario: Your business is in the world series of businesses, you and your team are blazing new paths, like extremely lucrative paths, and get this, you aren’t working 60-80 hours a week anymore. Matter of fact, you are putting in only about 20 hours per week, and hey, your checking account has never been this high! Could you handle that?
That my brothers & sisters is the advantage of the Leadership hack. It takes a nice hum drum ‘good’ business and gets it firing on all sparkplugs while running on nitro instead of regular gas.
Ok, you say, “If I was interested, where would I plug in to this Leadership stuff?” Lucky for you here’s a ‘quick-start’ docking tool:
Of all the people you could lead in a great way, the most important ones to start with at first will be you, your clients, and your affiliated resources (your outside team, people like suppliers, & service providers).
Now before you can actually lead anyone (including you), you will want to plant your flag figuratively, you want to create a rallying point for people to come together around you & your business, say a declared ‘message-territory’ that you own so that upon hearing this unique message, the ‘right people’ will want to choose to be associated with you. This is communication at a DNA level, a
customized plug-in for ‘the right’ clients, suppliers, service providers, as well as potential team members. People who will at first be intrigued, and then attracted to you and your message.
To create such a powerful message is simple but not easy, but not impossible either. Your success will depend upon how much effort you put into this. Begin by answering 3 questions:
- What is our purpose? (What are we here to do?)
- Why do we do what we do? (This appeals to the primal subconscious need that we all have)
- What do we want to be remembered for? (Your vision for your legacy)
The answers to these three robust questions are like secret sauce, they will help you compress time down so that you can achieve what you want to achieve through your business a lot more quickly, much more effectively, and with a lot less heartache & grief.
When you take the time to identify and then attend to these in a very succinct way, like no more than one sentence for each, then there will be a heck of a lot less friction with others trying to figure out if they should ‘connect’ & ‘commit’ with you and your business.
The answers to these questions are the rare metals of a ‘Great Business’, not a good business.
This is more about you having the courage to not live everyone else’s life, to verbalize and then declare who you are, why you do what you do, so that you can attract the right and best people to join in with you. When I say the right people, I mean the only people that you will want to be serving, those who are of one mind with you. To not do so means you will be wasting way too much time selling to the wrong people and then later spending even more time fighting to keep them. This process will save a ton of time, emotional energy, brain cells, and money.
When you have the right people, they know why they are with you, they are harder to lose, and they tend to refer more than any other group!
Stuck on where to start or how this can help you create more time and financial freedom in your business? Book a complimentary Discovery session today, click the link below.
D.R. Whitson is a Time & Financial Freedom Coach with expertise in creating Self-Managed Businesses through his experience of founding over 20 “start-up” companies and as a founding member of the “John Maxwell Team,” with over six billion dollars in revenue and 3,500 associates.