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Dec 02 2013
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Short Term Gains = Long Term Damage

By Comments & Opinion, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Business Growth, Foundations of Success, Planning for the future No Comments

Building a successful business all starts with the relationships you establish with your customers. In a sense it is a lot like building a wall. First you lay a solid foundation of trust, and then you build upon it layer after layer after layer, ever higher up toward the sky. Some companies however, keep knocking their walls down and have to rebuild them all over again.

I am astounded sometimes by the short sighted approach of some businesses to put short term profits ahead of long term growth. You may remember the 2009 – 2011 Toyota recall disaster where corners were cut on the quality of manufacturing in order to increase their bottom line. Instead, it ended up putting the safety of their customers at risk, cost the company billions of dollars in sales, fines, and compensation; and severely damaged the reputation of their brand in the process. It was a PR nightmare, and one that I hope other businesses considering the same practices take note of.

Unfortunately this is not an isolated incidence, and one that will most likely rear its ugly head from time to time. But luckily, not all businesses are so shortsighted.

I am reminded of a story about an ad executive named Jorge Heymann, whose agency had been approached by a new client that had recently built a modern seven-block riverfront shopping development on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The trouble was that the development was well off the beaten path and difficult to access, and as a result it needed a big advertising campaign to promote it. Heymann’s agency was given a clear objective: To create awareness and drive traffic to the complex. Budget: $4 million.

Now what most agencies would have done – and what the client was expecting – was to create a lavish multi-media advertising campaign. But what was unique about Heymann was that he understood exactly what he was being hired to do – to solve a problem – not to figure out a way to spend $4 million. He had gone out to inspect the site himself and found that given the inconvenient and remote location of the complex, an ad campaign wouldn’t be effective in driving the level of traffic needed.

So what did he do?

Instead of building an advertising campaign, Heymann proposed that the client instead use the budget to build a footbridge across the river making it more easily accessible to shoppers. As you might expect the client was stunned at this unexpected proposal, but nevertheless he saw the value in the bold idea and approved of it. The stunning footbridge was built and went on to become a Buenos Aires landmark, generating more publicity than any ad campaign ever could have and brought shoppers out by the thousands.

Heymann had displayed a keen understanding of his role in helping the client, he could have just taken the money, but knowing that his efforts wouldn’t really have been effective, what good would that have done him? Most likely the client would have been unhappy with the results and gone elsewhere. Instead, Heymann chose to build a long lasting relationship of trust with the client, a decision that cemented the reputation and fortunes of his agency for years to come.

As I have said before, people want to do business with people they trust. Ask yourself, how can I ensure my customers are still my customers in 10 years? Will my relationship with them lead to referrals and help build my business and its reputation?

The next time your business is faced with a short term gain at the expense of a customer, I strongly encourage you to put their needs ahead of your own. As the saying goes, it takes years to build a reputation and only seconds to destroy it.

Nov 25 2013
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Check Your Ego at the Door

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Business Growth, Foundations of Success No Comments

“If you always hire people who are smaller than you are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. If, on the other hand, you always hire people who are bigger than you are, we shall become a company of giants.” –  David Ogilvy

I have had the pleasure of working with many businesses over the years, helping entrepreneurs to build up their businesses and watching them flourish as leaders in the process. Many of them went on to become successful business leaders, others… not so much. Though many people talk about the passion and “never say die” attitude required to succeed in business, a quality that I have observed in successful leaders, and one that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves, is ego.

Successful business leaders are not afraid to admit their weaknesses, they know that there is always something more they can learn and an area that can always be improved. They understand that the growth and success of their business is not entirely a product of their own making, but is a collaborative effort of talented and dedicated individuals all working together towards a common goal – no matter how great a sports coach is, he isn’t going to win a championship with lousy players. Successful business leaders surround themselves with the best and brightest, freeing themselves to do what they as leaders do best – planning and developing the future growth of their business. They know exactly where they want to go, and put together the best team possible to help them get there – in a sense, they work on their business, not in their business.

On the other side of the coin is the mediocre business leader. They think they know everything and everyone else knows nothing. They are always right no matter what  because they view themselves as the single reason why their business is growing. Because of this attitude, they cannot foresee hiring anyone who is better at something than they are, and end up surrounding themselves with mediocrity which only tends to reinforce their ego. A harsh lesson that many of these mediocre business leaders learnt from the economic collapse of 2008 was that it was a hell of a lot easier to succeed in a booming economy. They had let their “success” blind them to the true realities of their situation. It was evident in the wake of the recession that the businesses that continued to survive — and even thrive — did so because of the planning of their leaders and the investment they had made in their people.

Are you prepared to become a successful business leader? You’ll need to ask yourself some tough questions and answer honestly about yourself and your own abilities. Maybe you won’t like what you hear. The real question is this: What will you learn from this exercise? And will your ego be able to handle it? Consider checking yours at the door, and maybe you’ll start down the path of building a company of giants.

Nov 18 2013
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Pruning the Tree

By Comments & Opinion, Business Insights, Business Growth, Business Health No Comments

With the calendar now midway through November, winter is definitely in the air. One of my routines for this time of year is to prepare the gardens around my property for the coming winter by pruning the shrubs and trees. As you might know, pruning trees is helpful for a variety of reasons:

  • to remove dead or diseased branches
  • to thin the crown to permit new growth and better air circulation
  • to remove obstructing lower branches
  • to shape a tree for design purposes

Okay, so I confess that I’m not actually the one out in the backyard with snips trimming branches but I do know the critical importance to the health, safety and aesthetics of my trees and shrubs that the annual pruning exercise means.

So what is your point Frank, I’ll bet your wondering. Quite simply, I find that there is an astonishing parallel between maintaining a garden and ensuring you have a healthy and growing company. Let me break it down a bit.

Trimming the dead branches

First, I’ll describe the practice of trimming away dead branches. There are three main benefits of cutting off dead or diseased branches from trees and shrubs:  it makes way for new growth to sprout and flourish, it mitigates the spread of disease and it improves the beauty of the tree.

Every company has the same issue of “dead branches” – unproductive and poor performing employees – and reaps the same benefits by doing some “pruning” – that is, letting those employees go. No matter how successful an organization is, it is inevitable that some employees will always fall into this category and business leaders need to be vigilant with their trimming. By removing these underperforming employees, the company’s up-and-comers have a better chance to stand out and be recognized for their achievements, and grow and prosper as the rest of the company grows.

Furthermore, like a diseased branch the employees that fall into this deadwood category often have a poor attitude that can infect the rest of the company. Pruning will help prevent the spread of morale and culturing-impacting negativism and pessimism.

Pruning also serves to enhance the attraction of the company to potential high-performing candidates, what I call the rock stars… hopefully they will see that this is an organization that doesn’t countenance low or poor performance, enhancing their attraction to the company.

Culling living branches

While it is of critical importance to cut off dead branches, pruning live branches is equally important. Sometimes this mean removing branches that are lower down on the trunk, or thinning out the crown of the shrub or tree. The art and act of trimming living branches is a bit more complex and strategic than removing dead branches. The desired outcome is to selectively remove those branches that are impeding (or will impede) others from growing properly, or are growing in a different direction than you want the tree to grow.

Again, the analogy to a company is striking. Oftentimes you may have a strong and productive employee, but that person’s behaviours or mindset are such that – while maybe acceptable at one point in time – she is now impeding others in the organization from performing to the maximum of their ability. As hard as it may seem, that person needs to go. Similarly, an employee that has a set of skills and capabilities that were extremely valuable to the organization at one point in time – say, during the start-up phase – but now that the company has grown and matured the value of that employee’s capabilities has greatly diminished. He, too, must go for the greater good of the organization.

I know that some of you are thinking, “But what if I make a mistake?  What if I cut the wrong person, or too many for that matter?”.  Read on and I’ll explain my view on that.

A Living Organism

The last point I will make on this topic is perhaps stating the obvious – much like a tree or a shrub, a company is a living organism. A tree or shrub that is not properly maintained and pruned will over time grow in ways that leave it less strong, vibrant and attractive compared to ones that have been consistently and properly pruned. While a case can be made that it’s never too late to prune a tree, if you let it go too long the amount of effort to get it back into the shape you want it will be high and it in fact may take years to get it going in the direction you want it to.

And so too it goes with a company: let it go untended too long, deferring those tough decisions on cutting out those seemingly healthy and productive “branches” or making excuses for keeping the deadwood around, means some really tough work ahead.

And to address your concern about cutting the wrong employee, or maybe removing too many (perhaps because you’ve left it too long), do not fear. Companies like trees are resilient and naturally rejuvenate – if you snip off the wrong branch while unfortunate another one will grow to take its place; similarly, if you lop off a few too many undeniably it will have a short term impact, but the reality is that it won’t take too long before ample new ones sprout in their place.

My message here is quite simple:  at least once a year – and fall is one of the best times – get your organizational “trimmers” out and do your company and employees a favour by cutting back selectively and with determination. I can assure you that if you do so, your company will be stronger, healthier and more prosperous as a result. Why?  I practice what I preach and I hold up the success of my companies past and present as the proof in the pudding. Oh, and you should see the trees in my backyard.

Oct 28 2013
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Are You Really Spending Your Time Selling?

By Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Sales Advice, Foundations of Success No Comments

One of the most frustrating aspects of managing a sales force that I experienced is people not making their quotas, the same applies when I observe businesses or entrepreneurs miss their revenue targets. Ultimately when sales targets are missed it’s either a lack of activity or skill or both. In my experience for the most part it’s a lack of activity. It’s simple math actually, if you’re 70% to your target, observe the hours or amount of dials, meetings or whatever other metric leads to results and increase them respectively and math tells you that’s how you will reach your target. The problem is people in general are inherently lazy, or don’t spend their time wisely, for the most part, assuming you have two individuals with equal intelligence, skill and talent, it’s how they spend their time that differentiates them and more often than not, the person who outworks the other makes more money or succeeds more in life. We also see it in sports, countless examples of athletes with inferior talent making it up with work ethic and what you find is that more action leads to mistakes and you learn from your mistakes and that practice does in time make perfect.

Ok so where to start?

First, you need to map out how you’re spending your time now. Sit down for an hour and review your calendar over the last three months, and figure out your own blocks of time for actual selling, prep and research, prospecting, lead management, administrative and CRM, traveling, meetings-both sales and “other”. Whatever the major blocks of time are that make sense to you. What we’re focused on here is to figure out the actual time spent working opportunities in the sales funnel. “Opportunities in the funnel” are the operative words.  Not marketing, not lead gen, not prospecting, not onboarding and servicing. Actual time in the funnel

A few B2B-all industries-stats to help you think about your own mapping:

  • Average “successful” salesperson spends 57 hours a week working
  • Roughly, that’s 3,100 hours a year
  • Lose 25% for holidays, vacations, sick, & non-utilizable time
  • You now have around 2300 hours “available”
  • 37-39% spent face to face or over the phone actually selling
  • 19% spent generating leads and researching accounts
  • 17% on average spent in administrative meetings
  • 14% in handling customer service calls (not selling)
  • 11% in travel and training

How do you stack up? This doesn’t even include smokers, which studies have shown spend upwards of three weeks of sales time per year outside killing themselves as opposed to selling.

Homework:

  1. Create your own time map of your approximate time as a sales professional/manager
  2. Figure out your ATS (Available Time to Sell) in hours/month
  3. Do that by month for the next quarter

I started my B2B sales career in selling audio conferencing and it changed my life. But what helped lay the foundation for my success believe it or not was a summer job I had dialing for dollars as a telemarketer selling newspaper subscriptions, it helped me overcome objections as far as skill development but the real value was that in that environment you are constantly watched and your number of calls are monitored and coffee isn’t provided and you weren’t allowed to wander around the office and breaks were scheduled and lateness wasn’t tolerated. Now although that boiler room doesn’t make for an ideal prolonged environment, it definitely taught me the discipline to be effective and spending every minute of the work day actually doing the activity that yields results and ultimately success!

Oct 21 2013
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Positivity = Prosperity

By Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Foundations of Success No Comments

Is your attitude holding you back from success? I’ve always been a big believer in positive thinking. It has helped me accomplish much in my life as an entrepreneur. When advising others, positive thinking is my first suggestion on the path to success.  All this made me wonder if there was any actual scientific links between positive thinking and success in business. Positive psychology is, in fact, a whole discipline centered entirely around the study of positivity and its effect on well-being, productivity, and success.  According to Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, if you start a positive habit and see that it has a positive effect upon your business or health outcomes, your brain is more willing to utilize resources to continue that behavior and scan for new ones. The resulting effect is a cascade of success as greater meaning and well-being fuel more successes than garnered by defensive pessimism or cynicism.

Is your bad attitude losing you money? An upward spiral certainly sounds better than a downward spiral, but unfortunately, the business world is full of challenges, stresses, and reasons to make you want to hide under your covers in the morning. While there are always the bright days when everything in your professional life goes according to plan, somehow we always manage to remember the rainy days where everything goes wrong. You would generally be more upset about losing a business deal rather than winning a deal of the same value, we tend to dwell on our failures more than our successes.  Debbie downers are less resilient, and resilience is a necessary emotion in professional life, especially when it comes to entrepreneurs starting up businesses with a high probability of failure. Positive thinking can mean the difference between an entrepreneur who picks himself or herself up and starts over again, and someone who stays down for the count.  It’s no secret the most productive people also tend to be the most successful, but if you’re caught in a negativity loop, your productivity is likely to falter. Negative thoughts and self-doubt can make you question every decision and second guess yourself, and while you’re second guessing, it’s likely that not a lot of work is getting accomplished. Which probably explains why the positive brain is 31 percent more productive than the negative brain.

We have already discovered negative occurrences tend to stick in the mind longer and stronger than positive outcomes. If you received 20 compliments on your business plan and one criticism, odds are you will focus on the one and ignore the many. So for every negative emotion, you need three positive emotions to keep your mood sunny. So how do you start tipping the balance in favor of positivity in order to improve your career prospects, your entrepreneurial endeavors, and your financial future?  One of the keys is to set your mind on success. Picturing a successful future might seem like Positive Thinking 101, yet it can be immensely helpful when it comes to meeting your goals. After all, the typical career path is littered with pitfalls, and the entrepreneurial path can sometimes become a 90-degree free fall to failure. In order to succeed, sometimes you need to have a little hubris — and plenty of self-confidence.  When mentoring others, there are always two steps I ask my mentees to take to improve their outlook. The first step is to write down 10 affirmations you want to achieve on a piece of paper. These affirmations can range from large-scale achievements to just small victories — “I want to be a millionaire” to “I want my presentation to go well.” Then every morning read these goals aloud to yourself. By focusing on your dreams, you can remind yourself why you work so hard. The other step I ask people to take is to write out their perfect day if money and time were not obstacles. Then, like your 10 goals, read your perfect day out loud every morning. By visualizing success and clearly defining your goals, you start your day by focusing on the positive instead of the negative. When your career, your business, or life gets you down, you can return to these visualization exercises to imagine a brighter future.

Another key is to surround yourself with positivity.  Stresses are all around us, especially if you’re starting up a new business. The life of an entrepreneur can be both exciting and exhausting. And too much stress can tip your positivity ratio into the danger zone.  Studies have proven that negative moods can be most easily and quickly altered by imagining positive or calming scenarios. So the next time you’re under the gun and think you don’t have time for a funny video of a panda sneezing, think again. Surrounding yourself with positivity is a good way to calm down in stressful situations. Make your work area somewhere you enjoy being and fill it with happy mementos of friends, family, and hobbies you enjoy.

Positivity doesn’t just make your life better, happier, and more fulfilling. It can also lead to professional success, which means you’ll be smiling right to the bank.

Oct 07 2013
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8 Key Steps to a Successful Client Relationship

By Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Sales Advice No Comments

I’ve effectively been in sales all my life, though I didn’t realize this until much later when my entrepreneurial endeavors became successful. Upon reflection of my earliest memories I realized sales and entrepreneurialism was in my DNA. It began when I was 3 years old, performing songs in front of my family for money, operating lemon aid stands on my front porch, newspaper routes, starting a grass cleaning business, snow removal, pretty much anything for a dollar through my toddler years. I was clearly looking to get a quick
start to my journey of riches!

I finally succumbed to the entrepreneur in me, during my second year of university, when I postponed my law degree to venture into a career in sales. When working as a sales professional, you are in essence in business for yourself within the safety net of the company.  You control the outcome of your income and directly impact the exponential growth. Or in short, you get out of it what you put in. Sales provides you with limitless
income opportunity, which is why I find it the best occupation on earth.

Through my years of being in sales and in business, I’ve made several observations of what the philosophies, actions and attitudes of the most successful salespeople are and today I’ve outlined them for you.

Start by considering and answering these four key questions:

1. WHO ARE YOU?

What are you opinions, prejudices, values, beliefs, and old baggage that may be sabotaging your sales success? A thorough and honest self-appraisal is critical if you want to successfully sell in today’s business climate.

2. WHAT IS YOUR BASIC FUNDAMENTAL PURPOSE OR MISSION
IN SELLING?

Is it to make money, serve your clients or grow your company? What aspect of
selling do you feel passionate about? Your reasons, more than your goals, will
determine your sense of peace, balance, and fulfillment in your sales career.

3. WHAT TYPE OF PEOPLE DO YOU LIKE TO BE AROUND?

How do you like to spend your career time? What else is important to you in your life besides your career? Selling is about building successful, positive, ongoing relationships.
Your overall success will be greatly affected by your willingness and ability
to establish and maintain positive relationships.

4. HOW MUCH TIME ARE YOU DEVOTING TO YOUR PERSONAL
GROWTH?

Do you regularly read books; attend seminars and network with people that can
help you? A successful selling career requires stamina, energy, and passion.

To be successful you must thoroughly know your clients’ business. Follow these key steps to develop successful client relationships and sales results:

1. SOLVING YOUR PROSPECTS’ OR CLIENTS’ PROBLEMS IS NO LONGER AN EFFECTIVE SALES STRATEGY.

Find out what is preventing your prospects from getting a good night’s sleep. Determine what is worrying them, and you won’t have to worry about customer loyalty, reducing prices, or over-aggressive competition. Even poor salespeople can solve a client’s problem with the right product or service.

2. PEOPLE BUY FROM PEOPLE THEY TRUST, NOT PEOPLE THEY LIKE.

They key to building trust is simple. Promise a lot and deliver more. Do what
you say you will do and then some. Peak performance salespeople study their
clients’ business, industries and their competition and are walking encyclopedias
on their own products and services.

3. SUCCESSFUL SALESPEOPLE DON’T SELL PRICE; THEY SELL VALUE.

When you focus on price because of poor product or client knowledge, or poor
sales skills, you will always lose in the long run. Clients want the best value
for their dollar so if you always sell value, you will never have to worry
about losing business to the competition.

4. EFFECTIVE PROSPECTING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SALES SKILL YOU WILL EVER NEED TO MASTER.

It is more important than good closing techniques or presentations. The most important element of the sales process is gathering information. The best salespeople never go into a sales situation without planning their questions to gather the information they want, so focus on asking questions and listening as opposed to presenting.

5. AN EFFECTIVE SALES PRESENTATION IS A TWO-WAY CONVERSATION.

Many salespeople have been trained to deliver their sales message as a programmed discussion of features and benefits and the pros don’t deliver this way. The successful salesperson customizes each sales conversation to the buying style, needs, interests, desires, and problems of each buyer.

6. SALES RESISTANCE GIVES YOU VALUABLE INSIGHT INTO
YOUR PROSPECTS THINKING.

Successful salespeople don’t try to maneuver around this resistance but get it into the open quickly; they don’t run and hide from price objections but bring up the value of working with a quality supplier early in the sales process.

7. CLOSING THE SALES IN NOT A MATTER OF MANIPULATION OR HARD-SELL TACTICS.

Poor salespeople try to turn poor prospects into customers; good
salespeople identify good prospects early and help them get what they want.
They accomplish this with good listening skills, a lot of client or prospect
understanding, and a willingness to be flexible and compromise.

8. AFTER SALES SERVICE IS THE GLUE THAT KEEPS CLIENTS
LOYAL, BUYING MORE, AND WILLING TO GIVE YOU REFERRALS.

The best salespeople work as hard to keep their clients as they did to get them. They understand that clients always have new choices for the services or products they sell.
Poor salespeople take the money and run.

If you want to excel in the greatest profession on earth today and in the years ahead, refocus your attitudes and approaches, and don’t be afraid to adapt or change your
strategies.

Sep 30 2013
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Creatures of Habit

By Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Sales Advice No Comments

If you make something a habit it doesn’t tax your willpower constantly. Think about the last time you needed to engage your willpower… Ugh, it is draining just thinking about it. The more you create habits in your life the more you have willpower for other tasks. The good news is it only takes 21 days to create a habit, whether a good or a bad one, so choose to make them good!

First decide what task or goal you want to accomplish, maybe start with something small such as: I want to spend more time ___________.

Let’s say you chose “selling”. You get busy everyday with admin work, writing content for your blog, taking service calls, planning out marketing messages, filling in expense reports, whatever. But you still want to spend more time selling, you know you want to do this, it’s just not happening. Every day, from 9:30 – 10:30 you are now selling, no other option. Force it to become habit until it does not tax your willpower every day. It will take great discipline and willpower for the first few weeks but there will be a time where you will move from using willpower to simply, a habit. And a habit requires little to no willpower. Mark it in your calendar, using a calendar as a tool to keep you disciplined and accountable is one of the tricks I learned very early in my career and it works like a charm. You are more likely to actually complete a task or take the time to do what’s important versus urgent if you schedule it in your calendar.

As a salesperson from my experience most of us don’t want to prospect or spend time on the phones trying to schedule appointments with potential clients. To make it easier what we do at The Wish Group is schedule an hour each day where every sales associate clears their desks of everything besides their phone and call script and essentially we make a concentrated effort to schedule meetings and usually average 20 dials, we call these our “Hours of Power”. We like to make declarations to the team ahead of time of what our goals are for the hour, and twice a week we even get on a conference call with associates across all the offices throughout the province to share our results and success stories.  I’ve been trying to exercise and get in better shape for years to no avail, when I look back at why I’ve struggled to maintain consistency I realize that if I apply the good habits that I’ve done in selling to the gym I would have a much better chance at success. This is why I think cross fit is a fitness craze that might actually stick. The principles of having a clear schedule every session, the benefit of having a leader or what is essentially similar to having a personal trainer to keep you motivated, targeting all types of training and using the method of team and accountability are all proven to assist in developing consistency and creating a habit which is ultimately the secret to all success!

Sep 23 2013
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The Most Valuable Trait for Success

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights No Comments

Whether as friends, parents, associates or leaders we want to have a positive impact on all of those we come in contact with on a daily basis. In my 12 years as an entrepreneur I’ve made many observations about the thousands of people I’ve interviewed and hired over that period.  I could make a list of several dozen attributes of people who seem to have success from both a professional and personal perspective as opposed to those who seem to struggle often at both.  But if you were to ask me if there were only one key criteria or common trait that I’ve observed of people who seem to live a powerful, happy successful life it would unquestionably be integrity.

Each moment of each day is an opportunity to live with a value of integrity. But what is integrity and why does it matter?  There are several definitions or examples of how to demonstrate integrity but in its simplest form, Integrity is doing what you said you were going to do or honoring your word.  There is a difference between honoring your word and keeping your word, it’s not always possible to keep your word whereas it’s possible to always honor your word.  For example, if you tell a friend you will meet up with them for lunch at 12pm and your car got a flat tire on the way to the restaurant and therefore cannot be there for 12pm you simply didn’t keep your word and the circumstances were out of your control.  However, you could have honored your word by being in communication with your friend as soon as the incident occurred and thus honoring your word.  The challenge or bad habit that a lot of us develop is we begin to believe that not honoring your word + having a good excuse = Integrity.  It simply doesn’t.

Many people live their lives this way because you can get by, no different than your car could physically drive with 3 regular tires and one of those donut spares that are meant to be temporary replacements to get you to a service station until a full replacement tire can be installed.  Most of us live our lives with that donut tire yet the challenge is we can never truly live up to our full potential as you simply can’t travel at 100 miles an hour on that donut and worst yet, if you hit a pothole or when life throws you a curve, the tire will fall off or your life seems to fall of the rails so to speak.  So if you want to live a powerful life, one that you love and attract quality people into it and live up to your full potential professionally, financially, as a friend, partner or parent, you must learn to live with integrity at all times.

Integrity is treating others the way you want to be treated, even sometimes better.

Integrity is being able to look into the mirror and say, “I like myself”.

Integrity is making decisions for the long term, not just for today.

Integrity is putting the truth on the table.

Integrity is standing up for yourself.

Integrity matters because at the end of the day and at the end of our life we answer to ourselves and nothing is more important than being able to say, “I lived a life of integrity and I would be proud to be my own friend.”

Sep 16 2013
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Getting the Balance Right

By Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights No Comments

For a lot of young entrepreneurs, balancing work with your life can sometimes be overwhelming. You’re so focused on getting yourself to where you need to be that it’s easy to let everything else fall by the wayside. As an entrepreneur I’ve made a commitment to never use time as an excuse to miss out. The difference between a receptionist and a CEO is time management. The CEO simply knows how to focus time on their top priorities and not get distracted with menial tasks. The bottom line is that busy people get things done.

By organizing your work life, your social life and your love life you can easily find a balance between the three. Figure out where your priorities need to be, then create goals for how to achieve them. You first question should be “are you happy with where you priorities are?” If you’re working long hours, and barely getting home in time to make dinner and head to bed, then your priorities are clearly on work. If you’re missing deadlines and always tired, your focus is probably somewhere else. Start every weekend by looking over your week, and identifying your daily goals. Then each night, break your next day down into an hourly schedule.

For most, the hardest hurdle to overcome is daily time killers such as surfing social media websites, texting, taking several coffee breaks or the dreaded smoke break every hour. These are time wasters and I’ve seen many a dream lost over them. You have to be your own dream’s champion, write down what you want in life, plaster pictures of your dreams all over your cubicle or office and every time you catch yourself procrastinating, look up at that picture of your dream home or car and let it inspire you to get back in the zone. Everyone’s priorities are different, but If you utilize your time better with equal portions of work, life, and love, a successful balance is possible

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