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Foundations of Success

Mar 03 2014
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Don’t Halt Creativity in Your Office – Let it Grow

By Comments & Opinion, Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Business Insights, Foundations of Success One Comment

fostering-creativityNo matter what type of industry you’re working in, creativity is the foundation of exceptional work. If you’re not fostering that creativity in your workplace, your team won’t produce the best work that they’re capable of. I touched this point briefly in one of my previous blog posts, but I decided that I should expand on this issue because of how important it is. Making sure that your work environment is a transparent and accessible space for ideas to flow will let your team reach new creative heights, allowing them to produce stimulating work at the same time.

Be a Mentor: I know I’ve discussed this point to no end in other blog posts, but I come back to it so often because I can’t stress how important it is to provide an avenue for creative growth. You simply can’t bring someone onto your team without providing constructive criticism and constant mentorship. However, you can’t micro-manage people either; you need to find a balance where you can give them a space to devise their ideas, and then see how you can help these ideas grow.

Have an Open Door Policy – and Mean it: Tying in with my last point, a phrase that is often tossed around by leaders when a new team member is brought in is “my door is always open”, yet this isn’t always the case. When you tell your team that your door is always open – mean it. Be available to them when they have ideas, suggestions or even just banter. Not only does this make you more human from your staff’s point of view, it also makes them more comfortable with you. This means that they’ll feel at ease when they suggest outlandish (and often creative) ideas.

Encourage Open Discussion: When you come together with your team for a brainstorming session, you should ask everyone present to throw an idea on the table, no matter how “bad” they feel the idea is. This open exchange of creativity often leads to some great ideas created from a thought that could have been discarded. A great idea is simply a bad idea that has been refined.

Reward Great Ideas: One of the simplest and most effective ways to foster creativity in your workplace is to reward great ideas. Of course, this doesn’t mean punish bad ones, but when there is a fantastic idea brought to the table you need to praise and reward these efforts. Don’t go overboard and give every admirable thought a new car – it can be something as simple as a cup of coffee or showing them praise in a companywide e-mail.

Do you feel like you’re doing enough to encourage creativity in your workplace? What methods do you use at your office? Do you feel like your team is comfortable sharing all of their creative thoughts? I would enjoy discussing this topic with everyone in the comments. 

Feb 18 2014
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Follow Your Heart to Turn Passion Into Profit

By Success & Inspiration, Achieving Wealth, Foundations of Success, Planning for the future No Comments

turn-passion-into-profitWhen was the last time that you asked yourself if you love what you do? You might immediately give yourself an enthusiastic “yes”, while at the same time find yourself struggling to go into the office every morning. When you love what you do, others will take note and your passion will inspire and motivate them. You can easily spot businesses that are passionate about their craft. Their care and effort shows up in their work, which excites people to work with them.

It’s no secret that I love what I do. I feel like I was born to own a business and am grateful that I’ve been able to tap into my passion to thrust my entrepreneurial endeavours to the next level. Here are a few tips that I have for entrepreneurs that can help you turn your passion into profit.

Be honest with yourself: As I mentioned, you need to ask yourself if you love what you’re doing and actually take the time to think about your answer. If you realize that you really don’t love your work, you need to figure out what it is that you love and start on your path to get there. Of course this won’t be an easy task, especially if you’re a business owner, but in the end you will get much more satisfaction from finding your passion rather than slowly becoming bitter towards your own business.

Remind yourself about your passion: No matter how much you love what you do, everyone has their off-days. Tight deadlines, lackluster sales quarters, personal struggles… Overwhelming stress can make you doubt what you’re doing and that will slowly drain your love for your work. Remind yourself why you love what you do – hang an inspirational quote or image that resonates with you, talk with your team or simply take some time to reflect so you can reignite your passion.

Ignore the cynics: If you take a brief look online, you will find various articles written by business owners who say that doing what you love is the worst decision you can make when you’re in business. They claim that “career passions are rare” and not realistic. I strongly disagree with this notion, as everyone should be doing what they love. If you’re living your life doing something you have no passion for, you need to at least try to take the steps to go after your dreams.

Don’t forget the fun: At the end of the day, you need to remember to have fun. Entrepreneurs that start a company spurred from their passion find their business fun, but they need to spread that positive energy to their team. A serious, grim and frigid work environment won’t allow your team’s creativity to fully flow, which leads to uninspired work from your company.

Do you still find passion in what you do? When was the last time seriously reflected on this topic? I would love to talk more about this topic with everyone in the comments.

Feb 11 2014
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The Difference between Being a “Boss” and Being a Leader

By Success & Inspiration, Entrepreneurial, Foundations of Success, Leadership No Comments

difference-between-a-boss-and-a-leaderWhen you’re an entrepreneur who runs their own business, you might find yourself questioning your leadership techniques from time to time. Being a leader is no easy task, and business owners should take the time to reassess how they’re influencing their co-workers and staff. Over the past 12 years of my entrepreneurship, I’ve had my share of triumphs and failures concerning leadership. I’m constantly trying to re-evaluate and change my methods to ensure that I’m not “bossing” my team around, but that I’m providing an avenue for personal and professional growth instead.

The terms “boss” and “leader” are often used interchangeably, but there is actually quite a big difference between the two. A boss watches and supervises workers to ensure that tasks and projects are getting delivered on time without any difficulties. A leader will give the same list of tasks, but also brings with them a level of inspiration and guidance. Leaders are there for their employees, and instead of telling their team to complete a task, they provide guidance and offer different methods to complete them.

Another quality that a boss possesses is that they only focus on their projects one at a time, and once those projects are complete they move on to the next item on their list without considering the big picture.  Leaders understand that every project your team completes should grow your company in some shape or form, be it financially or professionally. This isn’t limited to simply successes either – even a failed project or a lost client can help your team grow by realizing what mistakes you need to avoid in the future.

Lastly, a boss will examine their employee’s work and criticize their mistakes, while a leader will view these mistakes as coaching opportunities. It’s vital that instead of simply telling your staff why something is wrong, you coach them through their mistakes, tell them what they can do to avoid these mistakes in the future and how they can improve their work. There is nothing worse than having someone on your team who is too afraid to approach you with their best work because they’re concerned with how much you’ll dislike their efforts, instead of providing them with advice on how they can improve.

Of course, the transition from being a “boss” to becoming a leader takes time. I find myself struggling with these challenges almost every day, and even after 12 years I constantly remind myself to look for all of the coaching opportunities available for my team. It will take time and dedication, but the outcomes are well worth the effort.

Feb 05 2014
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Making goals is easy – Sticking to them is the challenge.

By Entrepreneurial, Foundations of Success, Planning for the future, Personal Accountability One Comment

The beginning of the year can be hectic for entrepreneurs. Once the year has settled in, it becomes far too easy to lose the focus and determination you had at the beginning of January. As I mentioned in one of my recent blog posts, I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, yet I still find myself being more focused at the beginning of the year. It takes dedication to keep that focus going, and it becomes more difficult as the months pass by. Anyone can stay determined for a month, but it takes a lot of strength and willpower to stay determined for an entire year.

There are many things you can do to stay focused on the goals you’ve set for yourself, and these are just a few things I do on a regular basis to stay focused.

Making sure that you have clear goals for yourself is very important, but it’s also important to be realistic about them. Instead of telling yourself “I’m going to reach a certain goal by the end of the year”, break them down to weekly or daily tasks. Doing this is an easier way to keep yourself accountable to your long-term goals, and it’s also easier to check things off when they come up instead of auditing yourself at the end of the year.

An important part of staying focused is also making sure that you’re taking the necessary time for yourself to unwind. I’ve been talking at length in the past few weeks about how I have been unwinding with some close friends on my beer league team of the Screaming Eagles. It’s important to find a past-time that you not only find entertaining, but that also lets you completely escape and forget about the stress that was brought about from your work.

Another way to de-stress is to simply unplug yourself from your smart phone and e-mail for about an hour or so before you go to bed. While that may seem challenging to those of us who are constantly checking our e-mails, and may also seem counter intuitive to staying focused, but no one can operate on a 24/7 basis and over-working yourself is one of the traps that entrepreneurs fall victim to that makes them lose sight of their goals.

These are just a few ways that you can stay focused this month and, in reality, for the rest of the year. Now that the first month of the year has passed by, this is the time where you can prove to yourself that those goals you made for yourself weren’t just for show – now it’s time to attain them.

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.

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.

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