Brand advocates are those who enjoy your product or service so much that they’ll happily spread the word about it. The customer’s ability to rate and review a company’s online reputation empowers them to speak out more when they use your service. Turning your customers into brand advocates is an important process since they’re your biggest advertising tool.
Staying at the top is a challenge that many businesses have trouble sustaining. It’s important to stay innovative and outperform your competition. Here’s a new set of tips on how to constantly improve your business to maintain success.
When you’re building a business, a lot of people will offer you advice. But, eventually, you are going to fail in some aspect and don’t be afraid because it will become a positive thing. Make mistakes, take risks, and don’t hold back are all cliché phrases you’ll hear. If you’re never failing, you’re probably never really winning either.
One of the most important roles as a leader is to develop your people into the best that they can be. Development actually starts the day you first meet them and should never stop. Every day is a chance to learn not just about yourself, but those you work collectively with to achieve your goals.
People are your best resource. They can grow your company for the better or for the worse. Because most managers normally progress up through the ranks, they believe they really know and understand people. Successful managers, just like successful people have the ability to adapt their management style to each person who reports to them.
It’s important to understand and analyze your team by taking a look at their development levels. (Self Reliant, Independent, Intermediate, Dependent). As you know, people tend to grow so its your job to lead and be the guide to your people’s success. One leadership/management style that’s assisted in my company’s growth is empowering my employees to do better. Allowing a person to identify, define, manage and plan their activities is very effective – especially to those who are self reliant.
Coach your team all the time regardless of their development level. Focus on improving techniques by reinforcing the principles that you instilled when they were first hired. Remove any interference to keep your team focused and productive.
Here are my top 5 elements to Developing your team:
1) Goal Clarity – Members must understand the team goals and commit their best efforts to achieving them.
2) Recognition/Cooperation – There must be an awareness of each member’s personal strength to the team. Members must be willing to cooperate with one another and make their contributions accordingly.
3) Role Clarity – Responsibilities and expectations for members are clearly spelled out, communicated and acknowledges. Responsibilities are openly discussed and questions clarified.
4) Trust – Members respect the competence of one another, trust and support each other and will come to the aid of a member when problems arise.
5) What’s Important Now! – The leaders keep members focused on what’s important to be successful now. Unnecessary activities are eliminated and the team is sheltered from outside distractions as much as possible.
Hope this helps. Always remember that ‘Knowledge without action is useless!’
Frank.
People sometimes think that success does not take hard work and persistence and speaking from experience it takes much more than that.
For example, take a look at the structure of an Iceberg that floats in the water. Only a small fraction of an iceberg is visible above the water line, whereas the larger part of an iceberg is hidden beneath the water. Everyone of us can see the outcome of a person’s actions and most of their accomplishments, whereas the efforts that were necessary to achieve such an outcome remain hidden and unnoticed. The majority of people tend to only see the great outcome that a successful person has achieved throughout their lives. These achievements blind us so that we often are not even aware of the huge efforts that were necessary to make these accomplishments possible.
The “Iceberg Theory of Success” helps us to realize that every famous or extraordinary successful person had to invest a lot of effort and work until this person achieved his/her goals. Having this in mind we can avoid having too high expectations towards an outcome that we want to achieve, but it also allows us to be more persistent, as we can clarify ourselves that we have to do “whatever it takes” to succeed. With that said, the next time you see a famous person or any other successful person you should try to direct your focus to the efforts that this person had to make in order to achieve his/her accomplishments. If you are willing to take risks, focus, create goals, be persistent, fail and get yourself back up, take massive action, sacrifice every day, build good habits and most of all – work hard. You will be successful!
Have a great week!
Frank.
The Power of Positive thinking is quite real. In fact, it’s all that gets me by, especially on bad days. Let’s be frank. There were days when I began my journey where I thought to myself “Am I on the right path?”, or when I was studying for an important test and thought to myself “I think I’m going to fail”.
One thing that’s always helped me while continuing on this journey called life, is that when the going gets tough, maintaining positivity has always pushed me through. Especially in sales. Sales can be a very hard task, especially if you’ve just started.
Good selling requires that you understand the product well and work as hard as you can to meet the customer’s need. But before everything, the secret of a good salesperson is about what goes on inside their head. Selling is an attitude. It’s how you think and feel. It’s about your whole approach to yourself, your company, your products and of course your customers. All of this can be summed up in three words: Confidence, pride and care.
A positive person anticipates happiness, health and success, and believes he or she can overcome any obstacle and difficulty.Please note that positive thinking is not accepted by everyone. Some, consider it as nonsense, and discourage people who follow it, but there is a growing number of people, who accept positive thinking as a fact, and believe in its effectiveness.
To use it in your life, you need more than just to be aware of its existence. You need to adopt the attitude of positive thinking in everything you do. Trust me, it will only steer you in the right direction.
Frank.
As we embark another week, I couldn’t help but look outside and see another SNOW day in Toronto. The shovelling, the treks in the 2 feet snow all seems a lot of fun right? Well, I think so. One thing I noticed while travelling for another day’s work was that many people either looked very happy to see the snow, or really angry that there was another day of bad weather and slushy sidewalks while commuting to work.
I couldn’t help but think to myself,does everyone’s place of business care about how or whether or not they will come in to work? For me, it’s always about Safety first. Communicating, and establishing an amazing rapport with my employees. I’ve heard many stories about companies forcing their employees to come in to work regardless of their location, personal issues or weather conditions and I think that’s terrible. As a company, it’s important to understand that your employees are your driving force! They are the front line in our daily battles. If they are not happy and successful, then most likely your company will not be either. So if you’re a business owner or manager, I have one word of advice: LISTEN.
At the end of the day we all have goals. I do, you do, and your fellow employees do too! So as you embark on another work day I have shared this image below as a daily reminder and I hope you can agree.
Sharing is caring,
Frank.
This past week I had the pleasure of taking part of an internal strategy summit with all of the Presidents of the different Wish Group companies, as well as attending our quarterly meeting with all of the companies. Admittedly, one of the challenges that we face with having so many different companies under one umbrella is a unified focus. While I’m perfectly happy with the success of each company all they have achieved, I adamantly believe that if all of the companies combine our synergies, we can become a much more efficient unit.
In fact, the heavy focus of this quarterly meeting was on efficiency. As with all of our meetings, we pick one theme and message to drive home to the team and our leaders felt that efficiency was certainly something that any company can always improve on. As such, from both our strategy summit and our quarterly meeting, here is what we are doing to increase our efficiency that can be applied to any company.
Re-examine How Things Currently Work – The first step towards making anything more efficient is taking an honest look at how things are currently working. I say honest because if you keep telling yourself that everything is perfect, nothing will ever improve. Examine some of your shortcomings and try to assess what mechanics you can put in place to streamline processes that will make you work smarter.
Assembly Line Principle – One of the analogies that we used to drive home efficiency is one of the most successful business efficiency success stories of all time – the assembly line. Henry Ford was famous for taking a long, complex process and turning it into something that made it significantly easier to produce more cars in less time. The main idea behind this was to have staff focus on using their strengths, instead of spreading them thin by trying to do everything. This is incredibly difficult at a start up company as everyone is always wearing multiple hats, but try and discover what tasks your team members excel at and whenever possible give them those tasks.
Trust Your Team – Tying into the previous point, once you’ve discovered what areas your team members are adept at, trust them to complete their task. If you’re constantly worrying about the kind of work your team is doing, it’ll leave less time for you to focus on running your business. Have faith that your team will always produce the best work possible.
I’m certain that efficiency is always top of mind for your company, so I’m curious to know what tasks you think you could be doing more efficiently, and what you want to improve on in your company.
This past weekend in Toronto was the Scotiabank Waterfront Marathon that had over 25,000 participants, with a few here in the Wish Group participating as well. Even though I run every now and then and do play hockey, I have to commend runners because it’s really an entirely different beast than most sports. Where hockey is tough, fast and furious, I find that long distance running is slower but a lot more mentally involved. It’s for this reason that I think long distance running can teach entrepreneurs many practical lessons about running their business.
Keep A Steady Pace – This is probably the hardest lesson to learn, both for runners and business owners. While a marathon is technically a race, it’s different in terms that you can’t sprint for 42 kilometers straight right from the get go. You need to find a pace that you can maintain for the duration of the run, one that won’t burn you out but at the same time lets you set a good time. Clearly this is the same with business growth. Your business won’t grow exponentially overnight. It takes a lot of time, and you need to make the right decisions to ensure success. Once you do though, you’ll be able to watch your company grow at a steady pace.
Move Past The Walls – All of the runners I’ve spoken to have always mentioned “the wall”. It’s the mental phenomenon where you feel like you can’t continue anymore, that you don’t know why you wanted to do this in the first place, and that you can’t make it to the finish and you want to give up more than anything. How many times have you thought something similar when things aren’t going so well with your business? What’s important to realize is that the runners DO surpass that wall by believing in what they do and staying determined in reaching the finish line. There is never really a “finish line” for entrepreneurs, but that’s why I’m a firm believer in setting goals. You can consider these goals that you set as mini finish lines and just keep moving from one to the next.
Keep Improving – The best thing about running is that you set new best times for yourself and then you have a new goal to train towards, which may seem impossible the first time to set a personal best. However, with hard work you’ll be able to overcome that. See where I’m going with this? It really speaks for itself, but once you have an incredibly success quarter or year it only makes sense that you want to beat that number the next year – no matter how difficult it may seem.
Most people tell you to learn from your failures. I’m saying that it’s important to reflect on your failures to understand where you went wrong, and I’ve even talked about it in great length in the past, but it’s equally important to focus on your successes too.
While failure can teach you what NOT to do next time, success teaches you about what works and what you need to continue to do. However, don’t be blinded by success and forget that things can and will change, and you’ll need to adapt. Next time you close a deal or make a decision that grows your bottom-line, keep these tips in mind to continue your winning-streak.
Self-Reflect and Give Credit – When it comes to failure, we often look elsewhere to determine how something went wrong. But when it comes to success, we often credit ourselves. Reflect on what you did well and when it is appropriate apply the same methods. Equally as important, give credit where credit is due. Key players in your success need to be acknowledged and appreciated. It’s not only best practice but it will also help motivate your employees to drive success in the future.
That’s Good But It Could Be Great – Yes, you’ve accomplished something great but there is always something you could have done better. Pick apart the process of your success and try to find areas of improvement to make your next move stronger. It may be the timing of your deal or not negotiating enough. Either way, dig deeper.
Discuss Success With Your Team – Gather feedback from your team to ensure you have a rounded perspective. What you think may have went well, may have been perceived differently from your team. Engage in active listening when receiving feedback and let your guard down. Allowing your team to participate in the construction of future success will help grow a stronger team with commitment to your future action plan.
Celebrate Your Success – Don’t forget to celebrate. The team has worked so hard for this and you all deserve some fun. If you’re consistently successful but you never get to enjoy it, your success won’t be sustainable. Employees don’t want to work in a team where their success is not rewarded while being pushed to grow future success. Make hard work worth it – reward yourself and your team.
Overall, don’t be blinded by success but remember to enjoy it. Every milestone in your company can be learned from so it’s important to take the time to recognize it. Whether it is success or failure, get to the root cause of it with your team.
