Specialties: Strategic and Tactical growth for Membership Organizations, Business Management & Development
Build a Better Business, Live a Better Life Blog
Creating an Environment for GREAT Things to Happen
Look around your office. Do you like what you see? Is your environment organized and inspiring or chaotic and unproductive? Would you want to work for you? Great work comes out of a GREAT environment, an environment that incorporates five components that create a supportive, ordered, motivating workplace.
What Are Your Plans for the Year?
Strategic Planning is only for the corporate world, not a small business owner right?
Strategic planning has the misconception of being time consuming, labor-intensive and intimidating to most small business owners, which makes it an easy task to procrastinate. Even when you do get around to it, having the vision of five years from now tends to be elusive and indefinable as you struggle in the day-to-day scramble of right now. It often-times leaves you wondering how relevant is this to me and is it even worth it?
So often small business owners have insights into their business with great intentions and expectations of implementing them, but it just falls to the wayside of the impatient clients and putting out fires. Everything else becomes more critical than the most important things that will move their business forward.
Take the Recharge Challenge
I had dinner with some clients last week, a husband and wife who own a property management company together. These are people who have a lot of interests beyond their business: He enjoys leatherworking and woodworking; she wants to write a book; they like to cycle and hike and travel. Their business is even in a place now where they can do more of that—but they don’t do as much as they would like.
“I don’t take time off,” the husband said to me at dinner. “I feel guilty when I do.”
How to Start Dreaming Again
I hear it all the time: “When I retire, I’m going to _____.” What goes in that blank—buy a boat, travel the world, spend more time with family, found a charity—is different for every person, but what’s not different is the timing. Everyone seems to think they have to wait until they’re 65 (or older!) to live the life they want to live. For small business owners, the idea of living life feels even more elusive because of worries about how they will pass on, sell or wind down their business.
It’s easy to see why so many small business owners give up on the idea of enjoying life. It seems too hard, too far away, too unattainable. It feels like a dream you will never wake up to.
Be Better Than Your Best
I once had a mentor tell me that my best wasn’t good enough. Ouch! Since best is, by definition, the best you can be, I think I was pretty reasonable in telling him, “Hey, my best is all I’ve got.”
He didn’t let it go: “That’s not good enough,” he told me. I asked him how I could do better if I was already doing my best. His response? “Do better. Learn more; read more. Become better.”
Did you hear the rumor about me?
For over the past 17 years I have been helping businesses grow and giving business owners back their life. I am passionate about what I do and I truly believe it is my calling. You see, I believe that people are dying in their business every day, just as my father had at the early age of 62. He never got to enjoy the full fruits of his labor and I see the same pattern arising in many of the business owners I consult with. I am on a mission to change this. My goal is to create businesses that can THRIVE and SURVIVE without the owners, so that they can enjoy their life and make an impact NOW, rather than waiting for someday when the owner can figure it out on their own.
The challenge I have been having is getting my message out there so I can help more people. I realized, rather it was brought to my attention, that there has been a lot of confusion around what it is I actually do. Well I would like to set the record straight and share with you what I have been up to in hopes that this will clarify what it is that I actually do.
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