How to build a business that owns YOU

Whether you’re building to sell or building for profit or BOTH suffering your way to success is a process that has a lot of victims.

You SUFFER because when you’re living a life you loath you experience the EXACT life you didn’t want for yourself along with your health, energy, mood, and relationships all suffering.

Your loved ones suffer as they get the worse of you as they get the tail end of your energy, the worst of your mood, the guilt of your suffering for them and the least of your time.

Even your colleagues and the business suffer as the energy, enthusiasm and inspiration required to both operate and sell a business can’t be faked for long.

Sometimes it can feel like a change occurred in you. Perhaps your wants and desires changed but I have found that each time I connect with a leader who felt disenfranchised, disconnected and stagnant in their business and were looking for a way out if not from the business then the way that they were experiencing it, these ingredients are always present.

It was placing MONEY over MISSION

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t an anti-money message, far from it. You can desire more money than Elon Musk, but putting money above mission will have you making poor decisions and often ones that harm the success of the business.

A mission focus though will support growth and innovation at every level of the business while giving you something to get your teeth into NOW rather than something you HOPE will motivate you during hard times.

It was placing Competition over Connection

A focus on competition is a focus on what other people are doing. The message is - do anything to win, always look over your should and focus outwards. And it’s a message that it’s hard not to turn inwards producing back stabbing, pointing fingers and hiding failures.

Competition is a recipe for stress. Connection though is a values focused company that works together to evolve as individuals and collective and ultimately becoming the business others look to imitate, replicate and chase. Innovations and growth are the natural byproduct of connection not the side effect of fear.

It was placing Instruction over Extraction

A sure fire way to create a business that you cannot WAIT to escape from is to attempt to run the business and your day to day interactions by telling.

Telling people WHAT to do. Telling them HOW to do it and tell them how you believe they need to improve IS the EXACT formula for creating dependents and bringing forward the worst performance of even the very best people. With you as the bottleneck at the top requiring more and more hours just to stay still.

A culture of EXTRACTION though is one that will not only draw the very best out of each individual but will build a culture that is a pleasure to spend time in that takes responsibility and ownership of their work. Leaving you free to oversea and look to the future.

They had Agreements but No disagreements

Something in us at the start of a new business, relationship or job has us focusing on what could go right rather than what could go wrong. We create fairytale scenarios, the dream business, dream person, dream job and we define loosely what that dream will be.

This is fine of course, important even. But what is FAR more important is that we talk about and make agreements or rather disagreements around the nightmare scenarios.

What do we do in the event of...

Not fulfilling your promise, Not enjoying the job, Feeling out of alignment, Feeling overwhelmed, Behaving in a way that reflects badly on others.

Without advanced planing of the worst case scenarios we are inviting chaos where rash decisions made, people get stuck in jobs they hate feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Businesses who haven’t defined what they expect of each other and what they don’t expect always end up experiencing some sort of unending nightmare.

It was placing Feelings over process

Feelings trick us into thinking we don’t operate from them. But in reality we operate from them ALL THE TIME though.

When we avoid conversations that need to be had we place feelings over process.

When we keep people in their jobs who fail to deliver on their promise despite having all the necessary time and resources we are placing feelings over process.

When we conduct meetings without purpose or outcome we place feelings above process.

In fact any time that we wish to achieve a specific outcome and we fail to document and edit process until we achieve success we are allowing the business to be governed by feelings and drama which tends to keep us from improving where we need to.

We must lose the drama and follow the data or we will create a nightmare.

So, what about you, Is there disconnect and things unsaid at the top of your business?

Are you a bottleneck doing the work of others and constantly teaching the same things to the same people?

Have you create a business that owns you?

Is now the time to make a change?

If not now when?