Month: September 2016

I get asked a lot of questions throughout the course of my day, and one of the biggest is this: how do you successfully scale a business? You’re putting in 14-hour days, all your attention is going to your business and still you aren’t seeing the growth you want. I’ve been there, and I know how frustrating it can be to watch your business fail to reach its potential. The answer, I’ve found through extensive experience, is scaling your business with purpose.

What do I mean by that? Think about it this way: growing a business is like swimming against a current. If you’re alone, there’s no way you can overcome the current to get where you need to go. You need great swimmers alongside you; you need equipment so you don’t exhaust yourself or your people; you need to understand how far you’ve gone; you need a clear direction to make sure you know where the finish line is. That is what I mean by scaling with purpose.

When you put these six things in place, your business will grow!

1. Your Mindset

Everything in your business starts with you, the owner. You are the only one who can set the values and mission of your company. You are the one who has to decide what you want your business to look and feel like. Your mindset is the foundation of your business, and it will inform absolutely everything that comes after.

Your team is going to look to you for guidance and approval. They want to understand what’s important to you and to the company. Having a proper mindset is essential to establish the company’s values that will drive and inform everyone’s performance. Once you have your proper mindset and values in place, you can measure everything your company does mindfully.

2. People

Getting the right people on your team in the right roles can be the difference between success and failure. They have to help you beat the current. Maybe one went to swimming college and majored in freestyle, but they aren’t motivated to perform at their best. Another has never dipped a toe in the water, but they are a natural once you teach them.

A lot of business leaders think that getting the perfect person on paper is the end of the hiring process. What they don’t realize, however, is that sometimes it’s better for you in the long term to hire someone who has a great attitude and enthusiasm for the role. Keep in mind what can be taught and what can’t. You should always be thinking about what kinds of people and personalities will complement (or totally sour) your existing team. When we grow, we grow together.

3. Your Real Numbers

No one can make progress unless they understand the impact of what they’ve done so far. Maybe you’re swimming as hard as you can, but you’ve gone off course and lost your way. In order to truly scale your business with purpose, you absolutely must identify your real numbers and make sure you are informed on the status of those numbers regularly, and in a way you can understand.

This is something you and your team should do together. Identify what matters most to your business. Is it new customer acquisition? Sales and marketing ROI? Where are you succeeding? What can you do to amplify or duplicate that success in other areas? Where are you failing? What do you need to adjust to turn that around? Your real numbers must be revisited and measured constantly to make sure your business stays on the path to growth.

4. Products and Services

This one can be the most difficult for passionate business leaders to grasp. It’s wonderful to have a lot of different offers and ideas for how to satisfy your customers. It’s fun and exciting to innovate and bring new ideas to market. The trouble comes when you’re spending so much time planning new products that they never see the light of day.

As business leaders, it’s our responsibility to make things happen. Products can’t get sold if they’re sitting in R&D forever. Keep simplicity and focus as your goal. You can always improve upon a product or service later down the line. Often, doing so can be even better for your business because you’ll have gotten some of the most valuable input out there: customer opinion.

5. Sales & Marketing

People in sales and people in marketing don’t always think alike. People in marketing love to create conversations and engage with consumers. Their work is both creative and analytical. They are always coming up with fresh ways to get your products in front of the customer, as well as meticulously measuring the effect of those efforts. Their work is carefully crafted, planned and executed.

Salespeople are generally more pragmatic. They are go-getters who can quickly change tactics as they read the room. They are numbers people; the more people they talk to, the more likely they are to make a sale. The truth is sales and marketing depend on each other. Even though they may have different strategies, they must align with each other so both groups can be successful. If you want to hone in on your product or service’s unique sales proposition, unite these two groups. This will inform the direction of both your sales and marketing people, and only amplify their efforts.

6. Processes & Systems

When I talk to people about processes and systems, one of the things I always say is, “We can walk down a dirt road as long as we have the equipment to pave behind us.” Even if you haven’t solidified how things should be done in your company, you can always start defining it now. This comes down to having the people who are doing the different and important roles in your company document how they work. Getting started is as simple as encouraging people to start writing down what they do and how they do it.

Even if these processes change over time, you’ll have a written record that can be easily adjusted or changed as you grow. I can’t stress to you how important this will be for long-term business growth. Along with refining your real numbers, you’ll also refine how things are done in your company. As new people join your team, you’ll have the blueprint you need to bring them up to speed.

These six areas are ones that I know from experience have the power to drive your business forward to 6 and 7-figure growth. If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, do some thinking about these areas as they relate to your business. I bet you’ll immediately see at least one or two concentration on which you could improve. If you want more guidance concerning scaling your business with purpose, get in touch. We’d love to help.

When you are looking to hire someone for your company, the personality of the individual plays an important part. But many business owners fail to realize the importance of this crucial fact and end up hiring the wrong people for the job. In my own career, I have come across many hiring managers who have never looked beyond the skill set and qualifications of candidates until they face the consequences of a wrong hire.

Ignoring the personality type of your candidates results in short- as well as long-term effects, and almost all of them are unfavorable for your business. When you hire an individual to work for you, they bring to your workplace a different persona. It’s your job to find out whether that persona fits in with the values, attitude and behavioral requirements of your business or not. You can’t just say that anyone will do as long as they have the right qualifications and experience!

What if you hire someone who has the perfect resume and test scores, but has a nasty habit of blaming others every time you find something wrong with their work? Such people not only cost you money, but also are detrimental for the growth of your business. If your employees are not going to acknowledge their mistakes to improve and grow, how is your business supposed to do so?

Here are some of the major consequences of hiring the wrong personality type:

THE BLAME GAME

This is in relation to the first example as discussed above. Normally, people who like to play victims blame others for their problems. Ever heard of “The sales team got back to me after the deadline, so it’s because of them that we are behind schedule”, or “Why does the boss always have a problem with me?”

If you hire people who have the victim syndrome, your workplace will radiate negativity sooner or later. Such individuals always blame others for every single thing that’s going wrong in their lives. Their attitude and behavior will influence other employees and pretty soon the negativity will be all around, lowering the morale and causing emotional distress.

So when you are interviewing candidates, keep an eye out for the victims. You can identify them by asking questions like, “How do you grow professionally? Tell us about a problem that you solved at your previous firm?” or you can ask point blank, “What do you think of people who blame others for their mistakes/problems?”

TEAM PESSIMISM

If you weren’t careful while interviewing the candidate and didn’t ask the right questions, you might end up with pessimists. Such people always find something bad about any piece of good news that you deliver.

“Hey! Did you hear? We landed that huge client!”

“Really? But isn’t he really finicky? We will probably work more than we have to on other clients.”

And just like that, acquiring a huge client won’t be looked forward to. Such an employee will spread pessimism in the team and before you know it, you will have employees asking to not work on that client.

This is just one scenario. There are so many other things that might go wrong if you hire a pessimistic individual.

TEAM TROUBLE

Narcissists are the root cause of team trouble. Being one of the dangerous personality types, narcissists are careless about commitments, manipulate others in the office and refuse to learn from their mistakes. They don’t get along with anybody and value their opinion above everyone else’s. Such people don’t fit well in teams and neither do they make good managers. They don’t take advice and disregard the opinions of others.

But the problem is; narcissists ace interviews! They will be charismatic and self-confident during the interview, almost always leading to a wrong hire. But if you go prepared, you can spot the red flags and save yourself some team trouble by looking out for signs of cockiness. In the interview, ask them about working in teams. Do they make discouraging remarks about their team or their sole focus is on their own abilities?

BAD COMPETITION

There is good competition, and then there is bad competition. Progress, growth and development come out of good competition. But bad competition leads to bad blood and low productivity. People who have an attraction for the spotlight are the cause of this bad competition. They rant all day long and up-scale every tiny thing they do. Whatever you say, they will always have done something more difficult, challenging and nerve-wrecking than you ever did.

“I am so glad that I am done with this report! I have been working on it for ages.”

“That’s nothing! You won’t believe the client I just had to deal with today. I would rather do your report.”

People who make out their work to be better than others stir a feeling of resentment and inferiority among others. It might be that the client was never that difficult and the report was nerve-wrecking, but the other employee would end up feeling discouraged and inferior.

LOW MORALE

Like it or not, there are people who are responsible to take the morale of a team to an all-time low. Social loafers are people who are inherently lazy when it comes to working in teams. For small businesses, it is more problematic because every employee counts. Such individuals make others do their work for them and possess an aggressive and passive attitude in the workplace. Other team members begin to resent them as they don’t do their share of the work.

You can spot this kind of personality type during interviews by assessing their energy levels. Look at their body language and posture when they walk in and answer questions. You can even take them out for a cup of coffee during the interview to delve into greater depth. It’s a smart way to get them moving and see if they are able to keep up with you.
You can probably relate to all these consequences as you would have come across a situation where you made a wrong hire and the candidate was not a cultural fit. I have seen this mistake repeated over time in my career and the main reason behind this is that “Personnel issues typically stem from the fact that we often hire for competence instead of culture.” So do consider the personality types of candidates before making the final decision – it will be worth it!