Tag Archives: success

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5 Simple Steps To Fail Your Way To Success

“The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure – to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.” Ed Catmull

 

Organizations that value growth and success encourage their employees to innovate, try new things and stretch the boundaries of the business. These organizations embrace failure because they realize without failure an organization cannot grow and reach new levels of success. They also know that if an organization is not growing then it is stagnating . . . and stagnating businesses fail.

My son and a few of his friends started a landscape and lawn care company this summer. They built a website, flyers, posters and brochures. They knocked on doors, distributed flyers and sold their services to as many people as they could. Once they landed enough customers, they went and rented an aerator and power rake and worked their tails off. At the end of the first day they had lost $15! Talk about a disappointing failure!

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What Makes Business Success Worthless And How To Avoid It

“There’s nothing more important than our good health – that’s our principal capital asset.” Arlen Specter

 

Without good health, we have nothing! It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, when your health is compromised your quality of life will drop significantly. If you sacrifice your health for business success then business success is truly worthless.

This is where business leaders often run into trouble. It is so easy to disregard living a healthy lifestyle because we are putting the needs of the business first. We only have so many hours in a day and exercise, proper diet and rest take away from our “productive time”. However, living an unhealthy lifestyle will always catch up with us and it usually does so when we least expect it and when it is least convenient!

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Real Leaders Don’t Make Excuses

“Leaders have forfeited their right to make excuses.” – Horst Schulze

 

How many times in the last year have you heard high profile leaders making excuses for something that happened in their organization rather than taking responsibility for it? Statements like:

  • “The price of oil fell more than expected and because of the previous government’s actions, we now can’t balance the budget.”
  • “It was an engineer working for us that programmed a module to defeat pollution control tests.”
  • “Someone falsified and deleted data to make our test results look better”
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4 Critical Rules For Any Business

It doesn’t matter whether you are in product manufacturing, internet marketing, engineering, retail sales, wholesales, real estate, auto repair, equipment rental, construction, or any other business . . . if you do not focus on empowering your customers and providing value to them, your business will flounder at best and most likely fail.

This is a servant mindset – or what Jay Abraham calls a “super-servant.” He defines a super servant in his book Your Secret Wealth, as someone who sets their “goal in life, in business, in jobs . . . is to identify and understand how many more, and better, and continuous ways you can help serve, or fulfill, or clarify the non-verbalized needs and desires of your customer or your marketplace – and your marketplace, again, is whomever it is you’re trying to positively impact.”

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What Does Your Business Canvas Look Like And Why Should You Care?

Every business is based on a business model. You can debate whether the model is well defined or undefined or whether it is realistic or crazy but every business has a business model. This model sets the high level direction for how the business functions and interacts with its stakeholders and, consequently, the business model determines the level of success that the business will achieve.

I was recently assisting a non-profit organization with some business related issues and uncovered that they had not spent any time defining their business model. They definitely had a model, or more accurately, they had a number of models all mashed together. To say that they were not operating very efficiently or effectively is an understatement. What they failed to realize is that their mashed up business model was a lid on their success.

As business owners and leaders it is critical for us to understand all components of our business model and how each component of the model interacts with and impacts the other components and the organization’s stakeholders.