Leadership - 2015 Archive

We believe you should be connected to the passion, hope, dreams and desires you had when you became a business owner; to be inspired every day to achieve your vision! Take a few minutes to reflect and recall what you hoped to achieve through owning a small business.

Question: How do your business personalities react with each other to transform you and your business?

Do you ever feel like you're being tugged in multiple directions? Like your business needs you to be multiple people at once? Don't worry, most business owners do! It's completely normal and best described by Michael E. Gerber, small business guru and bestselling author. In his book The E-Myth Revisited, Michael's story of Sarah the pie maker illustrates three personalities every business owner needs to be successful: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and The Technician.

Last week, we discussed the importance of communicating your vision in order to create employee ownership.   Our next focus on creating employee ownership is to earn and establish trust and loyalty. If your team does not feel like they can trust the company they will not develop a sense of loyalty to achieving the vision and will not take on an ownership mindset.   Establishing trust with your team starts with you and your leadership team. Follow these fundamental truths for building trust with your employees:

We often hear business owners ask how they can get their team to have more ownership in their work.   Make sure you follow us this month as we focus on how to foster ownership at every level of your business by cultivating an employee ownership mindset. In this article we are focusing on how communicating and engaging your employees in your company vision creates the foundation for taking ownership of their work, and in helping your business achieve its vision.

This month we have run a check-up on the business and on the staff in an effort to diagnose symptoms before they become true problems. There is however one area that we have not discussed. YOU! As a business owner, you are likely to fall into the trap of working in the business, rather than on the business. When this happens, you let the Technician take over and his only concern is getting the job done. The Technician tends to lose focus on aspects of time management, the company vision, and leadership.

When you hear business owners talk about growing their business, they are usually referring to increasing revenue and profits. The conversation immediately goes to growing their sales force, adding new clients, increasing their market share, and so on. More often than not, it is about doing more and more of what got the business owner where they are, which in one way is fine. On the other hand, it likely does not take into account those characteristics that will lead to maximum return when it is time to sell or transition out of the business. More often than not, the business remains highly dependent on its owner or certain key people, has co-mingled business and personal finances, the “processes” of the business are more accurately described as “habits” than systems, and there is no clear “strategy” for growth beyond the capabilities of “doing more of what we’ve always done.”