Set in Motion Systems for Growth
If you are an entrepreneur, it is important for you to set in motion systems for growth that are not critically dependent on your presence. Almost every entrepreneur has a natural predisposition to be innovative and creative; two qualities that are often stifled by the implementation phase.
Do you feel that you are not performing at your best when you are involved in the daily operations of your company?
Since a large majority of the people that read this blog are business owners and executives, I am sure the answer to that question is yes. Yes, I do feel that my performance decreases in correlation with my involvement in the daily operations of running my business. But why do we so readily accept those responsibilities? While everyone’s answer may be slightly different, I am sure all can be traced back to one single commonality, which is responsibility. Since we design the system, we feel responsible for it, and thus feel a duty to participate in the implementation phase and ensure everything goes according to plan. This is the quintessential example of shooting yourself in the foot. You are not helping yourself, and you are not helping your business by assuming the visionary, strategist, and implementer roles within your company. The solvent to this counterproductive practice is hiring people who have a natural predisposition to implementation. It is through this union that one of the most powerful synergies for success takes place.
If you are a student of Jim Collins’s work as I am, you will have heard the statement “first who, and then what.” Collins says that if you bring the right people into your organization, then figuring out what to do or where to go will happen naturally. The “right people” will be self-motivated, and you’ll find yourself liberated from the daily monotony of “what.” If only I had heard this wisdom before I went into business. Think about it for a second, “first who, and then what.” It’s as simple as it is powerful. Ideally, this topic would be one of the first lessons of any worthwhile business degree, or somehow magically made a mandatory step before a concept can be conceived. It would have been nice, wouldn’t it? But for many us, we have already rolled up our sleeves and jumped into the trenches. The ship has already set sail, and the ‘what’ is the responsibility that normally rests solely on our shoulders.
Today, I am going to reveal to you a rarely articulated concept that will liberate you from the daily grind and put your business on an autopilot that even the navigator of The Starship Enterprise would be jealous of. Are you ready? Here it goes: The really ‘successful and truly happy’ entrepreneurs are not the navigators and driving force of their companies. This is because they realize the dictator-like work environment that this mentality induces. Instead, they get the right people in the right seats and adopt a taxi driver- like role around the collaboratively defined and mutually agreed overall vision.
For some of you reading this post, most likely those of you who have sole proprietorship’s, your only option will be to make a short term financial sacrifice in order to feed your long term wealth creation strategy. In short, you are going to have to grow cajones, cough up some dosh (the British equivalent of dough), and invest your money in hiring someone to do the majority of your work so you can focus on what that work should be. Talented and skillful implementers are also usually awaiting an opportunity to become a part of something. You will find born implementers in abundance and bored out of their mind in almost every corporation in the world. For others who have a greater cash flow, it will be a little bit easier to assemble the right resources.
The goal of this blog post is not to give you a step-by-step strategy to optimize your business; it is merely to share with you some of my thoughts I have found to be true on creating lasting success and true happiness for my fellow entrepreneurs.
Aside from taking people from concept to profit with video and giving them the tools to do so, one of the goals of jiveSYSTEMS, and specifically this blog, is to build a community of successful and truly happy entrepreneurs. If you have some thoughts that you would like to share, take a moment to leave them in a comment below.
About the Author:
Will Franco is the CEO/Founder of jiveSYSTEMS (a video email marketing software and training company). He also runs an online community / membership group called AskFlywheel, in which he teaches cutting-edge online marketing strategies. His mantra at work is "Think-Automate: Do it, Automate it, Delegate it, or Ditch it"
