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The secret to continually escalating profits resides in building a vibrant work culture that can grow without you. This means you have to learn how to let go of the reins and empower your team with the tools they need to succeed.

In the past, I would take on the weight of the world. I would do the high priority and most complex tasks to ensure they were completed properly and in their entirety. I involved myself in nearly every aspect of running and building the business. How far and long can a company go on operating with one person doing and being responsible for the majority of the intellectual input? It’s safe to say that I would eventually burnout and my business would hit a very premature plateau. I recognize this, and therefore am changing my course.

I have read countless books, I regularly attend lectures, listen to seminars on CD and DVD, and more… each offering invaluable insight. In this manner, coupled with my own experience, I am designing the strategy to turn jiveSYSTEMS into a truly global corporation. Our dream is to teach people everywhere in many different languages, how to put the human [and winning] element back into their marketing.

We do have members joining our community from all over the world, right now. However, we are still a small start-up business balancing growth with infrastructure and cash flow.

Few people have built an idea into a concept, launched a company and then taken it global. Even fewer people have detailed their journey in real-time. Blogs are still a relatively new concept, so they simply didn’t have the vehicle. By the time they publish their biography, much of the nitty-gritty decision making days have been laid to rest. This is the stuff I want to learn! I get the big picture, most likely just like you do. However, I want to know how to prioritize the next three transitional steps.

Whether your company has regional, national or global potential, you will benefit from the three steps I am about to outline. Ideally, these three steps would be completed prior to launching a business.

Everything I have been studying leads to one place. That place is the company work culture. Most businesses that have stood the test of time have one unifying factor. Can you guess what it is? A vibrant work culture!

Remember, ultimately success and freedom from the daily grind is not about being in control, it’s about giving it to others and empowering them with the tools they need to succeed—it is much more fulfilling as well.

Here are the three steps we have taken that have transformed our blooming start-up into a vibrant and focused work culture:

Step 1 – Define your Hedgehog Concept

Most Passionate: About: Learning, Testing and then Teaching
Best in the World at: Expediting the understanding and strategic application of software and education driven principles of marketing
What Drives Our Economic Engine: Membership to use our software and coaching services

Step 2 – Define your Core Philosophy

Core Values
Compassionate, Holistic, and Prompt

Core Purpose
Mantra: Connecting People
Dream: Put the human element back into marketing.
Vision: Be the standard in video email and web video marketing software and coaching that businesses can trust to improve the way they communicate.
Purpose: Guide people from concept to profit using web video and teach them to create and sustain a global conversation about their products and services.
Mission: Create the leading video email and web video marketing software for online marketers, sales professionals, and small businesses – that is easy for a novice to leverage, yet versatile enough for the advanced user.
The Way: Teach people how to use it to save time and make more money, while providing better customer service.

Step 3 – Build an Analytics Culture

Not everyone has gut instinct. As entrepreneurs, we often rely on our intuition. However, it is definitely much harder to develop someone’s instinct than teach them to understand actual data. Sure there are times when you have to go against the grain and what the data suggests, but for the majority of the time, the incremental and sustainable success of your business is reliant on centralizing quality data. You can then delegate areas of the decision making process to key team members based on a section of groups of data. More quality data equals better decisions.

Initially, I identified each of the disparate reporting systems and spreadsheets: Web – Google Analytics, Woopra, CyStats, and CRM – Infusionsoft. I then built one big Google spreadsheet with all the appropriate fields. Fortunately, we have very few holes in our stats. This is largely due to our Infusionsoft (our CRM).

It is amazing what you will discover about your business when you build a robust reporting system that tracks all the key details. Granted it takes hours, in my case days, to building the system. However, once it is done, you only need to do maintenance and refining, and a huge weight is lifted from your shoulders. At least, that is how it worked for me! I now assign responsibilities based on the groups of columns in the spreadsheet. This puts me one step closer to a Results Oriented Work Environment (ROWE) with my executive team.

Conclusion

The foundation for a scalable and salable business can be engineered. They key is building a vibrant work culture that can continue to grow without your input. By authoring your company’s hedgehog concept and core philosophy, you bring clarity and focus to your organization—you become centered and this creates stability. Detailed quality and centralized analytics will become the backbone of your decision making process. As an entrepreneur, I will also trust my instinct over a spreadsheet. However, I have to admit having a robust reporting system makes my instincts a great deal sharper.

Further reading:

I learned about the Hedgehog concept from Jim Collins. A colleague of mine called him the modern day Napoleon Hill. I wholeheartedly believe Mr. Hill would not argue with that statement.

The root of defining our Core Philosophy came from reading a post by Clate Mask in the Infusionsoft Blog. He is also a huge advocate of Jim Collin’s work.

Tyler Garns is the marketing Director of Infusionsoft. I believe he was their 6th employee. They now have well over 100. Tyler is doing an amazing job. My desire to build a robust reporting system stemmed from one of his blog posts, in the Infusionsoft Blog.

I first heard about ROWE from Dan Pink (a genius). Dan discovered the real source of motivation, “and it’s not carrots and sticks!”