The Fundamentals of Business Success
June 4th, 2021 // 10:05 am @ Scott Manning
They call them hard and soft skills. While I get the concept and I agree that you do need some balance among your abilities as CEO of the Business of You and as the CEO of your actual business.
At the very same time, I have yet to meet anyone who you would consider successful who played the middle of the road on everything, being a generalist to some balance of hard and soft skills. You just don’t see it.
The most successful people I know can handle conversations and engage with others but are just fine and actually prefer to be with themselves either in solitude or with the people they’ve chosen to include. I’ve yet to meet a ‘total package’ successful person who is desperately in need of anything from anyone else and finds their fulfillment from within not from with-out.
To that point, I also find these people to have particularly strong opinions about things that matter to them – and completely indifferent to just about everything else.
If you string together all of the most recent weeks of our time here about “The Business of You” and everything from writing your own CEO “job” description as to how you can improve captaining your own ship…
…all of this is built on the premise that you first and foremost must value yourself and be unabashed about your own worth. The world will never see you, your people will never respect you, your business will never deliver returns to you, you will never achieve any greater success than you value yourself.
Yes, it all begins with you as Leader and CEO.
Remember this… any wealth comes from your worth first, any business success comes from your own success first. It all begins with your discipline to develop valuable skills that will become your assets for execution.
Today, I want to mention a few that you might not think about on the surface and then next week we’ll get into marketing, sales, management, and some of those areas of focus and development that all great business owners dedicate time to improving.
To me there are three core underlying principles that are the foundational pillars of success no matter what the business is and they must be honed if you want to do great things.
First of all, your passion for the purpose that your business has and your belief in your business as being on a mission to maximize your potential and being successful in the first place.
Listen, I’m the first person to say that passion alone is not enough and you must have a solid business plan among many other things – however – I’ve seen countless business owners with plans that are worth more than their passion and they never achieve their potential or even their goals.
No business owner is successful unless they have no other choice but to be; not just out of necessity of achievement but out of fulfillment of their purpose.
Second, no one ever becomes successful without becoming a competent communicator with others and ideally in as many forms as possible.
You won’t be successful in the long run and in a sustainable way if you aren’t a good communicator. In general, you must be able to make people feel comfortable and rally the troops to get others to believe in themselves and to believe in your mission.
Ask yourself: in what ways are you a great communicator and where could you stand to focus on improving? How can you be even more effective at the highest level of communication in your business organization whether marketing and sales or with your team or in your ability to convey your mission and message?
In short, be committed to empathetic communication by understanding of other people and learn to speak in more positive terms in every sense of the word.
We’ll continue on this topic in the weeks ahead.
Lastly, the other core principle of value building and of skill development has nothing to do with mastering your own industry (though, I would consider it a given); instead it is mastering the design of your business.
This is the actual engineering of your business how everything from customers to money to production to delivery move through your business from the point of inception to the backend and everything in between – in a deliberate fashion.
Far too few business owners really understand how their own business works. They are at the mercy of what happens instead of in control over making things happen.
To me, what’s the point of being in business and taking on all the risks (which don’t necessarily lead to rewards unless you design them to), if you aren’t going to choose how you do it all.
No business is that complicated. You should be able to break it down and understand the key leverage points that drive results.
Once mastered, you can take any problem in your business and turn it into an opportunity by using common sense and working backwards to make it happen.
The reason I share these with you is because these three things align together to create your triangle of success in your business and all the sales and marketing or team and systems or anything else in your business will never be more valuable than these things allow them to be.
Passionate Purpose
Competent Communication
Deliberate Design
There’s a lot to think about here. Take you time to review and assess where you can improve. Next week, we’ll take it even further. Stayed tuned.
Category : Blog
