Focused People

The "Stop Doing List" has been one of the most painful but powerful tools I have had to learn to use over the last 13 years of running a successful small business. 

As the year winds down, you are likely spending more and more time thinking about and working on next year’s projects. As you’re planning, I’d recommend you consider the following three actions. I believe they are critical for the long-term health and success of your business.

Synergists are masters at getting Visionaries, Operators, and Processors to work together. They are an essential addition for any team wanting to sustain innovation, execution, and scalability.

For a team to reach its maximum potential, for ideas to spread fully, for productivity to reach the next level, it needs Processor leadership. The question then, is how do we get these often shy, quiet, numbers people to blossom as the leaders that will take us to the next level?

This article is all about Operator Leaders! We dive into who these Operators are, why they are, and what specific actions they can take to overcome their unique challenges and become brilliant.

In the very beginning, your leadership team is you. Then the business grows, you hire some staff, and in a way, your whole staff feels like your leadership team. Then things get difficult.

I want to propose three principles and a simple yet powerful hiring model that will dramatically increase your hiring process’s effectiveness and reduce the time you spend hiring.

There is one choice every successful Founder must make. At some point, every Founder will need to choose between transforming culture and character of the organization to create the ability to scale OR limiting the growth of the organization to keep it within its current operating capacity.

Your business culture isn't a fixed set of values you scribbled with your mission statement on a napkin one night. Instead, it is a dynamic set of hierarchical values that can and should change in response to the business' growth and development.

The culture that has given you so much success and brought you so far will, at some point, prevent you from taking your company to the next level. There is an interesting pattern that happens in virtually every successful startup, regardless of their industry.

Every successful company's true values are almost virtually identical. These shared values actually define employee behavior and have more to do with their stage of development than they do their unique identity and how this is ok.