It Is A Soft World...Driven Leaders Are Rare.

Where do you stand with your job?  Are you just making sure you are remaining compliant?  Are you standing in line, waiting for someone to point out your direction?  Or are you reaching to produce the next best thing to help improve the working results of the production where you work?  Guess what...leaders are leaders.  They hit the trail looking to improve everything they come across.  Leaders do not generally wait around for someone to point out their direction.  That is how leaders do what they do.  They lead.

If you own a small business and you are waiting around for someone to point out your direction, you may be struggling to produce great results in that business.  You may need to take charge and lead the way.  Leaders understand this element to successful production.  Leaders lead.  They do not wait around for directions.

I know many leaders who are failing.  That happens.  Sometimes leaders get lost.  Sometimes they choose to do the wrong stuff.  Sometimes they get caught up with themselves.  However, it is the leaders that will eventually find their way through the lost forest and produce something worthwhile.  Leaders will come out in the end with better production, somewhere.  That is what usually drives them to lead.  Leaders who have a strong desire to produce success are the kinds of leaders that will eventually find their way out of a lost forest.  They prefer to win more often.  They learn how to make the right adjustments.  They are not afraid to lead.

Now, there are leaders who lead to gain attention.  Those are some of the dangerous ones.  They lead to become the center of attention.  They are not driven by successful productions.  They are motivated by the attention they can generate.  This is not usually the best kind of leader to have holding the steering wheel of your ship.  They know where the helm is but they use it to become the center of attention.  They may not, however, properly learn how to use the helm in a raging storm.  A leader who loves success and winning will be the one who learns the art of steering the ship through tough storms.  Great leaders know they must learn how to manage storms just as much as they enjoy managing in calm seas.

Great leaders do not come to your ship with softness.  They do not live in soft worlds very easily.  They have some hard edges they carry along their sides.  They may be respectful and somewhat patient, but they are best known for their get done attitudes.  That kind of attitude requires them to be a bit more tough in their production driven personalities.  The best leaders usually have the most strength in their overall personalities. They come to the table of work with a mission in mind.  It is obvious, driven and strong.  They scare most of the other soft leaders who spend a good deal of time standing around.  They come to the table with a bit of a push in their attitude to success.  They tend to carry some rough edges.

We live in a soft world.  A lot of people in positions of leadership have a tendency to avoid surrounding themselves with strong leaders who prefer to produce better results.  Our soft world prefers a smoother process.  Driven leaders do not easily fit well in these kinds of environments.  Most business models are made up of soft leaders.  Most business models are often driven by leaders who do not desire to be pushed, challenged or pressured by other strong leaders.  They prefer to remain calmer about getting enough done to remain fair in their path to perform.  Fair results will suffice for now.  That is how most business models do what they do.  Most of the soft leaders in our current world remain without change.  Even when it is pressing and needed.  A change is not welcomed.  It does not look like comfort.

We live in a soft world.  Hard forging leaders are not viewed as the right kinds of characters to have aboard your comfortable ship.  They push too hard, work to diligently and may threaten the current leaders sense of control.  Hard pressing leaders may easily disturb the world of protected change.  This is exactly how many business models resort to and remain forever satisfied with average production.  We are soft.  We reward soft followers.

We prefer easy leaders who work harder on compliance than they do on reaching out and trying new innovations and serving consumers better.  We are a soft world.  We prefer style over function.  Look at how we elect presidents!  Style will always cover up performance.  This makes our supply of great leaders rather limited.  Driven leaders are rare.  Driven leaders are more politically correct but it is harder to detect.  They are too busy performing well rather than spending large chunks of their time looking well.  Driven leaders are more blunt in how they arrive at the scene of high production.  Their motives are right but their transparency for coming to the work with such a great focus can easily serve up the wrong kind of attention. It is a soft world.

Our current soft world needs to satisfy the superiors first(to get in the door), the constituents second(to rally support) and the production third( the quality of the work applied).  This is usually the normal pattern of production that our soft world of business has come to protect.  The consumers come well behind the superiors desires and the rules and procedures they set in place.  This is how soft leaders perform what they are asked to perform.  Just as long as they comply with the rules of the boss, who cares about any disservice the consumer may need to experience.  The boss wants these few things done and that is that.  Rub up against this law and discover where you stand.  Not a good place.  That is one of the key reasons why we live in a soft world.  We need to please the boss first.  There are very few driven leaders who have the courage to forge ahead and deliver the solutions first.  Those kinds of leaders are viewed at the round table as threats.

Once the favor of supporting the boss becomes accomplished, the next step is to sell this package to the constituents...the buyer.  The second part of a soft world is to try to figure out which spin will work the best. Transparency is not usually the method of choice.  Cover ups work better for this task.  A lot of the things that drive our leaders today are things that are not necessarily high on the consumer driven level.  Those things will need some style added to their story to help the consumers accept the non-consumer driven ways of delivery.  A good spin helps.  The business world has come to this kind of performance pattern more than it does not.  We live in a soft world.  Strong transparent leaders are not welcomed in this kind of business environment.  Our world of leadership is too soft for this kind of challenge.

Speak First, Speak Often and Speak Loudly.

If you operate a small business in this day and age, you need to make sure your marketing techniques are running sharp.  This day and age has so many formidable competitors that if you are not sharp on your feet with your business marketing efforts, you may be missing out on a lot of volume opportunities.  Trust me, you have some serious competition.  People are being deluged with great reasons offered complete with easy opportunities to spend their hard earned money.  A quick glance at the personal consumer debt load, they are spending more than they have!  The consumer is spending it all and then some.  How much is your business getting of the consumer overspending that is currently going on?  Think clearly about this.

Consumers are not holding back.  They are filling their needs, wants and desires as fast as they can.  In fact, the data shows that the consumer is spending more than they make.  Go check it out.  There are loads of websites that report these findings.  Most of the consumer spending statistic reports show the consumer spending more than they earn.  If you own a small business and you are complaining about consumer spending being slow...maybe you are not in the right stream?  That is a "tough love" statement to most small business models.  The data also shows that most small businesses in America are still struggling with too much debt themselves.  They do not bring in enough revenues to cover their load of expense obligations.

The data brings up an interesting scenario.  I know of some small business models that are doing very well right now.  They are setting volume records, as we speak.  They are experiencing some of the best revenue sales in the history of their business existence.  Growth is occurring in many of those models.

Why?

Why are some doing so well and others struggling to survive?  Timing?  Location?  What are the specific reasons why some business models are getting more than their fair share and others seem to be left out?  Why is this pattern happening?

I may have the answer.  If you own a business you have only three key responsibilities.  The first responsibility is to make sure the accounting stuff is being managed properly.  Take great care of the books, the sales data, the ordering details, the deposits, the expenditures, the monetary controls and the numbers game that drives a business to do the good stuff it should and could be doing.  Take care of the numbers.  Know how to collect the right data.  Know how to read the right data.  Know how to manage that data.  Get the accounting game down well.  That is usually 'job 1'.

Next, get serious about your service and product knowledge.  Know your wares.  Know how your customers use your wares.  Make sure you are "current" with the wares you are peddling.  Being out of touch in this area can 'kill' your consumer interest.  They might not be able to recognize anything you have for sale.  Make sure you know your product stuff.  Make sure it is not stuff you learned thirty years ago.  If you know a whole lot about typewriters and you are one of the best repair people on the planet with typewriters, you are using old knowledge to operate your consumer services.  Get up to speed with your product knowledge.  It may be lagging too far behind.  Remember, consumers are very fickle.  Do not under-estimate this truth.

And thirdly, how healthy is your marketing plan and execution?  Are you current, timely and recognizable?  Is your business "out there" making sure its face is being seen?  Does your business model come to the consumers mind when they consider doing what your business does?  When they need a new mattress, do they think immediately of your furniture store?  When they need a new birthday gift, do they think immediately of shopping through the products you have in your store?  When they take the family out to eat after church, do they immediately think of your restaurant?  If the answer is always no, why?  How come your business model is not part of their current way of thinking?

For today...let's focus on that third step of the business stool.  Let's examine the marketing.  Think of it in this way, "speak first, speak often and speak loudly."

What does this mean?

Teamwork...How Do We Turn It Up?

One of the seventeen principles for producing success is "Organized Effort."  Team play.  Team work.  Organized effort.

How many business models do what they do all by themselves?  Too many.

Teamwork is vital to success.  Learning the art of permitting, arranging and managing an organized effort is one of the best components to employ if a business leader desires to become very successful.  The most successful ones are surrounded by a lot of very good help.  The successful ones completely understand this working principle.  Unfortunately, there are not very many successful business leaders.  Most business leaders struggle from one day to the next, quietly.  There is no fanfare to the art of business struggling.  It occurs quite quietly.  This leads us to the question, how many business leaders tend to avoid accentuating this principle?  How many business leaders do not employ an organized effort often enough?  Again the answer remains, too many.

Teamwork is the key.  Teamwork holds a wonderful stick that points directly to the path of success.  Most who learn this art and the truth it provides do not easily drift away from the practice of teamwork.  Once it is discovered and clearly understood, it occurs more frequently.  Unfortunately, those who do it the most are the ones who win the most.  They are the ones who add to the practice of performing more teamwork.  Those business leaders who do not 'get it' are the ones who do not add to the practice of team play.  The winners win more often and the 'also rans' continue to remain self-propelled to struggle some more.  This is not a great surprise to the evening news.  Most of us see this truth very well.

Teamwork.  What about teamwork?  How much do you use it?  How often do you permit your employees to drive portions of your business model?  I mean, truly!  How often do you allow one of your employees to place all of the product ordering?  How often do you allow one of your employees to select the next new hire?  How often do you permit an employee to manage the business accounting?  How often do you arrange an employee to produce, initiate and mange your complete business marketing plans?  If any of your answers are never...you may be one of those struggling business leaders.  You may have one of the most common business failure afflictions, lack of team play.  Teams win.  Individuals usually get slaughtered.  The world of business is way too competitive to take it all on by yourself.  Get serious.  Your competition is slopping up all of the excess business you are not able to harness.  If they are approaching your markets with better team play, they are winning more often.  It is as simple as that little truth.  You may be the only one who is denying it.  Your checkbook may be the only other one who knows this truth.

Teamwork.  It is vital to employ it if you plan on winning much in the business world.  There are no big secrets to the effects teamwork brings to the success table.  Teamwork is not a big surprise.  Its obvious presence can be found in every successful business model.  Team play is vital to success.  Team play is vital to helping the business model produce a better checkbook balance.  It is not a great big secret.  It is simple to see.  It is not hard to do.  Yet it is absent in so many business models.  Why?

To Win In Business...You Need More Bodies!

How do we get more bodies to respond to what we do?  How do we increase the foot traffic?  How do we get that foot traffic to come back once they have arrived?  Foot traffic is website clicks, page view visits and customers coming in the front door of the brick and mortar facility.  To be successful and win big in business, foot traffic is the key.  You need a lot of bodies.

How do we get bodies to increase in our business environment?  What are the steps?

First of all...the traffic that is currently flowing must not be curbed or eliminated.  Do not trim down the foot traffic currently enjoyed.  It is not easy to get customers to frequent your business in the first place.  If some are coming in to hang out right now, leave them alone.  You want bodies to hang out in your place of business.  If you are attracting the wrong set of customers that hang out in your place of business right now, change how you present what you present.  Convert those bodies into larger spenders.  Get creative in the right ways to harness their frequency but adds to your revenue growth.  This can be done with some very strategic thinking.  However, do not get caught up with wrong thoughts and actions that chase bodies away.  They are too hard to attract in the first place.  Keep the ones that are frequenting your business right now.  That is step one.

Second of all...why would customers come into your business in the first place?  Get serious about knowing this answer.  If you struggle with this second step, you do not have clarity about who you are, why you are doing what you do and how to achieve that understanding.  This is the real first step in making your business move towards better growth.  Your business model needs to know who it is, why it is there and what it does to attract who it is trying to gain.  This is marketing 101.  Do not skip this step.  Your ideas about what your business does and who you prefer your business to be, get this understanding down pat.  Know this stuff deeply.  Get clear about this step.  Your business needs to know who it is and it needs to properly express who it is.  Make certain this step is clear.  If you are into science, be scientific.  If you are into retro, be retro.  If you are into antiques, be authentic.  Do not fear being who your business decides to be.  This is step two.

Thirdly...what kinds of things are being done that help other business models attract more customers?  Your competition is winning because it is doing some things better than your model is doing.  Know exactly what those things are.  I am always amused at how often I hear business owners describe how their competition does so many things wrong.  I am also amused at how often I hear business owners describe how their competition is not going to 'hurt' them.  Hog wash!  Competition captures part of your market shares.  Do not place words in my mouth.  I love the free enterprise system of business arrangements.  It is the best system ever designed.  However, it requires competition in order for it to work well.  Too much government control, cartels, monopolies and models that arrange for protected market controls eventually grow up to spell death to the free enterprise system.  Become a great competitor.  Remain solid on the work to improve your competitive growth.  Find out what kinds of things your competitors are doing that shifts your potential customers away from your business.  Get to know why those customers go there instead of frequenting your business model.  This is step three.

Your business needs more bodies.  More bodies offers your business model more chances to gather up increasing revenues.  That is how growth occurs.  Find out what your model needs to do to gain access to attracting more bodies!  This is not rocket science, but an easily forgotten step to success.  Increase the flow of bodies.  Become better skilled at producing more bodies.  Think in terms of consumer activities that fill up your website with 'hits' and 'views'.  Think about how to get your store isles flowing with customer motion.  Learn what it takes to attract more bodies.  The success you manage in this area of your business responsibilities will offer your business model more chances to see increased revenues.  This kind of effect is a very good thing.  It helps you fill up the can that houses your bottom line.

To win in business...you need to attract more bodies.  How do we do that?

Top Secret: Marketing Is Media!

Ask yourself this simple question.  What do you do in your business model that is newsworthy?

What things have you done in your business that will be able to become a great news story for your region?  What introductions, assistance, discoveries, unique things produced or unusual services offered does your business model do that can easily capture the interest of the evening news?  If your business model cannot come up with something solid in any of these categories of interest, it is not marketing itself well.  Your business model is not doing the best it can do in the area of marketing.  It is being left out!

Take a look around.  Who is the top business model in the world?  Apple.  Apple has hit the number one spot.  It surpassed Microsoft in top dog billing.  What do these two companies do very well?  They become regular evening news stories!  They have strategically become part of the stream of news that fills the world with their company name.  So does Nike, Google, GE and many other highly successful business models who have learned how to paint the fine art of making their business work newsworthy.  Come on man, figure it out.  How does your business model compare to these news giants?  How well does your business model find itself on the evening news?

If you do not understand this kind of questioning, you may not fully comprehend how to market your business very well.  That's O.K., you are not alone.  It is of no shame to admit this.  Millions upon millions of business leaders in this world have missed the value of this wonderful marketing tip.  It is a subject that many business leaders have not explored, recognized nor inserted into their daily business efforts.  It is often easily ignored.  It carries very little strategic energy.  It is left off the pages of many written business plans.  Most people believe that news is created all by itself.  Fortunately, that does not need to remain the truth.  All business leaders can make newsworthy business moves.  It is stuff that the best leaders know how to do very well.  Just as it is true that it is of no shame to admit this kind of lack of understanding in marketing, it is also of no credit to remain there.  Adding newsworthy work to your strategic business planning can happen quite easily.  It can become a great addition to some very effective marketing efforts.  Market the media!  Add this effort to your business strategies.

I know a little lady who is the wife of a wheat farmer.  She has convinced their farm to place in storage a small amount of grain for her to use for her own little project.  She has developed an interest to take this small stock of grain and grind it down into a powder.  She then mixes this grain powder into the flour that is mixed with other strategic ingredients to produce pancake mixes, cookie mixes, scone mixes, bread mixes and many other popular flour products that the public likes to eat.  She pre-packages this flour with all of the proper measurements and ingredients for the baking of these popular goodies.  The instructions for adding water and timing the bake are placed on every little pre-packaged bag.  Just add water, mix the combination together and set the cooking temperature to its pre-determined time setting.  WhaLah!  Great blueberry scones!  All natural, all pre-packaged, very simple and all great tasting.  Straight from the farm!

She cannot get this little business off the ground.  She hustles around her small community, every day, trying to keep up with the demand of the sales that are happening in the little shops that display her packaged wonders.  She has the tail wagging the dog right now.  Her idea has turned out to become a good little business for her family.  She has described to me how she does not think her little bit of trade is big enough to do what it needs to do to go to the next level and become the business model it truly needs to become.  She admits, she does not know how to do that.  I said, "Use the news."  She looked at me like a deer in the headlights stare.  She did not understand what I was trying to suggest.  To her, it was not news.  However, I know, to the media...this is a great story to tell.  It is newsworthy!

She needs to get this little business model on the news.  It should become part of her marketing strategies.  Trust me, Apple, Nike and Google would not miss this wonderful opportunity.  They would be dropping out information snippets about their plans to deliver this newsworthy package to the general public.  They would be rolling out the news on this new attempt.  They have become masters at media marketing.  So can she.  As well, so can you.

The top secret today in the world of marketing is to get your business model lined up with newsworthy work.  Find out how to strategically develop newsworthy stuff.  Make it become part of your business plan.  Once that kind of work has been secured, develop the right kind of habit for properly releasing this news to the media.  You can have you own business 'WhaLah's.'  Use the news.  Market the media.

Let's examine some examples.

Success Is Personal And Particular

I see it everywhere.  Soft success.  Soft losing.  Forever trying to improve the bottom line.  Ups and downs that plague the business models as they try hard to improve their success quotients.  Energy wasted.  Energies expelled.  Wrong thoughts, wrong doings and wrong efforts.  Misguided plans.  Interrupted strategies.  Tons of business models trying to find their way through the menagerie of challenges to produce better results.  I see it everywhere.

Maybe you are leading one of these trying business models.  You might be one of those business leaders working your plans to better your bottom line.  The more you seem to give effort to those improvement plans the more that bottom line of success seems to escape your grasp.  The circumstances outweigh the possibilities.  You get caught up in the jungle of distractions and the goodness you planned for the winning you wanted is thwarted again at every corner of try.  Solid success becomes fleeting.  Solid success becomes frustrating.

If this is true and where your business model is resting, right now, do not become discouraged.  You are not alone.  Your efforts are just delayed.  They are not futile and completely expelled.  They may be worn out, but not dead.  There are millions of business owners facing these realities, just like this, in their own little worlds.  Unfortunately, you cannot see them because they are not wearing these truths on their outer sleeves.  They have become masters at deception.  They are very good at hiding what is not working well.  This is the gut honest truth about small business leaders.  They are directly wired to refrain from exposing their deepest plights.  They run comfortably on denial.  I know, I have been one of them for many years.  You cannot fool a masterful deceiver.

If you are trying desperately to work your business model into a winning series of good results with the frenzy of excitement and growing production, you are working in the right direction.  If you are not feeling this desire, you may be losing ground on the components required to sustain success in a healthier fashion.  You may be one of those millions of business owners who has lost their way.  You may be going to your place of business every single day doing the things that will not help your dreams come true.  At best, you may be managing soft success.  In reality, you may be managing losing battles that are finding their common way around and through the halls of your business model.  Your efforts to eradicate these troubling results have become the dominate ways that govern how you deal with the daily routine of managing what you are faced to manage.  Your rotten circumstances keep showing up to wag the tail of your business dog.  It is a troubling process.

When the tail wags the dog, the business model cannot win.  It will not win.  Your methods must be changed.  your efforts must retreat.  Your knowledge base must be altered.  What you currently know about what to do is damaged too much to repair what needs to be done correctly.  Your villain is hiding its face in the mirror on your own bathroom wall.  I usually find my same villain in the same place.  That distraction to success is always facing me when I look into my own mirror.  I suspect honestly that you may find the same location for the villain that is holding up your permanent patterns to succeed.  Trust me, it ain't nobody else who is at fault!

That kind of truth is often hard to accept.  Just because it is not popular does not mean it is not true.  Just because it does not stomach very well does not mean it is not true.  Just because we do a good job of disguising this truth from ourselves does not mean it does not exist.  The truth always remains the truth...whether we accept it or not.  Gravity still works even when we deny its existence.

In the end, success is personal and it is also very particular.  It does not happen casually and without effort.  Permanent patterns of success do not come to those who happen upon it.  Do not believe otherwise.  You will only be fooled into producing more results on the wrong side of your business success desires.  You will then learn creative ways on how to avoid looking into your bathroom mirror.  You will not want to see that villain.  Success is personal and particular.  Let's see why!