Starting a business, running a team and being responsible comes with high-stress activities like managing people, running budgets and reaching business targets. To overcome the challenge it takes work, dedication and a change in mindset. You as the leader, you as the manager need to have a vision and a way of making things happen that brings your team along the journey.
In this article, I’ll share some of my tips for making it all come together.
Changes to make in your business
Change 1: When working with my teams we actively try to avoid saying the word “Can’t” and swapping the words with more constructive words like “How can we” and “What is stopping us from doing this”. This gets the brain juices in a different position ready to tackle problems.
Change 2: We look at what has been done and is what we call stale, and we look at how can we make it better, and how can we twist the idea so that it has a unique blend to it. There are too many businesses that are legacy and have been doing the same thing for years. This needs to be part of your research, how can we make an old idea feel fresh.
We don’t settle for answers like “That’s the way it’s always been done” we like to break down the process and look under the hood to see if there is a better way.
Change 3: Change the mindset of jealousy into support and inspiration. When a team members earns a reward or hits a revenue milestone we don’t say that we are jealous as a team, we say wow that’s so cool we want to learn what steps you took, how you did it and how do you feel about achieving this milestone. Jealously has no place in a team environment.
Change 4: We are all so busy and in stressed states, we need to break this cycle. I like to change the focus point of busy to being focused, insanely focused on a target or a milestone for the bigger purpose of my company. When I hit that milestone we celebrate as a team. The work is tough and there’s lots of it but that’s why you scale teams up and down. Being busy can also mean busy going in circles. You can control stress levels by breaking big tasks into smaller ones and asking for help.
Change 5: Sharing the knowledge. I used to control all information streams into my team to the absolute micro detail. It was for good reason training juniors but in the long run it stemmed growth. Now I identify the learning styles of my team members and share knowledge to get new perspectives and alternative thoughts to my own.
Build a system for knowledge sharing and documentation for your information systems.
This slight change in my behaviour in itself has been highly valuable to the business we can cover more ground and have been much more flexible in our execution of strategies. It’s like having 4 of me and that has been huge for productivity.
Change 6: This is a direct result of Change 5, it means I need to talk more to my team, to my suppliers, to my affiliate managers and my network. I’m super introverted and often go for hours without speaking a word. This also doesn’t empower my people to make decisions, voice opinions or get advice when needed.
By me taking communications to a new level we have more direction, more support and clarity across the business. We asked for better commission rates for sending larger traffic volumes, we asked for better commissions for sending more relevant traffic to partners and we asked our customers for more feedback so that we could improve.
Change 7: Take the focus off the money. If you run teams taking pressure off them by not focusing on revenue at every turn, every meeting but instead show the target, then show people how they can play a part in reaching the target. This motivates the people to do their part.
Change 8: Controlled growth. At times during the business cycle, you might see signs that it’s time to scale before you are ready because of opportunities. My advice is to take it slow assess the market and make your move when you think the times are right. Think about it before making business critical changes.
Change 9: Luck has nothing to do with it. If competitors get ahead of you it’s not luck, it you make it big it’s prob not just luck. The growth ingredient is always the work that you put in. If you plant the seeds the garden will grow. If you plant the seeds and water them you will see even more growth. As long as you document and systemise the process you can repeat the process again and again.
Take these changes seriously and you will make a positive impact on your business and your teams. Take it one step at a time, use what makes sense, and do not feel like you have to change everything to make progress. Having taken the journey as a solopreneur and a co-owner I’ve made mistakes and made every milestone I set my targets on. These changes have helped me get to where I am now. I hope this helps.
