Author: Eric McCullough

maximize your time

Maximize Your Time With This Tool

Time is a precious resource and is the chief bartering tool for money and resources. We decide with each passing moment of the day how we invest that precious resource.

Maximizing your time expands the gifts and resources you can devote to productive and creative endeavors. How you manage time can increase happiness in your time and private life. However, ordering your calendar isn’t exactly intuitive, especially in this day and age of unnatural distraction.

We covered this in our podcasts linked below.

EP45- How to Manage Time Effectively (Part 1)

EP- How to Manage Time Effectively (Part 2)

If you want to grow your personal and professional life in an ordered way, here are 3 things you should do to maximize your time.

1. Focus on the finite

As much as we’d like to treat time as infinite, we know deep down it isn’t. Our kids’ soccer games go unwatched, recitals unattended, and cherished moments with friends or family vanish.

We look at our calendars and emails. Is it Christmas time already?

Where did the time go?

Something has to give. The path of least resistance to burnout is giving into the never ending list of tasks that bombard you day by day. Whether a project manager, team leader, or business executive, your day is filled with an unending task list.

We are trying to fit an infinite thing, our tasks, into a finite thing, our calendar.

If you feel overwhelmed, it’s because you are.

If you feel like you’re missing out on life, it’s because you are.

If you feel like your days and weeks are flying, it’s because they are.

A common mistake for leaders is to let tasks run the calendar rather than the other way around. If you want to be effective, you need to prioritize your time.

2. Weaponize Your Watch

We are driven to distraction. From the time we awaken to the time we sleep, our attention is continually assaulted. Whether through advertisers on the internet or people in our circles, we live in a world saturated with distractions. People want our attention.

And, that can be a good thing.

Distractions aren’t always bad. In fact, distractions can be a welcome relief in the day as you get the chance to devote time free from the pressures of productivity.

The problem comes when distractions are entertained throughout the day and prevent you from getting things done. Distractions become a surrogate for procrastination. And, we’ve all done it.

We’ve all been at that place where we’ve looked up from a mindless scroll through social media and YouTube only to realize an hour has gone by.

There has to be a better way…and there is.

The best way to overcome distractions is to order your day. You have to be intentional with your time. Remember, it’s a finite resource. If you don’t control it, someone or something else will.

You can do a job that’s important without being busy and stressed out.

Our Growability Model for maximizing time allows you to break the chain of distractions by partitioning your day in an intentional way.

Busy work: This is the lowest producer on our task management system. These are tasks that can be done in under 10 minutes. The main objective is to check off boxes and get the small things done so they don’t disturb the rest of your day.

Brainstorm: You must reserve think time at some point in the day. This is an opportunity for you to listen to a podcast, read a blog, or work with a group to explore possibilities and ideas. I argue this time is especially important for the creative process.

Bulldozer: Heavy cognitive lifting is needed during this time. This is when you get the chance to think deeply. In fact, set aside enough time to do Bulldozer time because it requires 20 minutes just to get in the zone. Silence your notifications. Put a Do Not Disturb sign on your office. You’re going to need this for the intense focus required.

These are just a few ways to partition your time but there are more ways to maximize your potential.

Contact a Growability Coach to learn more about this process and how you can implement this for yourself and your team.

3. Brake the bicycle

You can’t fix a bicycle while riding it. Running an organization, managing a project, or leading a team require you to maintain a constant balance to watch for changes in the environment and hazards along the way.

This constant state of inertia and awareness leaves little time to grapple with the processes and potholes along the way. “Kickstand” time is critical for process and system improvement.

This is a golden opportunity to work ON the business and not IN the business.

As a leader, it’s hard to distance yourself from the work being done. But, it has to happen. Your down time isn’t good for you; it’s great for everyone.

This time should be scheduled and segregated from your normal duties.

This is also your time to reset and evaluate processes within your organization, team, or yourself. Loads of self-help blogs and books call it self-care, self-management, and myriad of other tags but I think of it as update and upgrade time.

Every so often my computer prompts me to shut it down and restart so it can install needed updates. Kickstand time works the same. This is your opportunity to think and focus on processes or ideas.

If you’re feeling exhausted and demotivated, you need to prioritize some kickstand time. Whether in the morning, afternoon, or evening, it just needs to be a time you can look from the outside in to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Replace the “I needs” and “I should’s” with “I scheduled” and “I did it.” Fooling ourselves into future victory does little to soften the every day defeat of neglect.

Your success depends on your schedule.

CONTACT US

Let a Growability coach help you with your organization. Let us help you raise your organization to its fullest potential.

 

 

Growability Battle Plan

Use This Battle Plan to Manage Projects

Projects have slowly been replacing operations for businesses since the eve of the 20th century. Operations largely deals with the managing of an organization while projects involve performance improvement and changing the organization.

Projects allow for quicker, steadier growth of new products and technologies. To take the most advantage of projects, your organization needs to know how to pivot and manage projects effectively.

Our Growability Model shows you how projects can impact your business.

Listen to EP30 The 12 Step Growability Model Overview™

Forward looking companies see the opportunity in quality project management. This is an often overlooked skill set but can separate you from the competition.

If you’re ready to increase productivity, streamline processes, and improve project outcomes, you need to consider these 3 things from our Growability BATTLE Plan™.

1. organization benefit

What is the overall purpose of this project and is there a direct line to a benefit for the organization? One of the skill sets a manager needs is the ability to discern a Return On Investment (ROI).

Projects are going to cost personnel and resources. You want to get the best bang for resource use and not every project proposed is worthy of investing. This should be the first and most prominent question asked before you even consider pushing the project forward.

2. teams, tools, techniques

Who are the main characters and what are the main tools used for this project? You need to identify a project lead, the supporting team, and every tool, technology, or resource required for completion.

This planning phase of the project should be as precise and salient as possible. After all, this is where you extract the majority of project timelines and costs. The better you are here, the easier it will be to keep the project on a tight timeline and budget.

Project creep is real.

Loosely articulating the resources needed for a project may lead to a slow, creeping increase on those resources if not properly managed or maintained. Before you realize it, your project is beyond time and beyond budget. This didn’t happen overnight.

Incremental or nearly imperceivable changes can modify project timelines, budgets, and resources slightly. But, if the trend continues, you can end up with an inverse ROI. Good project managers need to understand all parts of the project process so they can speak to slight changes.

🚩 A major red flag for an organization is a project lead or manager who cannot answer basic questions about project progress. This includes timeline, budget, personnel, and other resources. If you have this issue, you need to consider alternatives to managing the project.

We cover some strategies to consider here on the podcast where we cover 5 Things You Should Prune from Your Business.

3. End results

How do you know this project succeeded? Take time and attention to identify and properly describe the various KPIs (key performance indicators) and KPDs(key performance determinants) for this project. These are the goals your team are striving to achieve. Improperly or loosely defined KPIs and KPDs can spell disaster for your project.

We cover the best practice for determining KPIs and KPDs in your organization and projects in Episode 47 Key Performance Indicators.

Results reflect expectations. If they don’t, you need to look into the internal and external factors that influenced the project scope and its execution.

The full battle plan

There are more things to consider when managing projects. Contact us to access to our full 6-step Growability BATTLE Plan™.

 

Pruning

The 3 Employee Types to Consider Firing

Firing someone from your organization is heavy, depressing, and stressful for all involved. This is a decision not to be taken lightly but is critical if you want to succeed.

I think of firing as pruning. Pruning is the removal of parts of a plant that does not contribute to the plant’s overall health but, in fact, injures its health and development. Pruning is an essential process to ensure the longevity of any plant or, in our case, organization.

5 Things to Prune from Your Organization

Pruning your organization for those that impede performance is an opportunity for you to achieve excellence. Your customer base and organization should be your top priorities. When it’s time to make these very tough decisions, you’ll want to use our Growability™ Prune Your Business tool.

If you want to lead a happy team and successful business, here are 3 employees you should consider pruning from your organization.

1) Overlappers

These employees weaken organization culture because they either require micromanagement or are micromanaging. There is no added benefit to an organization that permits micromanagement. 

I think of someone sitting at the laptop pouring over the screen while someone else is standing behind looking over their shoulder giving them critiques. If a team member doesn’t have the capacity to do the job unless someone is checking on them, I either haven’t provided the appropriate training or have the wrong team member in that position. 

Oftentimes, the problem isn’t the worker; it’s the micromanager. Micromanagers diminish organizational culture. Team members stop working for the organization and instead focus on meeting the micromanager’s requirements. It’s a bad environment all around. 

Alternatively, overlappers may be the result of being overstaffed. When there are too many people working in overlapping job roles and responsibilities, you end up with low performers and weakened growth.

2. Hero manager

Conversely, a hero manager is also a problem. A hero manager is the person who steps in and takes care of everyone’s problems. They swoop in like a superhero right as a mistake is being made. “I will fix this problem!” they proudly proclaim. 

This manager sounds like an asset not a liability. Many organizations would LOVE to have someone like this. The problem is they become a single point of failure. If something happens to that person and they leave the organization, they take the competencies and skill sets with them. Everyone else on the team depending on the hero manager is left scurrying. 

A good manager isn’t the one swooping in to fix problems. 

A good manager ensures the team is achieving full capacity and working with their skillset. If I’m leading an organization and have a hero manager, I need to find a way to have them become part of the team rather than staying on top pulling them up. Hero managers destroy systems because the become the system. 

Leaders may emerge as hero managers naturally if responsibilities and duties are incrementally and consistently added to them. They may not have started as a hero manager but circumstance have made them one. This isn’t healthy for the organization and may expedite burnout.

3. Suckers

Suckers are people in an organization that are universally liked by all but add little to no value for the organization itself. Let’s say I need to hire a salesperson, Sue, to increase my revenue to 10%. Everyone in the organization loves Sue, including myself.  In a year, I evaluate her performance and notice our sales are still at 5%. I have a terrible decision to make. 

Just because I like someone doesn’t mean that our organization needs them on staff. Just because everyone on the team likes this person doesn’t mean you keep them on the team. It’s a difficult decision to be in but remember that this is about growing the organization. 

Suckers use the same root system of your organization but don’t produce fruit for the organization. 

It sounds harsh to fire someone that is so well-liked but keeping them at the organization not only sets a bad precedent for performance but also stalls organizational momentum. You’re not doing the team any favors by keeping people on just because you like them. They may have immense talent; it’s just displaced at your organization. They may find a more fertile place to grow elsewhere. 

Firing as the last resort

I think it’s important to stop here and point out that firing should not be a “guns a-blazin’” approach to management. You lead with “Do we have the right systems in place for incentive, expectation, and feedback?” first. Firing should only be the last resort when all other options have been exhausted. 

Firing should not be the first and primary response to the behaviors and personalities described above. Do all you can to coach people to success. Coaching is a win for everyone. You may be able to turn someone around in your organization and they get to realize their potential. Co-workers and team members will see this dynamic play out. It has huge payoffs if you do it right. 

We at Growability want to see an organization reach their fullest potential. Not a great potential…not some potential…fullest potential. 

Contact Us

Let a Growability coach help you with your organization. Click the link below and let us help you raise your organization to its fullest potential.

right team

3 Guaranteed Ways to Create the Right Team

The right team will set the foundation of success for your company. If you want to win big in sales and marketing, you need the right mix of team members to get the job done. Anything less may result in not just failure but complete loss.

Ensure You Have the Right People and Plan (Part 1)

Ensure You Have the Right People and Plan (Part 2)

Did you know that there is a hidden opportunity in creating the right team that frequently goes overlooked? 

If you identify the strengths and empower your team to use them, there is no stopping the inertia that builds from that momentum. The Growability™ Strength Finder 2.0 Tool helps you identify each person’s given strength. Our tool simplifies the complex and allows you to best understand the strengths of you and your team so you can perform at your absolute best.

Here are 3 ways you can identify strengths and build the right team right now. 

1) Find the fountains

A fountain is an individual in an organization that is an idea factory. They come up with workarounds, fixes, and solutions to problems or opportunities.

I met a guy named Warner Butters who eventually became one of my mentors. He was a hospital administrator and was hired to take on a hospital that was in an 8-year decline and made almost no money. Frankly, It was a hot mess.

What Warner found out when he entered this hospital is that the fountains were being shut down by the system. Every time there was a good idea, it was knocked down so good ideas weren’t circulating in the hospital. 

“I have to figure out how to empower fountains to bring their best ideas to the table and then establish a good system with effective processes.”

Fountains are great to have in your organization. These people are your idea generators. They have insight into how things should be done and can generate ideas, concepts, and workflows. But, fountains alone can be dangerous.

2) Find the Builders

You get a builder who can come in, analyze the ideas, and build structures around the ideas. They create containers for the concepts. The water flows into the buckets so we can contain it, replicate, and profit from it. 

Without builders, fountains tend to make a mess. Builders give places for the fountain’s ideas to go. You may have someone in your organization who is great at coming up with good marketing ideas and campaigns. The builder would be the person who can put use the ideas. They understand the technology and mechanisms needed to get 

3) Find the Pourers

Pourers are the people that will show up every day to do the work. These are the physicians, nurses, administrators, and task masters who go to the bucket and pour it out. Pourers put the ideas to work. 

Think about the trilogy Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien is an incredible fountain able to write this trilogy as a solo entrepreneur. Another fountain named Peter Jackson comes along and decides this should be made into a movie. “The technology is here. This book series can be turned into a film series.”

Peter Jackson recruits other fountains- artists that create the art, storyboard, and visuals. Builders come along to scout locations, recruit the right talent, design the screenplays, and edit the process along the way. 

The pourers are the actors, camera, audio, and lighting people who invest a significant portion of their time and resources to create this work of art. At the end of the film, you don’t see a single person’s name. You see hundreds and hundreds of names, each contributing to their end something to the masterpiece. 

Summary

If you find the strengths in your organization, you’ll grow in ways beyond your expectations. Find who your Fountains, Builders, and Pourers are. Your ideas will flourish because their capacity isn’t capped. The work formed from those ideas will be meaningful. Everyone wins.

Contact Us

Let a Growability coach help you with your organization. Let us help you raise your organization to its fullest potential.

Acorns

3 Solid Ways to Build Your Customer Base

8 out of 10 first time small businesses fail. This is a grim statistic. That is an 80% crash and burn rate for every entrepreneur with dreams of winning and glory. It doesn’t have to be this way. What can we learn from the 20% that do succeed so we can steer out of the wreckage and into the clear? 
How to Attract Customers

One thing that all successful business do is build value for their customers. Businesses thrive and crush the market when they understand their customer’s needs, wants, and ambitions. 

If you apply our Growability Maslow Principle™ tool, it will allow you to understand your customer base and build a solid foundation of value to stand.

Here are 3 easy steps you can implement now to attract customers and grow your business.

1. Build Personas

Who is willing to pay for your product or service? That is the first and foremost question you must consider.  You need to know who is willing to pay you for the service you provide or product you sell.

The best strategy to use when mapping a potential customer is building a customer persona.  

Customer personas are individual people or groups within a market who will pay to have a need met. These are fictional archetypes you create based on the values, behaviors, or traits of your target customer. You can generate these archetypes based on data collected from your own research, the internet, or your competition.

However, you can get started building them now by answering these 3 questions about your customers: 

What is the problem that your value helps them overcome?

What is the cause of the problem?

What is their environmental problem?

Answering these questions help you determine three major advantages to explore: competitive, convenience, and consistency. This is a great starting point for building a customer persona but there are other aspects of a customer you have to consider.

How you identify the need is just as important as how you meet it. 

If you use our Growability Customer Persona tool, you’ll know how to do this. You’ll be enabled with the tools, techniques, and strategy for building a customer persona. This is a critical step in building your organization. You have to know who you’re selling to.

Contact a Growability coach so you can get started immediately.

2. Build Confidence

People have an innate desire to belong. They want to be a part of something larger than themselves. In fact, that sense of belonging and confidence is foundational to who we are as a human.

One company that has crushed the market in creating that sense of belonging and confidence is Nike. As a shoe company, they meet a health/ safety need as well as a sense of belonging to their customer base. 

“Just Do It” is a rallying cry that identifies the tribe of people associated with Nike and their marketing campaigns. Nike is super effective at making customers feel a strong sense of belonging. 

But, they have one more key ingredient to their success and that is altruism and achievement. Nike has long positioned themselves as the brand of champions.

People associate winning, gold medals, Olympic athletes, and the like with the infamous “swoosh.” Nike’s customers associate Nike’s product not only with a sense of connection with others who wear Nike but with a profound feeling of accomplishment.

3. Build a Library

There is a symbiotic relationship between the seed and the soil. The seed is nothing without soil. The same goes for businesses. Without customers, there is no business. The best thing a business leader can do is start learning. 

Businesses survive in an ecosystem of other competing businesses, customers, and employees amongst a variety of other factors. It is important for a leader to understand that an idea alone will not be enough to push the organization beyond the first phase. You must hit the books.

Your library influences your trajectory.

Expand your knowledge base by reading, watching, and listening. Subscribe to industry newsletters and top professionals in your field. Your competition may be the best source of education but so is your existing customers and employees.

Spend time learning from others and building an anthology of knowledge.

Let Us Help You build Your Customer Base

We would love to help you better understand your customers. Reach out to Growability and allow us to join you on your way to winning.

Resiliency

2 Things Resilient Organizations Do

Bad experiences will happen. Poor reviews, dissatisfied customers, and broken processes are just a few of the problems you can expect to happen in your organization. Although trouble is inevitable, disaster isn’t.

Our response to adversity dictates the damage. Leaders and organizations will only grow and flourish if they are resilient and adapt through inevitable pitfalls.

Resilience is the ability to recover from adversity, trauma, and general setbacks. Resilient organizations thrive amidst bad experiences and use negative outcomes to generate positive change.

Being resilient, however, is not intuitive nor innate. Resilience is gained through experience but the learning curve can be lessened with just a few slight changes.

Comfort in Discomfort

Change is uncomfortable and often difficult to manage. Resilient leaders adapt and flex to deal with change. In order to be flexible and able to adapt, you must first recognize your comfort zone and do things to move away from it.

Often, we don’t understand our own comfort zones. We move day-to-day with the same rituals going with the ebb and flow wherever it takes us. When something does happen that jars that rhythm, we meet it with fight or flight…freeze or flee actions. These actions can often lead to worse outcomes than the situation that caused it. We freeze or make hasty, irrational decisions without thinking it through.

This is automatic. Our brains are literally wired to react like that. But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

One way you can practice resiliency is to practice being uncomfortable. I’m not saying you need to take ice baths or do ultra-marathons but you can do or learn something that stands outside your comfort zone.

As a leader, you’re going to be exposed to situations, events, and people that make you uncomfortable. If you place yourself outside comfort zones before you are required to do so, you’ll be in a much better place to deal with stress when it eventually comes.

Fix the Plumbing

The thing you decide that puts you out of your comfort zone may have nothing to do with work, at all. One example might be tackling a small project at your house you would never consider doing like plumbing. You’ve got a leak but rather than finding a local plumber, YouTube it and attempt the repair yourself.

I’ve found that learning something outside my training and experience forces me to expose my own ignorance but also helps me understand how I can learn something.

If your weakness is connecting with people, find ways to connect with people. Confronting unhappy customers is both an art and skill. You must have people skills and you’ll not get those skills staying cooped up in an office or surrounded by the same people.

Volunteer. There are many organizations and churches desperate for volunteers of all stripes. Talk to people…everyone. Get to know people and connect in meaningful ways. This practice will pay off in dividends when you have personnel problems.

If you want a proven script and question set to use with every interaction, you need to reach out to a Growability Coach. 

Maintain their composure and avoid destructive behavior. Any stress or anxiety experienced by the leader isn’t spread through the ranks. Understands bad experiences and only dwells long enough to squeeze out the lesson. Emotional overload reservoir.

Respect Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law dictates that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. One practice that may ward off Murphy’s impact is capping your losses through planning. No plan is a plan to fail. Analyze gaps and weaknesses in your organization or processes.

Audit your organization from time-to-time. Look at the processes in place and see what happens when stress is applied. You can have someone act like a dissatisfied customer and see how your team handles the situation. Call your organization and audit the experience. Did the call flow well? Did they handle your requests like you expected?

Create flow charts and processes for negative experience. Anticipate the bad and plan around it. This added training exposes gaps and gives your team more confidence when bad things do happen.

If you want to know how to audit your organization or want a third-party analysis of your organization, make sure to contact a Growability Coach.

Post Traumatic Growth

Negative experiences can stimulate positive change. Organizations and leaders have an opportunity explore opportunities, recognize personal strengths, and improve relationships after a bad outcome.

This type of growth that occurs after trauma is known as PTG (post traumatic growth). This phenomenon is gaining in research popularity but its existence has been long established. When the smoke clears and you’ve surveyed the damage, you’re able to rebuild or repair. What emerges should be stronger than it was previously. This is the foundation of PTG.

The elements of post traumatic growth include knowledge and emotional regulation.

Know Who You Are

Knowledge includes knowing who you are as an organization. You can have a great mission, vision, and value statement but when the going gets tough, you’ll see it in action. Your organization and team can use bad experiences to innovate in new, emerging circumstances. You also get the opportunity to grow and learn as a team. This is often termed “growing pains.”

It may be painful but it doesn’t have to be debilitating.

Stop the Train

Stop the train of a bad experience, poor outcomes, or devastating loss begins with recognizing negative emotions. When you’re going through valleys, it’s hard to see the other side. You need to change your perspective.

Recall your past successes and conjure best-case scenarios rather than obsessing over the fleeting anxiety, anger, or guilt. If you allow these emotions to make decisions, they can lead to consequences further reaching than the occasion that caused it in the first place.

Resiliency is a Process

Resilient organizations don’t just bounce back; they improve. In the midst of a devastation, they rebuild and reform better than before. Their teams are stronger, communication is streamlined, and processes are improved.

This takes time and best practices. If you want to learn what it takes to be a resilient organization, reach out to a Growability Coach so they can provide you the resources you need.

big hairy audacious goals

Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals

People who have big, hairy, audacious goals are inspiring. They can see well into the future and are able to create compelling, long-term goals that inspire action. When you look at a big, hair, audacious goal, you want to know what impact it will have on society 20 years from now.  

Big, hairy, audacious goals are compelling, long-term goals that inspire employees to take action. They are meant to energize people to implement big picture plans that could take a long time to complete.

30 Years and $10 Billion

Look at the James Webb telescope. Grand in scope and tremendous in vision, this piece of technological marvel took well over 30 years and $10 billion to develop. It is now heralded as one of the grand scientific endeavors of the 21st century.

Now, that’s a BHAG of epic proportions. To think, there are professionals who worked on the project who were not employed when the telescope made its maiden voyage. As of this writing, we are still awaiting images that will peer back 13.5 billion years. A BHAG, indeed.

Steve Job’s BHAG

Steve Jobs was giving a talk to his team. He told them about a study he found in Scientific America where they discovered the fastest and most energy-efficient animal was the condor. Condors are able to use their wingspan and adjust accordingly to make the most efficient use of wind currents. He then used this study of condors and compared it to a person on a bicycle. 

He discovered that a person on a bicycle could generate more energy than a condor. The bicycle allowed the human to travel much faster and much farther than condors all while using significantly less energy. Technology made this possible. How else could technology be used to amplify and empower human ability? 

Steve Jobs was a computer expert, not a bicycle guy. And, what he knew about computers is that they were so complex, untrained people really couldn’t access them. But, computers were great.

They had such potential to expand human ingenuity and accomplishment, yet, only a small number of people could really understand them enough to use them. This is the impulse that seeded Jobs’s big, hairy audacious goal to make computers available to everyone. 

A Steep Learning Curve

The challenge with technology is learning curves. That is a bit of a foreign concept today since most of us live in a hyperconnected world where everyone we know has a computer either as a phone, tablet, laptop, or other device.

Computers are a ubiquitous experience in our world but it wasn’t always this way. They used to be large, complex machines that required a subset of expertise to understand them. 

Steve Jobs made a big, hair audacious goal to eliminate the problem of pre-education needed to use the device. Fast forward several years later and now my 2-year-old son can turn on Paw Patrol.

3 Important Questions to Ask

Big, hair audacious goals are inspiring goals. These aren’t your typical quantitative goals you may see in department meetings. These goals address important questions like,

Why are we setting this goal?

How is it going to create abundance?

What can we do to simplify complexity?

If I can’t, as the leader of an organization, create a big, hairy, audacious goal, why do I expect anybody on my team to want to be at my organization? We don’t know where we’re going.

beyond reason

The entire point of a BHAG is creating something that doesn’t exist or fails to exist at its fullest potential. But, in order to do it, you first have to establish why it needs to be created in the first place.

The why is the foundation for the what. Your WHY has to be compelling enough to motivate your team to join you through the hills and valleys you’ll inevitably encounter.

Fundamentally, a BHAG is a goal. There is no spend endless hours and emails wordsmithing the details into a “mission statement.” The BHAG itself is the destination.

Everyone will know what the destination is; however, your job as the leader is to motivate them with the why.

President Kennedy offered little more guidance for the NASA mission to the moon other than committing to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth before the end of the decade.

That was it.

There was no other grand standing or need for follow-up press conferences. The United States was going to the moon…we just had to get there. This was as audacious as it gets.

Create Abundance

A BHAG must have value. One of the ways you’ll create value is through a goal that generates abundance for others.

Steve Jobs’ vision was set on making technology so accessible a 3-year-old could pick up any of his devices and immediately use it. He created abundance in a market that previously had none.

One way to enhance your goal is to think of what you can offer that will create abundance for others. Consider something that you offer that will enhance lives.

Your creation goes beyond leaders at the helm and instead focuses highly on the process and subsequent product. In fact, you may experience multiple iterations of business before the goal is seen.

Leaders will come and go.

Your output may change in quantity or quality but the goal remains and that should be to enhance others’ lives. You’ll not go wrong focusing outward on what you can offer to help everyone else.

Simplify the Complex

Setting large goals actually helps you clarify your position.

     –>If you know where you’re going in 20 years, it is easier to plot out what steps you need to take. You can then sit down and write out a plan on what you want to accomplish in the next 5 years.

     –>If you don’t have that data, you can create a one-year goal and break those down into quarterly goals.

Once momentum starts, that inertia generates more movement toward that goal. If you go against it or refuse to start, you’re not sowing in the right direction. 

By creating small goals, you’ll also have better forecast project creep and modify the process to put the project back between the lines.

This part of the process is the quantitative data you’ll need to succeed. The timelines, goals, and milestones you set here will predict the what, how and when your BHAG succeeds.

The Growability Big, Hair Audacious Goal (BHAG)

Our big, hairy audacious goal at Growability is to see thousands of leadership coaches located throughout the world, equipping leaders to cultivate vision, rhythm and community.

By 2040, we want to operate in a hundred cities globally and have served a hundred thousand leaders.

If you impact a hundred thousand leaders by helping those leaders cultivate vision, rhythm and community, you’re going to impact millions upon millions of lives.

There is thousands of relief programs and cities and teams, and so many people are going to be impacted if we impact a hundred thousand leaders. So that’s a big, hairy, audacious goal.

The Growability Difference

If you want help defining and reaching big, hairy, audacious goals, reach out to us. Speak with a Growability coach on how you can raise the bar for your organization and forecast amazing things into the future.

reasons why businesses fail

2 Huge Reasons Businesses Fail

There are two huge reasons that businesses fail. They either measure the wrong things or fail to measure at all. 

Metrics are critical to businesses but oftentimes the wrong things are measured or things are measured inappropriately. This is why every business owner must know two critical measure terms: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Key Performance Drivers (KPDs).

KPIs and KPDs

Simply put, KPIs are the result of what actually happened while KPDs affirm the action that brought about the KPI. 

Now, it’s critical to recognize that KPIs are things you measure, not goals. It’s just data. In fact, many may have heard the term KPI and stray as far from it as possible but when you realize it’s just data, it’s not only less scary…it’s incredible. 

The more you understand about measurement the more you’ll love it. The things I measure improve and the things I don’t decline. So, if I want to improve anything at my business or anything in my life, I need to measure. 

All About the Honey

Let’s look at honey, as an example. Honey would be the KPI and bees the KPD. KPIs are quantitative values that demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving its objectives . We can see how much honey was produced and within what timeframe. KPDs are the activities necessary to produce the KPI results. Bees are the KPDs because they produce honey. 

Now, it’s nice to know that these measurements exist but you need to understand them both more fully so they’re practical and applicable to your business. KPIs and KPDs are not only helpful pieces of data, they are critical ingredients to your success. 

There are three KPIs that should be measured: purpose, production, and profitability.

Purpose, Productivity, and Profitability

There are three Purpose KPIs. The first Purpose KPIs look directly at the customer base. They tell you how many customers you serve and how well your product or service improves the life of the customer. The second purpose KPI is about human investment and this deals more with the charitable opportunity the organization has. The third Purpose KPI measures the impact the company has on your family. 

There is a simpler way to understand the Purpose KPIs and that is by answering each of these questions for your organization: 

What do I want to measure in terms of the quality of life I bring to my customers? (customer)

What do I want to measure in terms of charity I can bring into the world? (charity)

What do I want to measure in terms of the impact that this will make on my family and future generations? (family)

Productivity KPIs measure reality. If I walk into my garden and don’t see any vegetables, it could be that I have the wrong soil, it didn’t rain, or I neglected to plant seeds. When you look at productivity there are three things that typically end up on the KPI sheet. 

Cash flow, profit-loss statements, and customer volume makeup profitability KPIs. Cash flow concerns the amount of money that came in while profit-loss statements track both income and expenses and are composed of 3 factors:

Money

New Jobs

Current Customers

Once you’ve established how much money you have coming in as well as the quantity of new jobs compared to your existing customer base, you can better understand the dynamics of your organization.

Bread and Butter

The bread and butter of your company are your customers that keep your business in existence. If I have 12 different product lines but six of those produce 80% of the income, these are my bread and butter customers. These bread and butter customers for your line of profitability, the activity that yields actual gain. 

Once you establish profitability, you want to look at profit margins. Profit margins is income divided by revenue. So, if I want to get a full picture of profitability, I need to examine all of my product or service lines. This makes more sense if we go back to the example of 12 product lines. 

Profit Margins

Each product or service line will have a profit margin so I sell let’s say a shoe on 1 and make a 10% profit margin, I keep 10 cents on every dollar but on product two I have a 40% profit margin, I’ll get to keep 40 cents for every dollar.

But, this data only tells a one-sided view. We need another view of the numbers and this is where overhead comes in. Overhead is the amount of resources associated with running a business. If overhead was 50% last year that means for every dollar spent, I kept 50 cents. My next thought would be how can I get my overhead from 50% to 49% so I can keep 51 cents for every dollar spent. 

All of this makes more sense within the context of a business model. Listen to the 12 Step Growability Model and invest some time listening to that series. You will walk away with practical steps you can take to improve the systems in your organization. 

Participation Trophies and Score Cards

Imagine playing basketball except we decided to not keep score. Everyone is going to get an award no matter the outcome. By taking away the score, you’ve deflated the motivation. If I don’t have a score, what’s the point? I mean we can play for fun, certainly but when it comes to business no one should go to work for a participation trophy but that’s exactly the culture we breed when we decide to not measure KPDs. 

Excellence isn’t an accident. Excellence is built on processes and performance. Companies can’t win using participation trophies; they need excellence and to build excellence they need to be able to measure everyone on the team. For myself and everyone in the organization to see what it takes to win, I have to build a scorecard wherein I answer at minimum these three questions:

What was the expected result?

What was the actual result? 

How does this connect to my KPIs?

Keeping Score

Score cards provide valuable feedback for everyone on the team. They can use the data to edit their flow and productivity. Your team can look at the data from projects, quarterly earnings, productivity output, or any other set of metrics to help determine the best path forward. It also helps incentivize the work. People can actually see what impact their work has on the whole.

Organizations win based on their processes and feedback. Score cards combined with dashboards give everyone the upper hand. If you want to grow your business so you can reach points of excellence, learn what to measure, and how to communicate that in the best way, you need to contact our team.