Tuesday, February 9, 2010

A Continuation Making Sure Your Ladder Is Against The Right Wall

This is a continuation of the previous blog titled: 'Make Sure Your Ladder Is Leaning Against The Right Wall.'

The fourth step is building a team: The key focus here is to attract and build a team of people whose gifts, insights, and strengths are different but synergistic to yours. They should add what you can't provide, and have experience different to yours. Choose people who will challenge and expand your thinking. Team members don't need to be employees. In fact, it's often better to develop a strategic alliance of independent team members, each of whom can contribute their own expertise, and bring new perspectives.

Remember too that a fully aligned team takes time to form. Teamwork develops best when people feel they are valued, are willing participants, and operate within a supportive environment. Seek every opportunity to develop open communication. And most importantly build mutual trust. The process of building an effective team will lead you to engage in self-examination and ask yourself critical questions. Particularly to identify how you can become a better leader. Its one skill to lead a team of employees, it is leadership of a higher order to lead a collaborative team of independent people. The key here is to work harder on self-development than you do on business development.

The fifth step is creating synergy: Synergy is where 'magic' happens. Most businesses fail to achieve their full potential. Often it's because the person who owns the business is skilled at their technical work but doesn't truly know how to build a business that works with or without him or her. The key is to work 'on' the business where possible; not 'in' the business, learning how to leverage the skills of the team so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Synergy is a result of listening, building mutual trust, tuning into your intuition, being flexible, having compassion, and a total commitment to action.

The sixth step is achieving results: although up to ninety percent of new start-ups fail within one to five years they often do so because they haven't made the necessary distinctions that distinguish them from others. Optimal results are achieved by ensuring you spend a significant percentage of your time on whatever are the measurable revenue producing activities in your field, and delegating or outsourcing everything else you can.

In life we choose to either have reasons or results. Commit yourself to engage and move boldly forward, embrace a willingness to make mistakes, and don't become frozen with fear. When you decide to become an entrepreneur and to play the game of business some days will be testing and some days will be triumphant. However spectacular results will occur as you fully focus on creating success in your niche and when all the elements of the model are in place.

Remember that scarcity only exists in the mind. The universe is designed to deliver abundance when we follow universal laws. Don't deviate. Always define, refine, and refocus. Results will then occur at a obtained tangent to your stated intention, because when you plan, commit and take action on your plan, its like dropping a pebble into a pond, the ripples spread and have far reaching effects well beyond what you may dream. All that's left is to celebrate your success.

"The process for establishing a successful business is: find a master, together identify a niche, learn how to leverage that niche, develop a team; with that team generate the power of synergy, then create results." - D.C. Cordova of Excellerated Learning Systems. This article is based on a concept taught in the 'Money and You' seminar facilitated by Robert Kiyosaki and Blair Singer.

To Your Success,
Lloyd Dobson

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