5/30, 2013
This year we surveyed more than 1,700 business owners to create the 2013 State of the Business Owner Report – the largest report ever conducted on small and midsize businesses.
In this webinar you’ll get a “behind-the-scenes” look at the data, the story, and key takeaways from some of the most successful small and midsize businesses.
The results are in – and State of The Business Owner 2013 is live. We wanted to share one of the report’s key findings. Here’s a preview of the “The Ownership Stack” – a powerful set of best practices successful business owners are using to grow their business in today’s rapidly changing economy. Business owners who followed these best practices had 59.4% greater odds of hitting their profit targets.
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You grow a business by increasing sales. That simple assumption is the default way most businesses operate – especially small businesses. While this thinking is almost always wrong, the real problem is that it can easily take you further from the two goals you’re probably really after, which are (1) increased profits and (2) to feel more in control of your business and your life.
There’s a more sound approach to reach those goals. It starts by remembering that building a business with solid fundamentals has a very high likelihood of attracting new customers (and keeping them), and that it almost never works the other way around. Adding sales and new customers into an unstable business will simply expose the weakness and dysfunction already there, leading to potentially disastrous results.
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It takes a while for obsolete ideas to die off. There’s one that I’m surprised to see is still very much in circulation. It’s a management philosophy that’s responsible for most of the dysfunction that exists in the business world. It goes like this:
1. “I’m a ” (“control freak” or “tyrant” or “type A person”)
2. “I know that about myself but I can’t change it, it’s who I am.”
3. “So I surround myself with people who aren’t like me.”
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5/21 & 5/23, 2013
We’ve said “Your business is a reflection of you” for decades. But what can you do with that? This isn’t about beating yourself up, it’s about understanding and accepting yourself to become a better leader. All businesses have dysfunction: the issue is your relationship to dysfunction. Do you invest resources to work ON it or do you work around it?