Building Momentum and the Upward Spiral

The economy is in a tough spot. Millions without jobs, a government that bickers more than they actually solve problems, investments have tanked, banks have closed…hell, even Tiger Woods has fallen from grace. With so much negativity spinning around, it can be easy to allow your inertia to take a turn for the worse. It can be easy to become jaded and start looking outward to find blame for failures.

That’s one road to take.

Another is to Build Positive Momentum and create an Upward Spiral of success. Take even the smallest wins and celebrate them. Take one sale and turn it into three sales. Look for people who are succeeding and “hang” with them. Success begets success or the old adage I prefer, “You are who you hang with”. Instead of looking for ways to cut back, look for ways to expand. Look for new areas of opportunity that may be hiding under that rock over there. By the way, expanding and looking for new opportunities doesn’t necessarily mean spending more money, it could be accomplished by a little sumpin sumpin called networking. The power of many brains thinking about solutions to a problem is almost always more effective (except in government).

I like the word “stratification”. Wikipedia refers to stratification as “…the building up of layers. Stratified is an adjective referring to the arranging of layers, and is also the past form of the verb stratify, to separate or become separated into layers.” When you think of stratification, start to picture your business this way.

For example, is your marketing stratified? I mean, do you have layers of marketing like a website, mailers, social media, a solid name in your community. All of the elements allow you to stratify your business and help you to Build Momentum towards the Upward Spiral of success.

Do you have multiple offerings that allow you to stratify your business across different market segments, or even different demographics? You should. If you’ve only got one thing and that one thing is suddenly no longer valuable, you don’t have a business anymore. Plus, by looking at the layers of your business like this you may find ways to stratify and build momentum that you hadn’t seen before. I know I’ve had some big discoveries and helped clients have some big ones too, just by thinking about my business stratification.

So, instead of watching CNN or reading all the depressing crap in the papers, focus on your successes. Write ‘em down. Multiply them and trend towards the upward spiral. You’ll be better off for it and so will everyone around you.

-Brian

Goals, Planning and REALLY Planning

Every January I put my pencil to the pad and start thinking of what I want to achieve in the new year. I look back at what I wanted to achieve in the previous year. Did I make it happen? What was left over? What worked that I can do more of? What failed miserably and won’t be repeated?

I learn a lot about myself and my business when I do this. And it starts my brain thinking about how to achieve these things. My plans change. My goals need adjusting. But this start IS important.

A lot of business owners I work with fail to do this. Fail to plan for the year ahead and beyond. And often, it’s these very business owners who find themselves in a tight spot. Their vision is missing. How can you expect to run a successful business without vision. Here’s an idea; next time you go out for a drive, blindfold yourself first. Then go ahead and put the car in drive (or first for you manual folks) and see how far into the future you are able to make it. Obviously, not very far. This may be a bit of a tired analogy for some, but the truth is, this is EXACTLY what many business owners are doing every day. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

By just writing down what you expect, hope and want to achieve, you will be surprised at how much of it you actually achieve.

So what’s on my list for the year? Well, I’m thinking of starting a new blog. A more personal blog where I discuss things that I like in general. Some business, some sports, some nerdy/techy stuff, some current events; a little bit of everything. And to make it happen, I’ve written it down. Therefore sealing my fate.

A word of caution though. Writing it down is a GREAT start. But it’s just a start. Start with a list of goals, then break them down into smaller, more accomplishable goals. This way you can actually get closer to your larger goal every day, with the completion of a smaller, more manageable goal.

Feeling disgruntled? Frustrated? Stuck in the mud? If you start to feel as though you aren’t making any forward progress, revisit the list. Rethink your goals. Re-examine what it is you REALLY WANT to accomplish. The adjust your goals accordingly.

Still not working? How about an inspirational read? There are a bunch of good ones out there. Here are a couple I know are good, practical and worth reading multiple times (especially when you are in one of these moods where you are just fed up!)

Gary Vaynerchuk, of wine TV fame, has a book out that is easy to read and motivational as hell. You can get Crush It here (link redirects to Amazon.com) (and no, I am not a paid endorser or anything). He’s managed to land a 10 book deal as well as land millions of viewers and fans on his wineTV blog site. This guy is smart.

Napoleon Hill wrote the quintessential entrepreneur’s motivational book with Think and Grow Rich. If you haven’t already read this book, you can get it here. (again, no affiliation with Napoleon Hill’s estate or anything). If you have read it, do yourself a favor and read it again. This book does an excellent job of reminding you why you became a business owner in the first place.

Limitation, What Limitations?

I had the pleasure of meeting Nelson Marquina, PhD today. He is doing some amazingly innovative things with lasers in the health care field.  Dr. Marquina is a physicist who once worked with NASA and has now turned his passion for the laser into a life mission.  He actually created a laser (this is what physicists do for fun) that is unlike any other laser on the planet.  He is using this “pulse laser” (which pulses at up to 80,000 pulses per second!) to treat every type of ailment imaginable at the mitochondrial (cellular) level.   These ailments include everything from muscle, joint and tendon injuries, to liver and kidney diseases, to hair loss.  He has even successfully treated patients in Peru with life threatening heart conditions which some of his peers found unbelievable.  This is truly ground breaking stuff.

Now what does this have to do with you?  Everything.  You see, Dr. Marquina has been fighting against all odds for most of his career.  He is constantly being told that he cannot achieve what he is setting out to do, even when his data conclusively proves it!  The FDA and other regulatory agencies won’t even let him preform clinical trials in the U.S., so he travels to Peru where his work is literally saving lives.

The point is, there are no limitations.  The only limitations to human achievement are those that you allow yourself to believe.  The human mind, along with willpower, imagination, determination and hard work- can achieve anything.

Think about it, before the Wright brothers flew their first airplane, everyone said it couldn’t be done.  Even close friends and relatives of the Wright brothers said they were crazy.

It used to be, if you lost a limb, you were confined to a wheel chair for the rest of your life.  But that wasn’t good enough, and now there are artificial limbs that allow amputees to run marathons and participate in competitive sporting events.  Unbelievable, the human spirit.

We’ve gone from thatch huts to skyscrapers, wooden canoes to jet boats capable of 200mph+, not flying at all to landing on the moon, the candle to light bulbs that last 5 years and up, stone tables to teraflops of information available in a matter of seconds.

There are no limitations to what you can achieve, if you put your mind to it.  Don’t have all the pieces?  Don’t be discouraged.  Build from what you have and search out other resources to help you fill in the gaps.  The important thing is to keep pushing forward.  Dr. Marquina may discover a way to fight cancer, heal muscle, joint, tendon, and ligament injuries, even fix previously irreversible spinal injuries.  But if he had given up when the powers that be told him he couldn’t do that, all of that would be lost.  The key is to persevere in the face of adversity.  See a setback as an opportunity for advancement.  Study failures to glean information about how to improve results in the future.

Be passionate about what you do, no matter what you do, and you will see that there are no limitations to what you can achieve.

-Brian Forrester

Authenticity In a Skeptical World

Wikipedia defines Authenticity as “The quality of being genuine or not corrupted from the original” but what does that mean. On a more fundamental level as humans, we all have built in right or wrong meters. You know when you are doing something bad, dishonest, or wrong. Yet I see so many companies that have an Authenticity shortage.

Authenticity is corruptible from the top down, so it’s fixable, and more importantly, preventable from the top down too. This means that, as a business owner, the responsibility to stay genuine and, to use the parlance of our times, to ‘keep it real,’ rests squarely on your shoulders.

You know when you advertise something, or make an offer, whether or not it’s true or disingenuous. It can be tempting to throw in “not quite true” statements that are “almost” factual because, hey, these statements make you, your company and your offering sound better. The issue is that they aren’t true, and these statements are risky business. They have the potential to tarnish your reputation and hurt your business rather than to improve it (which is ironic because the reason you tell these little white lies is presumably to grow your business…).

Take a good look at your business. Remember why you started it. Remember what you love about it. Remember what you want other people to love about it. Use that passion to promote your business, because that passion is real, that passion is genuine, and that passion will keep you authentic in our ever more skeptical business landscape.

-Brian Forrester