Category Archives: Business Growth

Find time Today and for the Future

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As you’re reading this I hope this finds you well. How was your Canada Day? I hope it was relaxing. This day means a lot of things to many different people but for me besides getting a chance to kick back and celebrate the birthday of one of the greatest countries on earth, I like to remind myself how wonderful it is to be in a country where anyone with a dream and a product or service that people need and can afford can compete in the free enterprise system.

This week I want to address an issue I’ve heard leading up to this holiday which is the question of time. I’ve heard this so many times: “but I don’t have time for that”. While it’s true that time is limited, time is our most precious and limited resource, when I start talking to people about why they don’t have enough time, the picture becomes a little clearer as to how they could take their power back and really clean their calendar. I’m going to share with you some of my real time-saving strategies, because ultimately if it’s not on your calendar and if it’s not a routine or a ritual in your life, it will not come into fruition. Whatever you want to create, whether it’s an incredible healthy body or a successful business or whatever it might be – whatever you want to create requires time to be scheduled in your calendar and requires you to actually show up!

If your calendar is full of all kinds of other stuff from other people you’re never going to find time for you, and unfortunately you’re just going to slide into a mediocre boring life. You will become so resentful that you either just resign and say that’s just the way life is, or you get fired up and you hit a bottom and you say I’m never going to let this happen again. Maybe you’re at that place where you’re feeling frustrated that you want to do that creative project or work on your exercise and diet but just don’t have the time. If your ambition is to become successful, time shrinks the more successful you become. I found I had more time when just getting started than I do now with all these pressures and different deadlines. The key is to get your time and calendar right, and here’s how you got to do it. It’s very simple:

Learn to say NO: That’s the word you want to learn. No is how you detox your calendar, because if you look at your calendar and all the time that you’re spending with other people or on projects that you don’t want to be on, you would probably be shocked. Or if you’re honest, how much time are you spending on Netflix, HBO, twitter, Instagram, Facebook, doing things where you just let time pass by? People ask me all the time, how do you manage all those companies and still find time to travel, golf, give back to students and young entrepreneurs? It’s because I’ve become really good at saying the word no to distractions. When you have a hard time saying no, there’s usually two emotional issues. The first one is being okay with letting people down from time to time. You can do this without being out of integrity by being in communication with that person and re-negotiating the timing of when you can be present with them. The other emotional issue is when you create time to work on your projects, usually you’ve been spending so much time focusing on other people that there’s usually unfelt negative emotions inside you that you’ve been running from such as fear, guilt, or anger. We got to work on those emotions, because ultimately if you want to work on yourself and really take your business to the next level, exercise and take your body to the next level, or take your relationship to the next level, you’re going to have to work on yourself.
When you clear your calendar, all those emotions are going to well up, mainly the emotion of fear. Fear of whether it’s going to work out or fear if whether you’re good enough. Then we get to the real issue, which is not time, but rather the negative emotions and fear. How well you manage unfelt negative emotions and fear will determine the quality of your life. If you want to detox your calendar, believe in yourself and develop a daily ritual or a behavior every single day that leans you in the direction of getting all of your goals met.

For me, I need to read and do yoga or work on my body every single day. I always struggled with the time to do both with all the pre bedtime routines so I found that I can perform some stretches while reading every night before I go to sleep. It gives me time to distress and tune out all the distractions before bed so I can have a sound sleep and be recharged for what always seems to be a powerful day. You want to set yourself up so that you can actually do the behaviors and the rituals that make you the most fulfilled.

With that said, that would be my advice for you this week. Really take your calendar back to get the business results you want, the body you want, the relationship you want and ultimately the life you want.

Yours,

Frank.

The Art of Doing

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Leading a company takes a lot of guts and hard work. It starts with having a vision, and an idea that you’re passionate about but it doesn’t stop there. You must assemble a team, and bring that concept to life. The ability to successfully execute your vision or idea is what separates the dreamers from the entrepreneurs.

Here are some key qualities that every good leader should possess, and learn practicing every day:

Honesty

Your business and its employees are a reflection of yourself, and if you make honest and ethical behavior a key value, your team will follow suit. Honesty and Integrity is everything. Be as transparent as you can with your team to ensure success.

Delegating:

As a leader you must learn to delegate tasks accordingly and in the right way. Your brand’s vision is everything and it is essential to creating a trust with your team to help progress to the next level.

As things continue to grow for your company, more and more work will begin to pile up, and the more you stretch yourself thin, the lower the quality of your work will become, and the less you will produce great results. In addition, you want to keep your team motivated towards the continued success of the company, and keep the energy levels up. Keep the office mood a fine balance between productivity and playfulness.

Confidence

Confidence is key to leading the success of any business. It’s very important to keep your confidence at a high level especially when things are going in a downward spiral. Your team will look to you for support and leadership to help pick things up. There’s nothing worse than a leader who’s lost all confidence in his/her abilities.

Communication

“Miscommunication leads to complication.” I’m sure you understand where I’m going with this. Knowing what you want accomplished may seem clear in your head, but not always to everyone else. Being able to clearly describe what you want done is extremely important. If you can’t relate your vision to your team, you won’t all be working towards the same goal.

Ability to Inspire

This is very important. Creating a business often involves a bit of forecasting and speaking things into existence. Do we all know what the future holds? Probably not. But it’s important to write your goals down and work towards them. Especially in the beginning stages of a startup, inspiring your team to see the vision of the successes to come is essential to success. Make your team feel invested in the accomplishments of the company. Being able to inspire your team is great for focusing on the future goals, but it is also important for the current issues. It is your job to keep spirits up, and that begins with an appreciation for the hard work.

I wish you a great and productive week.

Frank.

Work & Life Balance

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Here in Canada we’ve just had our family day. A day off in February for us to spend time with or without family. If you’re reading this, I hope that you had a great weekend. As I think, life gets so crazy and busy sometimes that we don’t have any time to spend valuable time with our loved ones. As I’ve grown through my professional carer, I’ve always found that it’s important to find balance. Especially, in your business and personal relationships.

Life is a cycle and in order for positive things to happen in your life you must ensure that you put effort in all things that matter to you. It’s never a good idea to bring personal situations in to your work place. Nor is it better to bring work back home. In my career, I’ve found that separating the both has helped me sustain a healthy relationship between both.

I’ve come to understand that the workplace is also a family. We spend at least 8 hours a day around fellow employees 5 days a week. Sometimes more than our immediate family. So do what you can to maintain healthy relationships at work. The better your relationships are at work, the happier and more productive we’re going to be. Good working relationships give us several other benefits. Work is more enjoyable when we have good relationships with those around us. We’re more innovative and creative. I find that good relationships give us freedom, instead of spending time and energy overcoming the problems associated with negative relationships, we can, instead, focus on opportunities.

So as you start another work week remember to do what you love, and love what you do, with the people that you love.  Make your career your vocation. Your calling, something that keeps you excited for the next day.

Have a great week.

Frank.

Find Out What’s Important in 2015

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1325784419new-years-resolutionLet’s be serious – there is no doubt going to be an overabundance in blog posts detailing the importance of setting resolutions for the new year. Be it lose weight, get a promotion, go traveling or anything in between, resolutions are something that most of us set at this time of year.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll know that last year I had mentioned that New Year’s resolutions are something that I’m not a big fan of. Personally, I find that this time of year has people motivated to make this year all their own, but then usually give up by February (gyms are the perfect example of this). I believe that you shouldn’t have to wait for a new year to motivate you to get what you want. You should always be striving to be the best person that you can be, and taking the proper steps in order to reach that goal.

I think it’s much better to use this time of year to set some guidelines for the bigger picture. I feel that the whole point of resolutions is to start thinking about areas of your life that you want to improve. Once you’ve figured out what exactly needs changing, it’s dramatically easier to make a list of objectives that you need to accomplish to reach your final destination. The main difference between setting a goal and a resolution is essentially the thought that you put into them.

This of course doesn’t mean that I’m completely against New Year’s resolutions though. I’ve known many people who don’t even state a resolution unless they’re completely adamant about accomplishing it. The difference between these people and those who I’ve known to not accomplish them is the fact that they turn these into long-term goals – much like I stated above.

And while the goals I’ve discussed are all personal, there’s no reason that they can’t be adapted for growing your business. Be it with a specific sales target, company revenue or anything else, don’t simply make a bold statement to your employees without backing it up. Rather, make them into a long term goal, and discuss with your team what it will take to reach these goals.

No matter how you do it, make sure that you do everything you can to grow personally, and professionally in 2015.

Adapt When Your Plans Fall Through

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Plan-A-Plan-B-change-600x439If you went to the mall this past weekend (or anytime this month really) then you’ve been elbow to elbow trying to get some last minute shopping done. This could have all been easily avoided of course if you had just made a plan beforehand and then tackled it strategically.

The interesting part is that not everyone leaves all of their shopping to the last minute on purpose. I know many people who make detailed shopping plans that list everything from who the gift is for, to where they’ll buy the gift and even the exact price. With such a detailed plan, you would assume that getting everything done would be simple since all you have to do is tackle each piece one at a time. Things don’t always go as planned though, and even the most detailed plan can fall apart due to unforeseen circumstances…. See what I’m getting at?

Most entrepreneurs easily recognize this scenario, as a detailed business plan or planned acquisition can fall apart, leaving you scrambling to find alternatives if you’re ill prepared. Cases like this is where you need to be adaptable enough to find other solutions, instead of staying stuck on what could have been. But how?

Always Have A Contingency Plan – No matter how bullet proof a plan may appear to be, you always always need to have an ace up your sleeve. There have been many instances where an organization has been brought to their knees because they had all their hopes on a major acquisition or something similar, only to have it fall through. In essence, since these organizations thought that this one particular action item in a plan would pan out and essentially set them up for success, enough to the point where they don’t even attempt to get new business. Once things fall through, there’s a period of time where everything slows down because you need to build up momentum again and get over the failure – which not everyone does. This is where the contingency plan is useful, because you’ve already detailed what you need to do in the worst case scenario. All that’s left afterwards is to follow that plan.

Don’t “Fall In Love” And Rush In – An old Elvis song says “Only fools rush in”, and I think this ties in nicely with the previous point because the reason a lot of companies don’t have a back-up plan is because they’re completely in love with the potential ROI one of their created plans has to offer, and blindly chase it without considering the downsides. I’m not saying that being determined on a certain item is a bad thing, but I am saying that you need to be realistic about certain things. Get your team together and objectively assess whether or not this plan can come to fruition, and if you’ll have to change details that you might have been “in love” with.

At the end of the day, you can’t depend on anything realistically working out for you. Even those who work their tails off can have things blow up on them. It’s in these moments though that true leadership shines, as how you navigate these stormy seas can sometimes determine your organization’s success.

Mastering Efficiency For Better Business

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2594377_origThis past week I had the pleasure of taking part of an internal strategy summit with all of the Presidents of the different Wish Group companies, as well as attending our quarterly meeting with all of the companies. Admittedly, one of the challenges that we face with having so many different companies under one umbrella is a unified focus. While I’m perfectly happy with the success of each company all they have achieved, I adamantly believe that if all of the companies combine our synergies, we can become a much more efficient unit.

In fact, the heavy focus of this quarterly meeting was on efficiency. As with all of our meetings, we pick one theme and message to drive home to the team and our leaders felt that efficiency was certainly something that any company can always improve on. As such, from both our strategy summit and our quarterly meeting, here is what we are doing to increase our efficiency that can be applied to any company.

Re-examine How Things Currently Work – The first step towards making anything more efficient is taking an honest look at how things are currently working. I say honest because if you keep telling yourself that everything is perfect, nothing will ever improve. Examine some of your shortcomings and try to assess what mechanics you can put in place to streamline processes that will make you work smarter.

Assembly Line Principle – One of the analogies that we used to drive home efficiency is one of the most successful business efficiency success stories of all time – the assembly line. Henry Ford was famous for taking a long, complex process and turning it into something that made it significantly easier to produce more cars in less time. The main idea behind this was to have staff focus on using their strengths, instead of spreading them thin by trying to do everything. This is incredibly difficult at a start up company as everyone is always wearing multiple hats, but try and discover what tasks your team members excel at and whenever possible give them those tasks.

Trust Your Team – Tying into the previous point, once you’ve discovered what areas your team members are adept at, trust them to complete their task. If you’re constantly worrying about the kind of work your team is doing, it’ll leave less time for you to focus on running your business. Have faith that your team will always produce the best work possible.

I’m certain that efficiency is always top of mind for your company, so I’m curious to know what tasks you think you could be doing more efficiently, and what you want to improve on in your company.

“Thanks For All Your Hard Work”

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86539528When you’re sucked into the day to day of running your business, it becomes far too easy to let some things slip through the crack. Administrative tasks, maybe a deadline on a project…but these things you can recover from. What you should NEVER let fall through the cracks is how much you appreciate your employees.

Your employees are the backbone of your company. Whether they’re in sales or operations, you wouldn’t have a business without them. You might be shaking your head in agreement, but I challenge you to remember the last time that you truly appreciated a stand out employee of yours. Taking the time out of your day to praise your employees can make the world of difference to them. Here’s why I think that appreciating your employees will work wonders for your company:

They’ll Work Harder – This should be an obvious point. If you never appreciate how hard your staff member’s work, they’ll eventually stop working hard for you. Everyone works hard for different reasons. Some work hard because they want to shine better than everyone else, while others truly believe in the growth of the company. It’s critical that you get to know your employees and what motivates them. Everyone takes appreciation in a different way, so you can’t assume that just telling one person “good work” will suffice. Take the time to examine how exactly their work has helped the business, and explain the positive impact to them. Doing this will make your appreciation towards them seem much more sincere.

They’ll Feel Needed – Have you ever worked at a company where you felt expendable? Those are the worst possible conditions to stay motivated in because you’ll feel that no matter how hard you work, it won’t make a bit of difference since you don’t think that your employer needs you. This is easily the most important reason to take the time to praise your employees, because they will understand exactly how all of those long hours are helping the company and having a positive impact. This is also the time where you can work in some mentorship with your staff, as they’ll not only be looking at your for guidance when they do things right, but also for some advice on how to always do things right.

If your staff feels needed at your company, they’ll want to stay at your company AND work hard to ensure successful business growth. It may look like these points can stand on their own, but it’s when you do a combination of all this appreciation towards your employees that you’ll really see your business grow and prosper.

A Successful Business Isn’t A Dash To The Finish

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SCOTIABANK - Starting line shotThis past weekend in Toronto was the Scotiabank Waterfront Marathon that had over 25,000 participants, with a few here in the Wish Group participating as well. Even though I run every now and then and do play hockey, I have to commend runners because it’s really an entirely different beast than most sports. Where hockey is tough, fast and furious, I find that long distance running is slower but a lot more mentally involved. It’s for this reason that I think long distance running can teach entrepreneurs many practical lessons about running their business.

Keep A Steady Pace – This is probably the hardest lesson to learn, both for runners and business owners. While a marathon is technically a race, it’s different in terms that you can’t sprint for 42 kilometers straight right from the get go. You need to find a pace that you can maintain for the duration of the run, one that won’t burn you out but at the same time lets you set a good time. Clearly this is the same with business growth. Your business won’t grow exponentially overnight. It takes a lot of time, and you need to make the right decisions to ensure success. Once you do though, you’ll be able to watch your company grow at a steady pace.

Move Past The Walls – All of the runners I’ve spoken to have always mentioned “the wall”. It’s the mental phenomenon where you feel like you can’t continue anymore, that you don’t know why you wanted to do this in the first place, and that you can’t make it to the finish and you want to give up more than anything. How many times have you thought something similar when things aren’t going so well with your business? What’s important to realize is that the runners DO surpass that wall by believing in what they do and staying determined in reaching the finish line. There is never really a “finish line” for entrepreneurs, but that’s why I’m a firm believer in setting goals. You can consider these goals that you set as mini finish lines and just keep moving from one to the next.

Keep Improving – The best thing about running is that you set new best times for yourself and then you have a new goal to train towards, which may seem impossible the first time to set a personal best. However, with hard work you’ll be able to overcome that. See where I’m going with this? It really speaks for itself, but once you have an incredibly success quarter or year it only makes sense that you want to beat that number the next year – no matter how difficult it may seem.

Do You Treat Success Like Turkey And Pumpkin Pie?

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o-CANADA-THANKSGIVING-2012-facebookI hope that everyone enjoyed time with their family during Thanksgiving and that everyone had a chance to eat to their heart’s content. I have a very soft spot for pumpkin pie and as such I happen to over indulge a bit over the past weekend, along with a bunch of other food. If it’s in abundance, it’s the time to enjoy it as much as you can, correct?

I don’t think I need to tell you the consequences of enjoying too much pie, but I’ve found that many business owners treat success the same way as Thanksgiving treats – they gorge themselves on it without thinking of the consequences of the future. Here are some things to consider when it comes to celebrating your success:

Success Isn’t Given, It’s Created – It’s always nice to not be the host during Thanksgiving every now and then because it means that you’re not the one who is preparing the food. But just because it was handed to you doesn’t mean that it didn’t take hard work to make it happen. Don’t get lazy once your company starts seeing a lot of success, because it won’t always come as easily to you. You shouldn’t depend on success being given to you, you ALWAYS need to work hard and earn it.

Save Some For Later… – I don’t think I need to tell you, but I hope that once your company starts seeing financial success that you’re not spending it on unnecessary and extravagant expenses. There’s hardly any worse feeling than realizing that all of this infamous pie is gone, so imagine how it must feel when you realize that enjoying too much of your financial success and you’re almost back where you started or worse. It’s a good habit to keep an ongoing tally of your success and budget, and make sure that you’re properly investing in areas of your company that will ensure growth.

…But Still Enjoy It – Of course, we’re only human so don’t take this as me simply telling you to not enjoy your success. If your team worked hard to land an account, or your business has been consistently growing for a few months, treat your team and show them that this success was entirely possible because of their hard work and dedication. As with everything in life, balance is important. Be responsible with your celebrations.

It’s always tempting to go for more and want more, but as long as you’re responsible about how you do it, there’s nothing wrong with indulging every now and then.

Build A Relationship With Your Prospects

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build-relationshipWhen you’re selling to potential customers, I sincerely hope you’re not taking a “one night stand” approach with them, for lack of a better term. As always, this was a point I touched on in my last blog post that I really want to elaborate on. No one wants to be sold to, which shouldn’t be a surprise to people anymore. The question then, is how do you sell to people without selling to them? The answer is to build a potentially long lasting relationship with them.

There are many benefits to establishing a relationship with your prospects, but the most obvious advantage is the fact that they’ll trust you, and people are more accepting of products and services being offered to them from people that they trust. Here are some insights to help you keep a personal touch with potential customers.

Don’t Treat Them Like a Target – Stop the sales pitch and start a conversation. In order to build a sincere and serious relationship, you need to have real conversations with people. That means that your sales pitch can’t sound ANYTHING like a sales pitch. Even if you’re just having a conversation, the instant that anyone thinks you’re trying to sell them something it’s over. Talk with them, find out their problems and treat them like real people.

Take Genuine Interest In Them – Taking the last point a little further, don’t feign interest in something a prospect brings up just to impress them. A critical part of building a relationship with people is that you have to be yourself. I know it’s cliché, but you shouldn’t have to put on a “sales persona” every time you talk with a potential customer – in fact, that’s probably the WORST thing you can do. Even though you may think that you might be doing a good job feigning interest, I guarantee that the person you’re speaking with knows and are just politely playing along. Only take an interest in topics that are of actual interest to you, and you’ll get a much better response.

Take Notes And Follow Up – When you’re talking with potential customers, a habit you should already be into is taking notes while you’re chatting. But try and take some notes on comments they make that might be interesting later, like if they mention they’ll be away on vacation or mention they’ll be out of the office to see their child in a play. When you follow up with them and bring up these little anecdotes, you’ll definitely stand out.

What kind of techniques do you use to build a genuine relationship with potential customers? I look forward to your feedback in the comments.