Category Archives: Success & Inspiration

Success & Inspiration from the world of Business.

Developing Your People

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One of the most important roles as a leader is to develop your people into the best that they can be. Development actually starts the day you first meet them and should never stop. Every day is a chance to learn not just about yourself, but those you work collectively with to achieve your goals.

People are your best resource. They can grow your company for the better or for the worse. Because most managers normally progress up through the ranks, they believe they really know and understand people. Successful managers, just like successful people have the ability to adapt their management style to each person who reports to them.

It’s important to understand and analyze your team by taking a look at their development levels. (Self Reliant, Independent, Intermediate, Dependent). As you know, people tend to grow so its your job to lead and be the guide to your people’s success. One leadership/management style that’s assisted in my company’s growth is empowering my employees to do better. Allowing a person to identify, define, manage and plan their activities is very effective – especially to those who are self reliant.

Coach your team all the time regardless of their development level. Focus on improving techniques by reinforcing the principles that you instilled when they were first hired. Remove any interference to keep your team focused and productive.

Here are my top 5 elements to Developing your team:

1) Goal Clarity – Members must understand the team goals and commit their best efforts to achieving them.

2) Recognition/Cooperation – There must be an awareness of each member’s personal strength to the team. Members must be willing to cooperate with one another and make their contributions accordingly.

3) Role Clarity – Responsibilities and expectations for members are clearly spelled out, communicated and acknowledges. Responsibilities are openly discussed and questions clarified.

4) Trust – Members respect the competence of one another, trust and support each other and will come to the aid of a member when problems arise.

5) What’s Important Now! – The leaders keep members focused on what’s important to be successful now. Unnecessary activities are eliminated and the team is sheltered from outside distractions as much as possible.

Hope this helps. Always remember that ‘Knowledge without action is useless!’

Frank.

Success is an Iceberg

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People sometimes think that success does not take hard work and persistence and speaking from experience it takes much more than that.

For example, take a look at the structure of an Iceberg that floats in the water. Only a small fraction of an iceberg is visible above the water line, whereas the larger part of an iceberg is hidden beneath the water. Everyone of us can see the outcome of a person’s actions and most of their accomplishments, whereas the efforts that were necessary to achieve such an outcome remain hidden and unnoticed. The majority of people tend to only see the great outcome that a successful person has achieved throughout their lives. These achievements blind us so that we often are not even aware of the huge efforts that were necessary to make these accomplishments possible.

The “Iceberg Theory of Success” helps us to realize that every famous or extraordinary successful person had to invest a lot of effort and work until this person achieved his/her goals. Having this in mind we can avoid having too high expectations towards an outcome that we want to achieve, but it also allows us to be more persistent, as we can clarify ourselves that we have to do “whatever it takes” to succeed. With that said, the next time you see a famous person or any other successful person you should try to direct your focus to the efforts that this person had to make in order to achieve his/her accomplishments. If you are willing to take risks, focus, create goals, be persistent, fail and get yourself back up, take massive action, sacrifice every day, build good habits and most of all – work hard. You will be successful!

Have a great week!

Frank.

IceBerg

The Power of Positive Thinking

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The Power of Positive thinking is quite real. In fact, it’s all that gets me by, especially on bad days. Let’s be frank. There were days when I began my journey where I thought to myself “Am I on the right path?”, or when I was studying for an important test and thought to myself “I think I’m going to fail”.

One thing that’s always helped me while continuing on this journey called life, is that when the going gets tough, maintaining positivity has always pushed me through. Especially in sales. Sales can be a very hard task, especially if you’ve just started.

Optimism

Good selling requires that you understand the product well and work as hard as you can to meet the customer’s need. But before everything, the secret of a good salesperson is about what goes on inside their head. Selling is an attitude. It’s how you think and feel. It’s about your whole approach to yourself, your company, your products and of course your customers. All of this can be summed up in three words: Confidence, pride and care.

A positive person anticipates happiness, health and success, and believes he or she can overcome any obstacle and difficulty.Please note that positive thinking is not accepted by everyone. Some, consider it as nonsense, and discourage people who follow it, but there is a growing number of people, who accept positive thinking as a fact, and believe in its effectiveness.

To use it in your life, you need more than just to be aware of its existence. You need to adopt the attitude of positive thinking in everything you do. Trust me, it will only steer you in the right direction.

Frank.

What DRIVES You to Succeed?

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As we embark another week, I couldn’t help but look outside and see another SNOW day in Toronto. The shovelling, the treks in the 2 feet snow all seems a lot of fun right? Well, I think so. One thing I noticed while travelling for another day’s work was that many people either looked very happy to see the snow, or really angry that there was another day of bad weather and slushy sidewalks while commuting to work.

I couldn’t help but think to myself,does everyone’s place of business care about how or whether or not they will come in to work? For me, it’s always about Safety first. Communicating, and establishing an amazing rapport with my employees. I’ve heard many stories about companies forcing their employees to come in to work regardless of their location, personal issues or weather conditions and I think that’s terrible. As a company, it’s important to understand that your employees are your driving force! They are the front line in our daily battles. If they are not happy and successful, then most likely your company will not be either. So if you’re a business owner or manager, I have one word of advice: LISTEN.

At the end of the day we all have goals. I do, you do, and your fellow employees do too! So as you embark on another work day I have shared this image below as a daily reminder and I hope you can agree.

WorkForACompanyThatCares

Sharing is caring,

Frank.

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.

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.

How To Learn From Your Successes

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Celebrate-SuccessMost people tell you to learn from your failures. I’m saying that it’s important to reflect on your failures to understand where you went wrong, and I’ve even talked about it in great length in the past, but it’s equally important to focus on your successes too.

While failure can teach you what NOT to do next time, success teaches you about what works and what you need to continue to do. However, don’t be blinded by success and forget that things can and will change, and you’ll need to adapt. Next time you close a deal or make a decision that grows your bottom-line, keep these tips in mind to continue your winning-streak.

Self-Reflect and Give Credit – When it comes to failure, we often look elsewhere to determine how something went wrong. But when it comes to success, we often credit ourselves. Reflect on what you did well and when it is appropriate apply the same methods. Equally as important, give credit where credit is due. Key players in your success need to be acknowledged and appreciated. It’s not only best practice but it will also help motivate your employees to drive success in the future.

That’s Good But It Could Be Great – Yes, you’ve accomplished something great but there is always something you could have done better. Pick apart the process of your success and try to find areas of improvement to make your next move stronger. It may be the timing of your deal or not negotiating enough. Either way, dig deeper.

Discuss Success With Your Team – Gather feedback from your team to ensure you have a rounded perspective. What you think may have went well, may have been perceived differently from your team. Engage in active listening when receiving feedback and let your guard down. Allowing your team to participate in the construction of future success will help grow a stronger team with commitment to your future action plan.

Celebrate Your Success – Don’t forget to celebrate. The team has worked so hard for this and you all deserve some fun. If you’re consistently successful but you never get to enjoy it, your success won’t be sustainable. Employees don’t want to work in a team where their success is not rewarded while being pushed to grow future success. Make hard work worth it – reward yourself and your team.

Overall, don’t be blinded by success but remember to enjoy it. Every milestone in your company can be learned from so it’s important to take the time to recognize it.  Whether it is success or failure, get to the root cause of it with your team.

The Challenges of Executing and Delivering

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Wish_Group_Summer_ReunionWhether you only have one employee or 50 employees, execution will always be difficult. By execution I mean of course the way that you are completing tasks that will grow your business, and deliver positive results either to your leadership in the company or to yourself.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, the Wish Group went away for our bi-annual team building trip a couple of weeks ago. During these trips we like to have an overall theme for the event that will put a focus on the learning we’ll accomplish, with this year’s theme being execution.

The main goal for these trips is of course team building, but taking the time to discuss challenges and triumphs with your team is also an excellent way of doing that. When it comes to executing, we focused on four different areas that were loosely based on the four disciplines of execution, with a spotlight on sales of course:

Make Important Goals – The only way to achieve great success is to make goals that you can focus on. It may sound simple, but without a goal to focus on you simply won’t have the same drive that other sales people or companies have. One of the tasks we asked everyone at our Summer Reunion to complete is to write down their Wildly Important Goals for the year. This first step is really what sets the tone for how you’ll achieve success, since it’s important to actually define what success means to you!

Define Your Lead Measures – Even if you have a goal, what’s the point if you don’t have a practical way of reaching it? I put an emphasis on practical because it’s common to rush towards a goal instead of tackling it strategically. The best way I can explain this is with a common weight loss analogy. Your important goal may be to lose 50 pounds, but you can’t just make this goal and hope for the best. You’ll be keeping track of how much exercise you’re doing daily and even how many calories you’re taking in. The same thing applies to your sales team. Sure, they want to close a certain amount of deals, but victory lies in preparation. They’ll need to keep track of who they’re contacting, what prospects make the most sense to reach out to and what hasn’t been working for them in the past, just as a few examples.

Track Your Progress – It’s hard to admit, but there are only winners and losers when it comes to sales and business. People don’t pay to see two sports teams kick a ball around and not keep track of who wins. We pay to see one team win, which means another team has to lose. Keeping a scorecard of all of your successes will keep you focused on your goals in two ways. On one hand, having a visual record of the times when you didn’t quite reach your goals will motivate you to keep trying harder to turn those failures into triumphs. On the other hand, with the notes you keep from your lead measures combined with your scorecard, it’ll be extremely rewarding to have a solid trail of your success and how hard you’ve worked to get there.

Accountability to Yourself and Your Team – Your plans, your efforts and triumphs don’t mean anything if you don’t hold yourself accountable by actually following through with your action plan. It’s important to understand that this means keeping track of your failures too, because you’ll never be able to improve if you don’t look at both sides of your endeavors.

As you can clearly see, executing is by no means an easy task, and overnight results shouldn’t be expected. Like with most things in life, if you want to achieve greatness, you’ll need to take it one step at a time. And like most things as well, the first step is always the most difficult – but after that I guarantee that you’ll be able to do it!

The Wish Group Summer Reunion

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This past weekend I had the pleasure of hosting our annual Summer Reunion for the Wish Group and all of companies that we own. We have been doing these events for many years, and every year they somehow get better and better. Next week I intend to write up some of the more business and sales related issues we discussed at the event, but this week I wanted to share a few of my reflections from the event and why I believe events like these are essential for companies.

When you’re working day in and day out on tasks, meetings and other things, it becomes easy (far too easy) to lose sight of the most important asset in your company – your people. Your people are the reason that your company is successful.  Your people are essentially the secret sauce of why your company is different than any other company. That’s why it’s important to see where your people are coming from, and what motivates them to do what they do – and holding team events is the perfect venue for that.

At the Wish Group, we organize these events bi-annually – once at the beginning of the year to set goals and review the previous year, and one in the summer time to regroup and discuss how things are currently progressing. Even though we meet on a quarterly basis and do practice an open book management policy, we hold these more extravagant events so all of the leadership team has the chance to connect with staff on a more personal level and build rapport. Once your team understands why you’re so passionate about what you do, and vice versa, it’s easier to accomplish all of the goals you set out to do.

Another great benefit of events like this is the fact that your team will get to know each other better. This is arguably the most valuable thing that you’ll get from this event. Your team members are probably used to working with core people that they’re comfortable with, but these events provide the chance for them to build new relationships with team members they’ve never had the chance to mingle with. What this ends up doing is building peer accountability across your team. Peer accountability is crucial for any business, as it means that your team will work hard to finish projects and not let each other down – allowing you to grow your business without worrying.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be an extravagant event that you host. No matter how many employees that you have, you need to get your team together outside the office so they get to know each other better, and so you see what kind of drive they have towards your business. Once you see how dedicated your team is to your common goal, I guarantee that you’ll be inspired.

3 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self

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YoungerSelfI’ve made plenty of mistakes during my time as an entrepreneur. While I could have dwelled on them and got crushed by them, luckily I’ve always used them as lessons to push me forward. That being said, there’s a reason why mentors are usually those who are older than us.

Simply put, they’ve lived through the mistakes first hand and as such, know how to deal with any new problems that arise by thinking back on how they handled previous problems and applying these lessons to their current situation.

Now that I’m at an age where I frequently mentor young entrepreneurs, I honestly wish that I could tell my younger self some key lessons. Although there are many of them, here are my most important ones.

Learn to Say No – This one is one of the most difficult things to learn because we often see any new opportunity as an opportunity for growth. However, not all opportunities will be valuable in the long run. Take the time to evaluate your opportunities and cut the cord if it will act as a roadblock to your success.

Learn to Listen – Two ears and one mouth – they should be used in that order. Few people actually stop to take the time to listen, preventing them from truly understanding and learning. There are often times when you need to slow down because your deeper understanding of a subject that you got from listening will take you to the next level.

Don’t Be Afraid to Be You – We spend our childhood trying to fit in and our adult years trying to be different. Sometimes we never grow out of the desire to be like those around us. However, trying to be someone that you’re not will lead to an unfulfilled life. The best thing that you can offer those who you do business with is your genuine self. Your unique personality and insight is what your clients are truly after, since those traits and talents shine through your company.

These are the pieces of advice that I simply didn’t understand when I was younger. In fact, even I was to go back and tell my younger self this, I’m not sure if (a) I would understand or (b) if I would even listen. I believe that, for better or worse, people learn from harsh lessons rather than always heeding advice from others. It may not be simple, but try to keep your mentors advice in the back of your mind the next time you make a big decision.