Decisive Moments!
I think you’ll agree, life is full of decisions – moments in time when you must choose what action to take, what direction to head in, what opinions you will listen to and which you will ignore.
The fact is, our lives are the sum of the decisions we have made up until that moment.
When you recognise that the choices you make are shaping your destiny, you begin to pay close attention to the decisions you make.
I grew up playing soccer, (it was my first love) and I remember as a teenager playing for Victoria and the words of the state coach, when he asked the team to tell him what we thought was the biggest factor on the results we produced.
We guessed all the obvious things like scoring more goals, defending well and maintaining possession of the ball. He agreed these were all factors, however they were not the correct answer. The answer he was looking for was DECISION MAKING!
He stressed that if we hoped to become full time professionals, one of the biggest factors would be our decision-making ability, especially when we were under pressure.
While my best soccer playing days are well behind me, I think the importance of decision making is as relevant to me today as a business owner, as it was as a player. The reality is as an entrepreneur, if you are not a good decision maker, your business will suffer.
I see the impact of poor decision making on businesses nearly every day. The decisions people are making about their business are usually linked to their level of thinking.
While there are three levels of business thinking, I want to focus on just the first and most common one, which we call Employee Mentality.
Typically, at this level of thinking, the business owner spends most of their time focused on doing the work and delivering the product or service.
This is the DOER level, where the owner must juggle all the balls of the business and attempt to manage all aspects of production, sales, delivery and management.
All business owners must work their way through this phase.
One of the big issues associated with this phase is TIME, or more accurately, a distinct lack of it. If a business owner stays in employee mode for too long, the common consequence is BURN OUT!
People who decide the best way forward is to keep doing all the tasks themselves because they don’t have the time or the money to train someone else, are simply holding their business back and creating greater stress on themselves and their families.
The goal of every business owner must be to graduate from Employee Mentality as soon as possible. If you currently find yourself in this phase of business and want to accelerate your progress through it, you will need to do one critical thing… STOP!
If you want to grow and prosper sooner, then you will first need time to think, review and assess where you are going.
The problem is too many business owners are so busy peddling away that they never stop to ask is there a better way, a faster way, a more profitable way?
One of the real benefits of being a member of The Marketers Club is it gives you a chance to STOP and THINK about what you are doing and the way you are doing it.
Routinely you are offered a roadmap to more efficient ways to run your business and sure-fire strategies to help you make more money. But you will be BLIND to this information if you fail to take the time to read, listen and action it.
It is no accident that our most successful members are also the people who set aside time to read the weekly Monday Marketing Tip blog, who listen to our webinars and attend the live events.
When you decided that you are too busy to learn, to innovate or to review the way you do things, what you are essentially doing is committing to more of the same.
So, unless your current approach is delivering the financial and lifestyle results you want, I suggest you consider the possibility that there could be a better way.
In the aviation industry, where decision making is a matter of life and death, regulatory bodies implemented a system to help reduce the likelihood of pilot error by introducing a decision-making strategy known as Cockpit Resource Management (CRM).
The reason the system was introduced was because it was found that many plane crashes could have been avoided if the crew had been comfortable to question the judgement and authority of the pilot.
The problem was the pilot was seen as the boss and his decision was final.
As a consequence of not being willing to look at all the possibilities or take advice from others, planes crashed unnecessarily.
The CRM system is now used in other industries like hospitals, where the same rules that have helped prevent airline disasters, are also helping stop mistakes during surgery.
As a business owner, while your decisions may not be life or death related, they do have consequences for your financial wellbeing.
To blindly and stubbornly continue doing something that could in the long run be fatal to your business, is not only short-sighted, it’s STUPID!
If you were flying a plane and an experienced pilot who was sitting next to you, told you that if you maintain your current course you will hit a mountain, you wouldn’t say, ‘I’ll look at that when I finish these reports.’
The mantra of the CRM system is: See it, Say it, Fix it.
If you want to transform your business, you must:
1. Make the decision to stop and really see what is going on.
2. Say it, meaning give it a label and accurately identify the issues.
3. Get to work to fix it and stop defending your excuses.
While there is no escaping the fact that you will need to do the work to create your success, if you approach running your business with a ‘head down and bum up’ strategy, you never give yourself permission to look up and see the vision of a better way, a faster way and a far more profitable way to grow your business.
The Marketers Club offers you the chance to build a highly profitable business, but first you must decide – Are you going to keep saying I’m too busy to learn how to do things better, or are you ready to decide to open your eyes and your mind to something more?
Ultimately the choice is always yours, so all you need to do now is DECIDE!