Eden Sunshine's BLOG

Throw Out Tradition

Warren Buffet is the ultimate contrarian. When the market is up and people are excited, he is selling; when the market is down and people are freaked out, he is buying.

Going with the trend or what appears to be the practical thing to do often is not. Going with the majority can sometimes be a fatal mistake. The Level Seven Way often challenges what are often thought of as practical business practices. Sometimes it’s the seemingly impractical that produces the best results.

Here are some typical approaches that happen in business and their apparent impractical counterparts that have proven to produce better results.

Focus on the tactical work in the business versus focus on working strategically ON the business. Working On your business produces better strategies so that the tactical work is more efficient and effective.

Disregarding employee’s opinions versus creating collaboration and open participation. Engaging your employees so you have more hands and minds working on the common goals of the business.

Narrowing your focus on one primary goal like sales versus take a whole business collective results approach. Establish multiple qualitative and quantitative goals in order to ensure a balanced self sustaining business.

Point is this; just because everyone else does it a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the best approach. Look at the real results to determine if you should take a contrarian approach to your business development.

Employee's That Innovate? Yeah right!

“If you want to create a growth culture, you have to nurture people and not make them fight so … hard to get any idea through the door.”
Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE

Feedback from employees of companies suggest that they are very willing and often eager to share their ideas and suggestions on how to help you improve your business.

The challenges to overcome as you nurture this process include:

1- Helping them understand the process by which your business looks a problems and frustrations and seeks system solutions. You do have a process don’t you? This process means that we are looking at the situation from many angles. The employee needs to know that they are appreciated for bring the problem or idea forward and that sometimes more eyes, a fresh look, will produce a better result. In other words, we see the world through our own perceptions and sometimes we don’t see all the extenuating factors. So as much as their idea maybe a very good one, the process requires that we look at every problem from a whole business perspective.

2- The owner or manager MUST take some kind of action to resolve the frustration. One of the biggest complaint employees have about owners and managers, they don’t do anything to correct the problems.

To you owners, the bottom line is that you have your agenda and the employees have their agenda. Most often they are not the same. And since you are in charge, who’s agenda are you going to follow. Yours of course.

So you listen and thank them and then most often go about solving your frustrations and problems. At some point of along the way the employees says to themselves, “I am just wasting my breathe, nothing is ever going to change.” Ultimately, they stop caring and you wonder why your employees don’t care about the business like you do.

3- So lets pretend that you’ve heard this message and decide you are going to systematically respond to your employees suggestions. The next step is that once you’ve done something tangible to correct the frustration, you must report back to the employee in some form or another, “Here is what we did to resolve YOUR frustration.”

Now you’re creating an environment to encourage you employees involvement in the innovation and systemization process.

The Business Transformation

I can’t tell you how often business owners ask me about what it takes to
transform their business into a high performance, turn-key, fully systematized
business operation that really works for them

My response is simple.

#1 - You must have the right attitude and mindset about yourself and your business. You need to be sufficiently motivated, emotionally connected to the result. It must be very important and a high priority. You have got to want it and believe you are going to have it.

#2 - You need the tools, a business development methodology that works. In other words, you need the right technique or system. If you are going to make the investment in time, make sure you are focusing on the doing the right work.

#3- Speaking of knowing the right work, now you must do it. Bottom line: You must allocate time and resources to transforming your business.

When you combine the right way, the right behaviors and the right attitude you have a winning combination.