The personal qualities that determine whether a business succeeds or falls short.
The success of your business systems depends on the person running them.
I call the personal qualities that lie beneath the system’s meta-skills. They are the reason why some business owners outperform others.
Amanda, the founder of GotSafe Media had a real problem to solve. But as our conversation unfolded, the things holding her back were personal.
And that’s not uncommon at all.
Here are the six that came up.
Business Ownership Needs Resilience
Before we got into Amanda’s business, I said something I believe to be true from years of working with business owners.
If you don’t persist, you quit.
Resilience also requires independence. The one constant in business is change, and you need to be resilient in the face of it.
Resilience is like muscle training. The more reps you do, the easier it becomes to raise the bar.
Working Through The Difficulties
Only about 1% of people start a business. Of those, roughly 75% fail within the first few years.
Most people underestimate what the work actually involves.
Working hard in business goes beyond putting in long hours. How do you manage what happens emotionally when the hours are not producing results?
How do you handle rejection? Working through that with an open mind and without letting emotion drive decisions is a learnable skill. Amanda had it. That kind of durability comes from staying in it long enough to develop it.
Businesses fail when owners give up. The skill is learning to keep going when the return on effort is not yet visible.
Listen to The Market
At some point in our conversation, Amanda mentioned she had been reading business books quite a lot. I stopped her.
“Amanda, stop reading books.”
How many marathon runners can complete a marathon after reading about it in a book? None. At some point you have to lace up and run. The first time you run, you will not look graceful. You will probably struggle to get to the end of the street. But, the more ground you cover, the further you will go.
I read biographies, but for a specific reason. They remind me that the people who built remarkable businesses started from the same place as everyone else. From zero. Then I put the book down and got back to work.
All the knowledge you need is already in the market. Your customers will tell you what they need if you talk to them. They will tell you what your solution is missing and how to sharpen the offer. None of that comes from a planning session. It only comes from being in the market, taking the feedback, and adjusting.
A useful check: look at your last ten working days. How many of them involved doing something that could result in a new client or delivering work? If that number is low, you are still getting ready and not doing business.
Unique As a Business Asset
Near the end of our session, Amanda asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.
“How do I become Tracy?”
Tracy is a client of mine. Amanda had seen me mention her online and from what she had gathered, Tracy was the kind of leader Amanda wanted to become.
I told her I would encourage her to be Amanda instead.
What makes Tracy extraordinary is specific to her. You cannot replicate that by borrowing her habits or copying her approach. If you try, you become a lesser version of someone who already exists.
I think about another client, Matt. Quiet. Describes himself as someone who fades into the background. He had a delivery to a client running late. Most people would send an apology. Matt got on a plane and hand-delivered it himself, taking the product as his personal luggage.
Matt thinks of that as just doing the right thing. That is his edge, and it is completely his own.
Ask the people who know you well what they see in you that you cannot see in yourself. The business built on that foundation is one nobody else can replicate.
Plan for Bigger
Toward the end of our session, I added something to Amanda’s takeaways. She hadn’t asked for it, but I had been thinking about it as we talked. She had a revenue goal. I told her it wasn’t big enough.The size of the goal you hold in your mind determines what your business is capable of. Why plan a business to generate $1 million if you have the ability to generate $10 million?
When you plan to build a big business, you are less distracted by the smaller work that would not bring you closer to that goal.
Elite athletes train for distances longer than they will ever race. If you train for ten kilometres, running five becomes manageable. The same principle applies to the targets you set in your business.
And if you fall short of ten million? You are almost certainly running a more capable business than if you had aimed for one.
Business Owner Ego
When I think about the clients who make the most progress, they share one quality more than any other. Low ego.
Don’t confuse this with low confidence. The clients who get the best results are genuinely capable and willing to back themselves. They are also willing to take feedback without getting defensive and go back and adjust without treating that as a failure.
Amanda had this. She had tried multiple versions of her service, watched them not land the way she hoped, and was still open to reworking her approach entirely. That willingness to stay egoless about the work and to keep refining without protecting the previous version is what separates the businesses that eventually find their footing from those that stay stuck.
You are in the market to solve a problem and add value. The more clearly you hold that as the objective, and the less attached you are to being right about how you do it, the faster you will find what works.
The business systems covered in the last edition give your business a real foundation to build on. But they only produce results when the person running them has the personal qualities to back them up.
Meta Skills are worth developing with the same seriousness you bring to everything else in the business.
Here’s what I’d suggest this week.
- Pick the one from the six that is most true for you right now.
- Work out one thing you could do differently because of it. Then do it.
- That’s how you get your win.
Paul Claessen
Get your win