Month: June 2012

Is there a magical formula that makes one business successful while another fails? There are many ingredients that go into a winning business including a great idea, a great team, perseverance, a unique value proposition, and great leadership. You’ve likely witnessed this in your own company. All of these elements are important, but the ultimate weapon that truly fuels success is the ability to leverage all of the key activities that you perform for your business, and you can only do this with the right attitude.

Perseverance, a great winning attitude and a true passion for your business’s value can spark other flames and become contagious, igniting the passion of investors, business partners, customers and employees. When this passion and energy are controlled, directed and focused, they can truly boost a business’s chance for success.

Combine these with performing the right business activities, as discussed in this Bloginar and in my book, Lucky By Design, and you’ll put yourself in a better position to control the destiny of your company.

Weekly Lesson Thirteen (Try this…)

Ready for more? You can get more in depth lessons in my book, Lucky By Design, along with the 5-hour webinar training program designed to truly improve your odds of success!

We hope that the 90-Day Bloginar Series has been a powerful tool for you to grow your business. In the fall, we will begin another series to help you create a Business Action Plan for 2013. In the interim, I will be offering a video series online where I answer your business questions. This series, entitled Biz-Edge, provides answers to your questions about business growth. Feel free to submit questions directly to me at beth@m-edge.com.

Have a Business Challenge or Question?
Visit the BizEdge site on my website and let us answer it for you!

Forming solid partnerships can be very valuable and important for businesses, both large and small. However, good partnerships take time to develop, and require significant effort to sustain. A true partnership is a serious relationship between two parties that share common goals and have mutually agreed to join forces together to achieve something specific. Having the right partner – and the right partnership arrangement – can provide a very powerful boost for your business and can lead to some lucky opportunities being uncovered.

However, partnerships are a double-edged sword. They require significant effort, a great deal of mutual trust, and a champion on each side to manage the relationship in order to work. Therefore, having the right partner – and the right partnership arrangement – can provide a very powerful boost for your business and can lead to some lucky opportunities being uncovered by you and your partner organization. However, partnerships are not something that you should enter into casually because the wrong partnership can defeat morale and in the worst-case scenarios, destroy a business.

Weekly Lesson Twelve (Try this…)

Before committing to a new business partnership address the questions below. If you aren’t pleased with your response, think about what changes you need to make to improve the opportunity for success with current or future partnerships, for your benefit as well as the benefit of your company.

1. Have you clearly defined your most important goals, and made sure that your prospective partner shares those same goals and vision?

2. Have you assessed what specific gaps – in skills, in relationships, or in any other assets – this partner needs to fill in order to help you succeed?

3. Have you determined how you will help him/her succeed based on the skills or assets you bring to the relationship?

4. Is it clear that both parties stand to benefit more from being partners in this arrangement than working separately? Is this a win-win arrangement or is the scale unbalanced?

What’s the difference between a leader and a manager? A leader sets the tone and inspires as well as empowers his/her team to achieve the goal. A manager is often a key player in ensuring the plan is organized, coordinated and followed through and ideally shares the vision… but often doesn’t establish the vision for the rest of the team.

Which are you? Are you inspiring your team to carry through a vision that you hold? Are you motivating them to achieve greatness where 1 + 1 truly exceeds 2?

I’ve heard others say that a leader does the ‘right things’ while a manager ‘does things right.’ You need both of these roles in achieving greatness for an organization. Check your leadership skills below!

Weekly Lesson Eleven (Take this assessment …)

There are numerous ways to assess your leadership style. I found an interesting one online called the Leadership Legacy Assessment Test, written by Robert Galford and Regina Fazio Maruca. Check it out – it might give you some great insight into your leadership style. I’d love to hear your results!

http://www.yourleadershiplegacy.com/assessment.html 

I am thrilled to share my interview on creating your own lucky opportunities with JJ Ramberg of MSNBC’s Your Business! Please watch it then continue with the weekly bloginar lesson: Getting Out of Your Own Way!

If you have specific questions that I can address – please visit my newly redesigned website m-edge.com and click on the link for Biz-Edge where we answer YOUR business questions!

Are you frustrated with the rate of growth your firm is achieving or have you hit the kind of plateau that emerging firms often experience? Perhaps you’re struggling to enter new markets, drive more revenue or increase profits, yet you’re stuck. Well, that plateau is much more common than you might expect, and the reason for it is often the same.

The bootstrapping skills owners relied on to get to their current level of success are often not the skills that they need to move forward to the next level. Many new business owners find that in the early stages they need to control everything and make sure every “I” is dotted and every “T” crossed. However, by its very nature, growth into a different stage WILL BE UNCOMFORTABLE, because it is different. This actually is a good thing – if you don’t get a few butterflies in your stomach, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. Yet, without systems in place and a willingness and confidence to delegate responsibilities in a different way, your business simply can’t achieve a solid, sustainable growth level.

If you choose to grow your organization, you are also committing to challenging yourself in a new way. It is the rare founder who can do this without feeling a serious degree of discomfort. But, you need to make the choice on whether you can and want to become the kind of leader your company needs you to be in order to successfully lead the organization, or confront your shortcomings and decide if it’s better for somebody else to carry the company forward.

Weekly Lesson Ten (Answer these questions…)

• Are you ready to commit to growth or do you want to remain at your current stage?
  • If growth is a goal, what needs to change in your business?
• How important is delegation of decision-making at your company?
• If you need to control specific decisions, which ones are they and how will you include your team in the process so you don’t become an obstacle?