Do These 3 Things To Transform A Stagnant Business Into A Unicorn

A business is a system that will grow up to its constraint and no further.

There are many pieces that make up a business, but the single most important factor among all its pieces is the entrepreneur.

Anything is possible as long as the entrepreneur has the ability to figure it out.

This applies to businesses making $10k/year, $1M/year, or even $1B+/year.

The quality of a business is a reflection of its entrepreneur, for better or worse. 

Here are 3 dimensions that entrepreneurs must look at within themselves to assess why their business is where it is now, and what it will take for the business to grow even further.

1. Skills
2. Character Traits
3. Beliefs
   

Skills:

Learning the right skill is the bridge between where we are now and where we desire to be.

Achieving anything requires a process.

As long as we learn the process and take action on the process, we essentially get to accomplish anything we want. 

Therefore, the most important skill we can learn is the skill of learning.

As we improve the quality of our skills, we proportionately improve the quality of our life and our business in respective manner.

The quality of someone’s skills is the difference between making $10/hr, $100/hr or $1,000+/hr. 

In a business context, the need for the entrepreneur to develop a skill even further after a certain level of proficiency reaches a point of diminishing return.

With finite time and energy, the entrepreneur will become the bottleneck if they do too many things. 

For a further breakthrough to happen, the entrepreneur needs to learn skills that increase their leverage so that more can be done with less of their input.

This includes building marketing funnels, hiring teams, training recruits, streamlining operations and tracking data at scale.

Whenever something is stuck, all that is missing is the right skill.

This applies to life and business.

“If you want to be healthy, study health… if you want to be wealthy, study wealth… if you want to be happy, study happiness.” – Jim Rohn

Character Traits:

Skills only matter to the extent of its implementation.

Developing new skills is critical, but powerful results only occur and sustain with the help of key character traits like discipline, ethics, accountability, confidence and perseverance.

Skills without the right character traits are like an engine without fuel.

There are people with more talent that still experience less “success” than those who work harder. 

There are people who make unethical moves, only to ruin their reputation and prevent others from wanting to collaborate.

There are people who make decisions based on short-term gratification, inevitably exposing themselves to unnecessary risk over the long term.

There are people who lack the grit to persevere after setbacks, which leads to quitting prematurely because most worthwhile things do not come easy. 

Learning the right kills can make someone successful.

Developing the right character traits will help them stay successful.

Beliefs:

We all have conscious and subconscious belief systems that determine how we see the world.

It is highly unlikely to achieve something we consider “impossible”, “wrong” or incongruent to our sense of values. 

Even when we do, it is common to self-sabotage. 

Consequently, it is often more productive to first alter our beliefs in accordance to our goals, than it is to first focus on the “how”. 

Without the right beliefs, even straightforward instructions become useless because we will end up working against ourselves.

For instance, one mindset barrier many professionals have in their ability to justifiably charge more, is that they define their worth by how easy it is for them to do something, rather than by how much value that “something” actually delivers to their client.

After numerous years of doing something repeatedly, almost anything can start to feel easy to do.

People in this position may naturally assume, “it does not seem fair for me to charge ‘so much’ for something that seems effortless for me to do.”

With this mindset, even the best sales process will not improve their pricing because they do not believe they are actually worth it.

In this case, it may be more productive to first adjust their beliefs from defining value as “what it costs for them to deliver a service” to defining value as “the outcome their service delivers”.

Charging based on ease of effort and charging based on value both make sense.

But yet both beliefs lead to dramatically different results.

Another example demonstrating the impact of our beliefs is how entrepreneurs subconsciously define “success”.

It is human nature to pursue goals based on what is most celebrated by society.

This can be having a corner office, having many employees, having a lot of awards, having a “laptop lifestyle”, having a lot of revenue, having a public company, having millions in the bank, having an exotic car or having a lot of followers.

There is no right or wrong.

However, there is what is right or wrong for you.

Many people who achieve “success” experience a mid-life crisis because they succeed in goals that are not truly their own. 

The feeling is similar to climbing a mountain, only to realize at the top that we summited the wrong one. 

We compromise a life that that reflects our fullest authentic selves for a life that “looks good” to others.

Our beliefs dictate the way we show up in the world.

Our beliefs also dictate how we define “success” and how we optimize our actions towards “success”.

Instead of limiting ourselves to the beliefs that are conveniently imprinted onto us by our society, upbringing and unquestioned assumptions, it can be far more lucrative and fulfilling to consciously shape our beliefs in alignment with what is of greatest service to ourselves and others. 

Our skills give us capability, our character traits give us sustainability and our beliefs give us direction.

Making our beliefs conscious is important because it is more effective to run slowly towards the right destination, than it is to run faster going the wrong way.

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Growing businesses is not just about building marketing campaigns or allocating capital towards problems.

It is about continuously solving higher level problems and knowing whether the constraints come from a deficiency in skills, character traits or beliefs. 

This applies most critically to leaders of any organization (eg. The Founder or CEO), but it also applies to any other individual.

If you would like to learn more about the skills, character traits and belief systems our clients use to scale their businesses upwards of 7 & 8 figure enterprise valuations, schedule a call with us to see if we might be in a position to help you do the same.