You + Four Things = THE PERFECT TEAM

Your business’ startup phase is the most challenging part. So far, you have been serving your goals, and we have clarified that there is much more to business than what we’d know – knowledge comes from research. Your research turns to plan. You have the idea, strategies and plans. In the business plan, you should have identified “characters” that matter to the business. Different “channels” are working together to stabilize your business. Make sure you’d know all strengths, weaknesses surrounding the plan, and their effect on the business.

Regardless how smart you are, and your abilities to conduct all kind of research, you don’t fully comprehend your business until execution of the plan. This is where you get a new perspective. Executing generates experience and adaption as experience enriches. Plan execution depends on your identity, because you are the source of everything. If you’d ask most people “who are you?” They will probably use their professions or something they love to do to define themselves. These answers are correct, but they can be weak when it comes to business. Professional business consultants always say, “Do what you do best, and outsource the rest!”

You don’t really fully comprehend your plan, until you’d acknowledge the plan’s weaknesses. Strengths and weaknesses go hand-in-hand! If you don’t know your weaknesses, it is most likely that you are ignoring them! For example, I am really good at executing objectives, and meeting people’s need. But only if they come to me. For me to go to them is challenging, because it feels like I’m bugging them. I see objectives, and only use problems to approach people, and refuse to see people as objectives. This is my strength, which also automatically identify my weaknesses! Knowing them means I’d know where to improve. The questions become, “how do my strongest sides apply to the plan?” “What other things are important to the plan?”

It is essential that the business has strategic focus! This normally means focusing on cash, things that are critical to you and your business. Critical things must never be chosen by anyone else! The focus should also be on customers. The second is operational excellence, which means having a 99,9% error/defect-free operational, delivering on time and correcting mistakes. The third is constant improvement, which means making things better, faster, cheaper and improving the overall efficiency. The fourth is customer centric, which means loving your customers, and listening to them. Love your customers more than you’d love your product! These four things are also essential for choosing the team.

They are needed in practice, and your plan has directly or indirectly approach them. You and these four things is a process that means going through the trickiest part of a business – communication. I am not talking about talking to different people. The trickiest thing that I am talking about is, how do you project your “business identity” to the masses in a way that keeps the business intact, while appealing to as many people as possible?

When you focus on your ambition as discussed in the previous blog, “Serve Only Your Ambition”, it becomes possible to see areas to improve. Your plan is in the middle, and you have begun to execute, which also means your business’ experience is better. First time you approach people, you are going to face challenges, and find areas to improve.

It is important to have the ability to channel all challenges, and turn them to something useful. Out of these four things, which one can you do best? Where do you need improvements? You need to know the characters required to do these four things. Then you need to know the characters you have! And finally, which ones are missing? You will ultimately look for the missing ones in your team. Together, you will accomplish the four things that matter to your business on a consistent basis!

For you to successfully do something, different characters play a respective role in doing it. For you to talk to 100 people for example, you need your social, understanding, persuasive and optimistic characters – excluding characters like aggressive, cynic, and pessimistic. The included and excluded characters show to the people you talk to, as you interact with them.

In conclusion, you need to use your strength in combination to characters required for keeping the business intact. Subtract your strength from the required characters. Find those missing characters in other people, and viola, you have your perfect team!