Focused People

Your culture isn't the words on your walls, t-shirts, and website. It is those things that you do as a company that works and is therefore promoted, encouraged, repeated, and honored. Let me pick on integrity to illustrate my point as many, many businesses will include integrity in their core values.

As the year winds down, you are likely spending more and more time thinking about and working on next year’s projects. As you’re planning, I’d recommend you consider the following three actions. I believe they are critical for the long-term health and success of your business.

I want to propose three principles and a simple yet powerful hiring model that will dramatically increase your hiring process’s effectiveness and reduce the time you spend hiring.

Did you know there are different types of founders? Do you know what type you are? Did you know that there are different strategies for each type of founder? Where many founders get it wrong is they choose the wrong strategies simply because fail to recognize these differences.

In part 2 of our series 8 Practical Ways To Lead Your Team Through Every Crisis, I'm going to pick up where we left off and show you three ways you can use meetings to keep your team from fraying apart. If you take these steps, you'll not only keep your business alive, but you'll also activate and empower your team to do more than any of you thought possible. 

You and your leadership team have been through a lot. You've almost certainly had some extreme challenges, some small wins, and a lot of hard work. But as you look to the horizon, you're realizing; this is far from over.

It's time for the single most significant cultural change your business will experience, stage 3 of the Predictable Success model. Culture in Whitewater. To be honest, I cringed when I wrote the heading "Culture in Whitewater." Culture in Whitewater can be summed up in one word: awful.

The question of who "owns" a company culture is a tricky one. There are lots of right answers that are wrong, and lots of wrong answers that are right. Let me try to make some sense of all of this for you.

In the very beginning, your leadership team is you. Then the business grows, you hire some staff, and in a way, your whole staff feels like your leadership team. Then things get difficult.

When you have started a business, your first few hires will be some of the most critical decisions you will make. A bad hiring decision can kill the company you’ve worked so hard to build. If you hire too late, the work can build up, causing backlogs and missed orders. If you hire too early, you can burn right through what little cash you have. Hiring someone with the wrong personality can suck the life right out of you.

The "Stop Doing List" has been one of the most painful but powerful tools I have had to learn to use over the last 13 years of running a successful small business.