Working in marketing has allowed me an opportunity to meet many successful business leaders. Our process of discovery before rolling out a marketing program has given me an even greater opportunity to have in depth discussions with these visionary entrepreneurs.

Your chance for greatness can be realized if you adopt their common entrepreneurial traits. They’re excited about what they do, they know their business inside out and they are without exception… workaholics. Life balance may have escaped them but business needs leaders and the ones I’ve met seem comfortable with their calling. Maybe like sharks that need to keep swimming to stay alive, true entrepreneurs need to keep building their business for the same reason.

Assuming the best and being prepared for the worst are characteristics that put these individuals on a pedestal far above us common folk. I used to be in awe of their bigger than life personas. Over time, that awe has transformed to respect and the realization that the people running 2 million, 20 million or 200 million dollar companies have many similar characteristics.

Off comes the cloak of mystery. The truth is these entrepreneurs have learned and applied these simple lessons and you can take these 5 undisputable facts to the bank too:

1. Multiply your efforts through others.
2. Attract and keep great people.
3. Focus on your unique ability and delegate what you dislike or are not particularly good at to capable individuals on your team.
4. Make the bold move and seize the moment when it presents itself.
5. Let success build your confidence and increased confidence build your success.

Lee’s Quote for the day

“If you find something you love, that there is a market for, become really good at it, hang in there long enough, and add a little WYAO… success will be yours.”

Years ago, a friend of ours gave me insight into a key process behind business innovation. Essentially to get creative solutions to a particular challenge, you gather a diverse group of people willing to engage in a divergent exercise where every idea (at first) is a good idea. To arrive at this thinking you might be asked by the meeting chair to take on the personality of someone famous or pick an object from a box of miscellaneous items to help you come up with some thinking outside the usual.

When you’ve exhausted all the ideas in the room, the next step is then to converge on THE IDEA, the one that the group collectively can see to fruition. This is where the 6 thinking hats come in. Edward de Bono is a well known author with the agency world and divided thinking in to 6 key areas that collectively can improve the quality of your decision making by spotting issues and opportunities that come to light through alternate perspectives.

In short, the White hat is the reference thinker, the Red is more intuitive, the Black an eternal pessimist, the optimist is Yellow, the creative Green and the Blue is all about process. There are no bad hats but you need to recognize what colour is needed at what time in the process. By using backward/forward questioning you then determine the action items to achieve your ultimate goal. As a quick example, if your goal is to achieve 20% sales growth you pose the question- We’ve achieved 20% sales growth, what had to have happened? The answer might be we added 10 sales people. Okay we’ve added 10 sales people, what had to have happened? The answer might be we closed down a poor performing warehouse to free up funds, and so on…

Our company puts a lot of effort into the divergent/convergent process and it has enabled us to create fresh thinking and targeted messaging for each customer’s marketing. So far, after 6 years on this journey we are able to keep delivering great results and “thinking inside the hat” is a big part of it.