Control the things you can

The extent to which we can grow our business can largely be guided by our thoughts, actions and behaviours. However, there are external factors often at play that we can’t control, many of which could impact on us progressing to what we want. All too often we end up spending time worrying about issues that with all the will in the world you cannot have any direct impact on making them go your way. These could range from global economic factors, through to political and social issues, down as far as the behaviour and actions of other people.

Spending time worrying about the big things we can’t control can result in energy being absorbed in non value added thought. Here is a great way to think about control:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference

Reinhold Niebuhr

Success comes from managing the things we can control. Embracing this principle will get you motivated to moving forward on those pressing issues that need sorting out. Focusing on factors outside your sphere of influence could create stress and reduce the effectiveness of your actions. Your mental toughness will become eroded by the enormity of the task associated with thinking about the things you can’t change. This habit becomes emotionally draining and will impact on your efficiency and effectiveness. Accept it!

Focus on the 10 things you can control:

1. Attitude – believe you can, growth starts with believing you can
2. Learning and knowledge – you must learn and acquire knowledge if you want success
3. Friends – who you spend time with and who you share ideas with
4. Motivation – the invisible force that comes from within
5. Time – how you spend your time – who with and on what
6. Capabilities and offer – what you are providing to others and how effectively you deliver it
7. Financial matters – what you spend and your means
8. Treat and deal with people – always with respect, honesty and integrity
9. Deal with the environment – being aware of sustainability issues and how you treat your surroundings
10. Reputation – what you stand for and your personal effectiveness

Successful business people tend to have a strong belief in their ability to take control of the circumstances, issues and factors that will give them their desired outcome, in particular they will:

• Actively take part in initiatives that improve their current situation
• Have a strong internal control orientation, this is hungry for goal achievement
• Actively pursue a policy of self development
• Inquire and actively commit to understanding why things turned out the way they did
• Embrace learning to ensure positive outcomes in the future
• Ignore people who drain their energy

When we master the art of controlling the controllable, additional energy will be made available for doing, consequently you will gain a better balance between activity and thinking. Success is well within your control!

A decade of supporting high growth businesses

This year marks Winning Pitch’s tenth anniversary of being in business. The very reason I founded our organisation was to provide the tools to create, build and support individuals get the most from themselves and their companies. To achieve our mission it was imperative that Winning Pitch demonstrated an authenticity that could never be challenged, in other words we practiced what we preach. Ten years on, I am very proud to announce that we have worked with some 6,000 companies. Those we have supported over the past two years have grown 4 times the rate of GDP, the average change achieved in net worth, following Winning Pitch help is 335.5%, their balance sheet value has also increased by more than £181.96m. Impact on local economies is so satisfying to observe, Winning Pitch assistance has delivered approximately 5,000 new jobs. As a business we have reached revenues in excess of £10M and over 100 full time employees across the North and rest of UK. These impacts are testament to our core beliefs of authenticity, trusted adviser and an ability to deliver.

There is no finishing line in business and complacency is a danger zone that every entrepreneur should avoid entering into. After a decade of passionately supporting the entrepreneurial business, we ourselves have moved up a gear in terms of our growth plans and ambitions. Helped by a £2.5M investment last year, I am delighted to announce a new look Winning Pitch – one that’s aims to deepen even further our profile and brand in the SME growth space. Growth SMEs are going to be even more important to local, regional and national economies over the next decade; they are the job generators, the source of innovation, graduate jobs and foreign earnings. I want Winning Pitch to be at the heart of making these businesses succeed – with clarity of vision, superior propositions, strong leadership and teams, an ability to live in the customers world as well good housekeeping and financial strategy and control, everything is possible.

I want to carry on supporting individuals to grow and helping the next generation of stars to accelerate their performance and win. More specifically, we want to give more attention to those companies that can scale their operation. These are the businesses with global potential, they become bedrocks of local economies by delivering jobs, this in turn helps communities to prosper and thrive. We will be placing increased emphasis on this unique set of companies, whose business support needs are more sophisticated and complex to deliver.

I look forward to another ten years of innovation and obsessive focus on unlocking entrepreneurial ambition. We will continue to build and expand the Winning Pitch entrepreneurial community by giving courageous individuals the trusted guidance they need to achieve both profitable growth and a business they can be proud of.

Creating space

Not being able to see the wood for the trees is a common feature of life. People regularly talk about being busy and overworked – but just how much of this is self inflicted. All too often we engage in activity that brings no value to achieving our highest goals and ambitions. Without reflective time, our decision making becomes blurred and it is common to lose sight of what we want. The result is stale thought with patterns of behaviour that fail to deliver our deepest desires. Successful people have the fortunate ability to think clearly, this is helped by finding the time to take well earned breaks from being “busy”. This cleansing process provides the opportunity to de clutter the mind.

The practice of finding sanctuary helps to remove mental blockages and fosters a sense of balance between work and play. Without regular periods of reflection you will find yourself eventually in a rut – the place you don’t want to be!

You must think of Sanctuary on three levels of “time out”:

1. Daily sanctuary to help us to prepare for the day ahead – time with family, exercise, meditation, prayer, reading. Starting each day with 10 minutes of deep reflection, provides a kick start to focused activity and just being aware
2. Weekly sanctuary that helps divert our energies into non related activities like pursuing a hobby, sport or spending more time with family and relationships. These activities release you from the week that was – puts you in a good frame for the week ahead
3. Sanctuary includes those activities that most people can only fit in two or three times a year. They would typically involve family holiday’s, short breaks or some form or retreat. This level gives you the opportunity to ask the big questions – what is my life all about? What needs to change? Should I go and do something else?

Dedication to the 3 Levels will open your mind to new possibilities and opportunities. Chasing success can be as destructive as it is constructive – practicing the art of Finding Sanctuary will build perspective into your life and help to differentiate between what is and what is not important, what brings fulfilment and what does not – embed these disciplines into your routine and you will experience a profound improvement in clarity of thought – you will see things more clearly, you will make better decisions and life will feel less hectic.

Disciplined entrepreneurship

High growth companies are disproportionately innovative to those that are not, and whilst I believe creativity is the ultimate source of competitive advantage, I must caveat my views. The importance of embedding a culture to allow free thinking that stimulates new ideas is well documented. However, without control you end up with pet projects, loads of possibilities and hundreds of potential initiatives that absorb time, energy and resource. Large companies have processes to deal with their ideas pipeline, but in smaller high growth businesses the danger is that there is too much innovation and entrepreneurship and not enough control and discipline.

Commercial problems potentially loom when there is too much lateral thinking and lack of order. Jim Collins in Good to Great uses a very powerful phrase – “Disciplined Entrepreneurship”. This embraces the notion of balance – innovative thinking and behaviours being guided within a framework of performance measures and KPI’s.

Too much Discipline – then a disconnection with customers, markets and new possibilities takes place

Too much Entrepreneurial Flair – nothing gets done because everyone is bouncing off the walls with great ideas

Successful high growth companies tend to have a disciplined approach to new idea generation and implementation – a form of commercial filter. I often wonder how much smaller high growth companies can teach large corporates about innovative thinking and entrepreneurship. The reverse is also important – how can big companies help ambitious founders gain a better handle on their organisation? Feels like a powerful learning forum!

A personal vision is vital – your business vision will follow

Your vision provides the blue print for a successful future. Without a clear vision of what you want to achieve don’t be surprised if you are left with a feeling of, what is my life all about? This applies to relationships, career or business. Distilling what you want helps to focus your energies and actions in the right direction, it’s the starting point of a journey towards personal and professional fulfilment – knowing your destination is half the journey. In creating a vision it is vital that you are precise about what success looks and feels like at some given point in the future. A clear vision can take time to crystallise, it involves allowing time for self exploration and discovery, consider:

• What things are important to me?
• Why are they important?
• How will I feel if I don’t achieve my vision?

The reality is that many people spend their life discontent with their achievements and accomplishments, some talk about wanting more – but what does more mean? The feeling of having no direction is a common dilemma we experience in our careers and life. Not allowing time to answer deep searching questions around what is important will result in the sensations of lethargy, anxiety and inertia, a sense of wandering in the wilderness is a common feeling. As popular scripture states – “Where the is no vision the people perish”

Once we become spiritually connected to our vision and we commit to achieving what we consider important, life has an amazing way of giving you what you want. A vision can also be viewed as a strategic personal intention – everything you want to achieve flows from this intention. When we embed this intention into our subconscious mind synchronicity kicks in – circumstances, situations and events magically appear out of nowhere to assist in moving us closer to what we set out to achieve.

Your vision will become a source of inspiration, another way of looking at it is that it is your personal intention, and as with most things everything flows for this. Your vision also:

• Creates a sense of direction and meaning
• Helps you understand with clarity the relationships important for success
• Provides momentum for change when we feel we deserve more
• Creates a sense of what is important to your life
• Provides a foundation for focused activity

The visioning process will help you start with the end game – what does success look like in 3 years time – a new job, new career or a growing business. Developing a clear vision requires clarity of thought – in developing your future aspirations you must be free from the fog that diverts our mind from seeing clearly what we truly desire – so take time out to think it through. When you have clarity of the outcome, reflect on where you are now – the way forward should become clearer!

Entrepreneurial leaders – Create space for practical learning

It is the leaders role to create and communicate a compelling vision and strategy to staff and stakeholders. When this is done with passion and authenticity, strong foundations are built for innovation and creativity; it sets the scene for personal progression and engages teams to fire on all cylinders. But how does the leader gain the inspiration, insight and knowledge to build such an environment. Well the answer may lie in the cliché – leaders are readers. Having worked with over 3,000 small businesses over the past 6 years, many of which would be termed gazelles (high growth innovative firms), the one ingredient that differentiates outstanding performance from mediocre is a leaders approach to learning. Winning Pitch’s work in this field indicates that organisations led by individuals who create space to acquire and apply knowledge go on to derive benefits of faster and sustained levels of growth.

The inability or lack of motivation to allow time for learning often results in leaders pursuing business as usual strategies. In the worst case this leads to disconnection from the market place and the needs of customers. The resultant impact is lack of competitive advantage and a spiral decline in margins, market share and revenue. Innovative high growth business leaders practice the philosophy of 20% thinking and learning along with 80% doing and reviewing. This mental framework facilitates an iterative approach to entrepreneurship, project implementation, idea generation and learning. It is a process commonly associated with scientific discovery. Iteration provides an effective route to positive progression and getting new ideas and projects off the ground more rapidly. It drives momentum, a characteristic commonly displayed by successful entrepreneurs.

Maintaining the healthy 20:80 split is extremely important as a slip in either direction can lead to either inertia, particularly if too much learning prevails or chaos if too much doing dominates the agenda. The latter gives rise to another popular cliché – not being able to see the wood for the trees. So what is the secret sauce to achieving an optimum return for the 20%? It is appropriate to point out that entrepreneurial leaders embrace different learning preferences and styles, however our experiences are summed up wonderfully in the Chinese Proverb:

I hear and I forget

I see and I remember

I do and I understand

The power of learning by seeing and doing charaterises many of the ambitious entrepreneurial leaders Winning Pitch has worked with. Several learning formats that have emerged from this school of thought, the most popular being peer to peer networking – informal environments where entrepreneurs’ get together to discuss and debate issues and challenges they face. This becomes an extremely powerful option to fast tracked learning, the reason being many problems associated with growth are common – very often they revolve around building teams, finance, access to markets and regulations.

An environment where entrepreneurs debate how they solved specific growth challenges can save others facing similar difficulties an enormous amount of time. Such edited highlights are proving to be an increasingly popular way of consuming new learning. This approach has given rise to numerous entrepreneurial networking organisations such as Entrepreneurs Circle, Supper Club, Tie and Winning Pitch’s High Growth Foundation. Entrepreneurs often make reference to living a lonely life and exposure to their peer group can deliver a whole range of learning benefits, firstly, they can help to alleviate and cope with those feelings of isolation and secondly, they can steer them to solutions only obvious to an external viewer.

Experience sharing is a valuable tool for entrepreneurial businesses and their leaders; more specifically it produces accelerated learning within organisations where training budgets are limited. Simple yet highly effective routes to achieving this can be done by:

Viewing what great looks like – strategy, raising finance, sales & marketing approaches implemented by non-competing organisations. This helps entrepreneurs to acquire knowledge of trusted advisers and expertise. All too often entrepreneurs end up on the receiving end of bad advice. By speaking to those deemed as exemplar this can fast track to effective support networks.

Speaking to other entrepreneurs – what went right what went wrong. There are excellent learning opportunities distilled from bad experiences and more often than not entrepreneurs are only too willing to help others avoid the mistakes they made themselves.

Studying biographies of success – we live in an age where the digital environment provides a content rich source of inspirational stories of the tactics and tools successful people have implemented to achieve great results. Many high performing entrepreneurs featured as part of Winning Pitch’s network regularly refer to the insights gained from studying these biographies as being – stimulus for change, acquiring new knowledge and delivering enhanced performance.

In early 2012, Winning Pitch via its High Growth Foundation accompanied 18 entrepreneurial leaders on a learning journey to Silicon Valley. Common to these UK entrepreneurs was their desire to build globally focused organisations. Through Winning Pitch’s contacts on the West Coast ambitious individuals were exposed to some of the largest brands on the planet including Google and LinkedIn. On return participants stated that the learning journey had acted as catalyst for both personal and company progression.  Participating entrepreneurs listened to the stories and methods used by global company leaders – how they go about their business, innovate, manage staff, build culture, access finance – not only what they do but more importantly how they think. The UK delegation were united in one key learning outcome – The mindset and the scale of thinking within Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is a quantum level greater than that seen in the UK. Entrepreneurial leaders – Create space for practical learning (See www.highgrowthfoundation.co.uk for more information)

 

The UK boasts internationally competitive and highly recognised educational institutions, ones equipped to teach strategy, management tools and techniques and associated frameworks and philosophies at the highest level. However, is there a missing link in the provision of assistance? Could more be done to help entrepreneurs embrace a mindset which raises the bar of performance in a big way? The UK economy needs more high growth businesses and new starts to deliver employment opportunities – NESTA’s Vital 6 per cent report clearly showed that a small minority of high-growth businesses hold the key to job creation and wider prosperity. This means we need UK entrepreneurs to learn how to think bigger, no better way of doing that than seeing it in action.

The Silver Bullets – Rules for Gazelles

Here they are, and they work!

1. Create and craft differentiated propositions that stand out from the crowd – don’t compete on price, compete on difference
2. Develop an effective vision, strategy and execute of a practical game plan – communicate this to the rest of your team – success is 20% thinking and 80% doing
3. Drive innovation into the processes and functions of your company and always look at doing things differently
4. Embrace change and see it as an opportunity to develop and introduce new propositions
5. Build a great team – thinkers, sellers, doers and controllers – create a culture where values and behaviours are aligned to delivering great service both internally and externally
6. Condition your mindset – coping with the challenges that come with growth means a Believe You Can (BYC) state of mind is vital
7. Live in the “Customer’s World” and deliver services and products that capture their need and voice. Build long-term relationship and keep coming up with new ideas to address their challenges.
8. Disciplined systems and processes need to be put in place – KPIs that provide a real time state of business health are vital. Key your eye on cash and how you finance your company. Get expert help.
9. Become great at selling and put the sales engine in place – sales are the lifeblood of any organisations, sell what you believe in as well as the products and services you offer.
10. Find connectors that can provide answers to the challenges you face – getting experienced mentors, coaches and non executive directors working to raise the bar of performance are an essential ingredient of success

Personal development is the ultimate source of competitive advantage – be aware of what you are good and bad at. Review how you are performing in relation to the Ten Silver Bullets !

 

Your Business – An “asset” or “calling”

It never ceases to amaze me how passionate and animated entrepreneurs become when they talk about their business and what they do. To those listening it can come across as “in your face”, however, the reality is, most founders are just so proud of what they have achieved. Business and personal time are inextricably linked feeding each off every minute of the day.

The successful high growth entrepreneurs I have worked with often started their business because of a “calling” – this means putting something right, fixing a problem, chasing a dream of freedom, pursue a passion, wanting to make a difference or proving to others they can achieve something quite amazing.

So many entrepreneurs often forget that their business is also an asset with value. The danger is when the founders view their company solely as an asset. This creates inward focused strategies, lack of customer focus, greed, ultimately this will lead to only one place  – a disconnection with the real world and decline. My advice is when the voice of the “calling”  gets overshadowed by the asset, its time for rethink. A danger zone is just around the corner. Its about balance, of course a business must generate wealth, however it works far better and in my view becomes more profitable when its game plan is linked to a purpose.

That feeling of doing what you do because it makes a difference to others is probably one of the best you can have in your career, long may it last!

High growth companies – “safety net” required

As I have said in recent blogs, high growth equals high personal risk. What comes with high risk is the need for a safety net that cushions any potential falls or scary moments encountered along the way. A CEO of one of the North’s leading companies stated this week:

What would have helped early on, would have been investment and advice from another entrepreneur who had already built and sold a business.

The safety net here is very clear – “advice from someone who has been there and done it”. Entrepreneurs need to operate in a safe environment, typically with those who get it! The notion of an entrepreneur being a nut case risking personal assets every day of the week is totally wrong. My experience is that great entrepreneurs embrace strategies that de risk the potential challenges they face (courage is a necessary ingredient because 100% de risk is not possible). Going forward hopefully public sector will roll out support that provides a safety net of been, there done, it operators who can encourage, motivate and help set clear direction. Being able to anticipate the risks and surprises ahead is what the stars of the future need.

My own personal experience of business support in the past has been that it was too light touch, lacking depth and credibility. Often delivered by individuals who had no empathy with a personal/business high growth journey. This must change in the future.

High Performers Need To Have Confidence

Confidence is a key element to high performance and going the extra mile. When you have confidence you feel that you can take on the world – but be careful that this confidence does not come across as arrogance – always underpin outward facing high energy with humility.

Confidence can be viewed in context of three dimensions – inner self, external you and your profession or vocation:

Inner confidence – your game plan for life should be clear and you are comfortable with the direction in which you are heading. By setting personal intentions and putting energy into moving towards them you achieve a clear sense of purpose, it makes getting out of bed a pleasure. When you have a real meaning to what you do, you feel energised and motivated to get on with things

Outer confidence – physical well-being and feeling comfortable with our appearance does away with any inhibitions that we may have about ourself. If you feel over weight, unfit then this can have a negative impact on confidence. Take time for regular exercise, this is both mentally and physically stimulating.

Professional confidence – being the master of your trade, career, vocation or profession makes you confident when interacting with others. When you know your stuff and you are well prepared with your knowledge and expertise you do away with nerves associated with lack of understanding.

Communication with others whether that be one to one or to a group becomes easier when we can tick each of the confidence boxes. When any element is out of sync we end up with an uncomfortable feeling that manifests itself into lack of confidence. When these three areas are aligned we become comfortable with who we are and we reach a state of being confident in our own skin. We connect more effectively with others and take on new challenges far more easily.