One of the lessons that I have learned in my years in business is that what got you to where you are will not get you to where you want to go. There are multiple facets to this, from your mindset, to your actions, to the people you have working with you. In all organizations there is a revolving door, people come, people go. This is inevitable and part of the cycle of business, yet I didn’t always think this was the way it was.
I remember in the early days of my leadership, when I had just begun to open my mind to the idea of growing my business beyond my threshold of control. We had a group of people, my “A team”, as I referred to them, that were managing our one location. I began the process of intentionally meeting with them on a weekly basis. These 5 people, along with my husband James, were my inner circle. This was a big growth phase for me as a leader, because these weekly meetings gave me the incentive to identify and clarify what the keys to our success were thus far. We became very close and grew together as we troubleshooted and planned the growth of our business from 1 location to 3. This phase of our growth was dominated by innovation and improving what we were doing, as well as how to duplicate our standards as we grew.
What is curious though is that only one of those 5 people are with us in our organization now. They were with us at the precise moments in our growth that they were supposed to be, but gradually they most moved on to other opportunities. Some I was ready to see move on, because we had reached the limit of where I could help them grow, but some were very hard to say goodbye to. It was sometimes very difficult to have someone move on and not take it personally. But what happened, though it is only clear to me now in retrospect, is that it opened the path for the next phase of our growth. The knowledge that people will always be moving in and out of our organization is now clear. The key is to ensure that the people coming in are operating at a higher level than those that are leaving, if the opposite is true there is a big problem.
By far the biggest change that had to happen to get me where I wanted to go was my mindset. Where did I want to go? I wanted to be able to grow my business, for many reasons, both selfish and not. Ego played its part, as well as wanting to increase my income, but the most compelling reasons where the ones that I needed to evolve into. This began when I realized that money and reputation were empty goals. I began to change my thinking, not intentionally at first, but as a progression as I realized that I wasn’t feeling the satisfaction and accomplishment I was seeking. A shift began inside me, a shift to wanting to serve more people, to give jobs, to help people grow, and this made the stresses and incredible time demands of operating a business worth it. The desire and excitement that I felt at the beginning of my business came back as I found a new and bigger reason to do what I do.