How to enhance someone's experience of life

You know that sometimes when you come to work something extraordinary happens that reminds you of why you are passionate about what you do.

Our company purpose is "to enhance people's experience of life" and I have just finished a meeting with a client that reminds me of why I am so passionate about making that happen.

When we started working with her company she was working extremely hard, had great difficulty in taking time off and the business stress was affecting her relationship. It was a good company that was limited in its ability to grow.

3 years on and with less than 2 weeks notice she was able to leave the country and spend time with her daughters in Egypt. She has also sailed around the world with her husband and is a glowing representation of someone having fun who owns a business. So what changed?

It all started with a plan, this gave the ability to put in some key metrics to measure but this doesn't sound so different. In fact they had a lot of this in place before we started working together. What was different was that they were held accountable to execute their strategy, weekly meetings happened regardless and tangble outcomes were agreed to be delivered upon and issues were brought out when they happened, and there butts got kicked if they didn't do it.

This drove stronger communication, better visibility and most important of all accountability around execution of the plan. Execution has always been the most difficult part of achievement but also the most important. Tom Peters calls it the missing 98%.

The four fundamentals things to achieve greatness and freedom in business is:

- Write down a exciting compelling goal that engages your people
- Put it in a clear plan that everyone in your business can see everyday
- Have a clear and visible system of measuring results
- Have a system of accountability

I guarentee that it is this simple but it doesn't happen overnight. This story is an example where this stuff was put in place and three years later achieving a freedom goal that she thought would take 10 years.

Have we enhanced her experience of life.....absolutely
Am I excited about it ..... absolutely

Replying sensibly to emails

I have spend the weekend reviewing sales letters and emails for companies and 1 thing has become quite evident in doing so.

People often provide far to much detail and don't really consider who they are sending their sales letter or email to.

golden rule of emails is your reply should reflect the original message size. ie if it is a few short words reply in a few short words. If it is 3 paragraphs provide enough detail to mirror the length of the email.

Try and understand behaivioral profiles of who you are conversing with before you reply.

Getting Stuck In...!!

As another week screams to a close what have I learnt? Most of the businesses I come across have the same issues time and again. Namely lack of sales, lack of accountability, a bottleneck with the owner and concerns around how to make the business get some traction in this market.

Across my team it is the same with those they are working with.....accountability (setting realistic targets, getting buy in from those who need to hit them and then holding them accountable when they don't!), measuring KPI's, Planning, internal communications (the right info to the right people in the company), having a unique point of difference on which the business bases marketing and sales pitch and most of all the bottleneck that the Owner of the company causes....because all key decisions have to come to them.

It is time for some time out before we roll our sleeves up next week and get stuck in again.

Karl