Build a great company on a powerful foundation!
PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS STRIVING for improvement. And visionaries paint an attractive picture of the future.
Leaders are the ones who can make the connection between the two.
The challenge is to pick a vision which is attractive, believable, and attainable. But you may have discovered that each of these is squishy, with lots of room for challenges.
WE FOCUS AN AWFUL LOT on product features. We’re faster, more powerful, more fully featured than the competition.
Honestly, a lot of customers are getting burned out on that.
They’re recognizing that “good enough” is plenty sufficient for most things in life. There are a few things that each person deeply cares about, but other things … it’s OK to not have the best.
HOW OBVIOUS is your company’s mission?
Is it so compelling that customers can tell you what it is, in their own words?
Is it so clear that your employees are thinking about it in some way every day?
WE’VE ALL CREATED lots of marketing messages. Our products will solve this problem. We’ll make your life better. We’ll treat you great.
Those are fine. Even powerful and compelling.
But how does this benefit your employees?
THERE’S A LOT OF FAKENESS in the world.
I would imagine that it’s always been this way, I suppose, but now it’s so much more obvious when people aren’t showing their company authentically in the world.
And consumers are getting really quite sophisticated in detecting fake messages.
SOMETIMES I JUST FEEL LIKE I’m drowning.
It’s not because I’m particularly messed up or disadvantaged. I’m just as human as anyone, and we all have our challenges.
The question is what we DO about it.
WE ALL KNOW that goals are important. If you’re going to make progress, you have to decide what moving forward means.
But that has no emotion in it. It’s just blah-blah-blah management speak.
Our challenge is how to create a sense of excitement and inspiration with your business goals.
IWAS READING a powerful article recently about building a conscious company from a systems perspective. It got me thinking about the idea of how we tend to create success measures.
It matters because those measures drive all behavior in your company.
The question is: What if we would adopt our customers’ measures of success as our own? What would happen?
RECENTLY I’VE BEEN THINKING about some of the principles that ground my life and my business. With some thought, I’ve been able to articulate one that’s pretty fundamental and serves me well.
I’m not the smartest guy around, but I get by. The reason is that I figure most anything can be learned given some focus.
I see that many people seem to really struggle when they run into barriers. I get that. When you’re standing right next to an obstacle, it looks really big. Even insurmountable.
OLD TOWN MEDIA has developed an amazing reputation in northern Colorado. They’re a creative and thorough marketing agency based in Fort Collins. With a love for office dogs!
Every time I hear someone mention this business, the same words keep popping up:
When I had the chance to chat with CEO and Founder Miles Kailburn recently. We talked about the phases they’ve gone through since starting the company in 2007.
The Values-Based Business 