Build a great company on a powerful foundation!
J ANE NORTHRUP IS MY INSPIRATION. Because she’s living an amazing story with clarity and conviction.
Jane started Authority Staffing last year, as a way to bring ex-convicts to full employment. But that’s a tiny fraction of the story.
You see, she’s doing this because her deep Christian faith has given her concrete direction. Even including the name of the company itself and the fact that it’s for-profit.
THIS WEEK I WAS HONORED to give a presentation for Fort Collins Startup Week titled Build Your Business on a Powerful Mission. We had a great discussion and explored some really neat territory about mission-driven startups.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to hear more.
One of the participants asked a really great question: What does a mission statement actually look like? You need to capture something with power and clarity when you’re looking for great partners, employees, and investors.
I promised that I’d expand on the answer to that question here.
THE GREAT DISCUSSION this week with Hugh Liddle and Jim Hamlin started some new momentum. I’m glad we could broadcast it to a worldwide audience.
For a Values Based Business, the concepts are simple but not easy to implement.
Let me expand on that just a bit.
Read the rest of this entry »
THIS WEEK I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to broadcast a wonderful discussion with my favorite sales wizards Hugh Liddle and Jim Hamlin. They’re doing wonderful stuff to bring honest, effective and non-sleazy selling into the world.
We explored the subject of values-based selling, obviously near and dear to my heart. When you’re in a business where your mission is an important part of your message, it takes special skills to incorporate that into selling.
Especially because most prospects have their guard up these days. At the first sniff of something that’s dishonest or inauthentic, you’ve lost them. Forever. Read the rest of this entry »
USUALLY I PROFILE FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES but I was so fascinated by this story that I just had to share.
I was introduced to Lucy Wallace by Stephanie Heacox, who I talked about last week. Lucy heads up Alchemy of Movement, where she delivers extremely energetic dance classes in Boulder.
But Lucy discovered an opportunity to bring dance into women’s prisons. At first she thought this might just be an occasional class, but over the last year it’s become amazing.
THIS WEEK I DISCOVERED an exciting new program offered by Benedictine University near Chicago: their Doctoral Program in Values Driven Leadership for Senior Executives.
This is an amazing development.
This is a mature, well-thought-through program for those who are truly serious about leading businesses with deeper values – the same values I talk about here on this blog.
STEPHANIE HEACOX is launching a great new business, Senior Homeshares. It’s built on a powerful personal motivation to address pain and reduce anxiety.
You see, a few years ago, her mother was in the usual end-of-life bind about housing. She couldn’t sustain the family home, but didn’t want to move into Assisted Living or one of the other services for people who need support.
The financial burden was part of it, of course, but also the difficulty of making decisions to become dependent on others.
MOST PEOPLE I’M TALKING WITH are positive about the outlook for 2016.
Personally, my 2015 was transformative, and I’m incredibly excited about the new projects I’m working on right now. I’ll be talking about that here on the blog real soon.
It’s a bit surprising, actually, the optimism that I’m seeing. Read the rest of this entry »
IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, there’s nothing special about the beginning of a new year.
Yet it’s amazing how much importance we place on this event. Especially when you realize that there’s different calendars, with all kinds of various starting dates.
But here we are.
The importance of a new year is what we choose to place on it. Read the rest of this entry »
HOLIDAYS like Christmas, Eid ul-Fitr and Passover are important at multiple levels. We enjoy them perhaps as cultural touchstones, but even more important is the core grounding of each event.
These examples happen to be religious, but you can find similar secular examples. In the US we’ve adopted Memorial Day and Labor Day as the unofficial beginning and end of summer. And like everything in this country, it seems they’ve also been overtaken as consumer events.
But the core behind these remembrances is quite deep, based on the loss of lives in military battle, and the conflict between management and labor in the Industrial Revolution.
The Values-Based Business 