What is EnergizedGrowth?
Lisa Nirell, EnergizeGrowth LLC

As a business owner, what would your life look like if your business strategy were clear, focused, and exciting?

Despite the amount of economic turmoil, services margin erosion, and talent shortage, the DREAM of doing more of what you love is alive, and it's doing well. It simply takes time and patience to learn how to get it.

After spending over a year personally interviewing top performing entrepreneurs, I found that leaders running energized growth companies ruthlessly ask three questions throughout the life of their business:

1. What are we PASSIONATE about?
2. What can we be EXCELLENT at doing?
3. How well does it fuel our ECONOMIC ENGINE—can we be paid well for it?

Jim Collins' "Good to Great" is a timeless guidebook that helps us focus on these disciplined questions. Peter Drucker inspired Jim. And Napoleon Hill, author of “Think and Grow Rich,” probably inspired Peter with the results of his interviews of over 200 turn-of-the-century tycoons.

Let's fast forward to today. How often do you HONESTLY answer these questions? And how swiftly do you make changes to your company's growth strategy?

If you answered "seldom" or "never," you're not alone.

That's because it's easy for any entrepreneur to plan for growth. But few plan for energized growth. Typically, entrepreneurs face five common energy-drainers:

• Saying "yes" to too many things. How many times have you been stuck in your office at midnight, working on some volunteer project, and missing another moment to enjoy some family time? If this has happened to you, it is possible that obligation, guilt, and "should do" lists rule your life.
• Discovering that former best selling products or services don't make money like they used to—yet you keep promoting them. Every month becomes a contest to see whether they will be profitable. This often leads to employees not knowing the behaviors and measures that drive profitable business. Therefore, most of your employees cannot explain how their job ties to the financial success of the company!
• Not knowing what ideas should be pursued. Every idea seems valid. Should you do them all at once, or one at a time? Which ideas will pay off? Most over-committed entrepreneurs lack any feedback system to separate 'good ideas' from viable business models.
• Having more tasks to do than hours in the day. How often do you let yourself get distracted with every phone call or instant message? Companies that lack an energized growth model allow other people's priorities to rule their day--and many of them are not customers. These leaders typically say they are overwhelmed and exhausted.
• Trading hours for dollars. Few founders have discovered the passive income route in their companies. Often, they think 'hours for dollars' is the only method to generate revenue.

Services professionals are notorious for getting stuck in the 'hours for dollars' trap because they don't know how to command higher rates in their field and be viewed as an industry expert. Or, they are missing out entirely on a brand new opportunity to grow their business because they are heavily focused on delivering good service. I have seen this problem heightened within the legal and accounting professions.

People trapped in this paradigm have not yet embraced the mindset of an expert with a leveraged business model. A leveraged model expert surrounds herself with technicians and specialists, and ties her services to the value delivered—not hours billed.

Four steps can help you avoid these growth traps...

1. Eliminate hidden roadblocks getting in the way of your growth. Develop a set of ruthlessly honest questions and share with your team. If they are well developed, they will reveal an area of your business that is DRAINING YOU of profits and opportunity. When I work with clients, they complete a financial and marketing survey to identify these blind spots—whether they be inadequate cash, lack of sales resources, poor market positioning, etc.
2. Know your style, natural gifts, and blind spots as an entrepreneurial leader. Invest a few thousand dollars in personality assessments (such as PDP, MBTI and DISC) for new hires and potential top performers. Have you ever measured the impact of one bad hire? In most services industries, it can be as much as three times a person’s annual salary. Applying this strategy will cost a fraction of that huge hit to your bottom line.
3. Develop a feedback system to ensure your company's core business, or "hedgehog," honors your financial and personal goals. If you are a private or family owned business, you answer to yourself and your family—not Wall Street. Hire an objective outsider to gather feedback about what you do best, your values, and untapped opportunities. Our 'built in' human filters block important information if you try doing this alone!
4. Create a custom dashboard to communicate, guide and measure growth in your company. Focus more on what is of highest value to your employees and customers. If you are currently using only trailing indicators to lead your business, chances are you have made costly strategic choices in the past. Trailing indicators may include total revenue per employee, quarterly profits, days sales outstanding (DSO), etc. Leading indicators track changes in internal (employee) and external (market or client) behaviors that ultimately lead to the results you’re seeking.

Author and seasoned CEO Gary Sutton shares growth wisdom in his newest book, "Corporate Canaries". A man of few (but powerful) words, he says "One of the three ways to kill your company is to have fuzzy direction. Even while Fortune, Business Week and all the others were naming Enron 'Company of the Year,' nobody could describe what they were doing. If you don't have two or three forward indicators, your controls are incomplete."

You can EnergizeGrowth today in your company. Don't wait to complete these four steps. Begin now by asking: "What habits do we need to succeed, and what questions will we relentlessly ask to help us reinforce them?"

Clarity and focus can really be exciting. With discipline comes freedom. Build some new habits, and your business is guaranteed to look different.
Copyright 2006, Lisa Nirell.

> Learn more by visiting our Video Page.