Business Coach | Evaluate Yourself
This business coach post explains why you must take time to evaluate yourself.
Business Coach Tips & Letter to My Younger Self:
“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.” – Jack Welch
Dear Clay,
Congratulations on all of the awards you’ve been winning and the business success you’ve been experiencing. On a personal note, I know that you are concerned about the increased presence of hair found within your nasal cavity. You should be. In the future, this only gets worse. Pretty soon, you will have so much of this hair growing in your nose that you could harvest those nose hairs and weave them into a sweater each month. You are also going to reach a point where you will gain weight simply by smelling food. I know it’s hard to believe, but it will happen. When walking into restaurants, you will soon be spotted plugging your nose and eating ice chips for lunch. It gets serious in your 30’s man.
Now, back to business coach. My friend, it’s time to invest in a mirror and face reality. Daniel Goleman, psychologist and bestselling author of the New York Times bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Matters More Than IQ, puts it another way, “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far” (New York: Bantam Books, 2005).
Clay, don’t get me wrong here. Through pig-head discipline and determination, you have built a formidable event entertainment company, yet I know that your lack of self-awareness will serve as your Achilles Heel if you don’t address it soon. With that in mind, I need for you to take five minutes and evaluate yourself on the following areas of business mastery. A rating of 10 means that you are a complete Jedi Master in an area. A rating of 1 means that you clearly have no competency in that area, and that you are figuratively standing naked in front of business associates every day in this area.
- Your ability to manage your time and the increased responsibilities that come with becoming a leader
- Your ability to raise seed, growth and venture capital
- Your ability to create the standard “Pitch Deck” that most venture capitalists prefer
- Your ability to create a detailed pro-forma so that you always know your break-even point, your hard costs, your variable costs, your cost of goods sold, your profitability per customer and the overall specific number of transactions you need to do in order to achieve your dreams
- Your ability to optimize your website so that your company will appear at the top or near the top of Google searches
- Your ability to design and launch effective landing web pages to improve your ratio of website visits to conversions
- Your ability to market effectively using social media
- Your ability to build a duplicable and scalable sales process
- Your ability to train inexperienced sales people to become effective sales machines
- Your ability to write effective sales scripts
- Your ability to create an effective sales conversion pipeline
- Your ability to teach your sales people how to overcome objections in a systematic and scalable way
- Your ability to manage your sales people effectively
- Your ability to create sales collateral and materials including effective business cards, brochures, print pieces, advertisements, etc.
- Your ability to launch an effective mailer / print piece campaign
- Your ability to execute a successful tradeshow appearance
- Your ability lead a group of ten or more team members/employees
- Your ability to think like an entrepreneur to spot the business opportunities that are all around you
- Your ability to create and map out your customer service program in a scalable and duplicable way
- Your ability to increase the overall level of quality of the products and services your company provides
- Your ability to implement a mystery shopper program
- Your ability to implement a merit-based program
- Your ability to implement a profit-share program
- Your ability to motivate yourself and stay motivated through times of great adversity
- Your ability to create consistent media attention for your business
- Your ability to lead what Gino Wickman calls a “Level 10 Meeting”
- Your ability to find, recruit, hire, inspire and retain top quality people
- Your ability to known when to fire an employee
- Your ability to design an appropriate compensation plan
- Your ability to execute complex projects and tasks
- Your ability to create, design and improve workflows
- Your ability to say no to distractions in a tactful and consistent way so that you can stay focused on achieving your purpose
- Your ability to turn your current business systems and processes into a duplicable and scalable turn-key business model
- Your ability to make smart real estate decisions about buying, selling or leasing office space
- Your ability to network effectively and to turn interactions into active clients and friends
- Your ability to manage the legal aspects of your business
- Your ability to financially and emotionally navigate a lawsuit
- Your ability to deliver public speeches
- Your ability to lead effective workshops
- Your ability to inspire people
- Your ability to achieve a healthy life and sustainable life balance
Congratulations! You have just completed an in-depth analysis of your business skills for the first time. I know that you are thinking to yourself, “Now that I’ve filled out this fabulous survey, what I am supposed to do with this information?” Well my friend, you must immediately begin to buy into the business coach concept that what you don’t know can and will hurt you in business and in life. You can’t keep skinny dipping in the shark infested ocean waters of business while wrapped in bacon without eventually losing a limb. I know at this point in your life, you have just started listening to Brian Tracy, internationally renowned business speaker and bestselling author, while driving to and from work, so you now know how valuable each and every word he says about business success truly is. Clayvis, soon you will hear a business coach truth that will blow your mind like a gas-powered blow dryer, “No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.”
My younger self, listen, you beautiful man! Brian is saying that it is far easier and much less painful to learn from mentors than from mistakes. However, I know you and I know the way that your brain works. Getting through to you is about as easy as using an auger to drill down through 100 feet of dense rock. But I also know that once you finally shove a nugget of business coach knowledge inside your gourd, it stays there forever. So let me hit you with yet another notable quotable on which you can marinate. John Maxwell says, “Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, and relationships that have lost their meaning.”
Clay, I can sense it, you are starting to experience an epiphany! You are starting to get it! You are starting to see that you are going to need to start learning from business coach mentors, not mistakes if you want to grow your business and your life exponentially. Sir Isaac Newton, the man we have to thank for the creation of calculus and much of the foundation for classical mechanics, once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” At the risk of ruining the entire space-time continuum and unraveling the very threads that bind our universe together, I’m going to give you a glimpse of the future, my friend. Until the year 2015, you must block off 30 minutes per day to read the books on the reading list I gave you earlier in my letters. However, in the year 2015 and beyond, you can log on to www.Thrive15.com to grab this information. As the world begins to change faster and faster, the company you helped to start will pump out even more and more practical training at an even faster rate. Clayvis, Thrive15.com distills the books and knowledge you need to know into powerful and actionable training that will absolutely change your life once you begin to implement the principles, strategies and systems being taught. However, until then, you must learn from real mentors so that you can avoid and reduce the amount of mistakes you make. I know reaching these people can feel much like chasing down a unicorn, but it is possible. Clay, you are so close to escaping the death grip of jackassery. Now that you have the facts, you have to act. This is your year to thrive, my friend. You can do it, but you have to start blocking out time to learn more if you want to earn more.
Sincerely, You of the Future,
Boom!
Clay Clark
P.S. When your ex-girlfriend from high school randomly reaches out to you, do not introduce her to Vanessa (your wife). Introducing your ex to your wife is a bad idea. I have no idea what motivated us to introduce her to your wife, but I am nearly certain it was inspiration from Satan himself, the Dark Lord of Jackassery.