Welcome to 2016!

To grow your business this year, for many it’s not going to be any different from 2015.

But for a few, it is going to be the greatest year of their lives yet.

None of these two outcomes are automatic; they both require your permission to come to pass.

To have the same kind of year as you did last year depends on you. To have a different year than you did last year, also depends on you.

Fortunately, this unusual article is for the entrepreneurs seeking the second outcome; to make this year 2016 the greatest year of their life yet!

5 Killer Activities to Grow your Business this Year

To grow your business this year, you will need to focus on some very fundamental activities that produce killer results. I have always believed in fundamentals, they are the unchanging elements of getting anything worthwhile done.

Rather than occupy myself with the latest fad or gimmick or tactic in town, I focus on sharpening the fundamentals. Gimmicks, fads, and tactics will always come and go, but fundamentals remain the same. They are timeless!

So rather than telling you about the popular business gimmick, fad or tactic in town, I’m going to draw your attention back to the fundamentals that you’ve been ignoring. These fundamentals are not going to be ideologies that you are going to passively learn and forget soon, these are going to be activities.

They are actions you must continually take throughout the course of this year in your business. They are practical actions you have heard of in the past but not actively doing.

I call them killer activities because of their dual impact on any business.

1). They are killer activities because failure to continually do them and do them well is what will KILL your business. That’s a guarantee!

2). They are killer activities because continually doing them and doing them well is what will GROW your business. Again, that’s a guarantee!

In other words, their impact on any business is powerful. It can kill and it can transform. They are unavoidable. Period.

Here they are;

Marketing

This is one of the greatest fundamentals of growing your business this year or any other year ever. It’s a do or die fundamental activity of any business.

Let me repeat myself; to grow your business this year, this is a DO or DIE fundamental activity!

There’s no substitute to marketing. I have witnessed this fundamental activity over and over again in my business that I can boldly say this; without it, your business is a living corpse. It’s just a matter of time, it will eventually die!

There’s never enough marketing. So if you aren’t doing it at all, then you are simply digging your own grave. Those who do it are working towards doing more of it because they have experienced the killer results it brings.

So what is Marketing fundamentally?

Every activity that involves reaching out to both your existing and potential customers in order to add value.

Here are the keywords to bear in mind;

• Activity: it’s an action. Meaning, if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.
• Reaching out: it’s always about others. Meaning, you do it in order to connect, engage and communicate with others. It’s not done in isolation.
• Existing and Potential Customers: it’s for both kind of customers. Your old ones and the new ones you are pursuing. It’s not one sided. Both deserve to be reached out to continually.
• Add Value: it’s about helping the customers. Any marketing that isn’t focused on helping the customer is a failed strategy. It won’t last. You reach out in order to help them solve a problem or achieve a result they can’t do on their own.

Now that we have covered the fundamentals, to get started, you need to have the 3M’s of marketing;

• The Message
• The Messenger
• The Medium

Click here to learn more about the 3M’s of marketing.

Team Building

To grow your business this year or any other year ever, will require the collective efforts of several skilled and passionate people other than yourself.

The growth potentials of your business is directly dependent on the collective potentials of the people working on it. By taking on two additional vision partners last year, my business exponentially grew. We broke through the limitations placed on our revenues!

The saying that; “together efforts achieves more” is no cliche. It’s a fact!

Don’t think you will earn less by bringing on other smart people to join you. The ironic truth is that you will actually make more money than you ever did alone. But this doesn’t happen automatically, you do need to get the right people on board to make it so.

I have witnessed on several occasions people whose business crumbled when they got in others. It’s all a question of getting the right people on board. To know the right people, read this unusual article on team building.

So what is Team Building fundamentally?

Bringing in on board other smart people to complement you with other skills critical to the business’s growth.

Here are the keywords to bear in mind;

• Other smart people: don’t bring on board a fool. Don’t bring on board someone you are smarter than in all areas. They must be competently skilled with one or more skills the business needs but you don’t have. Don’t bring on board your jobless brother or sister or cousin or nephew just to help them.
• Complement: this is the objective; someone to complete you in the areas where you are weak. I tell my vision partners, that I don’t expect anything less than 110% from them because I know I brought them in to enable me focus on my strength 110%. In return, I expect them to focus only on their strengths too. That way everybody performs at their best and not averagely.
• Other skills critical to the business’s growth: for growing businesses, don’t bring in two of the same skills at first. Duplication of functions early will allow other areas to suffer. So highlight the key skills the business needs to grow and first fill all with at least one very smart person that will serve as the leader of that function.
  Once every team member complements one another with the critical skills for the business, the next phase is to duplicate yourselves with new subordinates. This time around, you are not just getting them for their skills, you also want to show them how the business works in relation to their skills.
  The function of the first team members is to help create a system of how that function will be performed going forward in the business. That’s why you really need a very smart person for this first role. Not just anyone with the lacking skill set.

Product Development 

The best mouse trap will soon become the obsolete mouse trap if there’s no improvement. I’m often amazed when I see entrepreneurs with mediocre products/services complain of slow business.

For crying out loud, who wants to pay for trash!

If you must go into business, unless you are the first in that line of business, the least product/service you can start with must be at par with the existing competitions. And that is already a wrong position to start with.

So when I see entrepreneurs with even less quality products in the market I just wonder how they ever think they will succeed by being less.

To grow your business this year, you have to continually step up your products/services by adding more layers of improvement that adds more value to your customers.

Don’t think you can keep selling trash and hope to grow. Your customers will only keep tolerating you until a superior offering shows up. This is one of the crucial reasons why team building was discussed above.

Without good heads in your business, how then will you create products/services better than the competitions?

Only the best brains can create the next market wave. If you doubt me, go and ask Apple, Google, Facebook and all these technology pioneers. You can’t create tomorrow by hiring people from the past!

You need forward thinking people who will help you create innovative solutions that addresses the problems your target customers have and are dying to solve.

Don’t settle for average. Always be in the forefront of the market with new and improved versions of your existing products/services. The company with the latest improvements becomes the center of attraction in the market.

That’s how you maintain market relevance; by continually reinventing your products/services and introducing new ones.

Capacity Development

To grow your business this year, your team members and including yourself must never cease to learn. Growing a business is not a static function or activity. Business is a fluid terrain; it is constantly ever changing, so you need to be at the top of your game.

Capacity development is all about sharpening your skills and that of your team members. Knowledge is the ingredient used to think up new products/services. If you are still using only what you learnt 5 years ago to run your business, then I am not surprised why it is struggling.

Investing on trainings and other information products like books, seminars, CDs, etc. is how you stay at the top of your game. When something new pops up in your area of competence, no one other than yourself should be the first to know about it.

Your mind and that of your people is the greatest asset of your business. You need to keep sharpening it. Don’t depend on old skills to compete in an ever changing business terrain. Keep on learning!

So what is Capacity Development fundamentally?

It is the conscious effort to continually increase a business’s ability to do more through reading, training and knowledge sharing.

Here are the keywords to bear in mind;

• Conscious Effort: just like every other killer activities discussed above, capacity development is not automatic. It won’t be done until you do it.
• Continually Increase: it’s a never ending process. It doesn’t end. So don’t be tired of reading, attending seminars, trainings or sharing what you know with your team.
• Business’s Ability to Do More: capacity is your ability to do something. So if you know one thing for instance, you have the ability to do one thing. The moment you know two things more, you just increased your ability to do more than one thing, now you can do 3 things. So if your capacity development is not translating to increasing your business’s ability to do more, it’s not effective. The result of knowledge is improved action, decisions and thinking.
• Reading, Training and Knowledge Sharing: these are the 3 fundamental ways of capacity development. Knowledge sharing can be in the form of mentoring and coaching.

Systems Development

Successful businesses are built on systems and systems are run by people.

There’s no growth without stability. To grow, your business must be able to function without chaos. This is why you need systems to create some level of stability and structure in your business.

I have come in contact with several entrepreneurs who rely on chance to run their business. And yet they wonder why they experience stagnation. Growth doesn’t thrive on chance, it thrives on stability and structure.

So if you want to grow your business this year, you have to focus on creating some form of stability and structure. This can only be done through systems development.

So what is Systems Development fundamentally?

This is the deliberate organization of several repeated activities in your business into structured processes that can be easily documented and duplicated.

Here are the keywords to bear in mind;

• Deliberate Organization: chaos is the opposite of organization. To create systems you need to be organized and this takes deliberate efforts. It won’t happen automatically. If you can’t do it, get someone who can.
• Several Repeated Activities: running a business is all about carrying out several activities daily either by you or other members of your team. Soon, you will realize these activities are often repeated. By grouping several repeated activities is how you create a system.For instance, the several repeated activities that you undertake to create a product/service can be grouped into  the production system. The way you handle customer complains can be grouped into the customer care system.
• Structured Processes: a process is a guide to do things or a way of doing things. The grouped repeated activities are outlined into step-by-step processes in their order of implementation. Without these structured processes of carrying out these several activities, there is no system yet.
• Easily Documented and Duplicated: this is the ultimate objective of systems development in your business, to have it written down and passed on so anyone with the required skill set can perform that function easily. Having it documented enables you to save time when another person is coming on board to do the work. It also enables you find loopholes in the entire process and think up better ways to achieve the same results with less activities involved.

Conclusion

This year can be a whole lot better for your business if you simply focus on doing these 5 killer activities. You won’t gain mastery doing them this year alone, as you progress in your business you will need to be upgrading your knowledge and skills in these 5 fundamentals of business growth.

My goal with this unusual article was to help you focus on the few things that matters so that you can take actions without much confusion. Don’t do too many things this year, just do these 5 killer activities very diligently and you will sing a different song come December 2016!

Team building is a crucial part of your success story as an entrepreneur. It is so crucial that I have personally coined up two words to better convey the importance of building a team – vision partners.

Team building is about creating vision partners for your business. You see, business is a team’s sport, and only the teams with the best players win!

Very early in my entrepreneurial journey, I learnt this valuable business lesson about team building, thanks to Robert Kiyosaki.

Learning this principle about team building was such a great eye opener for me, it made me arrive at two critical decisions that have served me well as an entrepreneur.

1. To never go on this entrepreneurial journey alone.
2. To always be on the lookout for the best players to bring onboard.

Many entrepreneurs don’t take this issue of team building very seriously. If they even do, it’s often later in their entrepreneurial journey, rather than early, that they begin to consider this issue seriously.

Here’s the plain truth; all other things you need in your business to make it work can’t work without people. So pushing this issue of team building aside until later in your entrepreneurial journey isn’t quite a smart choice.

Now is the time to begin to prioritize the need to surround yourself and your business with the best available minds, talents and skills you can find. Having them around early will make the difference between success and failure on the long run!

Debunking the #1 Myth of Team Building

Before going ahead to the 5 winning qualities of the right team players, I want to quickly debunk a prevailing myth many entrepreneurs have about team building. What’s this myth?

You Need Money to Hire the Best Teams

This is often the most prevailing reason many entrepreneurs give for not building a team early enough in their entrepreneurial journey. They allow the lack of money to limit their potentials to attract the best team members.

This is one of those entrepreneurial fallacies and myths about team building that needs to be debunked. And I will give you some real life examples to validate this.

• Copyblogger Media

Was built by assembling the best online marketing minds Brian Clark met along his entrepreneurial journey. These were people like himself who were also passionate about building a digital media company.

All he had to do to get them onboard was to share the vision of a preferable future if they all decide to work together as a team. At the time of bringing them onboard, he didn’t have any money set aside to pay as salaries for each of them. He only presented the opportunity for collaboration and left the products they would co-create to determine how much financial reward they would all get.

Through this, he was able to get such A-list online entrepreneurs such as Sonia Simone, Chris Garret, Tony Clark, Brian Gardner, Robert Bruce, and others on his team. Every one of these guys had their own businesses and was doing well by themselves. But the opportunity of working together was going to make them become greater than they could have achieved alone.

• Apple Inc.

When Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, they didn’t have any salary structures in place to pay for the founding team members they brought onboard. The potentials of the opportunity they were introduced to presented enough motivation that inspired them to get onboard while deferring their financial compensation till later.

If Steve Jobs had let the thought of not having enough money hold him back from reaching out to get the best players onboard, Apple wouldn’t have become the success story it is today. Rather, he allowed the enormity of the opportunity they were all pursuing to determine how much they all stood to gain if they all worked together to make it a success.

• Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg built facebook through his founding team members he assembled on campus. They comprised of his college roommates and fellow Harvard University students Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.

Just imagine how much money he had to pay them to get them onboard early on his entrepreneurial journey?

Nothing!

Again, he only shared the potentials of the opportunity they were going to all pursue together and allowed the product they would co-create determine how much they were each going to get paid when it became a success.

Money is a Factor, But NOT a Limitation of Team Building

It’s a fact you do need to consider the financial reward of each vision partner you want to bring onboard, but it’s not up to you. It’s up to the opportunity!

When starting out, nothing can be more obvious than your inability to pay for the right vision partners. If you had the money to pay them, they wouldn’t qualify as vision partners would they?

So stop trying to magnify your inability to pay, the right vision partners are already aware of this. They aren’t counting on you to pay them what they know you can’t afford when starting out, they are only counting on your leadership.

They realize it’s up to the vision to provide the financial reward that will compensate for their contributions. What they require from you far more than you can ever afford financially is your leadership.

Much more than they believe the vision and want to pursue the opportunity together, they have to believe in your capacity as their leader to help them successfully deliver the vision. Stop focusing on your lack of money to hire the best teams, rather focus on your capacity as an entrepreneurial leader assembling a team of vision partners.

TEAM BUILDING CHECKLIST: 5 Winning Qualities of the Right VISION PARTNERS

Now that we’ve debunked the #1 myth of team building, it’s time to talk about the 5 winning qualities of the right vision partners. These are the checklist I have used to choose my vision partners over my 10 years in business. They have served me well; I hope they do the same for you too!

1. They get IT
2. They get YOU
3. They get ON with it
4. They get THERE with you
5. They get READY for what’s next

• They get IT

The first winning quality of the right vision partners is that ‘they get IT’. What do I mean by ‘they get IT’?

In team building, there are essentially 3 core attributes the right vision partners need to get that qualifies them to come onboard. And this is what I mean by ‘they get IT’; the ‘IT’ here represents these core attributes;

1. Shared Vision

Not everyone can or should qualify to join your team of vision partners, only the right people should make the team. Its more headache trying to change the wrong person into the right person for your team than it is to diligently seek out and enlist the right person.

Remember what you are looking for is a vision partner, so having a shared vision is one of the distinguishing qualities you need to lookout. The right vision partner is someone who also shares the same vision as you the founder of the company.

• He/she must also want to build a business that MATTERS.
• He/she must also seek to change the world and profit from purpose as you.
• He/she must also buy into the purpose, vision and mission of the company.
• He/she must also be passionate about the products/services you are co-creating together.
• He/she must also be passionate about the problems you are in business to solve for your target customers.

2. Shared Values

The second core attribute they need to get is shared values. It’s difficult to build a team of vision partners with conflicting values. Your values are what dictate your intentions [thoughts], actions [activities] as well as dispositions [behaviours]. They constitute the internal codes that power your external realities.

Team building without shared values is the recipe for disaster. Why? Because you will never be able to align the thoughts, activities and behaviours of your vision partners towards achieving the shared vision of the company.

Shared values are what will determine the culture and personality of the organization. That’s why your team of vision partners must;

• Exemplify similar virtues.
• Possess similar work ethics.
• Passionate about similar ideas.
• Uphold similar principles of life.
• Share similar business philosophy.

3. Complementary Skills

The third core attribute your team of vision partners needs to get is complementary skills. The whole essence of team building is to maximize your results by amplifying your efforts. In other words, together efforts achieve more.

So you shouldn’t be on the lookout for a duplicate of yourself but rather you should seek out a complement of yourself. Don’t select someone that has the same skill set just like you, rather select someone that possesses the skill set that you lack.

The goal is to see your business as a big puzzle and your team of vision partners as the different pieces of the puzzle that needs to be fit together to complete the puzzle. So it doesn’t quite pay to have the same skill set onboard as vision partners. You need people with complementary skills.

This is very crucial because as the business grows, each of them will then duplicate themselves by hiring more of their kinds to facilitate that specific operational function.

• They get YOU

When it comes to team building, as I have mentioned earlier above, your fundamental role and function on the team is leadership. Your vision partners are counting on your capacity to function as an entrepreneurial leader.

They need your guidance and direction to be able to work together in co-creating the shared vision of the business. So it’s absolutely important they also buy into you as the leader of the business and not just into the vision alone.

This is what I mean by ‘they get YOU’.

• Getting YOU is about your vision partner’s unwavering believe in your capacity and the trust earned from your character as a person.
• Getting YOU is about your vision partner’s mutual understanding of what you are trying to accomplish through the business.
• Getting YOU is about your vision partner’s unwavering commitment to submit to your leadership.
• Getting YOU is about your vision partner’s knowledge of you, admiration for what you are trying to accomplish, and the confidence that you can deliver.

• They get ON with it

In team building, the right vision partners are master executors. They are not time wasters or eye-service workers. They are neither slothful nor deceitful. They work without supervision and don’t need to be micro-managed.

This is because they first get IT and then they get YOU, so it’s time to get ON with it. For them, these two winning qualities serve as the basis of their internal motivation to execute persistently. They work because they do what they love and love what they do. For them, work is play!

This is what I mean by ‘they get ON with it’.

So the right vision partner is anyone you’ve carefully observed and repeatedly seen exhibiting the following principles of self mastery;

• Being proactive – taking initiatives without being told
• Beginning with the End in Mind – aligning actions with purpose
• Putting First Things First – working according to priority

• They get THERE with you

When it comes to team building, the right vision partners are those who are in it for the long haul. The entrepreneurial journey as I have often said is not a sprint, but a marathon. Building a business that MATTERS takes time.

So you wouldn’t be doing yourself and your business any favour if you surround yourself with short term vision partners. These are the people who are only in it for the immediate gain your business brings. They are always looking for a quick exit strategy; they want to make it big and fast, and then cash out.

The right vision partners don’t just get IT or get YOU or get ON with it; they also want to get THERE with you. For them, the journey is as important as the destination.

This is what I mean by ‘they get THERE with you’.

• Getting THERE with you is about your vision partner’s commitment to the cause/vision/purpose/mission.
• Getting THERE with you is about your vision partner’s willingness to integrate their dreams into yours to make it bigger, better and greater.
• Getting THERE with you is about your vision partner’s capacity to hang on regardless of other tempting opportunities out there within their reach.

• They get READY for what’s next

In team building, the right vision partners don’t rest on their laurels. They realize there’s always more out there that needs to be done. So they are never complacent as a result of today’s achievements, no. They are always ever reaching out for what’s next.

One of the dangers of success is the hubris that comes with it. In his book “How the Mighty Fall”, management Guru Jim Collins has this to say about the hubris born of success;

“Great enterprises can become insulated by success; accumulated momentum can carry an enterprise forward for a while, even if its leaders make poor decisions or lose discipline. The hubris born of success kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place. When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow.”

The right vision partners never lose sight of the underlying factors, principles and processes that makes them successful, no. They never relent on their quest to achieve their purpose despite how successful they must have come. They keep on raising the bar!

This is what I mean by ‘they get READY for what’s next’.

• Getting READY for what’s next is about your vision partner’s dedication to their craft.
• Getting READY for what’s next is about your vision partner’s discipline to keep sharpening the saw – improving themselves.
• Getting READY for what’s next is about your vision partner’s capacity to be more and do more than has been done before.

Conclusion

Don’t wait till you are big before you start choosing the right vision partners. Team building is possible for you even as a startup with no money. The potentials of your business idea and the opportunity it presents is enough compensation to get the right team onboard.

And don’t forget to keep in mind these 5 winning qualities of the right vision partners;

1. They get IT
2. They get YOU
3. They get ON with it
4. They get THERE with you
5. They get READY for what’s next

I am sure there are more to these 5 team building checklists for entrepreneurs; feel free to add your own in the comments. Thanks!