Helping you create an energetic life you love, with more money and less stress
To all our highly valued clients and acquaintances:
“You can get anything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
Zig Ziglar
We are starting a new series of newsletters. You may ask, why now?
I often joke with people that I have been coaching for over fifty years. I started when I was 10 years old, on a beautiful private golf course in the Greater Boston Area, helping business owners, attorneys, doctors, and other high-net-worth individuals win their competitive golf tournaments, while having the time of their life, often under pressure. Yes, I was a caddy.
Though I didn’t think in these terms back in the day, while I was shouldering two golf bags at a time, I experienced marketing, building a brand and creating demand, based upon helping our clients improve their performance and produce their desired, competitive results.
Can you also relate earlier experiences in your life with your current professional work?
Recently, a respected colleague of mine told me that, when working with clients, he strives to remind himself that, “I’m just here to help. It’s not about me. It’s about them.”
On the journey, once I completed studies as a Structural Design Engineer, with some business start-up experiences along the way, I served nonprofits, helping them to be more systematic, dedicated to making a meaningful difference, contributing to a wide variety of causes. Once I got married, however, with a child well on the way, I realized I needed to get serious about a real-deal, life makeover.
In 1987, I began coaching, consulting and facilitating for clients in the private sector. For the past two decades, I have been primarily working in the financial services industry, incorporating my broader, entrepreneurial development resources along with it.
For many years, I entertained the idea of writing a book and was highly encouraged to do so, from numerous friends and colleagues. However, being a family of six was my first priority, and I had an abundance of “word of mouth” referral opportunities to keep myself sufficiently engaged.
At this stage in my life, with both grown children and more discretionary time, in our rapidly developing, changing, and often uncertain information age, I decided to assemble what I have learned so far, from having served thousands of clients. This upcoming series of newsletters will offer a summary snapshot of key practices, that can be repeatedly implemented with excellence, to produce your desired results.
For some of you, this may eventually serve as a pocket-size guide and refresher checklist, to reinforce your focus and accelerate your performance on everything you’ve learned and accomplished to date. For others, this may serve as a cornerstone for a new beginning in business.
When we talk about results, I am first asking you to consider what, for you, constitutes a great life? What does a life well-lived look like? What is a quality of life for which you are grateful and proud of, regardless of pressing circumstances and innumerable challenges along the way? On the basis of those questions, I think we’re ready to talk about how to best organize yourself, your business model and your professional practices to get where you want to go.
The high ground here, in my opinion, is not that you achieve mere numerical results and milestones, but that you create the life and business you want with the best people possible, with a great future for growth together – a celebratory joyride for everyone involved.
As you grow into all that you aspire to be as a person and a professional, you also can have the satisfaction of pioneering new frontiers in your own creative ingenuity and unique self-expression, giving shape to the art that your life and business can be, with integrity and dignity.
For many years, I have advocated, the mantra, “So goes January, so goes the 1st quarter, so goes the year.” Whatever your hopes and dreams for the new year, there is always time to re-stoke the fires – to “Get and Keep Your Year in Gear,” so to speak.
I’m sure that we have all heard messages to the following effect:
“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
– Stephen R. Covey
I advocate a simple framework and approach, which I call “8 Key Strategies for Your Total Business Success.” I have found that these strategies constitute a “critical mass” for business success and can be built upon, personalized and customized depending on the reader’s style, markets, and plans for future growth. You might call these the Pareto Principle type strategies (The 80/20 Rule), where 20% of the input creates 80% of the results (though this is not an exact science – the ratio could be 10-90, 15-85, etc).
My main point is that these are mission-critical, core strategies to institutionalize and continuously improve in one’s business practices or peripheral activities won’t really make a difference. We strive to be Brilliant with these Basics.
“8 Key Strategies for Your Total Business Success.”
1. Create a compelling, passionate, three-year vision for yourself.
2. Make the time to plan and energetically execute your most important priorities.
3. Effectively manage all areas of your finances and cash flow.
4. Develop and lead a championship support team–create “win-win” everywhere.
5. Create exceptionally delighted clients and long-lasting, raving fans.
6. Generate a consistently systematic and relentlessly effective marketing engine.
7. Refine your professional sales presentation process.
8. Maintain a great balance between work, rest, and play.
For years, my email signature has included the tagline:
“To know and not to do is the virtual equivalent of not to know”
My main point here is not to just recognize that these strategies are common sense and are already conceptually understood. Much more important is to embrace the “execution challenge” and strive for highly sustainable implementation, with all the benefits that follow.
Included in this newsletter series will be recommended resources for you to access, such as checklists to review, books to study or websites to visit. So let’s get started and make something happen!
(In fact, for a quick snapshot on your practice, consider doing this Professional Practice Checklist.)
As we asked in our previous newsletter:
What can you learn and build upon, from your previous accomplishments?
What do you need to plan and execute to Get and Keep Your Year in Gear?
Knowing what you know now, do your plans make sense, going forward? Do they light you up? Are they set up to do what you want them to do? What if you don’t do them?
Until our next meeting, here’s to your progress, success and happiness!
Sincerely,
Don