Whether you are a new, or long-time, business owner, you and your company face a unique set of challenges, sometimes on a daily basis. As the founder, and owner of MEGAComfort, I’ve been fortunate to grow our company, learning from mistakes and avoiding others, by learning from successful entrepreneurs and business owners. Regardless of where you are in your business, I’ve found that you can always learn something from other leaders. In fact, as you manage and lead your team, it’s wise to listen to those in front and behind you to make sure you have a full picture of what’s going on.
To ensure the success of MEGAComfort, and actively work to be a good leader for our team, I constantly strive to better myself and our direction. I hope my experience as a business owner and leader can help you reach your potential and goals.
- Set Specific Goals
This may seem obvious (that a company needs goals), but the specifics and how you measure those goals is important. One thing we learned early on was to break huge goals into smaller more attainable goals. For example, if you have a number in sales you want to reach, that’s great! How realistic is it? It may be high, and it might be reachable in 3 years’ time, so why set the goal for one year? If you’re trying to achieve a massive goal in an unlikely time period, you’re going to stress out your team and set them up to fail.
When you break down goals and become very detailed, your team can not only reach the goal, they can exceed it because the road map to success is very clear. Not only is it easier to reach your goals, it’s also easier to create useful analytics and repeat the successful process.
An easy way to remember this is to be SMART. Obviously, you’re already brilliant, but it’s a great acronym to remember. SMART stands for: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Timely. As I’ve already mentioned, this is the pathway to setting yourself and your team up for success.
- Delegate and Share
I remember all too well, that feeling of handing off your baby to someone new. Yes, I’m a father but I’m not talking about handing off my actual children to someone elses care. I’m talking about the time that I started sharing responsibilities with new employees and managers. When you’re starting a new business it’s so easy hold all of the responsibility, the business becomes your baby, the center of your world, and it can be hard to share and trust your employees.
You want to make sure you hire smart, capable, solid employees that share your enthusiasm for your business. Then you want to hand off responsibilities and delegate tasks, projects, and share goals and develop strategies together. In the beginning, it may feel strange to share or give up responsibility of certain areas of your business, but the only way you can grow your business is to give other experts the freedom to build your business.
- Surround Yourself with Good People
This goes hand-in-hand with my second tip, because you want to focus on hiring people that embody or are passionate about your brand and mission. Not only do you want to hire people that you want to work with each day, but you want to build a professional network of people that are involved in growing and pushing themselves to be better every day.
- Mistakes Happen, Make them Fast
We’ve all been told since we were kids that mistakes happen. It’s true at every age and every stage of life. In business, it’s better to make mistakes when you’re starting out because later they can have a more profound impact. However, at any stage just remember it’s not the mistake that matters as much as how you bounce back. Don’t let it set you back, and don’t let it affect your team in any other way than to motivate them to learn from the mistake and make wiser decisions.
- Time
Success takes time. MEGAComfort first started as an idea, then a dream, and finally a business. In that transformation, it took hard work, perseverance, dedication, sleepless nights, and did I mention hard work? The one theme within any successful business, is that it takes time to move in the right direction. Time doesn’t just pass and you get to where you want to be, but time allows you to continuously push for your dream to come to fruition.
My advice is to take your time and build the company and business you want to be a part of. In that time, work hard and then some! We still work hard at MEGAComfort, we have a mission that I believe we can really accomplish. We want to help everyone reduce pain and fatigue with every step. Much like we are working towards our goal, you have your own goal to attain and I hope some of these tips will help you get there.