Driven to Business with Eddie Mayfield

First of all, let’s clarify the terms. A “team” is people, individual people with their own frustrations, gifts, passions, and problems.  When you lead a team,  you are dealing with individual people, not some amorphous entity.

This is why you don’t lead with memos, emails, and blog posts.  You must deal in the messy reality of individual people.  Anyone aspiring to leadership must come to grips with that truth.

To begin with, you have to care.  In their well researched book on military leadership,  Five Star Leadership, Patrick Townsend and Joan Gephardt  interview a hardened marine corp gunnery sergeant about what he felt was the most necessary ingredient for being a good leader.  His answer was surprising- you have to love the people under you.  Hardly the answer you’d expect, but nonetheless, exactly correct. You have to care.

Jim Collins is famous for comparing a business to a bus. At first, one might think that the role of the leader is to drive the bus, but Collins says no; the role of the leader is to put the right people in the right seats on the bus.  Who is in what seat will determine where the bus goes.

The late Zig Ziglar said that you don’t build a business, you build people. Then the people build the business.

But how do you do that?

The first thing, as mentioned, is to care about the people you lead.  Don’t skip this step. For many aspiring leaders, it’s the hardest one.  Tim Cummins, a Christian leader here in Atlanta, said one of the mistakes young pastors make, is trying to build and grow a church from a computer.  It doesn’t work for them, and it won’t for you in your business.  You have to care about people, and that starts by engaging them.   Anyone that thinks this is easy has never done it.

Learn to trust.  Jim Belasko and Ralph Stayer wrote a great book some years ago- Flight of the Buffalo. They discuss a hunting technique used by buffalo hunters to simply shoot the dominant bull first.  The rest of the herd would then mill aimlessly around, and they could pick them off one by one.

The question this generates is: what is your team doing when you aren’t there?  Milling aimlessly around?  In many cases the answer is yes, and here’s why.  You’ve taught them to do it.

When we make it clear that we don’t trust the people we lead,   when we make it clear that mistakes are not tolerated, when we, in effect, punish creativity and energy, we will get lethargic, unmotivated team members.

Townsend and Gephardt talk about a class at a British military academy where after a leadership lecture, the instructor was asked: “Sir, what do you do if you are assigned to a crummy company?”  To which he replied, “if you have a crummy company, then you are a crummy leader.”

If you have a terrible team, then you are a terrible leader, period.  While that may sound harsh, in fact, it’s empowering.  IF I am the problem, then I am the solution. That mindset allows much clearer thinking and corrective actions, then blaming everyone else.

Get the right people in the right seats.  Encourage, encourage, encourage.  Don’t concentrate on failures, concentrate on solutions and successes.  People will make mistakes, and by the way, so do you!

Another great Zig Ziglar quote is that we judge others by their actions, but ourselves by our intentions.  Stop finding errors, and instead find opportunities.

No One ever arrives at being a great leader; it’s a journey. So get started.

To say that Glen Meakem has been a successful entrepreneur would be an understatement.  Glen was an early achiever in the technology boom, founding several high tech firms.  Among them were Kiva Systems- sold to Amazon, Hotpads-sold to Zillow, Shipwire-sold to Ingram Micro, and CloudMeter-sold to Splunk.

Glen is a venture capitalist, and co-founder of Freemarkets, which at its height, had a market cap of $13 billion.  In addition to all of this, Glen hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, “Glen Meakem on the weekend.”  Glen was a combat officer in the Gulf War, and is a Harvard MBA.

His latest venture is perhaps his most interesting.  Glen founded Forever Inc in 2012.  Forever is the world’s first and only permanent media storage and sharing company.  Visit Forever’s site HERE.   Forever is actually hosting a 3 day photo and scrapbooking extravaganza right here in the Buckhead area September 24-27.  You can read about that HERE.

Most of us use digital media to take pictures, videos, and generate documents.  We attempt to store them for safekeeping, perhaps on a DVD, hard drive, or even using the online storage sites.

A common and reasonable concern has been that the media we’re using to back things up might not be readable in a few years.  As a for instance, at one time our company backed up files on 7 1/4 inch floppy disks. We now have nothing that will read those disks.  There is almost no media any of us are using, that will not be replaced or fail at some point.

That has opened up a huge market for online backup, but there are issues.  Google, for instance, is a great company, and does a good job at storing your data online, but it has a downside.  Google’s free storage is limited, and they mine your data.  Under Google’s present plan, you can only store up to 16 MP resolution.  Larger files are compressed, and original documents are discarded. The question of exactly who owns those files once uploaded is an open question.  Facebook, for instance, to their credit, is very open that THEY own your photos once you upload them.

Glen founded Forever with a different mindset.  Their mission  is to back up your media and memories, guaranteed for your life plus 100 years.  To accomplish this, he founded the Forever Guarantee Fund, designed to grow over time like an endowment.  The majority of fees paid by Forever subscribers goes to this fund, to ensure that the media is preserved for generations.  It’s a unique and smart approach, much like most of Glen’s other business ideas.

Don’t miss this conversation with one of the most interesting businessmen you’ll ever hear.  Glen’s interview with Eddie airs at 11 AM, Saturday June 20th.

Driven to Business, hosted by Eddie Mayfield is heard every Saturday morning on Atlanta’s business radio, WAFS, 1190 AM.  The show is streamed live on biz1190.com and podcast on eddiemayfield.com and itunes.

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta..   Driven to Business.

Nicole Fallon wrote an article for Business News Daily listing 15 business ideas for 2015.  Not all of her ideas appeal to me, but it’s an interesting article, and  the topic of our discussion this week on Driven to Business.

In the first place, this is an exciting time to be an entrepreneur.  Opportunities that never before existed are out there to be seized.  At the same time, we’re in one of the most unstable times my generation has seen. Obamacare, the devaluation of currency, a huge increase in the dependent class, and the subsequent rise of class envy  has eroded much of the American dream.

Here’s how I look at that; no one can predict the future with certainty.  Even the New Testament warns against this in the book of James, saying: “Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.”  Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow”

So, we live until we die, and the worst thing anyone can do is hunker down in a hole and await the apocalypse. But all that being said.  I remain an optimist.

Here is a sampling  of Ms Fallon’s ideas..

• Kid Friendly Apps..  Reminds me of when Apple began supplying computers to elementary schools so kids would grow up liking Apple computers.  ANYTHING you can do that appeals to kids AND their parents is probably a good business idea.
• Freelancing..  figure out what a business manager hates to do, and learn to do it for them.  Outsourcing is huge, driven in part by businesses leery of adding employees due to regulation, insurance, and instability.
• Translator..  don’t laugh..  IF you are fluent in languages other than English (and are fluent in English) many businesses need you.  Heck, even if you don’t speak another language, you can still start this business and simply hire those that do.
• Traveling beauty and nail salon..  admittedly, not for me, but with an aging population still wanting to look good.  Mobil services like this can fly.

There are more, and we’ll talk about this and other topics Saturday at 11 on Driven to Business.

Driven to Business hosted by Eddie Mayfield is heard every Saturday morning on Atlanta’s Business Radio..  BIZ1190.  The show is streamed live on biz1190.com and podcast on eddiemayfield.com and itunes.

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta..  Driven to Business.

Major league hitters sometimes go into what’s described as a “slump.”  The time honored advice-  is to  “bat your way out of it.”  That’s actually sound coaching, because slumps get worse when you stop swinging the bat.

It’s the same for us in business; the worst thing you can do is resign yourself to being in a slump, because just like the batter, it will become a self fulfilling prophesy.

One of the temptations is to think that the business environment in which we live today is somehow, not the norm.  Here’s a news flash..  it is!  Accept that, and learn to be successful in the new normal.

Here’s a couple of quick ideas to help you swing your bat.

Play the paradigm game:  It goes like this..  gather your team around you and ask “what is impossible to do today, that if it were possible, would make a substantial positive impact on our business?

Let everyone run pretty wild with this; after all, you’re talking about the impossible right?  Write the answers down on a notepad or whiteboard.   If necessary, trim the impossible thoughts down to two or three.

Then ask a harder question..   ” is there any part of the impossible situation that actually could be possible?”  Here’s a quick example:  Let’s say your lunch restaurant would do incredible business IF you could serve everyone their meal under ten minutes.  But, that’s impossible because it takes longer than that to cook much of the food.

But, boring deeper, what food could be prepared in less than ten minutes?  And, would there be a market for having a “quick serve” menu that people could order from if they were in a hurry?

Maybe yes, maybe no, but these kind of exercises put energy and creativity to work for you.

Here’s another idea..

Take a look at your customer list with your team, and spend some time talking about who actually buys from you.  Then consider what that same person might be buying from someone else, that you could supply at a profit.

It costs a lot less money and is a much easier sales effort to sell additional products or services to people with whom you already have a relationship than it does to prospect for new ones.

Here’s one more..

Brainstorm about how you can “add value” to your customers and prospects. 

Do you have expertise that would be of value to them, even if its not directly related to what you sell and service?  IF so, then offer “lunch and learns” (or webinars)  and add the value of your expertise to them at no cost.

This allows you to earn the right to their business, and puts you in a much better position than your competitors who are simply trying to sell them something.  Remember the adage, people love to buy, but hate being sold.  Add value to your customers and prospects

That’s this week’s discussion on Driven to Business.  Tune in Saturday at 11.

Driven to Business with Eddie Mayfield  airs each Saturday at 11 AM on Atlanta’s Biz 1190 AM.  The show is podcast on eddiemayfield.com and itunes, and streams live on biz1190.com

Simply the best business radio in Atlanta.. Driven to Business.