I get asked this question by clients, prospects, coach mentees, and students in the classes I facilitate at CoachU.
“What’s the secret to building a successful business?”
I came across an intriguing TEDx talk by Andrew Johnston, member of the business faculty at Red Rocks Community College in Colorado.
In Andrew’s Introduction to Business class, he assigns students a project to go out and speak with a business owner and ask lots of questions on the inner workings of what it takes to make a business successful.
Students ask the entrepreneurs questions on what they’ve been reading in their textbooks. Typical Four P type questions on Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Invariably, the business owners reveal the real secret to what it takes to build a successful business. Consistent steps.
The short way is the long way and the long way is the short way.
Having coached entrepreneurs for 12 years who are based in 12 countries, I wasn’t surprised what I heard in this video.
Even though I’m equipped with an MBA and almost 40 years of business experience. To be frank? The coaching conversations with clients are not normally monopolized by biz school lexicon and all that technical bizzy whiz corporate jargon.
Please don’t misunderstand. The Four P’s are important in addition to understanding competition, hiring great talent, and knowing how to sell. Just to name a few.
But it’s been my experience, my most successful clients are those who have built a consistency muscle that makes them so much stronger than the rest of their competitors.
“It’s not about doing the OCCASIONAL BIG things, it’s about doing the CONSISTENT SMALL things!” ~ Andrew Johnston, Faculty at Red Rock Community College
In 2013, Andrew and his colleagues created a new class called “Change Through Challenge.” The premise for this class is to learn the life skills required to create a thriving business enterprise such as doggedness, conviction, and intestinal fortitude by training for and completing a marathon.
I’m not suggesting you train for a marathon. Full disclosure: I have no intentions of training for one either. Although I’ve run my share of races in the past including a 15K.
However, if your goal is to build a business, hit the pause button on email, social media, binge watching your fave Netflix show, etc. and take 12 minutes to watch this video that gets to the heart of what it takes to create a sustainable business.