Momentum Builds Into an “Overnight Success”

If Cindy and I had only been measuring our accomplishments by reviewing our bank statements and retirement account balances, making some of the decisions we’ve been faced with over the last fifteen years would have been substantially harder. Reflecting on even the smallest personal or business victories, though, has been critical in helping us sustain the harder right to live out our values on a daily basis - despite varying levels of nonsense on any given day. 

I remember sitting in a group of a few hundred people at the end of the event that completed my initial licensing to use John Maxwell’s material. During that session, one of the speakers emphasized the importance of having additional products or services to offer our clients. I understood that concept from a bricks and mortar aspect but I was so new to the idea of operating my own business that I couldn’t picture how it could ever happen. Not long after that, I started my weekly email series, which is now branded as A Daily Dose Of Leadership and reaches tens of thousands of people through the emails and these subsequent blog posts. In early 2018, Cindy and I shared our Emerging Leader Development course (as a set package) for the very first time. While presenting those lessons, we decided we wanted to offer participants completing the course some sort of ongoing support for their leadership journey; that has since grown into our Leading At The Next Level program with more than 150 hours of material that we’ve created. As I write this, our website is averaging north of 90k visitors each month. We’ve contributed to two collaborative books, wrote and published the Amazon #1 best-seller What’s KILLING Your Profitability?, we’re close to the release date of Leading With A Clear Purpose, and we’re planning an event for close to 1,000 people locally. As I sat with those few hundred people I had never met in August 2015, I wouldn’t have believed any of this was possible if you told me…

Just as clearly as I remember that feeling as I heard that suggestion to have additional products or services to offer, I remember the manufacturing plant manager I was working for a year prior to that telling me that I was making the biggest mistake of my career by leaving the company I had worked for my entire adult life to that point. Please know, I don’t share any of the things we’ve accomplished to boast. Quite honestly, we’ve worked harder (and longer hours) since starting our business than we ever had previously - and we have always worked pretty damn hard! I share it because none of this would have happened without ferociously standing by our personal core values and routinely reflecting on just the smallest bits of progress along the way. 

Before wrapping this part up, I need to clarify why I just referenced our personal core values rather than the core values of our business. Anything we’ve accomplished to this point as well as any success we achieve moving forward in our business is based on a foundation of the values we hold personally. We don’t have the luxury of separating our personal feelings from how we operate our business. And quite frankly, I’ve never seen anyone lead effectively over the long haul when they try to. One of the reasons the positive experiences I know you picture when I mention the service at Chick-fil-A is that the Cathy family modeled strong values, in their personal lives and in the business, and they set a high expectation for the owners of each location to do the same. Having worked closely with my friend, Craig, for several years now, I know he ran a company with close to a billion in annual revenue just like he’s running the four small businesses he and his wife own today: on a foundation of their core personal values.

Whether we’re leading a small team, operating our own business, or running a large organization, modeling our core values - especially when it’s hard - will provide our teams with something they’ll happily rally around. Doing that consistently over time will provide our clients and the community around us with plenty of reasons to do the same. Eventually, living by those core values will build a reputation for our organizations that impacts everything we’re working to achieve and that’s what we’ll work through next!