Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT)

Entrepreneurial anxiety is real, all of us feel it but very few of us admit it as often as we do. It can come up out of nowhere and affect us throughout the day. We look over our shoulders feeling like we are constantly missing something. On my group coaching call tonight with my hand mastermind, a long-standing client of mine Matt Barker asked why he was feeling this anxiety in his events company. For Matt, and possibly for you, the answer and solution were both simple.

When you have time deadlines and a team member steps up to make things happen, it can be exciting. People pulling together and overcoming adversity is part of what the team is all about. However if this condition becomes the norm at your company, you are at risk of building a hero culture. One where heroes get all the credit, heroism is the order of the day, and your team is constantly overcoming unreasonable deadlines and expectations. While this may feel like momentum in the short term, it breaks down even the best of teams in the long term. Unfortunately when you build a hero culture, you challenge your teams ability to grow.

When I look at the human race, I see four distinctive tribes. Each of them was necessary throughout the history of humanity and is necessary today. One of these tribes cannot exist without the other three. All four tribes make the world possible. However one tribe tends to have conflicts with factions with in the other three. Which tribe are you in?

As entrepreneurs there comes a time when the momentum we can create on our own just isn't enough. We know the outcome is bigger then we can accomplish by ourselves so we start to build a team. Every entrepreneur in the world, including me, has thought to ourselves "but I am so much better and faster than they are." This thought is our ego getting in the way of our contribution, you don't have to let that happen.

When we first start our business one of the most exciting things we do is sell something. When someone makes the decision to buy from us, work with us, and become one of our clients it is exhilarating. Many of us get addicted to this feeling of getting people to buy. I know I am. Successful marketing and sales initiatives are incredibly exciting for me, so much so that I get impatient when I'm putting them together. It took me decades to realize how much my impatience hurt my team, it doesn't have to take you that long.

This concept can make or break your business. It doesn't matter what kind of product you sell, if you sell it as a painkiller you have a lot better chances of succeeding. Listen as I coach one of our clients through this concept, and share with him a time I used it to sell over $10 million in product on live television. Thanks to Justin Light on my team, there is a second audio. You will hear me and Coleen Lopez kick off a Today's Special on Home Shopping Network.

Don't make your team lose This may seem like the most obvious entrepreneurial advice ever given. However it is one of the most consistent conversations I have with my clients. As entrepreneurs we aren't afraid of losing, we like to set a target far away and take our best shot. We don't mind coming from behind and missing every once in a while. Often deadlines lose importance to us on our way to the destination. Changing the direction we are going or the time we allotted to get there doesn't bother us that much. The opposite is true for our teams. If you make your team lose, they will quit. The better the team member, the more losing will affect them. Unfortunately this was one of the most difficult lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur, and it took me decades. It doesn't have to take you that long.

As entrepreneurs we want everything right now in the moment, sometimes yesterday. It is our impatience that makes us successful. Our insistence that things happen our way is how we change the status quo. In many ways, our impatience is the cause of our success. But it can also be our downfall. Our impatience can cause us to derail our team, waste resources and make us an ineffective leader. It can cause us to chase shiny objects and delay or halt our progress. When we take a longer time horizon everything changes. We can tell our team where we are going and rather then following us, they can lead the way and help us get there.

One of the most consistent ways that entrepreneurs waste time is heading off in a direction without a plan. We have an idea, get excited, and start executing as fast as we can. We are eager to see the end result before we are 100% clear on what that results should be. This results in us spending a lot of time that we don't need to getting mediocre results if any. There is a better way.

When we learn the minimum effective dose planning methods, everything changes. Spending just a little bit of time clarifying where we are going ensures that we get there faster and get the result we want. It's amazing how many different places I've seen these entrepreneurial lessons, they appear, even when my daughters are getting a haircut.

As entrepreneurs, when we start our business the vast majority of us have to do everything. Let's be honest, we are the only ones there and if we don't do it it won't get done. As we move forward and grow our business, we may soon find people who can take tasks off our hands. We contract people to take small parts of our process and do them for us. This offloading of tasks and items will help you grow your business and scale… to a point. When you grow enough, having people do things for you won't be enough. Eventually you will need other people on your team who are capable of chasing down outcomes and getting results. Far too many entrepreneurs today are trying to build businesses with people as process, this is why so many of them are failing to grow.