Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT)

At many large corporations "happy hours" are seen as a team building tool. Employees are encouraged to go out and hang out together at a bar, drinking, in hopes that they will build relationships that will somehow help the company. I have never understood the logic in this. When I was a consulting with multiple Fortune 500 companies, every month at least one of the companies I worked with had something happen during a happy hour. When you work at one company, you may only see something happen every once in a while. But when you work with a lot of companies, you realize just how damaging happy hours are. There is more than one reason we don't support happy hours in our organization. If you want to build a world changing company, you may not want to support them either.

Entrepreneurs are evolutionary hunters. We are propelled forward and driven to seek momentum. Evolutionary hunters are driven forword and compelled to seek momentum. We are physiologically sensitive momentum base beings that are highly reactive to constraint. When we feel constrained our bodies can go into fight or flight mode. This can cause us to operate at a fraction of our capabilities. If you don't feel like you are there, congratulations. Unfortunately too many entrepreneurs exist in some level of fight or flight.

Evolutionary hunters are different than the rest of the world. We are more sensitive to the world around us, we see opportunity and risk in a different way and we are driven to continue to go forward and seek momentum. Anything that gets in our way or causes constraint throws us off. How much, we don't know. But it is clear that when people like us experience too much pressure and noise things do not go well. There is one place where far too much of the world invites rather than defends against pressure and noise and that is what we put in our mouths. This may be one of the most important podcasts I have recorded.

There is no excuse for an unsuccessful marketing consultant today. Anyone who is working in today's environment has it easy. You identify an avatar, understand where they are, pay in order to get in front of them, and generate leads so you can sell your product. The guesswork is gone. Marketing is as direct as it has ever been in history. That is why it is so frustrating when I hear business owners getting ripped off by consultants and marketing companies when they're spending their time in places where it just doesn't pay. If you have a company that is helping you market or sell and they aren't showing you a dial where you can turn up your lead volume or turn it down, something is wrong. If you are a victim of a marketing ripoff, you will know it for sure after listening to this podcast.

Before you make the decision to follow a leader, you should understand who they are. It is inevitable that you will become more like them in every way. You maybe going to someone for business advice but if you join a mastermind, when you spend enough time with them and learn enough from them, you will pick up their habits, tendencies, and you will be influenced by their strengths and weaknesses. This is a major decision that many entrepreneurs enter into lightly and pay for later. I know I did. When I finally realized just how much we absorb from the people we are following, I immediately changed the mastermind I was in. I realized that the person I follow must not just be doing well in business, but share my values and support who I am. If you are following someone to help you grow your self or your business, you can't forget you follow the whole leader with nothing left out.

Remember a few years ago after Apple introduced the app store and after just about anything said you would get the reply "there's an app for that!"? The funny thing was that there really was an app for just about everything. Want to sell something or buy something? There's an app for that. Want to relocate to a place you never been? There's an app for that. It was funny that there was an app for just about everything except… Leadership. It doesn't matter how hard you try, or how well you have learn the software you are using, you cannot lead people through an app. Leadership is a contact sport and it requires proximity to your people. You have to spend time with them, get to know them, understand them and then you can lead them. Far too many entrepreneurs today are trying to lead their companies through a software program. This just isn't how it works.

There's a very high percentage of business owners today that are starting their companies looking for an exit strategy. I am consistently surprised at how often "exit strategy" comes up in conversations with relatively inexperienced entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs who are barely getting started are already looking for a way out. This is about the most difficult way to start a business and it may make it impossible. Growing a company is one of the most difficult things any person can choose to do in their lifetimes. When you get into business trying to stop, you add unnecessary constraints that may freeze you in place. On top of that, exits aren't all they are cracked up to be. Take it from someone who has been there. The silence of success is deafening.

There are some things in business that just work, organizational charts are one of them. As an entrepreneur your organizational chart shows you exactly what resources you have and how they're being applied.

But it is much more than that. Your org chart also shows you chain of command and the flow of communication. Organizational charts help us reduce ambiguity and increase clarity through which we lead our team. Recently there has been a movement to eliminate titles, organizational charts, hierarchy, structure, and bureaucracy of any kind in business. This is BS. You can try and run a business in this chaotic and haphazard way but it won't work. Growing a business is one of the most difficult things we do and helping the people in the business grow is essential. Your org chart is your road map to success.

The easiest way to be seen as a leader is to be consistent. People trust someone who is consistent. They believe in a leader who is consistently emotionally self regulated. They believe in the leader who consistently wins. The more consistent you allow yourself to be, the more your team will naturally see you as a leader.

There comes a time in every entrepreneurs career where we must start to predict the future. This is not a metaphor, this is a reality. In order to be a successful entrepreneur you have to assemble a team and give them a clear outcome, provide the resources and plan to get there, and coach their success along on the way. By achieving the outcome you've created, you have now predicted the future. The more you predict the future, the more your team will trust you. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs do the opposite of predicting the future. They instead teach their team how to lose gracefully and challenge trust as a leader. There is an easier way, pull the target closer and predict the future.