HOW TO KEEP PASSION IN YOUR BUSINESS
Your typical day consists of many pieces: client meetings, returning emails and phone calls, texting back your spouse/kids about tonight’s ball game, squeezing in lunch when you can; but in between it all where do you find time to mindfully focus on your true passion?
In the larger scheme of things, how do you keep the passion alive? We’re talking about your love affair with the business. Your business needs the nurturing and close attention just as your marriage or any other meaningful relationship does.
Keeping the passion alive boils down to three pieces: your mission, your profits, and your business plan. The combination of the three keeps your people on board (as they see the mission and the vision), the profit piece allows you to quantify the cost, the business plan allows you to make the pivot fast.
BRING IT BACK TO YOUR MISSION
You have to develop a process that forces you to deliberately make investments in your passion. And this evolves over time! Year one in your business journey your mission could simply be survival. Year two could be a building block year – trying to figure out what that passion/purpose truly is. Then the third stage would be defining your passion exclusively and operating to that each day (in process and practice).
You have to have a mission and you always have to make investments in that mission. The kicker then is constantly reconciling that mission of the business with the profitability of the business.
KEEP IT FRESH
You have to keep the passion and the mission fresh. And “fresh” can be defined as a five year period of time, it doesn’t have to be every month.
The goal is making investments as you go. Fresh can mean your mission evolving, a rebranding, a new location; all of these things are building blocks to keep it fresh.
Through this process the level of passion remains high because you’re keeping it fresh, new, and exciting but the business plan update and tying the pieces together is what you really have to get good at. The sooner you can make this part of your culture as an organization, the better off you’re going to be.
DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE PLAN
Your business plan, that is. If you can get good at utilizing the business plan to predict profitability, you’re golden.
When you have a process that forces you to relate everything back to your business plan you can make go/no go decisions from this plan and quantify those decisions. You can make projections as outlined in the plan but if it doesn’t work, you can pivot. This will help you pivot more effectively and efficiently. You control your losses!
You have to understand, you are always going to have losing ventures and/or ideas. The kicker is, good entrepreneurs have controlled loses; meaning they fail fast. This projections helps make the staffing piece of your organization much more obvious as well. – That transcends from professional service firms to manufacturing companies.
ALIGN YOUR PROFITS, PASSION & BUSINESS PLAN
As you grow you need a process for reconciling the mission of the business with the profitability and the business plan (all of those things together). The way these three pieces talk to each other is critical.
How have you kept the passion alive in your business? Share with us on Facebook and Instagram!