Letting everything out of your mind can be an effective mechanism for you to reset your day and re-evaluate the things that make you move forward or not. As a leader, you might be on your tipping point, but you have to remind yourself that you signed up for something big that generates something big for the greater good. With this, re-assessing your efficiency in leadership is necessary to keep your company well-oiled and your people on top of their game. In this episode, Ken Courtright emphasizes the importance of focusing on efficiency and cites Elon Musk as an example of being the greatest entrepreneur in history, setting the three-question test to see whether you’re efficient or ineffective on what you are currently doing.
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Is It Pity Party Time? Explode
This is the episode where I live life and if I hear something, see something or smell something that is directly impacting a business owner and entrepreneur or a company, I write it down and I make sure I blog on it. My backdrop for faster growth and the title of the show is today’s growth versus growth techniques that worked 10, 20, 30 years ago, is that I will never put out a theory on this show. We have 3,000 clients as a growth consulting firm. We manage 1,000-plus money-making websites for partners. They have to grow. We have seen a lot and heard a lot. In the last many days, I have tripped across a few entrepreneurs, people I would consider very strong that was in my belief having a little bit of a pity party.
It was centering on the suffocation they felt of managing Slack, Skype, Zoom, text, email, phone calls, meetings and general everyday business. I did not interject myself. I should have. I feel guilty, not so I knew I needed to get a show out to get this off my chest. I want to talk to my show audience the way my father would have talked to me, the way my grandfather would have talked to my father for sure. I titled this one Pity Party Time. Sometimes we have to take a step back and ask ourselves or remind ourselves what we signed up for. We are leaders of people. We are leaders of companies, leaders of divisions. We lead our families even if we don’t have a family yet. We are future leaders. With that comes a responsibility to do a little bit more than let’s say the average person.
Everybody tuning to the podcast gets paid in direct proportion to the true value of your service. Click To TweetWith that responsibility, if performed well, will come and I promise incredible compensation. It may not even come compensation for money. You might run a nonprofit, but you will be compensated. You will be justly rewarded. As I’ve said years ago on early shows, everybody reading this blog gets paid in direct proportion to the true value of your service. If you are putting out a killer product, a great service, you will always be compensated in such very few tremendous products unless you’re just butchering the marketing and in the brand message and you have no clue how to reach an audience.
A few great, incredible products and services fail. That said, the feeling I’ve had, I have to get it out there. Let me jump in and I’m going to set the table with a very large sledgehammer. Elon Musk is going to go down in history, at least to this point, as the greatest entrepreneur that has ever walked planet earth. Why? He is on pace to be managing $5 billion companies at the same time. I believe he has Tesla, the electric car company. He has a solar company. He has Boring, his newest company, which is going to bore holes between pretty much every airport and every downtown city. That’s already working and functional. They’re trying to get approval from downtown Chicago to O’Hare Airport. He launched another company that hasn’t even been in revenue. It’s just been valued at $2.2 billion. SpaceX, he sends rockets to the moon. This person has found a way to manage hundreds of thousands of employees across five different corporate entities.
How many meetings does this guy sit-in in a week? How many jet airplane trips does he take in a week? I read his autobiography. He lives on an airplane. The question is, as Bill Gates famously wrote in Time Magazine in the early 2000s, if you’re not doing it in 40 hours a week, if you can’t get it done in 40 hours, you’re doing something wrong. You don’t have to put twelve, eighteen, sixteen hours a day. You have to be more efficient. Here’s my question to everybody. Is it possible that you are simply either efficiently ineffective, meaning no controls and levers and if you don’t know what I mean, read episode 438 or are you simply inefficient? You’re either ineffective or you’re inefficient.
Here’s the cool thing. Either one is okay, either one is fixable. Here’s the deal. I’m an idea guy. I am not a follow-up and follow-through guy. If somebody graded me on follow-up and follow-through skills, we would need to find a grade lower than F. I am famous for starting projects, having a meeting, puking on a few people with great idea, getting buy-in, which in my world is somebody nodding their head following what I’m saying, not even getting commitment that they’re going to start the project. I’ll come back to a month later saying, “Is the project done?” My brain is wired to create ideas and see things. See around the corner. I am not wired in any capacity to take notes, set things in motion or confirm they’re being done. That’s not me.
It took me many years to figure that out. It took me many years to not feel guilty. Now, I surround myself with those types of people. Here is a three-question test to see why you might be inefficient or ineffective. Number one, not even knowing the definition. If you had to give yourself a score of what is called a visionary score, what would it be? One through ten, ten being the best, one being the worst. Are you a visionary? Can you predict the next steps in your industry? Can you predict the next company, the next product can be launched in your company, in your industry? Can you finish people’s sentences in meetings? Are you a visionary? It’s unequivocally a gift.
There are no excuses in business, only try again. Click To TweetIt’s a skill. It’s a craft. Grade yourself. Give yourself a managerial score. It’s what it sounds like. How good are you at managing people? Do you delegate well? Do you delegate often? When you delegate, do you delegate closed-loop communication or is it a one-way delegation? You just tell people to do it. That’s one way. Closed-loop, proper delegation is you delegate a task on a Monday. You get buy-in that they’re willing to have it finished by Monday. You check on them on Thursday, are you on track for Monday? Hold them accountable and you have a meeting and they show off their results on Monday. That’s closed-loop communication. If you do it like that, that’s a ten? You’re a good manager. You’re efficient. What are your follow-up and follow-through score, ten to one?
Once you score yourself on visionary, managerial and follow-up and follow-through for your own personal self, how well do you follow up? If somebody is managing you, you might be hyper visionary. You better get some freaking great managers and great people underneath them that are great at follow-up. If you stink at visionary, but you’re great at managing, you better find some visionary people in your space to help you. If you stink at visionary and you stink at managing, but you’re great at follow-up, clearly you need to find some great visionary people and some great management. This is all fixable. Find the right people to fill the gap. “Ken, I’m a one-person shop.” Is that your answer? Do you know how many interns, how many virtual assistants in the Philippines, in India would love to join your team for pennies? Are you kidding me? There are no excuses here. You just do it. There’s no pity party. Elon Musk a few years ago was physically broke living on a friend’s couch. He had no money. He was under in his three main bank accounts. There are no excuses in business. There is just try again. How exactly do I try again? If you haven’t read 337, 338, and 339, you might want to read those again.
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