You're Only as Successful as the Sum of Your Parts

You’re only as healthy as the health of each organ and system in your body. And your business can only be as successful as the weakest element required to run a business. At its most basic level your business consists of just three functionalities: marketing, sales, and production/administration. But to make each piece perform at a peak level it requires: strategic planning, marketing, sales, time management, and leadership. Just like the bottleneck in a production process limits the process, the weakest piece in your business will limit your success. Your strategic plan provides the overall picture and actionable and measurable plan to run the entire business.

Marketing is the engine that drives the need for the other functionalities. Without marketing you don’t have a way to connect with the people you want to work with. Without a way to make a good connection it’s very hard to fill your appointment book. When you don’t have appointments you can’t have sales and without sales there isn’t a need for production/administration.

Without sales there isn’t a business. The more productive and efficient you become in sales the higher your potential, and the greater success you can achieve. Sales is an emotional process and experience for both you and your prospects. When you aren’t getting the sales you need it’s emotionally devastating to you and for you. If you can’t help your prospects to get to the underlying emotional reason they want something you’ll never become a top producer.

As your marketing produces the leads you need to fill your appointment book and you close business, time and time efficiency grow increasingly important. Time management can be the single thing that will either make you or break you. If you don’t have balance in your life the strain and imbalance will lead to increasing levels of stress and the more stressed you are the greater the pain will be from time management issues. You have to increase your time efficiency so you have the time to lead the life you want to live, or it just won’t be worth it.

Whether you work alone or you have a staff someone has to be the leader and that someone is you. Leadership is the skill you need to get results through yourself and others. Leadership is the skill you need to develop the strategy for your business, and leadership is what will motivate you to take the actions you need to take even when you don’t want to take them to get the results you want. Leadership is also the skill you need to improve your communications between yourself and your clients, and yourself and your staff. No one is ever fully developed in all areas so you always have opportunities for improvement, but when you lack proficiency in any of these areas that area can be the limiting bottleneck that keeps you where you are and makes it nearly impossible for you to move forward.