Being Brave And Letting Go: How This Can Revolutionize Your Business

If you’re an entrepreneur you’ve probably come across this situation before:

You’ve invested big into a new project, new venture, new employee, or new system…

You’ve spent months preparing this new thing, you’ve long been excited about it’s potential, and you’ve planned on it being a significant step in the growth of your business.

But at a certain point, things stop moving in the right direction. Progress is slow, the pieces of the puzzle aren’t fitting together, and you’re starting to wonder whether this project/venture/employee/system is really taking you in the direction of your company’s goals after all.

What happens next?

One of the most important skills of an Entrepreneur turning CEO can have is an acute sensitivity to how closely a company’s actual results are to their desired results on a consistent basis. Not only that, but the CEO needs the strength to be able to make decisions based on these results without emotion and without bias.

As the leader of your company, you’re the one who has to be able to spot the clouds on the horizon before the storms of trouble are gushing down on your business. When the writing’s on the wall about an employee not quite fitting right, a project delayed that little bit too long, or a venture not quite coming together as planned, you’re the one who has to be able to step in and make the tough decision on what to do about it. Do we shut this thing down, do we make a change NOW, or do we carry on as planned and wait it out…?

Sounds easy enough right? Actually it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever learn as you shift from "solopreneur" to CEO. So how is it done? How do the best CEO’s develop this quality and make these tough decisions?

Usually you’ll find that businesses and their CEO’s who possess this quality have a few things in common. Here’s some of those factors and how you can replicate them in your business:

1. Know your goals. The progress or success of any venture, employee, system, or project can only ever be known relative to the outcome or goal it was intended to achieve. It’s the old personal development mantra, if you don’t have firm goals, you can’t know whether or not you’re moving towards them and you can’t know whether or not a change in approach needs to be made. Having those clear goals known by everyone in your organization is key to your decision making ability.

2. Measure Your Progress – What can’t be measured can’t be improved. If you’re not measuring how well your new employee is doing, how effective your new system is at producing a result, you can’t tell how well it’s meeting your company’s goals. If you’re measuring properly, the numbers can make the decisions for you. Are quota’s being met? Is the goal being achieved? If yes, great, if no, bye bye. Hard decisions can get made for you if you’re properly measuring.

3. Don’t Be Scared To Be Wrong – You have to maintain a culture in your organization that being wrong isn’t failing. Being wrong, or rather, knowing and admitting quickly when you are wrong is something that should be upheld as amongst the highest of values. It’s when you have so much pride and so much fear of admitting that your plan for the project/employee/venture was wrong in the first place, that you find it hard to make that tough decision and shut it down. If there’s no fear of being wrong, admitting that you were is a whole lot easier.

Following these simple rules you can be the one who takes charge and makes the hard decisions that no one else wants to make.

And it’s when you have this capability as the leader of your business that your efficiency and your profitability rises to a whole new level.