What still excites you? 4 Real Business Stories. In Blackboard Fridays Episode 91, Jacob talks about Commercial Vision. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

Which comes first – the passion, or the success? In my experience, either can be the case – for every passionate entrepreneur who turned their dream into reality, there are other successful business owners who stumbled upon success and found that passionate and enthusiasm followed.

Whichever order they follow, there’s no doubt a boss who remains excited about their business has a positive effect on the excitement of their team.

In this week’s episode, let me introduce you to 4 real business stories where the excitement of the owner/s has led to even more business success. These teams range from 4 to 800 people:

• Creating a million ALEs
• Winning national awards
• Choosing a ‘freedom’ lifestyle
• Commiting to educating the industry

What still excites you?

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

Happy Friday Blackboarders, or is it as you may have experienced as the years go by the happiness on a Friday morning, happiness on every morning, starts potentially to wane.

As you’re well aware the energy that you as the business owner bring to your team has a massive impact on their energy, their commitment, and through your team a massive impact on how happy, satisfied, whether they’re raving advocates your clients happen to be.

Today, I wanted to talk about understanding what still excites you in your business. Getting in touch with that thing that still gives you some drive and some purpose. It may have changed since the business started and that’s great, but if you’re hanging on to something that you’ve communicated previously you possibly got a team that are wondering whether this is really as legitimate culture as what you say it is.

I’m gonna share this through four specific case studies, four business that I know who have got in touch with what still excites them after years in the industry or even years in their business. I hope that you can see through their stories what still drives you and maybe work on how you can do that more and communicate that with your team.

Let’s talk first about Bright Conferences. This is an organization here in Queensland, they’ve won a number of awards and frankly they’re incredible when it comes to managing your conference from the marketing through to the events production and they even host a number of their own events around Australia every year.

It’s pretty easy after the amount of time they’ve spent in that industry to just get into a rut, to kind of keep fronting up and doing the same ol same ol. They have a super clear purpose. They call them ALEs, awesome learning experiences and they’ve got a goal to get to one million ALEs in their business.

In other words to deliver an awesome learning experience to one million individuals through the events that they host themselves and for others that they support and manage. That’s a heck of a cool goal and when they sit down with team members and say you’re helping us get closer to the million, when they update the chart that they’ve got in their office with the new number, whether they adding one person to that or whether they’re adding a thousand from a big event seeing them getting closer to the million target is incredibly energizing for everybody that interacts with them.

This over here is one of the real estate clients I work with and a big shout out to the team, the Tate Brownlee team at Raine & Horne Banora Point. Tate loves helping people. He sees his role in real estate as helping them to move from one house to whatever they’re going to achieve with the rest of their life, which may be buying another house off him or somebody else. There’s a whole lot of reasons why people sell and he just wants to help them to achieve it.

As a result he recently won a big award for being the top sales person in Queensland. Now the impact that that has on his team in enormous, because his passion and drive as a leader is infectious. They want to learn from him, they want to work with him, they want to be part of his team, because they can see how excited he is year after year going out, not just selling houses, but changing peoples lives.

Hey, if you want to talk about changing peoples lives I love the story, the founder of the FD Centre Globally. Very experienced financial director what we call in some countries like Australia the chief financial officer.

Now being experienced and being great at what he did, he had a life where he’d get up, jump in the car, drive to work at a big corporation, go home at the end of the day. Doing great things, achieving great results, but excitement wasn’t really there. He wanted something more. He wanted freedom and his focus as he achieved that for himself was actually going well how do I create freedom for a whole lot of other people.

So instead of going how do I take these very specific skills into one big organization he created a business that took FD skills into small business on a part-time basis. 17 years later they’re the number one provider of part-time FD and CFO services worldwide. They’ve got a series of sister businesses that are applying the same approach bring the same freedom to specialist and bringing a solution to small businesses that previously couldn’t have afforded it.

By getting in touch with what excited him, by getting in touch with that freedom and of course by having the support and love of his family and his team he’s now managed the change the lives of not just 800 people that work in his business globally, but all of their clients as well, and he still gets up every morning excited to be running that business.

The last example I’m saving for last, because it’s an example of a business that from the outside many people might see as being pretty boring, pretty uninspiring and uninteresting, this is Suburban Pest Management. They provide pest management solutions to residential, to commercial, to industrial buildings across southeast Queensland. They’re pretty good at going in, spraying the chemicals or putting the traps in place to kill those insects and for most clients that’s enough.

If I’ve got ants and they can come in and get rid of ants I’m happy, but that’s not enough for, Thomas, the business owner. His drive is not just to be really good at pest management. His drive is to change the industry and in particular, that’s a motor board, to educate the industry, both the personnel who work in it and those of us who are consumers who maybe don’t fully understand and appreciate the importance they play in our lives both residentially and commercially.

So his team get up every morning asking themselves how can I do this job better, how can I be more efficient, how can I deliver a better customer experience or a better customer outcome. They’re not resting on their laurels. They’re not resting on training that they did 10 or 15 years ago. They’re continually as an organization looking for ways to do things better.

As a result they’re slowly but surely beginning to change the face of that industry. None of these businesses are revolutionary. None of these businesses are the billion dollar unicorn Amazon, Facebook, Google kind of thing that you might read about in a lot of the press, but every single one of these businesses has an energy that when you walk in the door you go I want to be apart of this, whether this is a client, as a team member, or just as a service provider or somebody who likes going into cool businesses like I do.

For you what is it about your business that still excites you? Is it the same thing that got you into this industry years ago? Is it something that’s evolved over time? Is it nothing? Is there nothing left for you to achieve, in which case maybe it’s time for the next thing that excites you.

Frankly I’d be surprised if that’s the case. There are very few business owners were after just two or three questions I don’t get them to a point where they reignite with their passion and once you’re reignited with your passionate team, the clients, the whole industry changes and maybe one day I’ll be talking about you in a Blackboard Friday’s video.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

• Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
• Call, Text, or WhatsApp me +61 427 151 181
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