Prosperity and Priorities

Last Saturday, I was invited to speak at a leadership conference sponsored by Northeastern University at their beautiful modern facilities at the Batterymarch building - which also houses the Wyndham Hotel in downtown Boston. There were six speakers for the day. Most of the speakers were engaging, inclusive and very open. Two of the speakers were distinctly aloof - not rude or cold, just detached. By the end of the day I learned, these more aloof presenters work mostly with large corporations. They hold their power in their positioning and their pricing.

They work with large corporations very clearly because that's where the largest fees are - large corporations have larger budgets for outside services. One even told me quite simply that the higher fees was her reason for focusing on large corporates.

In contrast, the rest of the speakers, myself included, target small and mid-size companies where there is an urgent need and appreciation for the services we provide. This group had life, energy, curiosity, animation and genuine caring on an individual level.

If you believe in abundance and the Law of Attraction, why would you want to rule out the largest and fastest growing market for your product or services?

You can target the largest corporations and take a year of marketing efforts and research to get a contract with your top ten ideal prospects. But then you will be faced with that same research and effort starting from scratch for each additional prospect you target.

Whereas with small businesses, there are so many of them cropping up in every niche you may choose to target, you can hardly keep up with the names never mind all the opportunities they present to find a need and fill it.

Your prosperity has to be aligned with your values and your priorities or you risk having the business eat your soul, leaving only the shell of a person to deliver a fraction of your offering. There are so many other choices.

Three minute rule

Growing up, my mother would cook soft-boiled eggs for breakfast. In our house, to get a soft-boiled egg, it had to boil for three minutes. My mother didn't use an egg timer. Instead, she braided my hair. As a six-year old, my job was to have my hair brushed, and elastics and ribbons in hand so that as soon as the eggs went in the boiling water, my mother could braid my hair and tie bows at the end of each braid in three minutes.

Fast-forward to a past-life in retail sales. I got very good at keeping every phone call to under three-minutes. I could greet, question and book almost anyone in a three-minute phone call. One of my mentors, Ann Newbury, a Texas millionaire many times over, emphasized that when a call drags on beyond that, you are wasting booking time. You need to get off the phone and get on to the next call.

The three minute rule came up again today. It was the premise of a short article on UPS in Business 2.0 "The Three-Minute Huddle" Secret 20 in their Best-Kept Secrets of the World's Best Companies. At UPS, everyone starts the day with a lightning-fast, all-hands mandatory briefing. The key is, it can only take three minutes. It's how managers guard against slack. They cover company announcements, local information that could impact on-time delivery or customer complaints and concludes with a safety tip. The practice has proven to be so successful that many hourly office workers start each day with a three-minute huddle of their own.

When I talk to business leaders about planning time to plan, they love the concept of a brief meeting every day to keep everyone on the same page. In reality, this concise, focused briefing gets relegated to the Should List instead of the 6-Most Important Things List. Think of the different it would make if we all followed through for just 180 seconds each day.