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Five Qualities Necessary for Recession Survival and Growth
During this day and age of uncertainty I am constantly being asked to boil success down to a handful of qualities. Everybody wants the five “secrets” to success.
While I am hard pressed to limit the qualities of successful entrepreneurs, business leaders and professionals to just five things, I can give you five qualities that are common among all successful people.
Incidentally, these five qualities were not developed by me. They were developed by a researcher named Napoleon Hill as a result of a 20-year study he conducted on successful business leaders.
Hill developed 16 laws of success as a result of this study. All of Hill’s laws can be applied to professionals but there are five in particular that separate the winning professionals from the others.
Here are the five qualities from Napoleon Hill’s work that I believe to be most responsible for success:
Quality 1: Successful Business Leaders have a Burning Desire to Serve Their Clients:
This means you must really want to make a difference for your clients and you believe in your ability to do so. That passion and desire is easily spotted in successful people. It is a quality that attracts others – clients and referring attorneys – to you like a magnet.
It can be difficult to stay motivated under the current conditions. If you watch the news, it can flat out depress you. So, stop watching the news. Keep focusing on the value you provide and why it is important to your best clients.
What is your value?
How does it make a difference for your clients?
Is that value still the same?
What additional value can you provide?
Be loud and proud about that!
Quality 2: Successful Business Leaders Make Use of Specialized Knowledge:
You have specialized knowledge of your product or service. But people who grow during a recession also have the specialized knowledge of how to communicate their value, how to build and how to run a business. They have specialized knowledge on building systems that set their business up for success. They have specialized knowledge in business strategy and they know how to deploy their resources toward an area of need in the market.
Specialized knowledge goes well beyond the day-to-day aspects of selling. It extends to the knowledge necessary to deepen relationships over days, weeks, months and years.
This is the perfect time to acquire additional specialized knowledge. You don’t have a commute right now. You don’t have the common office disruptions. Use this time to acquire additional specialized knowledge.
Quality 3: Successful Entrepreneurs and Professionals are Decisive:
This is a quality that stands out in a business leader. They assimilate information and then they make a decision. You have to make correct decisions and you have to do it in a way that projects confidence in yourself and in the people around you.
Let’s face it; if you have the will, you can recover from almost any mistake you make in life.
However, you may never be able to recapture an opportunity that presents itself if you don’t make a decision. Great opportunities – golden opportunities – only come along so often – and you need to be decisive to take advantage of them. Napoleon Hill found that decisiveness was a key quality in successful people, and I agree whole heartedly.
Decide right now to invest in your future. Decide to invest in your growth. Make the decision to be aggressive in your acquisition of new business even though others around you are negative.
Quality 4: Successful Business Leaders and Professionals Set Goals:
Successful people are goal oriented. This means they have actually taken the time to think about where they want to be in five years, ten years and twenty years. This may seem too long term given the circumstances.
If you want to achieve significant success you need to first define what success is. That means setting goals.
Here is an exercise you can do to help you get trough the current situation and associated recession:
Pick out five things you would like to accomplish between now and the end of the year.
Write these five things down on a sheet of paper.
Fold the paper up and put it in your pocket.
Review this sheet of paper every time you eat a meal.
You will be amazed at the results.
When you write your goals down your subconscious mind automatically goes to work to try to help you achieve them. You will find yourself drawn to activities that will bring you closer to your goals.
Once you become comfortable with this process, conduct a similar exercise, setting goals for the next five years.
Even under difficult conditions, you brain will adjust, and you will act to make those goals happen. Don’t trust me. See for yourself. Do it now.
Quality 5: Successful Entrepreneurs and Professionals Tap into the Collective Intelligence of Others
This is critically important. You need to have a group of people you can trust to give you honest feedback on your ideas and performance. You must have a group of like-minded people who know and understand what you are going through and can help you achieve your goals.
This last one really resonates with me because when I started my own business, I was a one-person operation. After having worked my entire career in big firms, I suddenly found myself without a sounding board for ideas. This lead to a stifling of my creativity.
As my business has grown, I have actively sought out successful people to bounce my ideas off of. This process has been phenomenally value in many ways. Everyone needs a handful of people in whom he can confide.
When a business leader comes to me and says he needs help with sales I review these five characteristics with him. Almost always, I find he has not developed any of these qualities in himself. That’s when I ask him a critical question:
“Are you willing to adopt these five qualities and use them in your business?”
You see, part of Napoleon Hill’s study revealed that successful people are not born with these qualities. They developed them over time. Success is a learned behavior.
And now I have an opportunity for you.
You can join me as part of my Inner Circle. This is a group of business leaders and professionals that meets three times each week to exchange ideas, pass referrals and provide support for each other.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I provide some business growth information – to help you meet your goals for growth and then we have a discussion where you can tap into the power of the guidance and support of other members of my inner circle.
In addition, you also have access 24/7 access to my library of business growth content, information and resources. This includes online courses, Q&A sessions, and examples of tools my successful clients have used over the years.
This is literally the best way to not only grow your business but also keep ...
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