Business Coach : Creative Compassion
-The enthusiastic quarterback is the one who wins the game. If you watch The Cake Boss on TV, or if you watch Flipping Houses, or you watch any of these shows about successful entrepreneurs, they’re all enthusiastic. There’s no melancholy.
-If you look at business, business is a creative process. It’s a creative compassion to serve people. You’re creating a product or service. It’s creative compassion in action. There is no creativity without enthusiasm. You’ve got to have energy that you put into this stirring pot of creativity. There’s got to be energy, heat to the fire, in order to really cook this stuff to make it happen. You cannot have creativity and sustain that without having that enthusiasm. A business coach will help with enthusiasm.
-I’ve been told that the entrepreneur’s job is to bring that fire.
-To be that contagion.
-There was one guy who told me it’s like a space shuttle. He’s like– if you don’t ignite that spark, it never takes off. I want to ask you this. When you guys were growing Tax and Accounting Software, you go from two people. It’s just you and the founder, right? You’re having a meeting. It’s just you and him. Then it’s kind of awkward. Then you have a third guy– you and him and another guy. Then you and him another guy. And another guy. Now there’s five or six or seven. It’s growing.
Why did you always look to hire enthusiastic people? Why not just hire technical people? Or anybody? Why did you always try to find enthusiastic leaders? I know you’ve talked about it. A business coach can help answer these questions.
-We needed really technical people. Our clientele was very smart– these CPAs, these tax people, they’re very detailed. When the world didn’t work right, they just exploded with– aah! My world’s not perfect. And so we needed people that were really smart but could handle the emotional trauma that our clients would bring them. And I’m telling you– most people who have businesses have clients that bring emotional trauma that if you don’t have emotional energy greater than theirs, their energy will swap your energy. Their negative energy will swap yours.
So we had to find people that would still be standing at the end of the day. And that’s why we hired people like Todd Starkey. He wasn’t even a tax or accounting expert. But he had the emotional energy. He had a contagiousness about him. He had a resolve within himself. He said if it’s to be, it’s up to me.
If somebody says that and believes that, we’ll go to hell and back together. I need somebody there that if I’m going to be in these foxholes here, I need somebody that’s going to fight with me when we’re under a lot of fire. I want somebody that can stay with me and understand that as a business owner, you’re like this infectious disease. You’ve got to be contagious. And what you’re contagious with has got to be something that lifts them up.
We had to hire these people. And sometimes we didn’t. And they left in the heat of battle, and we were hurting because of it.
-Here’s a story. I want you to tell me a story. This is story time with Tim Redmond. Tell me how my story ends if I’m a perpetually low-energy person who operates with low enthusiasm on a daily basis. Tell me this story. What will happen to me if I have amazing technical skill in some area and I’m just low-energy. What will happen to me?
-I love to talk to these people. They are passionate about the world. You know, when something blinks slow, I fire them. I don’t hire them, for sure.
I feel–
If you feel, get out of my sight, please. I want people to feel and get in touch with their passion and all that, but you know what? The law of thermodynamics says that things that are in motion will stay in motion until they run into a resistance greater than that motion. When things are still, they’re going to stay still until they got a force acting upon them greater than that resistance to stay still.
And so in your business, you’ve got to get things moving. You’ve got to get things going here. Your energy and your excitement and your enthusiasm, if you don’t know how to create that– well, that’s just not my personality– I’m asking you to get a personality. You’ve got to be able to speak to yourself in a way you’ve got the energy to put into this mess called your business here. If you don’t put enough energy into it, it’s going to kick back this mediocre thing that’s going to keep you poor. It’s going to keep you in this lackluster performance.
And so these kind of people, they never worked out my business and helped my business grow. A business coach can teach you what to look for when hiring