Here is the business coach Notable Quotable. He says, “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.” You got to hold your team accountable to a high standard, or by default they are definitely going to drift, and I see it time and time again. I’ll go into a business.
Another example, I used to work with Oral Roberts University in their call center. I was brought in to help fix the call center, which is funny because I actually got asked to leave Oral Roberts University as a result of a parody that I wrote about the school’s president, but it was kind of fun getting asked to come back and help fix the call center, and the move number one that we did is we began to hold everyone accountable to a set number of outbound calls, and I’m going to give you the real number, 200. 200? Yeah, we required everyone to make 200 outbound calls per day, and you might be thinking to yourself, how is that even possible? Well, it’s possible because we had a clear target. We knew the Key Performance Indicators. We knew what we were doing. We knew what we were going for, and because we knew that, it was very easy to hold the team accountable to those hard numbers, so your action item right now, if you don’t have Key Performance Indicators, you must get them.
Now we move on to our next Notable Quotable, our next Notable Quotable. This Notable Quotable, it might come across as a little bit rough, little bit, I don’t know, tough here for you, but Gino Wickman is the best selling author of a book called Traction, taught from a business coach and he talks about diamond mines. Is this a book about diamond mining? I don’t want to learn about diamond mining. I want to learn about how to grow a business. Well, okay. Work with me. Hang tight. He wrote this book called traction, and what he talks about is that most entrepreneurs will do that. Not you, I mean other people. The people that you know are doing this, not you. This just in, you have never done this, but the people you know have done this, and here it is. He says, “Most people are sitting on their diamond mines. The surest way to lose your diamond mine is to get bored, become overambitious, or start thinking the grass is greener on the other side. Find your core focus. Stick to it. Devote your time and resources to excelling at it.” Whoa! That deserves a second read, Gino Wickman. Okay, I’ll read it one more time.
“Most people are sitting on your own diamond mines. The surest way to lose your diamond mine is to get bored, to become overambitious, or to start thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. Find your core focus. Stick to it. Devote your time and resources to it.” That is powerful. That is powerful when you think about the fact that if your team doesn’t, if their team’s not held accountable to a set number, a quota, you’re never going to find those diamonds in those mines. You’re going to move on to another hill. You keep moving on to another hill, you’re never going to get that traction according to the business coach.
Now the next question I want you to ask yourself here, on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the best, one being the worst, how good, how confident are you, that your company has a core differentiator? On a scale of one to 10, 10 being the best, one being the worst, how confident are you that your company has a clear differentiator, a clear we’ll call it a purple cow, something that makes you unique, because if you’re doing the exact same thing as your competition, it becomes very hard for people to remember you and to choose you over the competition.
When we come back, we’re going to talk about how to make … How to define your core differentiator. Stay tuned, thrivetimeshow.com. (singing) The world’s most amazing business coach ever