MISSION DRIVEN

8 POWER MOVES OF SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES!

Let’s talk about power moves! What are they and how do you do them? If you Google the words Power Moves in Business, you’ll get something like half a billion results. I don’t recommend spending too much time on this effort, although there are some interesting perspectives out there when it comes to power moves. Typically, power moves are something that somebody does that makes a big impact, a big statement, establishes control in a situation, sometimes intimidates, but ultimately designed to impress or take control. And, while I don’t necessarily disagree with some of the stuff I’ve read before on this topic, the power moves I’m talking about in this episode are not about establishing power or dominance over somebody else, they’re simply moves I strongly suggest you make if you want to build a killer team, an awesome organizational culture, and be a dominant player in your market. 

So, what is a power move in this context? Its actually doing some of the things you know you should be doing, but probably haven’t yet. The power moves we’ll talk about in this episode revolve primarily about your mission, your vision, and your values and how they’re communicated to your market. And by the way, as we’ve talked many times, you have external clients and customers, as well as internal clients and customers. Your Internal clients are the people that work for and with you to solve the problems your business is designed and created to solve. Our primary audience for this show consists of real estate appraisers, real estate agents and brokers, and lenders to the real estate industry. We, of course, have other industries that subscribe to the show, and all of this advice applies as much to you as it does to the industries I just mentioned. It doesn’t matter, by the way, if you’re a one man or one woman business, or a 10,000 employee company. What I will say though, is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to implement these power moves when you’re a one person to, say, 30-person business, than it is when you’re at 100 to 1000 employees with lots of layers of management, leadership, and production. So, if you’re at the lower end of those numbers, consider yourself lucky!

I’ll give you 8 power moves in this episode, and all of them will revolve around your mission, your vision, and your values, just know that we have power moves for almost every aspect of your business. What I first want to talk about though, is why this is so important. One of the most important lessons I learned from my leadership and business Sensei, Mr. Toyoda, was that everybody has a story. They have a story about their upbringing, a story about their life overall, a story about their likes and dislikes, and stories that play in their heads every second of every day that ultimately guide and direct them to make the decisions they make moment to moment. Stories make up the basic operating systems of the brain and the stories we often never question are the invisible guides that either make things happen for us, or magically always seem to throw up roadblocks in our path. 

Have you ever met somebody who always seems to have bad luck? Have you ever known somebody for whom things randomly break on them at the most in-opportune times? Nothing ever goes right for them, they’re always in some kind of situation, and they never seem to get the breaks that others get. What you can be assured about these people is that there is a story within them that plays all f these situations out in advance without them even knowing it. They might be really great people at their core, but they have a story inside of them that assures they will have the worst luck possible in almost every situation. Story is powerful because, not only does our story shape how we see the world, it shapes how others see us in the world. The great thing about our individual stories is that our stories can be rewritten so as to be more empowering, uplifting, powerful, and inspirational for ourselves, and for others. The same is true for our businesses.

Every day we go into the office and engage in our work we are doing so based on a story we’ve told ourselves about the work, what it means, how we do it, who we do it for, and how we’re perceived in that business by the market of volunteers who choose to work for us and those who pay us for our products and services. Yes, I said volunteers deliberately because that is one of the elements of any corporate story that needs to be cemented into your brain. All of your employees and customers or clients are volunteers. They’ve chosen to work with and for you for some reason (based on their own story) and it serves you to never forget that. As soon as the story about that relationship shifts to you believing you are somehow in control because you pay that person, or because you think you’re the best at what you do and that’s why they chose you, you’ve left yourself open to be dropped like a bad habit. Never forget one of the most important elements of this story, everybody is a volunteer!

And with that, what does your company mission, vision, and values have to do with storytelling? They have everything to do with storytelling because they are your story! And what is the purpose of a story? The purpose of story is to teach, that’s it. Maybe your story is entertaining, maybe its not, but the point of story is to teach and convey something. Story has been around since the dawn of time as a way to give meaning to things we understood and things maybe we didn’t understand. Cave people etched stories on cave walls to warn others of the danger that existed if they went any further into the cave. They etched stories about the man eating bears and crocodiles that lived among them. And in that way, stories allowed us an evolutionary advantage over all of the other species. Animals, as far as we know, can’t tell stories to convey meaning to another animal. If they do, they don’t have the advantage of language like humans do. Its one of the things that separates humans from the animals. Our ability to tell stories to teach and covey meaning is unique to humans. 

Just as stories became an evolutionary advantage for humans, story has also become an evolutionary advantage in business. Of course, the companies with the combination of the best product, best service, best price relative to the first two, and the best story tend to dominate in every market. Notice I didn’t say those with the best product win. I said those with the best combination of the things I mentioned. History is filled with stories of companies with an absolutely killer product that were pushed out of business by somebody with an inferior product, maybe superior service, but most likely superior marketing and storytelling capabilities. The winner tends to have a better story and, therefore, an evolutionary advantage over a company that doesn’t, even if that company has a better product. In addition to having a great product and service, which are both whole episodes in and of themselves, having an awesome and uplifting, as well as compelling and inspiring story is, in my opinion, an absolute must if you want to have an evolutionary advantage in business. 

So let’s get into the 8 power moves that all revolve around your story. The first power move is simply to come up with a mission, and then place it prominently where everyone can see it. The first person that needs to be sold on your story is you! Keep your mission simple and straightforward and even if you’re the only one who works in your office, or even the only one who works for the company, remember that you are creating the story that will become your evolutionary advantage over all others. This is one of the ways we grew the Real Value Group in our market to be one of the dominant valuation businesses. We came up with a story early on, we came up with our mission, which hasn’t really needed to evolve much since I first wrote it, and we’ve told that story every single day in some way since coming up with it. More importantly, we’ve found unique and creative ways to live out and evolve our story. By the way, our mission at RVG is really simple: add value to and through every interaction and be the trusted advisor in the valuation industry. Its only 16 words, if you count the articles like A, And, and The, and lays out quite simply what we’re about. 

Of course, how we live that mission out every day is part of our vision and values statements, but our mission gives every one of the volunteers who work for and with RVG a North Star, so to speak, with which to filter all of our interactions through. We can always play things out before hand and ask, “will this add value to and through the interaction, and will it help us be the trusted advisor?” Of course, we’ve gone to great lengths to take away aspects of subjectivity by spelling out our Strategic Identity, our Master Operating principles, and developed a fairly extensive training document of what we’re never do or say, and what we’ll always do or say instead. But all of those things started with the first part of the story, which is your mission. It doesn’t matter if you’re an appraiser, a Realtor, a loan originator, or work the factory line at Ford. I highly recommend you come up with both a personal mission statement, as well as a company mission statement regardless of the number of people in your organization. Print out the company mission statement and hang it in your office. As you add people to your organization, refer back to the mission in almost all of your communications and interactions. Which is power move number 2.

Repeat your company’s mission over and over until you hear yourself saying it in your sleep. Make your people practice it and say it in meetings. Reward them when they can recite it without mistake, and then ask for how they think it can be a lived experience within the organization. Ask them what they think the specific value words mean to them, and how they see the company living out the mission on a daily basis. This is all part of clarifying your mission within yourself first, as well as clarifying it with the team. Most team’s especially as they grow, tend to drift from the core mission over time, especially if there is any conflict or adversity. Its vital that the leader of the organization believes in the mission and lives it out daily. Its vital that you bring up the mission in formal communications, in casual conversation, and when you’re simply talking with yourself.

The third power move is to share your testimonials and reviews with the team. We talk all the time about getting 5 star reviews on your Google My Business page and how important that is for social proof, not to mention for SEO of your web presence. But how often are you sharing your testimonials and reviews with your team? If not, why not? Take time to tell that story to your team to reinforce why it is they do what they do and that they’re part of making that happen. By the way, I recommend sharing the not so good ones as well. Those are great opportunities to figure out what happened, respond appropriately to the client, and go on to fix any issues that may have been pointed out. Always thank people for giving negative reviews! Even if you don’t agree with what they said, or why they’re not happy. Thank them for being willing to share their experience and let them know you appreciate their willingness to do so. I know what the appraisers are saying, “Blaine, I’m not thanking some shit head who doesn’t understand the appraisal process and is just pissed off at our opinion of value!” Ok, don’t. We will if it ever happens and you can be assured that it will deflate any negative perceptions for those reading the review. People aren’t stupid. We all read reviews and take into consideration the negative ones. We can all read through the irrational ones, and the ones where there was a real breakdown in communication and service. Share your reviews with your people and relate it back to your mission.

The fourth power move is to add your mission to all of your external and internal communications. If your story, and your mission, is important to you, make it appear as important as it is by putting it on your emails, your newsletters and blogs, your website, and any other communications both internally and externally. Everybody in your company, as well as all those who might engage you in your area of expertise needs to know what your story is and what your mission is. In all three of the primary business industries we coach in, there is lots of competition and a massive risk of being commoditized. Realtors all charge similar commissions and offer similar services. Appraisers all charge similar fees for similar services, and return a report that is, more or less, a commodity to the end user. Lenders have interest rates and closing speed to sell. Those are the commodities and if you’ve never done anything to pull yourself out of the commodity trap, you tend to stay there. What happens from there is that your story becomes one of disdain for your industry, disdain for your customers and clients, and disdain for your predicament and lot in life, and you ultimate become a miserable person to be around. The aura of your organization devolves into one that can only compete on the commoditized aspects. 

All three of those businesses are people and relationship businesses. The appraisal business has become somewhat jaded on the relationship part due primarily to the HVCC, Dodd-Frank, Appraiser Independence, and pressure from clients to hit values. The pressure has always been there for the companies without a strong story and weak leadership however. The ones with strong leadership, strong principles, and a story to tell about their business have always attracted the best clients and have had the cojones to drop clients who constantly pressure to hit values. Be proud of your new story and your mission and put it on all of your company communications and materials. Let the world know that you know who you are, what you’re about, and that everything you do, you do because you’re on a mission. I hope you get that point about mission statements for your life and business. People and companies on a mission are much more energized and focused than ones that aren’t. Its not about writing a statement that means nothing to anybody, its about coming up with a mission that motivates, inspires, and maybe more importantly, guides and directs your decisions and your time. When you’re on a mission you value your time differently than when you’re not. 

Power move number 5 is to publicly praise your talent, your staff, your volunteers whenever they do anything that exemplifies the mission. However great or small the action, praise it, light it up for all to see, reward it! As the leader of your organization, you want to always be on the lookout for opportunities to reward what you want to see more of and encourage within your organization. Talk about the mission, write out the mission, place the mission prominently on all your communications, and then point out when the mission is being carried out by your people. Don’t have any people yet? That’s ok! Remind yourself that you’re doing this because its part of your mission. Make the story strong within you first before trying to infect others with your inspiration. The stronger your conviction about the mission, the more infectious it becomes to others. The more you praise it, the more your culture becomes one of mission driven over task driven. Task driven organizations are uninspired and uninspiring. Mission driven ones are inspired, inspiring, and infectious! Make the wins visible and call out any actions from your talent that lives out the mission in daily life and interactions. 

Power move number 6 is a tough one for some. This takes leadership and a plan, but number six is to try your absolute best to infect everybody in the organization with the energy and inspiration of the mission. However, when you’ve exhausted all of your efforts in that regard and you find that its just not working with somebody, its time to let them move on to their next employment experience. I know its tough to have to let people go, especially when you’ve invested time in training them. However, when you find somebody who is uninspired and uninspirable, you’ve found somebody who will potentially infect the rest of your volunteers with the wrong type of energy. I’ve talked in past episodes about how energy works and how it always moves from high to low. It’s the second law of thermodynamics and it applies to emotional energy the same way that it applies to chemical, steam, or mechanical energy. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy is always conserved. The amount never changes, but its qualities change over time and depending on how its used. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that energy always moves from high to low. Higher energy will always bleed off to lower energy paths. When it comes to people, this means that high energy, highly motivated, and highly inspired and focused people will always bleed off their energy to lower energy people. This is why inspired people can inspire those around them. Their inspiration is literally (scientifically) breathing life into those with lower energy. 

Another way to put this is that those lower energy folks that will never buy into your mission will always suck the energy out of others. There is no way around it friends, and the longer you put it off, the more energy you allow them to suck out of the others in your organization, and maybe you. I didn’t say they might not be good people. I’m simply telling you to very conscious of who gets the story and who doesn’t. If you want your story to be part of what your clients see, hear, feel, and experience, you need people who buy into the story and will live out the mission through their actions, not resist it and potentially drain the energy from others. If you’ve never had one of these people working with you, trust me when I tell you that they can cause PTSD. You will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to ‘rehabilitate’ their attitudes and personalities, and to no avail! In the meantime, you may find yourself apologizing to clients for them, putting bandages on situations because they haven’t bought in, and avoiding them or having anxiety about dealing with them at company meetings. Get rid of them as soon as you know they don’t fit. 

Power move number 7 is to get really clear on how each team member’s role and daily tasks contribute to the company’s overall mission. Our mission is to add value to and through every interaction and the be the most trusted advisor in the valuation industry. If that’s our mission then I have to get really clear on how my customer service staff adds value to and through every interaction and can help us become the most trusted advisor in the valuation industry. I need to get really clear on how our appraisers can add value to and through every interaction and become a trusted advisor. I need to get really clear on how our trainees can add value to and through every interaction and so on. Once you know what your mission is and you’re sold on it, its imperative that you know how that plays out in every single role, and then write that story for your people. You can never assume that the people you have working with you fully understand how their role and daily tasks fit into the bigger picture. Its your job as the leader to tell that story to them on a regular basis and get their buy in. What you’ll find is that, over time and with enough repetitions of the mission and how their role contributes, they’ll start coming up with new and creative ways of doing things that more closely fit the mission. 

Let me give you an example from our industry to bring this point home. We talk all the time about offloading the least valuable and time-consuming tasks in your business. For an appraiser, one of those tasks is basic data entry. If you’re still entering all the data into your appraisal reports, you’re doing it wrong friends. Its not scalable and it tremendously drags down your dollars per hour. What do we advise? Hire somebody! There are lots of people out there who are probably better at it than you and will do it for considerably less than your hourly rate. So, you hire somebody for $5, $7, $10, or maybe even $20 per hour to handle those tasks. When that happens, appraisers tend to think that since this person is just a hired hand, so to speak, and quite often a foreign hired hand, that they aren’t part of this story telling and mission driven process, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Is having good and correct data a part of our mission? Absolutely! We can’t add value to and through every interaction and become a trusted advisor if there are mistakes and incorrect data. What do we do? We write out the mission at the top of our training document so that the data entry person knows what our story is. We talk to them about it to plant the seeds about how we’ll be communicating. How we want their input and feedback on how the mission can be best achieved. And then we set about training them on the specific tasks their role requires, but always through the filter of how that task will help us fulfill our mission. If things go awry and we have to make corrections to a work process, we typically start it off with, “remember what our mission is, its to add value to and through every interaction and be the most trusted advisor in the valuation industry. If we send out work with these mistakes and errors, we are failing at that mission. What do you need from us to solve this issue forever?” As we just talked about in Power Move number six, if we just can’t get buy in on our mission, we tend to move on in search of somebody who does want to be part of something bigger than just their daily tasks. 

The eighth power move is to create a core values manifesto for the whole company that clearly expresses the values you expect from every single person on the team as you pursue the company’s mission. Understand, your mission is the ‘why’, your values explain the ‘how’ of fulfilling your mission. Your story and your mission tell the world why you do what you do, where your core values manifesto tells the team what you expect in carrying out the mission. Again, even if you’re still a one-person business, it is super valuable to solidify your mission and the values you stand on while carrying out that mission. If you ever decide to grow and start adding people you will be worlds ahead of every other business that has never taken the time to do this stuff. As we talk all the time on this show, if you want to remove yourself from the commoditization process that is at play in almost every business and every industry, it is imperative that you develop a story about you and your business that speaks to your specialization. Let me assure you that having a story, a mission, and core values spelled out is considered a specialization in most industries. And if you plan on specializing more narrowly within the industry, having a prominently advertised and lived mission makes your success that much more likely. 

And with that, my friends, I thank you for investing your most valuable asset, resource, and currency with me again this week. Your time is extremely valuable and I hope I’ve been able to add some value for you with these 8 power moves for your life and business. As always, we are accepting applications for our Level 1 coaching, as well as our higher level Black Belt coaching teams. If you’d like to jump on a free coaching call with me, I always welcome the opportunity! By the way, our mission at the Real Value Coaching Academy is to increase the self worth and net worth of people around the world and be your most trusted advisor. I will never try to sell you anything on our calls. My mission is to add value for you in any way that I can and we always leave it up to the individual to ask about our programs if they choose to. If they don’t, we just add value, give some advice, make some recommendations, and leave the call knowing I fulfilled my mission. You have absolutely nothing to lose by reaching out and if you fear being sold on something, let me eliminate that fear by assuring you we never even mention our programs on calls, unless I am asked specifically about them. You are always in control of that. 

So, until I find myself on a value-added conversation with you one on one, or until next week my friends, I’m out…