Mindset Archives - Eric Gilbert-Williams

Benefits and Traps Of Going The Extra Mile In Business

March 28, 2020August 30, 2019 by Eric Gilbert-Williams

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Always doing ‘The Extra 10%’ can launch your business up to a new level. Or it can leave you burnt out and your team frustrated.

Wait. What IS “the extra 10%”?

Well, it’s that extra effort you put into everything you do. It’s the thing you do that completely surpasses the expectations of the people around you; clients, team members, partners, investors and board members alike. It’s that extra push of effort you put in, even AFTER you feel completely wiped.

Doing the extra 10% keeps you miles ahead of your competition, it gains you powerful loyalty with clients and it inspires your team to be the best they can be.

But Careful, there are limits!

Sometimes I can be a bit obsessive, and other times I can take things a little bit too literally. There was a time where I latched onto the concept of putting in the extra 10% so much that I nearly burnt myself out completely.

I was ‘going the extra mile’, on top of the extra mile, on top of the extra mile, perpetually. I wouldn’t stop pushing, and the next thing I knew I was wiped, verging on burn out.

To me, I define burnout as “waking up in the morning and just not giving a damn anymore”.

It’s a terrible feeling. I got into business because I loved it. I pushed myself and my team hard because I felt passionately about what we were doing. And then one day I woke up and didn’t care anymore. I looked into the mirror and just saw a hollow, exhausted face looking back at me. It scared the crap out of me how low my energy was at that point.

Lesson:

Pick your battles, and give yourself the extra 10% as well.

Going the extra mile in business

People notice when you do the extra 10%. It will stand out and get you recognised. It’s going to pay dividends when it comes to client loyalty, team loyalty, team motivation, quality of product, your reputation, how much fear it inspires in the hearts of your enemies, and more.

It makes you a better person because every time you push yourself that extra little bit you become that much better. You learn to persevere and push passed your own mental blocks.

When you’re exhausted and everything feels like it’s falling apart, just do a little more. One more step. When 100 clients say ‘no’, you find the best on your 101st try.

The good vibes will ripple out to teammates. Let me share a personal story as an example.

Walk the talk

There was this one time where my team was getting burnt out, no surprise there because upper management was consistently clocking 60-hour weeks. We were struggling, it was a tough season, margins were lower, it was a very competitive year and somehow we had to get through it.

We knew we didn’t want to just crawl across the finish line, which is why we were working so hard! We wanted to rocket across the finish line and have a great year!

I had to take a step back and ask myself questions like:

“What do I do to motivate these people who are already working so hard?”

“How do I help my team work harder, go farther, and accomplish more?”

“How can I encourage them to keep their chin up and keep moving?”

The best thing I could think to do was to push myself harder and to be there for them at the frontline, leading by example.

To whatever capacity you can, “be the change you want to see in the world.” (Mahatma Gandi)

The positive energy and hard-working vibes I injected spread to my team and we rallied to close off one of our most successful years ever. So don’t be shy, walk the talk and show your team how you want them to behave.

Do it!

Go that extra mile yourself!

You’re worth the extra 10% too

Take care of yourself first, and you’ll be in a better position to help others afterwards.

I’m suggesting you apply this concept to yourself and not just to your business. Give yourself the care, the rest, the self-love you need to be the best version of yourself that you can be. The extra 10% applies to every area of your life including family time, fulfilling your dreams, playing music, hiking, personal development, meditation, whatever’s important to you.

“You’ve got to give yourself everything you need to grow, and you need to give yourself a reason to continue pushing so hard. Give yourself a reward.”

Give yourself and your own development that extra 10%. Try to find more and more ways to let that bright, positive entrepreneurial light inside of you out into the world. Read, go to workshops, hire a professional support team, do whatever you need to do.

Recommended Read: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There By Marshall Goldsmith

We’re going to keep getting success after success after success until we hit this point where we plateau. We have to do something to break out from under that ceiling. You can do this by becoming a better person, leader, and always putting that extra 10% into your personal development.

As you grow and fill yourself up, that will spill over into your professional life as well.

Traps of doing the extra 10%

Just as there are benefits for going the extra mile, there are definite traps as well if you don’t monitor yourself. Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way.

1. Don’t burn yourself out

You can do the extra 10% on top of the extra 10% on top of more, but you don’t want to go there. You’ve got to check in with your personal health along the way.

I’ve skirted near-burnout three times. It’s hard to say but I definitely hit some levels of energy drain I’m not proud of.

It’s this weird psychological thing, something in you switches. That’s a dangerous place to be when you’re a leader.

“There’s a fine line between working really hard and overworking, and only you know where that line is for yourself.”

Check in with yourself, meditate, turn your phone off, go camping for a bit, spend time with your family, go play with your kids, go see a sports game. Balance yourself. Do whatever you need to do. If you see burnout happening with a team member, encourage them to do the same.

When you show up at worked gassed and burnt out, what do you think your management team is going to feel? What will the impact be on your leadership?

Side note: In other articles and videos we’ll talk about automating your business so this doesn’t happen.

Show up happy with a balanced life and a happy family, then go to your team and say, ‘how can I help you?’ That’s one of the great keys to inspired leadership. Take care of yourself and then help others too.

The energy that radiates out of this happy place has a positive effect to move you and your team forward. So get there, keep it up and don’t burn out.

2. Don’t let it affect your ego

You could go around talking about all the extra stuff you did, and how much more you did.

Avoid, at all costs, phrases that sound anything like “I worked harder than you” when trying to inspire people. Saying things like that will just make them feel bad and resent you. Unless you’re dealing with a dysfunctional team member, of course, in which case maybe you need to replace them.

You’ve got to push harder for the right reasons. Don’t let your ego be your motivation or your beneficiary. It will mess up your head and your team.

When you do the extra 10%, ultimately we want the rest of your team motivated and inspired to do the same, not guilted into it, not shamed into it. Check where your motives lie.

If anything in this article made sense for you and struck a chord, check out my other articles.

Don’t forget you can book a free call with me, we’ll chat 1-on-1 about your business, trade ideas or you can ask for advice. Book your call here and let’s talk!

3 Simple Solutions to Help Create a Sales Culture

September 23, 2019August 30, 2019 by Eric Gilbert-Williams

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Every single person on your team contributes to the overall sales of your company either directly or indirectly.

Question: Who on your team is NOT contributing to sales?

“Oh, well, my bookkeeper doesn’t affect sales.”

Yes, they do.

“My assistant has nothing to do with sales.”

Yes, my friend, they do.

“Fine. But what about the janitor?”

Them too!

Stop looking at sales as an isolated position description, it’s not a single department. Sales is a critical concept your entire team needs to understand, embody and embrace. If someone on your team doesn’t get this concept, let them go find work somewhere else and bring in someone better.

Sales is my favorite topic when it comes to business and entrepreneurship. The gasoline to your engine, the rocket fuel that puts you across the finish line. You have HUGE potential sitting right under your nose, and it costs very little (next to nothing) to tap into it.

While this article is a broad look at sales, I have other articles and videos you can look through as well. Or, book a call with me, it’s complimentary and customised to you and what you’re focusing on in your business right now.

2 common sales leadership mistakes

1. Too much risk in the hands of too few

Picture this: 50 people in your company with 5 people in sales. That’s 10% of your staff responsible for 100% of your pipeline. It doesn’t make sense.

Personal Experience #1:

Too often in my past ventures, I focused exclusively on my sales team to generate results. I believed ‘sales’ was about just salespeople selling. I thought revenue came from that small percentage of people with the magical five-letter word ‘sales’ written on their position description.

A common challenge faced by growing businesses is keeping up with results that were once easily attained when they were smaller. They struggle with how to keep that momentum flowing to reach the next level.

After banging my head against the wall with this challenge, I had an epiphany.

I finally realised one of the reasons sales was easier when my company was small was because everyone was contributing back then. The ‘buy-in’ factor from the team was much stronger when everyone talked directly to me on a daily basis.

Why?

The larger my team, the farther people became until a lot of people only knew me by name, not as a person. The larger my company became, the more diluted my leadership message and energy became as well.

Solution #1:

I had to stop carrying all the weight and empower key team members better. I had to start by accepting that the problem was with me, not with my team. I needed to become a better leader, one which was adapted better at working with a larger team.

Once I tackled this — and believe me, it took a lot of work — I started to see some amazing results! People at lower levels of my organisation started to behave differently. I also started to receive more compliments from customers instead of complaints. The compliments led to strong referrals which lined up my staff to hit more home runs. I also had random team members tell me about what they did to help close on a deal. It was amazing to witness the transformation!

2. Being sold in an interview

A good salesperson will sell you in an interview. They’ll successfully convince you to hire them, even if they aren’t a good fit for your organization.

Yup, I got sold. Bamboozled! Duped. Call it what you may. I let myself get ‘sold’ in an interview and hired the wrong salespeople. Have you ever been there?

Remember that in an interview, the person is trying to sell themselves.

If they’re actually good at sales, they’ll sell you on hiring them even if they aren’t a good fit for the company. They’ll relate to you, make you feel comfortable, help you overlook that they are a bad fit, and make it easy for you to say ‘yes’. Those are all skills of a good salesperson but have nothing to do with their ‘overall fit’ with your organisation as a whole.

“Having the wrong people on your team is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.”

How does it happen?

Fear. Pressure. Being reactive with hiring. That’s how.

Hopefully, your company is in a profitable position. You have all the time in the world and little to no pressure in your day-to-day life. On the flip side, maybe you’ve found yourself a little bit like me where my overhead increased, the market dipped, and competitors were in attack mode. It was stressful! And it put the pressure on to hire more salespeople… fast. Too fast.

I let fear, stress, and pressure influence too many of my decisions in the wrong way. Some things can’t be rushed.

As the old saying goes:

“Rushin’ didn’t get no-one anywhere faster.”

Solution #2:

Relax. Be objective and let go of the emotions. Then check your gut and ask yourself: “of all the candidates I’m interviewing, do I really believe this person a good fit for my organization?”

Never ‘settle’. Keep interviewing until you have the right fit.

It’s easier to turn down someone in an interview than it is to fire them after they’re employed.

After it happened a couple of times I was able to spot the patterns and filter those ‘good at sales but bad fit’ people out better. It took some trial and error but eventually, I started hiring the right people to replace my lower performers.

Sales is a culture, a universal subject

It’s worth repeating: we need to stop looking at sales as an isolated role.

Everyone on your team is either helping or harming the reputation of your organisation.

Hear me out.

When an employee goes home to family or out with friends, bitching about your company, it affects your reputation. THEIR friends and extended family inadvertently expand on the negativity and so on. This type of cycle impacts the attitude of your market before your sales staff even show up.

Your image and reputation spread organically, whether you realise it or not, whether you like it or not, and whether you focus on it or not. People talk.

“Anything anyone ever says about your company is critical and it’s going to be in one of two contexts: either it will help your company or hinder it.“

Word of mouth vibrates and reverberates, it gains momentum and gets stronger with time. We want it to be getting stronger in a positive way, not in a negative one. We want your reputation to be strong, and to spread out to the market in that context.

I’m talking about unleashing the hidden potential of your existing team.

Your team must know how important they are

In one of my past ventures I had dynamic salespeople on my team. They knew what they were doing, they brought customers in the door and closed on good deals.

Then reality hit, the rest of my team wasn’t meeting customer expectations that my sales team had set up.

Lower level team members interacted poorly with clients. Bookkeeping was making mistakes on invoices. Operations people were stretched too thin and not giving good service to key accounts. A ton of little things started piling up, creating bad experiences for clients.

Accounts which started as happy (after dealing with my sales staff) began to complain and were angry by the end of the client cycle.

Solution #3:

Educate your team on how important they are for the competitive edge of your company as a whole.

I would spend quality time with key team members who weren’t representing my company’s core values. A little education goes a long way.

“A little heart to heart and showing you care about your team can go a very long way”

Does your team prioritize your customer’s client experience as their top priority, or are they just showing up to do their job?

We want to get your team excited about working for you and with you to build a kick-ass reputation for your company they can feel proud about. Anything less than this is a waste of potential.

If you need some guidance on this or more how-to, book a call with me and let’s talk about it.

Rally the troops!

One of my biggest sales challenges came within a recession. No surprise there, I suppose.

With high overhead, not enough sales and lower margins from a recessed economy, I was in trouble. I was scared and moved too slowly to make corrective actions. Ultimately I found myself just two weeks away from not being able to make payroll and pay off suppliers.

Scary shit, to say the least.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences in my business career. I lost a lot of sleep during those days.

To get through it, I needed the whole company to come together and push through. We all had to drive sales forward. I didn’t have enough money to hire more salespeople so I had to rely on everyone else to chip in on the effort as an entire organisation.

This was an enlightening moment. It helped me realise some of the mistakes I had made in the past as my company was expanding.

When the company was smaller, we all had multiple job descriptions. Salespeople helped with operations, operations people helped out with bookkeeping, bookkeepers were close with salespeople and made happy, friendly conversation with their clients. It was a positive cycle revolving on a strong team dynamic.

As the company grew, my team grew farther and farther apart. Job descriptions started to become isolated, like a cold, process-oriented assembly line. Communication and relationships started to weaken and become fragmented.

With a lot of serious effort, we made it through that tough time. All because every single person in the company rallied together to help with sales. Quality client experience, as a whole, became a universal subject for each team member which led to client trust, positive reputation, and an increase in referrals.

That year ended up being the most profitable year up until that point. It was a complete turnaround from a near-catastrophic disaster!

All because we stopped thinking of sales as an isolated role and implemented it as a universal role that touched every job description.

Together, let’s put the spotlight on the subject and turn the light on. We’ll explore every corner and get to the root of driving you to the next level. Book a complimentary consultation, it’s on me.