Earnest Get's You Halfway

This month it will be 3 years since I started my insurance agency. It was about this time then, that I was recruiting my staff, negotiating the lease, and getting the place painted.

It's fun to reflect on how far we've come. We've had a bit of turnover as we've figured things out. Ervin is my last man standing from back then. I initially hired him as my executive assistant and he is now one of my licensed insurance specialists. I remember asking him in his interview if he'd be offended by a request to pick up my dry cleaning or change the burnt out headlight on my car. Ha.  He's come a long way.

I've had a lot of good breaks and been given many benefit's of the doubt over the last three years, but I'd attribute a fair amount of our success up to this point to earnestness. What is earnestness?

I like TheFreeDictionary.com's definition: the trait of sincere and steadfast fixity of purpose; "a man of energy and commitment"

I appreciate earnestness as a businessman and look for it when I recruit. To me, it’s a combination of a “whatever it takes” mentality with a high regard for relationship and “doing the right thing”. This “trait” will carry a person a long way. But on it’s own, has it’s limits.

We ran full speed our first year, and relaxed only slightly the second. This last year has been a strong one, but also full of reflection and change. It’s become painfully clear, that for our business to go to the proverbial next level, I have to get beyond earnestness, and develop systems, disciplines, and culture in our business.

I’m going to review 3 things I’m currently implementing in our business. I’ll reveal one in this post and the other two in a followup. Please leave your feedback, comments and ideas.

#1 Clearly defining 4 “results” goals and attaching to them 4 “activity” goals

• What are we trying to accomplish, specifically, and what specifically do we need to be doing daily to get there?
• This is making “holding people accountable” much more natural
• It’s also giving our team much more clarity of focus

In past years, I’ve been all over the map. I’d get back from a customer service conference, and I’d create some new service initiative for us to focus on. Then I’d come back from another long term care insurance class and we’d be all gung ho about that. This year, we’re focusing on 4 mission critical objectives for our business. Every team meeting we’re reviewing those goals, and comparing our week to week results against them.

Amazingly, and it seems almost elementary when you reflect on it, we’ve been failing to make the connection between our “activity goals” and our results for the week. We get to the end of a busy week that either did or did not get the results we wanted, and somehow we weren’t focusing  a sharp eye on how our activities might have been the culprit.

We instead devolved into pointing at what “fell through” or what “didn’t materialize” or which clients we couldn’t get a hold of to wrap things up or how “busy” we were with things. The real problem in many cases, was our four mission critical activities lagged, and thus so did our results. So this Friday we begin making that connection, and adjusting our activities to get the results we need and want.

Seems simple, but in the fast and furious life of an earnest young business, these principles get overlooked and instead, we just “work harder next week”.

Next post I'll be talking about "Creating Opportunities to Model Culture". By the way, I just added a "subscribe via email" widget to the upper right hand corner of my blog. A lot of people like to follow blogs that way. Basically put in your email and any time I post it pops right into your email immediately.

Cheers, Chris