WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GROW A SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS?

The one thing everyone is missing...

Is there a magical silver bullet for success?

One of the paradoxes of life is: received wisdom says that there is no easy route to success. There is no cheating the system, there are no magic beans or one single magic bullet that will make everything a success.

And Yet… we never stop trying to find it.

We are bombarded with advertising of all sorts that promise us the world – Lose weight, gain muscle, get fitter, find love, beat the stock market; whatever we feel insecure about, someone is trying to sell us an easy solution. And just like a river flows to the ocean, as humans we are conditioned to find that path of least resistance.

Considering all this, what if we told you that there IS one thing that will help you grow your business, literally overnight? There actually is a silver bullet that will make your business more successful? Does it make us sound full of the typical sales bollocks you hear everyday?

We know, it doesn’t sound very Geeky. If you’ve seen any of our videos, attended any of our training or maybe you are a Sales Geek Hub™ member, then you might readily expect us to be in the aforementioned “no easy route to success” club.

Nope!

There really is one thing above anything else that will make your business more successful. We’ve listed below 5 of the usual ‘keys to success’ that are spouted to sell books and seminars and coaching and then we give you the bombshell…

So how did we discover this?

Wistful reflections and the seed of an idea…

Over Christmas, as the turkey and mince pies began to stretch our waistlines and the remote, virtual, interactive present unwrapping had faded, we began to reflect on our business journey in 2020, the challenges we and everyone else had overcome. We thought we could perhaps distil some of the things that made our year successful into a brew of stout cheer and succour for other businesses, entrepreneurs and business leaders around the world. We came up with the list below.

And then it struck us…

All of it was superseded by our ultimate secret Geeky ingredient which we supply you with at the end of this blog.

1. confidence

Confidence, like bravery isn’t about the absence of worry, it’s never blasé, quite the opposite. Confidence, comes from trust. Trust in yourself and your own abilities, trust in your products and services, trust in your people. Confidence can be learned and experience is often it’s greatest teacher. Like most other businesses, at Geek, as the first lockdown hit, we lost 80% of our business overnight. But our trust (not faith – faith is based on conviction rather than proof) in our products; our preparedness for digital and in our staff to deliver exceptional value for clients at a time when our services were needed most; gave us the confidence to move forward and continue investing in our business. It seems strange maybe to kick this all off with ‘confidence’, but then, when you think about it – maybe it’s makes complete sense.

Associated Geek Value: GEEKS ARE BRAVE

2. honesty

We thought about some sort of order for this list. The natural follow on from confidence is honesty. If there is honesty and integrity in everything we do then we can have confidence in our convictions. Honesty can be brutal at times, particularly when we look inward or use it as a decision making tool but it should never be weaponised to make others feel like sh*t (we all know someone who proclaims “I say it how it is” but uses that as justification to be mean to everyone). If the lockdowns can teach us anything in business, then maybe it’s to look at ourselves, our products and our people with complete honesty (maybe for the first time) and say to ourselves “is this taking us closer to or further away from our goals?”

Associated Geek Value: GEEKS ARE BRAVE – We stand up for what is right.

3. proactivity

If we aren’t moving forward, then we are moving backward, right? Maybe that ‘truism’ has lost some of it’s lustre in the current environment. It feels like consolidation is, at this time, progress. Whilst that’s true at Geek, if our business were a game of cricket, then we are very much made in the Ian Bell mode. We like to get out on our front foot as much as possible, be proactive and make things happen. And if Ian Bell is the measure of that approach then there is great beauty in it (see exhibit “A” opposite). Of course there’s no point in doing things for the sake of it, just to look busy and especially if it’s poor business. But many of us fall into that trap. It’s amazing to us just how many of the businesses we work with continue to engage in loss making activities. So proactivity must be prefaced with good decison-making, risk management and leadership and backed up with a solid work ethic. NB: If you aren’t a cricket fan and can’t see the beauty in that stroke then you are excluded from ever being Secret Geek’s friend

Associated Geek Value: GEEKS GET **IT DONE

4. flexible determination

OK, so it’s sort of a cheat to have two things in one here but the juxtaposition hints at each attribute being useful in equal measure and not to the detriment of the other. Our culture, often as not, glorifies the determined, the dogged, bloody-minded and obsessive. Our love of the under-dog is rooted in our innate admiration of their firmness of purpose and subsequent success against all odds.

On the other side of that coin is a perhaps a more modern concept that relishes flexibility. Perhaps flexibility quenches our desire for freedom? We admire those that can withstand the vagaries of life and bend without breaking. Lord knows we’ve all needed some of that, this year. And if there’s one, now clichéd concept, that perhaps sums up this year it is that of pivoting. In fact, think how great your bottom line would have looked for 2020 if you had trademarked the word pivot and taken royalties on it!!

Flexibility and determination are two sides of the same coin because they are both paradigms for dealing with and making it through, life. We either, determinedly plow on or we flexibly move one. Both approaches are forms of resilience and no one approach is better than the other – rather there is great wisdom in knowing when to doggedly plow on and when to pivot.

Unsurprisingly, both approaches can be used at the same time – our Geeky decisions in 2020 (whether wise or not are not for us to judge) revolved around flexibly pivoting wholeheartedly to digital delivery of our products and creating new ones that helped our audience, notably giving away hours and hours of our expertise. But we also pushed on determinedly with our expansion plans and in the middle of a pandemic, we moved premises and upscaled, providing a great new environment for all our Geeks and our clients to use.

Associated Geek Value: GEEKS ARE ALWAYS LEARNING – We adapt and thrive within an ever changing world.

5. KINDNESS

God knows there seems to be precious little of it about these days. But actually just a little kindness can achieve so much. Kindness stems from care. Think about how transformational it would be if everyone in our business cared. No?

Go on – just think of the power of that and what it means across every aspect of our lives, Now apply that to our businesses.

One of our core beliefs at Geek is:

‘GEEKS CARE‘: Compassion starts at home. Being a Geek is belonging to a tribe. We look out for each other and that attitude transfers to our clients.

We live our values and without immodestly listing examples we know that our love and care gets paid back to us ten-fold at least. It is a virtuous circle we could all do with jumping into.

Please check out our Geeky values here and see right into our DNA to realise it flows through everything we do including this blog.

DO you want to know a secret?

And so we get to the crux of it all.

You may have been reading this knowing exactly where we are going. Knowing that actually, our big secret isn’t a big secret because there’s been a bloody best selling book and film made about it?

Well, you are wrong!

THE Secret, isn’t OUR secret.

The law of attraction is powerful but it can’t PROMISE you results like our ‘dirty little secret’ can.

So without further ado here is the ONE THING EVERYONE IS MISSING.

The one thing that supersedes all our good advice above

The one thing that will help grow a business, literally overnight.

The magical silver bullet to help you grow a successful business is…

...more sales

Sorry if you think that’s a cop out, that seems obvious or too simple, but there is truth in simplicity!

Of course it is slightly tongue in cheek and we know that many of you (that didn’t click the link at the top of the article) will be groaning similarly to the punchline of a dad joke. But there is a serious point here.