Let me ask you…What *exactly* do you do?

When you strip away all the terms and all the nice-to-haves, what is it you do?

I heard a story once of a home security system installer who, when faced with a decrease in new customers, had to figure out how his business would make money.

So he thought about it a bit and realized that he wasn’t a “home security system installer” at all, he was a guy who ran wires in homes.

Once he stripped away everything, he ran wires…period.

Can you see how basic that is?

And because that’s what he did, he was no longer limited by “home security systems” and was able to branch into “home theaters” and other areas that never before occurred to him when he labeled himself as a “home security system” installer.

Now let me ask you again…What *exactly* do you do?

You’re not an accountant, a life coach, a guru of any nature, a marketing mentor, etc. — these aren’t things you “do”, these are labels you’ve taken on.

In determining where the greatest opportunity exists for creating multiple revenue streams, or tapping previously undiscovered ones, you need to know, at the most basic level, what you do.

Making It Real — My Request to You

It’s tough to determine what you do at the most basic level. We spend a lifetime piling all these descriptive words on and then on some more — heck, this is what the gurus tell us to do — that it’s hard to determine the true, most basic, essence of something.

Look at the results you get for your clients.

End of the day, what do they walk away with? And if you’re not sure, ask them.

I could list several things here, but that would make it too easy for you to pick what you WANT your clients to get, rather than what they actually receive. Instead, I want you to do the business soul searching it takes to determine exactly what concrete results your clients get from you.

Note that I DO consider increased self-care and happiness or stronger, healthier relationships to be concrete results, these aren’t *soft* to me and it’s important to remember that it’s not always about the numbers!

What specific steps are you taking to ensure you’re fully participating in this New Economy by sharing your skills and passion with as many people as possible, and then converting those who resonate into your ideal clients?

Benchmark your team’s performance against other teams in¬side your company or other organizations. Toyota executives recog¬nized that to make the transition to luxury cars, they had to first show their employees the more demanding customer requirements of the luxury car market. To drive home this point, they transported busloads of employees to the Nagota golf course and encouraged them to examine closely the Mercedes, Porsches, Jaguars, and BMWs in the parking lot.

By encouraging the examination of everything from paint finishes to metal frames, Toyota made a very eloquent statement about the performance jump that was needed to produce a car of comparable quality.
Remove yourself as a buffer. If a team doesn’t seem committed to change, it may be because members have been insulated from exposure to performance problems. If you find that you are being overly protec¬tive of your team, try the following tactics:

• Let your team hear directly from your customers about the need for performance improvement. This may require meetings with your customers, visits to customer sites to see firsthand the difficulties customers are having with your products or services.
• Show your team the result of performance problems. The production manager of a manufacturing company accomplished this by taking engineering and production people through his shop’s quarantine area (the area reserved for defective products) and then explaining the amount of money that was being lost through these defects.

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