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Seven reasons to be grateful you’re an entrepreneur right now.
It’s become clearer than ever over the past six months that the Strategic Coach® community is a welcome refuge for many entrepreneurs in a world awash with bad news and uncertainty. Our clients have been regularly expressing their gratitude for the opportunity to get refocused on the positive in their Strategic Coach® workshops, and there is much to be positive about. Here are seven things to remember as you look forward to the rest of 2009 and beyond:
1. The need for new, better, and different ways of doing things is more evident to more people now than it has been for decades. Entrepreneurs specialize in the new, better, and different. People are in tremendous need of direction, confidence, and capability right now in many spheres. The breakdown of institutions and systems that were not based on real value creation has left people hungry for solutions that are. There has never been a better time for the entrepreneur who understands how to help his or her clientele eliminate their dangers, capture their opportunities, and leverage their strengths.
2. You have invaluable assets that the market can’t touch. Among them are the abilities to create value, find solutions, mobilize talent, sell people on what they need to make their futures bigger, and make your visions real. If anything, recent events have put these capabilities in higher demand than ever. They are and will continue to be what’s needed to revitalize our economies and societies. Confidence, which you can create for yourself and others at virtually no expense, is especially valuable right now. Many of our clients have been putting their efforts into helping their clients get their confidence back in these uncertain times, with great results.
3. If you’ve lost money in the markets, you can make it back in your business. This is a tremendous advantage that a majority of the non-entrepreneurial world doesn’t have. It’s not unusual to take an emotional hit when you lose large sums of money overnight. Redirect that energy creatively into finding new ways to grow your business, and you may actually be thankful one day for the crisis that led to some of your most important breakthroughs. We’ve seen entrepreneurs go through terrible crises and come out stronger than ever. The interesting thing is that the changes they institute in these situations almost always return many times the income that was lost—that is, they tend to overcompensate, with powerfully positive results.
4. Most entrepreneurs do their best work at times like these. According to Amy Bruske of Kolbe Corp., challenges and uncertainty actually bring out most entrepreneurs’ best instincts for creativity and innovation. She suggests that this is a time to trust your gut and not to overanalyze or allow yourself to be unduly swayed by the opinions of others.
5. Unlike others, you have the ability to insulate yourself permanently from external economic shocks. While workers at every level in almost every sector of the economy live with looming threats of shutdowns, cutbacks, and layoffs, every day in Strategic Coach®, we see entrepreneurs whose progress has not been negatively affected by what’s going on in the world. Mostly, these are people who are selling their own Unique Process™ to clients who can’t imagine living without it. In times of great uncertainty, people like to know they’re in good hands. These processes create such crucial value for those who buy them that they are considered essential and non-negotiable when cutback time rolls around. As an entrepreneur, you have the freedom to build a business like this if you haven’t already, and, as we’ll see in the next point, the way to do so is clearer than ever.
6. There is a model that works. Many people are suffering right now because the systems and structures they relied upon are breaking down and can no longer provide them with the kind of future they want. On the other hand, many Unique Process entrepreneurs in Strategic Coach® are reporting every day that, even in the toughest of times, their businesses are growing and thriving. Some are having their best quarters ever. Based on constant accountability to ongoing, growing value creation for your clientele, the Unique Process is a powerful business model for a future where people will be much more wary of staking their money and their lives on anything that seems to lack substance or integrity. For any entrepreneur who wants to prosper by creating a new kind of value in the world, what it takes to do so has never been clearer.
7. Your entrepreneurial life will keep you going and growing. In a crisis, entrepreneurs have no choice but to keep moving, even if it’s tough going. But heavy lifting builds big muscles. The only real choice now is to go forward, and you will grow your capabilities and learn a lot by doing so. Mike Bischof, the subject of our feature growth story, is a great example of what can happen when you embrace this realization with gusto. As long as you stay predominantly positive, confident, and focused on your goals, you will come out of this more capable and focused, wiser, and perhaps even pleasantly surprised by what you were able to accomplish. As a result, new opportunities and possibilities will open up that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Your forward motion will create them.
Read Mike Bischof's Story
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