Entreleadership Quotes

Seth Godin says, “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.

A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week. —George S. Patton

Parents who let teens run around with unearned adult freedoms are naive and stupid.

Henry Ford said, “Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.

You must sell benefits, not products.

Having children doesn’t make you a good parent, it means you had sex. That’s all.

If you as a leader allow people to halfway do their jobs and don’t demand excellence as a prerequisite to keeping their job, you will create a culture of mediocrity.

one reason people make bad decisions is they don’t have a good decision as one of their options.

John Maxwell says a budget (for your money) is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Managing time is the same; you will either tell your day what to do or you will wonder where it went.

The weird thing is that the more efficient, on task, on goal you are with your time, the more energy you have. Working with no traction, or for that matter simply wasting a day, does not relax you, it drains you.// Strange as it may seem, when you work a daily plan in pursuit of your written goals that flow from your mission statement born of your vision for living your dreams, you are energized after a tough long day.

A year of intense exercise and watching what you eat will likely change the trajectory of your life physically. You will melt away fat, tone up muscle, feel better, and change your habits, likely for life. But only ten days of that exercise program won’t move the needle on the scale. To create big-time success you have to stay focused and stay intense over an extended period of time.

I finally realized that results are generated by activities. If I manage my activities then the results I want occur.

Humpty Dumpty is hard to put back together, and so is trust.

Nothing was left to chance; every smell, every piece of furniture, and certainly the design of the floor plans made these model homes world-class.

If you don’t own the goal and it doesn’t come from your dream, then you won’t have the toughness to persevere when the going gets tough. And I will promise you that the going will get tough. There is never an exception—everyone who wins must push through obstacles, lots of them. You simply will not get up at dawn for your three-mile run because your wife wants you thinner. Big goals require big backbone—wimps need not apply.

The Bible says in Habakkuk 2:2, “Write the vision and make it plain.” The written goal is the breakfast of champions. You just can’t do big things without making your goals specific, measurable, yours, with a time limit, and in writing.

It is hard to work your day job and spend a ton of hours on your business, but it is harder to make a mistake and lose your home in foreclosure because you jumped before the boat was close enough to the dock.

1. Career 2. Financial 3. Spiritual 4. Physical 5. Intellectual 6. Family 7. Social

If you are going to open a retail store you would want to consider Christmas. Most retailers make the majority of their entire year’s income between

The problem with your company is not the economy, it is not the lack of opportunity, it is not your team. The problem is you. That is the bad news. The good news is, if you're the problem, you're also the solution. You're the one person you can change the easiest. You can decide to grow. Grow your abilities, your character, your education, and your capacity. You can decide who you want to be and get about the business of becoming that person.

When leadership sets the goals by themselves they are not goals, they are quotas. And no one likes quotas.

If you wouldn’t want your mother to buy the item or the service then don’t sell it.

People will not buy from you if they don’t trust you, your product, and your company.

Good to Great by my friend Jim Collins.

you find yourself unable to stop micromanaging, ask yourself if your team has a problem. You may have to reorganize or bring in some more talented people who have the capacity to earn the right to be delegated to. If your team continually drops the ball you are right to micromanage until they don’t drop the ball or you get some new team members.

People who change their values, their ethics, are not trustworthy and should be avoided.

La Rochefoucauld once said, “The most untutored person with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

Business is really not that hard. You are, however, required to do the basics or you will not win.

Dreaming also has a negative connotation as well. Some people dream and stop there. They never do anything about making their dreams come true.

A lot of beginners in business think of marketing merely as selling.

If you have a customer who is able to make the purchase, they trust you, and you have shown them the benefits of the purchase, they will close themselves; you do not need some arm-twisting technique.

Businesses and entrepreneurs have become experts at microwaving rather than Crock-Potting their business plan. They are so worried about the moment, Q1 or Q2, that they lose their vision and their soul. They trade real, rich, abiding, deep success for the momentary win and then are constantly having to start over. Have a long-term vision and execute it. As the billionaire advised me, slow and steady wins the race.

Goals convert vision into energy. When you lay out exactly what you want to do in detail, you immediately start feeling the room move and the earth shake. You are pulled into your new life like some scene from a movie. Goals help make great men. J. C. Penney once said, “Give me a stock clerk with a goal, and I will give you a man who will make history. Give me a man without a goal and I will give you a stock clerk.

Passion is so key in leading and creating excellence that I will hire passion over education or talent every time. I prefer to have both, but given a choice I will take passion. La Rochefoucauld once said, “The most untutored person with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

Dorothy Bernard says that courage is just fear that has said its prayers.

President John F. Kennedy said, “There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

should always be dreaming. Dreaming is a sign you have hope.

If we aren’t profitable by December 20, I will close the business.” That would leave him about $800,000, plus his retirement money and home, and he would do something else to earn a living.

Ninety percent of making the right decision is the gathering of information. The bigger the decision, the more time you take, the more options you gather, and the more informed you should become.

If you are trying to get momentum in marketing, business, marriage, your physical condition, or your parenting, take your best focused intensity over time and multiply it by God for unstoppable momentum.

My friend John Maxwell says a budget (for your money) is telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Managing time is the same; you will either tell your day what to do or you will wonder where it went. The weird thing is that the more efficient, on task, on goal you are with your time, the more energy you have. Working with no traction, or for that matter simply wasting away a day, does not relax you, it drains you. Have you ever taken a day off, slept late, wandered around with no plan or thought for the day, watched some stupid rerun of a bad movie as you surfed the TV, and at the end of your great day off found yourself absolutely exhausted? Strange as it may seem, when you work a daily plan in pursuit of your written goals that flow from your mission statement born of your vision for living your dreams, you are energized after a tough long day.

Goals Must Have a Time Limit Goals without a time limit are unable to be broken down into micro goals to measure your progress, to observe your traction. You might say, “I want to write a book.” Great, when? In twenty years? In twenty months? If you don’t put a deadline on the goal it will never happen and you will get to eat the bitter fruit of regret.

Quadrant II is the important but not urgent. This may be the most important use of your time as an EntreLeader. The things that fall in this category impact the quality of your life and business possibly more than any other area. Examples of what falls into this area are exercise, strategic planning, goal setting, reading nonfiction leadership/business books, taking a class or three, relationship building, prayer, date night with your spouse, a day off devoted to brainstorming, doing your will/estate plan, saving money, and having the oil changed in your car. We can all agree that things that aren’t urgent but are important may be the most important activities we engage in as we look back at our life. The problem is we live in a society where the urge to be in motion, frenetic motion, at all times seems to be the spirit of the age. There is something about a quad II activity that causes you to pause and let a breath out, sigh, then engage in it. Activities like the ones mentioned above are the building blocks of a high-quality life and business, and yet because they are not urgent they seem to be some of the things we avoid the most.

A pyramid scheme is illegal and is where no product or service is sold; the business exists just to bring in recruiting fees. These still pop up from time to time and are an illegal cousin to the Ponzi or Madoff scheme because of the last-man rule. The last-man rule is, if you were to extend the company’s success until the last man on earth joined the business, would it be over because they only make money from recruiting and never the sale of a product or service? If it would, this is illegal.

Goals Must Be Specific and Goals Must Be Measurable Goals cannot be vague. Vague goals are not goals; they are dreams and wishes, and you don’t want to end up being one of those dreamers who do nothing. You can’t simply say I want to lose weight; that is not specific enough. You can’t say you want to be better educated; that is not measurable or specific. “I want to make more money” is a dream and won’t happen, because while “more money” is measurable, it is not specific. So you should set goals by saying things such as: 1. I want to lose thirty pounds. 2. I want a waist that is four inches smaller. 3. I want to make $100,000 per year. 4. I want a college degree in ________.

The weird thing is that while persuasional leadership takes longer and takes more restraint at the time, it is much more efficient over the long haul. When you teach team members or teens the why, they are more equipped to make the same decision next time without you. You don’t have to watch their every move, you don’t have to put in a time clock, and you don’t have to implant a GPS chip in their hide when they learn how to think for themselves. Positional leadership doesn’t take as long in the exchange, but you have to do it over and over and over and over. You never get to enjoy your team or your kids because they become a source of frustration rather than a source of pride.

Your job as an EntreLeader is to make sure when your team member leaves your office they take their monkey with them. The first step is to give them some ideas for options and instruct them to come back with three good ways to solve the problem and a suggested course of action. The next step is to teach your team to come to your office with a problem only after they have found three or more possible solutions and a suggested course of action. That makes for some great discussions and teachable moments as you show them how you would make the call. After solving problems and making the call with your help several times, the best team members begin to see the pattern you use and can do what you do. The final step is very personally rewarding.

Know the Competition I had a wonderful experience purchasing a luxury car. I was looking at three different brands. I have owned all three at different times in my life so I knew each fairly well. I had studied the market and knew most of the features of the competing models. However, this particular sales guy knew every detail about every car I was considering and so served me wonderfully in my purchase. He never once used his knowledge to speak poorly of the competition. On the contrary, he told me where each model was better than the car I was considering. Wow. I found myself starting to trust this guy because he was being honest and transparent. He stood firm that his car was the car I should buy because of its particular features and quality, but he brought great information about his competitors to the discussion. It was a really classy way to handle a sales role. A really sad part of my wonderful car purchase was that I was on a competitor’s lot the next day and the sales guy there knew less about the car he was selling than my guy knew about the same car. In

One of the biggest benefits I have found in this process, which I didn’t recognize on the front end, is by doing the spousal interview you will discover if your hire is married to crazy. Have you ever hired a great person whose crazy spouse completely took away their ability to win because they were doing maintenance on crazy? I was interviewing a very sharp young man for our broadcast department and explained to him that our final interview would be an informal dinner with his spouse. A few hours later I got a screaming and cussing phone call from his wife. She blew a gasket at the very thought that she had to be involved in her husband’s hiring. After she yelled and cussed for a minute or two she finally asked me, laced with profanity that I’ll leave out, “Why do you do this spouse interview anyway!” To which I responded, “To find people like you.” That poor guy gets his backbone ripped out every morning and maybe she gives it back to him at night if she hears a noise outside. Either he is a complete jellyfish, their marriage will end up in counseling, or they will get divorced. None of those options sounds like a productive team member. So the spousal interview might help you discover if the person is married to crazy; if they are, stay away.

Traction equals satisfaction

We don’t keep jerks; life is too short to work with them and really way too short to pay them and work with them too. Seems simple, but it requires that you fight to build an incredible team and culture from the moment you post a position until you celebrate their retirement. Every day every behavior, attitude, and execution has to be led well by a courageous, loving leader.

The more options I had the less rejection mattered.

out-of-bounds marker or the game is hard to play. One of the leading causes of small-business failure is success

If you can make the customer feel the way you do about your product, then your customer will buy your product.

Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.

The only people who never fail are those who never try.