There are lots of folks who will sell you a “9 step process for growing your business quickly so you can retire early”. (Spoiler Alert: It’s going to involve buying a lot of FaceBook ads!)

Heck, I even wrote a curriculum that I used with some early clients to make them better CEOs.

That doesn’t work!

I’ll never forget walking into a client’s conference room all ready to talk about “Lesson 3: Communicating Clear Expectations to your Team,” and the client told me that he had just lost his biggest and longest-held client. 

They had fired him that morning. 

He didn’t care about “clear expectations” – he was in survival mode, and was grappling with what this meant, not just for his business, but for him as a man, as a business owner, as a father…

I can think of another client giving out very generous bonuses to her team – and then immediately resenting those same team members that she spent so much money honoring! She was following what the book taught her to do, but the feelings it created in her would not lead to a happy, successful team.

I also have to acknowledge the counter-examples. Those impulsive and capricious leaders didn’t do a great job recognizing their team’s accomplishments – but their warmth and generosity of spirit more than made up for their failures in what the books would teach about leadership.

A different way

It was experiences like these that led me to change course, to stop selling consulting that focused on creating suitable structures and processes on the outside.

Now I focus on working on your insides, head and heart, getting you back in touch with your gut, your intuition. Once we see differently from the inside, the systems and structures are easy to put in place.

One of the reasons folks sell you those 9 step process courses is that they are easy to sell. They make a clear promise and lay it out in doable terms. This “inside-out” stuff is much fuzzier! But if your “spider-sense” is tingling and you are wondering if this is something you should explore hit reply and let me know.

It just might be what you and your business need.