A Passion for What?

I spent today in a sort of live master mind group – facilitating a round table discussion, working with several small business owners. At the heart of every successful small business, or even sales territory, is a passion. If you build your business trying to fake passion just to make a dollar, you’re bound to fail. Not only will people see through your facade, you’ll be wasting your life. If you plan to spend the next ten or twenty years doing something, make sure your passion is at the heart of it. There are probably a dozen paths you can take; just make sure your passion is central to your work.

How do you find this passion? We spent today do just that… on planning vision, setting the mission, looking at personal talents and gifts, and considering the people we serve in our businesses. We looked at the three components Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, gives us in his hedgehog concept; Passion, becoming the best, and determining your economic engine. Setting aside time to do this kind of planning is likely the best thing you can do for your business. From this we came up with numerous ideas on how to develop new products, adjacent markets, greater efficiencies and profits, and how to structure time away from the business grind to plan, course correct, and renew the vision.

When was the last time you took the time to make sure you are headed in the right direction?