If you do open up to your staff, and share your dreams, fears, frustrations, passions, and even a bit of your silly self, they’ll attach themselves even closer to you and your company.  When CEOs show more of their ‘real’ self, employees want to help you grow.

I was at Clint Greenleafs company the other day in Austin, Texas and this life size statue of his idol showed me a bit of the real Clint.  It also was a great indication as to why his company culture is as great as it is.

I was in Austin, TX this week at an EO Member’s company.  At lunch we went for a drive and they showed me a HOT trend in Austin.  Food Trailers.  And these are not your dad’s hot dog stands either.

Some of the hottest, trendiest restaurants & chefs in Austin are setting up remote restaurants in food trailers.  This is upscale fast food.  Upscale food trailers.

Think NO overhead. LOW cost. CLOSE to your customers.  And great expansion strategy that’s way out of the box.

How is your industry changing ?  I’d love to hear…

Where you

Most CEOs I mentor at one stage had companies that were struggling to grow.

So don’t be put off by the process of identifying strengths and weaknesses. It’s not easy.

One of the best tools for getting started with crafting your Painted Picture is to begin with an inventory of your company or business areas as they stand today. One of my favorite ways to do this is through a SWOT Analysis, which will determine your ‘Current State’.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

Sitting down to analyze each of these terms as it relates to your company can be extremely eye-opening.

Before you begin creating your Painted Picture, do a SWOT Analysis. Give all of the key people in your company or leadership team a stack of Post-It Notes (or any small pieces of paper).  Give them ten minutes at most to write down one idea per note pertaining to of the four areas represented by SWOT.  When time is up, have each person read each of their notes out loud and post them up on a wall by category (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats).

After everyone does this, start taking stock of the current state of your company, and where you want to be headed in the future. This will give shape to the key projects you need to complete in order to make the future happen the way you want it to.  Those projects will serve as the basis for your Painted Picture, and the starting point for your own process of reverse engineering.

What have you learned in any recent SWOTs you’ve done.

Yesterday while attending a charity event in the city filled with Vancouver business elite I was asked 5 times where I got the shirt I was wearing. a) Made me feel great cuz no one asked when I was wearing a boring button down and b) Robert Graham Designs got more word of mouth and buzz being generated.

You’ll see me for the rest of 2010 & 2011 wearing Robert Graham clothing. The brand’s Credo “Knowledge Wisdom Truth” is embroidered on every shirt. Who’s dressing you?

Once you know what key numbers to measure in your company you then need to decide who will be responsible for them and how often the data will be reviewed, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

The key to making these metrics work is having a good single point accountable or “SPA” person that can really dig into the different areas, rather than you simply “playing businessman” and watching the reports instead of proactively growing the business. With regular attention to metrics, you’ll be able to notice important patterns, some of which may service as warning signs or opportunities for growth.

Measurement doesn’t have to be too sophisticated; one simple thing I do to help decide what metrics to even measure is build a simple spreadsheet with columns showing the metric in question, who is responsible for it, when it will be reviewed, its status, and so forth.

Once a year I have the CEOs I mentor look and examine the frequency of the metrics they are measuring.  It’s key to adjust how often you’ll review each one going forward.  Did you have enough data at your fingertips this past year?  Would more or less frequency for each have helped you? Make sure you answer these questions.

Remember: don’t turn this into a paper-pushing exercise or “analysis paralysis,” either. Keep it simple.

Grandmothers are chock full of wisdom, so when you’re thinking about running your business, think about the simplicity of grandmother’s rules, and make sure they’re incorporated into the way you run your business.

Simple, handwritten thank you notes go miles. Nothing beats a handwritten thank you note.  It’s even more powerful today in our fleeting, electronic world. Getting a handwritten note means you took the time to say thank you the right way.

Jack Daly takes the handwritten thank you note one step further. Jack takes photos of himself with people, often in fun situations.  He then uploads those photos to Shutterfly.com, SendOutCards.com or a similar website where he can quickly type up a personal note.  Then presto, Shutterfly mails the card to the person’s address for Jack. Those cards don’t get thrown away.  Instead, they stay as little marketing reminders to his friends.

What are you doing to get your clients to RAVE about you ?

Are you using the right tools to grow your business ? Or are you still using the old ones you’ve always used ?

If this parrot is more creative than you are, then perhaps a coach or mentor can help you find new ways to build your company too.

A few years ago, I read a book called

The general premise that I took away from this four hour business-changing read is that if you care more about your employees’ personal goals than the company work they are doing, they’ll go through brick walls for you to build your company.

Sounds odd, but focusing on employees’ dreams will change them forever, and they’ll associate that positive feeling with your company.

How to Use Dreams

One easy, fun and impactful system you can put in place is called the “101 Dream Goals.”  Give each employee thirty minutes and have them write as many things they can think of that:

· They’d like to buy

· They’d like to do

· They want to learn

· They want to try for the first time

· Personal goals they want to achieve

· Sights they want to see

· Places they want to go

Then start spending time every day or every week helping them to make their dreams happen, one by one.  Many of them won’t involve any time or money either. Employees will begin to feel a huge connection with you as you help them to achieve their personal goals with nothing expected in return.  When employees see the company really caring about them as people with dreams, some pretty awesome cultural stuff starts to happen.

Three of my employees had student debt and they felt like they were being crushed by it.  They had no family support showing them how to get out of it and it never would have come up had they not written “get out of debt” on their list of goals.  I asked the three of them if they were OK with me getting them all together to help them out.  All expressed interest in meeting up.  We set up a dinner club – I was buying – and for a few months we met to review budgets that included debt repayment, investing and spending plans I’d put each of them on.  Within six months, all were either out of debt or substantially on their way to getting out of debt.  Two had started companies.  All three were investing, and two were actually using my stockbroker as an adviser.  All were thrilled.

Another one of my employees had on his list that he wanted to watch our national hockey league team, the Vancouver Canucks, have a pre-game practice and then sit behind the bench to watch the actual game.  For him it seemed like an unattainable goal. I made one call to Mike Johnson, the Assistant Coach from the Vancouver Canucks, who not only made it all happen, but a few of the players took Geoff out for drinks after the game.  And yeah, he’d go through brick walls for me now, too.

When you really care for your employees like the family you say that you are, that means caring for them personally and not just talking to them about what has to get done to build your company.

One of my favorite lines at the office used to be

Tell people to go home and relax once in a while.

We all know that as entrepreneurs we duck out of the office for our little stress breaks.  Let your team take some once in a while, too.

And if you really like your employees as much as you say you do, let them take the same amount of vacations, as you’d want.  Most employees feel that five weeks’ paid vacation (including their sick days) in addition to the statutory government holidays is about right.

Let them take it.

They won’t quit.  They won’t come into work sick.  And we all know the most productive time at the office is the day before vacation.

So give people time off.

To be sure they take this time off, force them to or they lose it.  The idea is to recharge your batteries regularly and not stockpile the time and have a meltdown.  Give them five weeks’ time, however, make them take all five weeks of time during the calendar year.