Who holds the boss accountable?
We’re participating in a conference call to discuss progress on the two winners’ goals since meeting in June.
Erickson has just explained she’s taken Willer’s and the other experts’ advice to create a strategic plan for her business, and purchased a “strategic planning toolkit” that guides her in involving all her staff members in the process.
“Can I call you on one thing,”
says Winthrop & Weinstine’s Dean Willer, addressing Chris Erickson, the CEO of Benefit Extras and an Upsize Growth Challenge winner.
Erickson has just explained she’s taken Willer’s and the other experts’ advice to create a strategic plan for her business, and purchased a “strategic planning toolkit” that guides her in involving all her staff members in the process.
“I have to be honest, I haven’t actually implemented it,” she admits, because of a lack of time. But Willer presses the point. “You need to make the time.
You need to make a point to do it,” he says, and refers to the finale Upsize Growth Challenge event, just a week away.
“If you haven’t started it before this point, once we meet at the Minneapolis Club you have no further external motivators, and it will sit on the shelf,” he says.
“I’m going to challenge you: Sit on Outlook, and set aside the time every week” on the calendars of everyone who’s going to be involved. “And do it right now.”
It’s the kind of in-your-face pushback that so few business owners hear, especially if they don’t have investors or a board.
Who’s going to hold the boss accountable, if they owe their livelihood to that boss? Who’s going to talk tough to the boss, especially if she’s smart and accomplished and personable and successful, like Erickson is.
Erickson has built her business to a $1 million player in the third-party administrator industry, taking an idea sketched on a napkin 15 years ago that she could do it better.
She’s never been a planner and through sheer hard work and a fierce commitment to customer service her company has simply grown. With more leads coming in the door than her staff can even handle, why rock the boat?
But that’s just it—like many business owners, Erickson has reached a plateau and she’d like to get growth going again.
To do so, she’ll need to take some calculated risks, to become a CEO setting strategic goals for the business, not just a founder working like crazy at task after task every day.
Like her, all of us business owners need to be called out when we’re repeating the same patterns. What’s getting in the way of our company’s growth?
What have we said over and over but still failed to execute? What learning do we need, as leaders, to rise to the next level? And who’s going to tell us to get it done right now?
My husband long ago had a boss whom he loathed, who would constantly berate her employees about the need for “a sense of urgency.” He was a stock guy at Target at the time, and a “sense of urgency” became a catchphrase for the two of us to mock.
“Where’s your sense of urgency in picking up more toilet paper at the store,” we’d snicker. Or, “we need more sense of urgency in taking out the garbage.”
But 20 years later he’s a boss himself, and admits he finds himself quoting that long-ago supervisor, albeit in his much more charming style, because the only way to make things happen is to make things happen.
Where’s your sense of urgency in building a bigger and more profitable company? Why not start right now?
