Kurt Sayce Ventures

In my years in business I have heard it said that people are our greatest asset.  Have you heard that one before?  How is it then, as soon as things slow down the first thing to go is the people?

If you are in a business that interacts with customers then you have to work with people.  Even if you have an Internet business, people are the ones buying you product.  If you are in a service business then not only do you have to deal with people who are your customers you now have to work with your staff, which are made up of people.  So no matter where you go in business you are going to have to learn how to deal with people.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see business owners make is to fail to recognize that they cannot hire the finished product.  You cannot hire the employee who is mature, motivated, and knows what to do, how to do it and when to do it!  Sorry, I wish it was different, but it is not.  The only thing that you can do is hire people who have character, talent and hopefully ambition.

When I was in the clothing business, I dealt with high-level executives, small business owners, sales people, administrative people, tailors, and factory workers.  In order to succeed I had to learn how to work with all types of people from all different backgrounds.  In the beginning of my career I really did not care about the people I worked with.  I was just interested in doing my job and making a living.  The problem was that I had a lot of turnover on my sales team.  The reason was not that I was not good at my job, but that I was not good at building relationships with my sales team and staff.  I had an attitude of “I am paying you well, so do you job or you are out of here”.  That just doesn’t work.

People want to know that they belong, that you care and that what they do makes a difference.

The problem is that most people are not motivated by money.  If they were the more you paid them the more motivated they would be.  I know that sounds strange, but it is true.  Think about yourself.  Are you motivated by how big you bank account is or by what you can do and where you can go with that big bank account?  People are not motivated by money; they are motivated by what they can do with the money.

You job as a business owner is to help develop people’s innate abilities, their goals and to give them a vision of something bigger than themselves.  How can you do that?  First, you have to learn to do it yourself.

You can’t teach what you don’t know and you can’t lead where you won’t go.

You have to develop yourself first.  You need to have a vision, goals, good work habits, etc… before you can develop others.

Start with this basic principle.  The only thing that changes you are the books you read and the people you associate with. So start reading.  If I had to choose one book I would start with Steven Covey’s “ 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.   Start communicating with people that you think are successful.  If you can emulate their thinking then you can duplicate their results.  Don’t just look at what they do.  Find out how they think.

Follow these principles and you will be well on you way to a more fulfilling and successful career.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 30th, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.