EO Lessons Learned — 20 Years — The Evolution of an Entrepreneurial Leader
A guest post from one of our Strategic Partners:
Randy Nelson
In 1998, I was one of the founding members of the Raleigh Durham chapter of the Young Entrepreneur’s Organization (YEO). Over the past 20 years, the name was changed to EO, and I officially switched from being a 20-year member to becoming an SAP for EO Raleigh-Durham, transitioning from building my own companies to helping you build yours. Along the journey, I compiled a list of my top 20 lessons learned and have shared them with you below. My hope is that some, or all of them resonate with you!
Listen with the intent to understand not reply. Thanks to Stephen Covey for this revelation. As a new entrepreneur – I thought I was supposed to know all the answers. As a seasoned entrepreneur, I have learned that is much better to be able to ask the right questions. To do this, we must listen with the intent to understand first.
Build your organization with the AND philosophy – Entrepreneurship and leadership, vision and execution, creativity and discipline, etc.
Combine self-confidence with self-awareness – The fatal flaw of a leader is their lack of self-awareness. It takes guts to start a business, but it takes a lot more than that to build one for the long-term, like self-awareness - Know Thyself. Improve Thyself. Complement Thyself.
Mine for gold and diamonds in your metrics and data – As entrepreneurs, we trust our intuition, and indeed, it is critical to our success. But to reach our full potential, we must embrace our data and metrics too, and to mine them in our organizations.
Baseline everything – Once you have been in business for a length of time (7- 10 years), you have significant data to “baseline” who you are and who you are not – from metrics to leadership assessments. Your baseline gives you the starting line for comparison and future growth.
Developing leaders takes more than delegation, it needs discipline and follow up – Fast growth entrepreneurial leaders like to move quickly…decide…act…decide…act. When it is time to promote leaders, the critical success factor is not in assuming we have the right leaders, but in ensuring we do.
Give and take equally in Forum – You are an EO member who understands the benefits of being part of a forum. I found the need to both give and take to be a critical success factor for growth of the forum and for the EO member themselves. This goes along with # 1 above – by listening intently in your forum meeting, you can ask better questions and help your peers by giving them your best every meeting, and vice versa.
Learn and implement – EO has fabulous learning opportunities and I encourage you to be aware of and to take full advantage of them. I attended Birthing of Giants (now called EMP), London Business School and Various EO universities just to name a few. When you go, don’t just learn – implement when you get back home, because that is where the ROI will come from.
Blend work and life – set your Non-Negotiables – My best-selling book, The Third Decision, challenges you to decide the areas where you are not willing to discuss or compromise in your personal life. These decisions can act as restrictor plates in your business, and they should do just that!
Be present when you are present – Stop having multiple conversations with yourself and learn to be truly present when you are present, it is one of the best gifts you could ever give yourself, your organization and those you love.
Learn to take real time off – After 15 years as an entrepreneur, I had to face the fact that I had never gone a day without responding to e-mail…learning to take time off is a skill that should be mastered like many others in your career.
Learn to say NO – Steve Jobs taught us this…but doing it is much harder than saying it. If you would like to accomplish # 9, 10 and 11, you must learn to say and embrace NO.
Work in your unique ability and delegate everything else – Over my career I expanded the definition of Self-Awareness to Know Thyself. Accept Thyself. Improve Thyself. Accept Others. Complement Thyself. We have our strengths and our weaknesses…accept who you are and accept others to set your organization up to reach its full potential.
Failure and bad things happen in life and in business – learn and grow from them – Recessions happen. Pandemics happen. Crisis happens. Deal with them, they will happen again throughout your entrepreneurial career.
Slow down to speed up – You might start out with a quantity and speed mindset but shifting to a quality (and quantity) mindset will maximize your potential. You cannot baseline (#5) if you never slow down.
Acknowledge and embrace the fact that “The growth of a company is limited by the growth of its leaders “- Choose the right role for yourself in the next 3-5 years - Leader, Role-Player, or Creator. (this is covered in The Second Decision book)
Double your personal capacity every 2-3 years – get qualified for what’s next – Look ahead to where you are building the company, and then get yourself and your leaders qualified to lead you there – grow your leadership skills as fast the company is growing.
Admit you might just be an entrepreneurial addict – Your love of ideas is a blessing and a curse. The reality is you may never be able to fully retire, but you can change how you operate as an entrepreneur to love the journey and blend work and life along the way.
Entrepreneur and Intrapreneur – When you sell and become an intrapreneur…use that opportunity to learn everything you can…be a sponge…you never know when you might use your new skills in the future.
Selling your business is a new starting line – Selling will be an extreme high when it happens, but what comes next can be an extreme low. Get some coaching to help you through the transition as this will be a period where you don’t know what you don’t know.
I hope these insights are helpful and I wish you the best in your next 20 years as an entrepreneur!
Randy H. Nelson is the CEO of Gold Dolphins, LLC, a coaching, writing, speaking and consulting firm for entrepreneurs and leaders. He’s also a 30+ year, serial entrepreneur with two successful enterprises (Orion Talent and NSTAR Global Services) which today are industry leaders that have produced over $1 billion in sales.
Randy provides his private, personalized coaching to a select few organizations at The Decision Center in Garner, NC. As part of Randy’s coaching, he will be sharing what will eventually be The Fourth Decision, among other advanced leadership and entrepreneurial techniques, skills and mindsets.
He can be contacted at rnelson@gold-dolphins.com.
For more information on Randy and his services, go to his website at www.randyhnelson.com