I was fortunate enough to be asked to be on a panel of Philadelphia entrepreneurs. Its titled “Winning: What does it take to become a winner?” .
I must say I am not fond of the title one bit and hope to change the content. To me winning is not about what the world sees as winning. Very few people will ever know if I am truly “winning” because the metrics by which I judge success will never entirely be found in quickbooks or in a P&L or in an award. Now of course, growing SEER is part of my success equation, but no amount of awards makes up for the many other ways I feel like I am on the right path.
To me, I my definition of winning changes every so often, it evolves, but today, to me…
- winning means I wake up happy and energized to come into work
- winning means I TRULY enjoy the people I work with and the clients I work for
- winning means I get to spend as much time with my loved ones as possible and that work doesn’t prevent that for me, OR for people on my team
- winning means I don’t have someone who has invested in my company poking their nose around or pushing me in directions I don’t want to go
- winning means we retain our clients and we retain our team members
- winning means our reputation is in tact and that our referral pipeline is strong
- winning means I spend serious time doing something to help someone other than myself, my friends or my loved ones
Its funny, when you look at sports, you win when the final buzzer sounds, or when the first person crosses the finish line. There is no final buzzer in business, maybe some people would say at a sale of a company, an I’ll say maybe I agree, but a lot of exits are not all we think they are.
For SEER and surely there is no finish line that I have crossed yet.
History is littered with athletes or companies (Ahem myspace vs facebook) who started pulling up because they were in the lead, only to watch someone come from behind and whoop their ass.
So for me, what am I going to talk about at the panel? It surely won’t be winning in the traditional sense, because thinking of myself or my company as a winner would be like myspace thinking they were the winners in social networking back in 06, oh wait that did happen.
My advice to anyone out there, whether you run your own show, or not, is never ever ever congratulate yourself while you are still running the race, always act as if you are behind and that someone is on your tail trying to take your place. It will pay dividends in all aspects of life.
You will be more likely to “win” and sustain “winning” if you never act like you are “winning”.
So instead of making my part an “I’m awesome” brag session, I’m hopefully going to convince the panelists to do something more like I was invited to do by the Happy Cog Crew lat year at SXSW, check out the video below that was an excerpt of our panel with Greg Hoy, Tracey Halvorsen, Kevin Hoffman, and Greg Storey. Maybe one small part of “winning” is being comfortable enough to share with a massive audience your losses and not think it makes you look bad.