Consistent Leaders Win

As entrepreneurs, we love adventure. We love to do new things. We like to take on new challenges and have our days be different. It's actually what drives us, that variety, that change, that making things happen that makes us feel like we are moving forward. However, what our teams crave from us, need from us, and desire from us more than anything is consistency. In fact, the most consistent leaders are the ones who win.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game-changers, trailblazers, shot-takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. Instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

I know that my approach to coaching entrepreneurs is different than just about every other business coach out there. In fact, I think there's a reason for that. It's because I've spent my career on both sides of the table. I've spent my career working with entrepreneurs, hearing their thoughts, their desires, their dreams, their challenges, their fantasies, but also I'm the consultant who is in the room after the entrepreneur left over and over again. I could see how the team responded, how the team reacted, how the team felt when they were engaging with an entrepreneur.

I see both sides of the story I think in a unique way. I've had the experience of being on both sides of the table in a very unique way. In fact, not only have I been in the room, our company has done thousands of surveys and time studies and audit and Q&As and gotten the information from entrepreneurial companies about really what makes them grow. Here are the complaints team members have about entrepreneurs.

Number one complaint: we change direction too often. Second complaint: we don't get communicated with enough. We don't know where we're going. Third complaint: leadership is inconsistent, and we don't really know how to win. Those are the top three complaints from entrepreneurial teams. Let me repeat them for you. The number one complaint is we don't really know where we're going. We change directions too often. The second complaint is not enough direction, not enough communication. The third one is just there's a general inconsistency with how things work.

If you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to get over some of our core issues as entrepreneurs. I remember how I had to get past these, because let me be very clear with you. As an entrepreneur, I don't like structure. I don't like anything that even looks like bureaucracy. I don't like repetitiveness. I like to get up every day and be able to dream and explore and make things happen. But here's what I figured out over time is that I like to win much more than those other things. In fact, I really love achieving and changing the world, and not just hitting seven figures but hitting multiple seven figures. Not just multiple seven figures, but eight. Before I'm gone, I want to get to nine again and go past that if I can.

Here's what I know about growing a business past the early stages, is that the more consistently you lead your team, the more consistently your team will achieve. As an entrepreneur, like I just said, we don't like structure, we don't like bureaucracy. We don't want anything repetitive.

But here's where your team is right now. I don't care how long you've had a team. I don't care how small it is. I don't care how many people are on it. Whether they've told you or not, here's what your team wants. Your team craves consistency. They want consistency. They want to understand how to win. They want to understand where they're going. They want to understand what the goals are, and they want to knock the goals down over and over again.

Your team also is dying for order and rules. They want to know what are the rules of the game. How do we play in a way that's going to consistently make us win? How big a risk can we take? What is it that we can do? What is it that we can't do? Your team is dying to know these things, and your team actually craves repetitiveness. They want to have the same meetings with you over and over again. They want you to explain things in the same way. They want you to convey information in a way that they understand. They want to know that when they go into a monthly meeting where you release results, they want to anticipate in advance how you're going to do it because it makes them feel like they are a member of a team and it makes them feel like they are winning.

When you're a member of a team, you don't feel surprised. When you're a member of a team, you can anticipate what's coming next. When you're a member of a team, you know what the needs of the other people in the room are. You can start to anticipate what the person who's in charge is doing. You're a leader. You can start to anticipate leadership. The challenges in most entrepreneurial business is entrepreneurs fight consistency so much that they never actually give their team what they really need.

See, here's the reality. For every single member of an entrepreneurial team, you are asking them to come into the ... And especially if you don't have a strategic plan, because here's what happens. You as the entrepreneur can see the future. You know where you're going. You can see the next steps. But until there's a strategic plan laid out for your team, until your team knows where they're going, it's communicated consistently, and you're consistent, your team doesn't know how to win.

You're asking them to come into the office every day and take a step off of a cliff and pray that you've filled in the dirt below them and they don't fall. Most team members don't want to do that consistently. Most team members feel uncomfortable doing that consistently. If you're asking your team to come into the office every day and take a step off of a cliff, I want you to know something. You are not getting everything you could get out of your team. You are not getting all the leverage and all the energy and all the work and all the achievement you could out of your team, because until your team feels safe, they aren't going to take massive risks for you.

This is something I've fought with my entire career, because even though I was in the meetings on both sides of the table, I still wanted to run my company like most entrepreneurs do. I wanted to set unrealistic goals. I wanted to show up when I wanted to. I would meet with my team when I felt like it, not when they needed. I was as inconsistent as any entrepreneur out there.

Then in my 20s, I grew a massive organization. It was a series of missteps that led to me doing it, but I finally got to a business where we were responsible for over $250 million in sales. It was overwhelming to have a business of that size. What happened was I was forced into being consistent. I was forced into getting a strategy plan together to show my team where we were going. I was forced into making sure that I communicated in a way that every one on my team understood what was going on, or I was wasting massive amounts of money.

What happened was by jumping through that chasm, by being forced to mature as a business person because my business took off, I realized that when I created a strategic plan, when I communicated consistently with my team, when I showed up in a consistent way on a daily basis, when I stopped being the biggest free radical in my business, everyone on my team achieved more.

When I stopped doing those things, everyone on my team became more talented. When I stopped doing those things, everyone on my team was able to achieve more, make more happen, move the company faster in the right direction, and everyone on my team started transforming into even better team members than they had been before. Here's why. When I was consistent, when I communicated, when I had a strategic plan, my entire team felt safer.

When they knew that they were going to hear from me every weekend or weekly meeting, when they knew that I was going to be in our daily huddle every day, when they knew that they were going to have the same systems and the same structure this week that they have next week and the week after that, they all felt comfortable going all in. Because I was willing to do those things, I gave my team the three things that you must have as a human being to be in momentum.

If you're in momentum right now, congratulations. If you don't feel like you are, you're missing one of the following three things. One, a clear outcome, a strategic plan, a destination that is compelling and exciting for you. Two, accountability. You don't have clarity around what you're doing and what the people around you are doing. Three, a scoreboard. If you don't have transparent statistics or perspective on how you're moving forward, you will not be in momentum.

But when I gave those things to my team, when I created a strategic plan and gave them clear outcomes, even though I didn't do it perfectly, and when I created a communication structure where everyone on the team knew what they were responsible for and, just as importantly, they knew what everyone else was responsible for, everything started moving forward faster. When we put together the scoreboards that told every single member of my team with perspective of what was happening, everyone got better at what they did.

Today in the team that I have, I watch people transform on a weekly basis. I watch our team get more and more talented. Not to say that they didn't start incredibly talented when they came in, but we helped them do even better. We create an environment where everyone can excel, everyone can succeed, and everyone understands the rules, because I show up in a way that is consistent and makes my team feel safe.

If you're ready to make next year the biggest year your business has ever had, if you're ready to finally start knocking down the goals that you've always known you should, if you're finally ready to have a team that calls their shots, makes them happen, and then lines up and does it again, consistent leaders win. The more consistent you are, the more consistent your team will be in creating the results you want.

If you're ready to become more consistent as a leader, if you're ready to plug and play the systems and structure that will help you build a game-changing team that will help you create your empire, it's simple. Go to billionairecode.com/apply. Billionairecode.com/apply. Answer a few questions from my team and me or a member of my team will jump on a call with you and tell you how we can help you. If you're ready to blow the doors off your business, make the biggest contribution you ever had, and have a team that finally gives you the protection and support you need so you can achieve at the very highest level, billionairecode.com/apply.