Chuck Blakeman

We drove out of the airport at 9pm into the deep Kenyan night, so much blacker this near the equator. The driver did 5-20mph because anything more would have broken the suspension on the Land Rover. To the left of the airport entrance bonfires blazed 50 feet into air as tires were burned away for the metal chords in them. It was my first encounter of the close kind with the Cycle of Poverty.

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Business divides pretty neatly into seven categories or “elements” that all businesses must pay attention to in order to be successful. They exist whether we pay attention to them or not. If we pay attention, we are successful, if we don’t, we are not.

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Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, understood that to have his business grow up and run itself, he would need to pay attention to all of the Seven Elements of a Business – so he did.

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Our business trains us to focus on the wrong thing. And we buy into the lie.

There are Seven Stages in the Maturity of a business. Today we’ll focus on the first four, because they tell us what happened that screwed up our understanding of how to grow a business and why we can’t get off the treadmill.

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Your Guiding Principles are more important to your business than anything you sell.

As my great Irish friend John Heenan says: “If you don’t have a vision for your own life, you become part of someone else’s vision for theirs.” Without clarity of purpose, we don’t own our business, it owns us – we’re employees of ourselves.

Everything we do comes from a belief system, whether intentionally or subconsciously. Do you guide your biz or does it rule you? Who’s really in charge?

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