The 4 P’s of marketing are a well-known recipe for a successful marketing plan. Most of us know these to be ‘Product, Price, Promotion and Place’. There are also 4 P’s for successful business leadership.
Purpose
We have to know exactly where we are headed and why to get there in the straightest line possible – we find these answers by clarifying our purpose. Our purpose is unique to us; it seldom comes down to a financial gain in isolation, but almost always needs to be funded from a financial gain. Therefore, I stress the necessity of placing a specific value to our purpose so that we build our businesses to create the funding we need. If we do this, a focused plan of action will follow more naturally.
Persistence
Being an entrepreneur can be very lonely and we have to learn to carry on, often in isolation, regardless of the feedback we may or may not be receiving. For many of us, there is no one waiting for us to arrive at the office at 8am and only expecting us to leave at 5pm. We have to find our persistence within, often besieged by daily domestic demands. There are ways to deal with this.
Whilst I love working from home, I often pack my laptop into my handbag and head to a coffee shop where I can work with focus for a couple of hours. Whilst the noise level around me is often high, it’s less distracting than the pets, family and washing at home. I also find that going to a place where I don’t have wireless helps me to stay off distractions like email and social media whilst I push through the creative process of what I do.
Patience
This is a hard one in a world of instant gratification – and possibly the hardest one for our younger entrepreneurs to accept.
I have learned, and I keep learning over with every new project that the world is not in the same hurry that I am. I can imagine the universe is looking down at me saying, “So you want that do you? Well, let’s just make sure of that”, as it withholds any form of positive feedback until it becomes convinced that I am serious about what I want to create or make happen.
To be patiently persistent is one of the biggest challenges for my personality type – but I have had to develop this skill in the entrepreneurial world. Having an action plan around dealing effectively with the physical and mental effects of frustration is very helpful.
Productivity
This is everything. No one gets to where they are going as a business leader, or business builder or business navigator without a massive amount of action. As business leaders with a purpose we will be naturally driven but like everyone else we only get 24 hours in every day, and we have many other demands on our time.
Productivity is key to our success as it lies at the heart of our expertise as a business leader. But be warned – massive productivity often means massive failure. One of the most common and devastating mistakes the less successful EnQ ‘species’ of entrepreneurs I identify in Path of the Lion, make – is to avoid failure at all costs. And it does cost – in doing so they also avoid the successes that lie right beyond the failures. Being productive does not mean getting everything right, it means finding out the ways that don’t work faster than the competition and in time to realise the financial gains needed for our purpose.
Sandy Geyer is an entrepreneur and mentor and teaches the principles of entrepreneurial intelligence at ENQ Practice.
