BEST PRACTICES FOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT What It Takes to Grow a Million-Dollar Business
by Evie Baron-Hernandez
EDITOR'S NOTE: I asked Evie Baron-Hernandez, marketing creative for the Institute, to give you her perspective on how I grow my business. Working with me every day, Evie has an exceptional inside view of what it takes to make me and my business successful. Evie will give you new ideas and strategies for taking your CLNC® practice to new levels of success and prosperity.
I like to think of Vickie as my soul sister because we think so much alike. This drives everybody in our office crazy. When we come up with one of our grander-than-life ideas, we usually support each other even though the staff thinks we've lost our minds. That's most often an excellent indicator we are onto something really good.
Open Your Mind to Different Possibilities
However, the truth is, Vickie and I don't always think alike. Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm anything but a "Yes" person. Just when Vickie thinks she has it all figured out – boom, here I come with some new input that throws her plans off. Vickie refers to me as her other voice and is always willing to listen to what I have to say.
That's the first quality of a successful CEO. They have to keep an open mind to other people's ideas.
Vickie always says, "I'm not married to my ideas. My mission is to keep this company growing." She'll drop one of her ideas for a better one faster than a Chippendale's dancer drops his pants at a bachelorette party.
Vickie is also constantly expanding both her own knowledge and her team's knowledge. Openness to new ideas and new knowledge is one of the 5 Promises she practices and teaches: I will be a lifetime student.
Grow New Innovations
New ideas are fine in and of themselves – but they're vital to an entrepreneur as a source of growth. Most small business owners would be more than happy if they had a million-dollar month. Not Vickie. Unlike many other entrepreneurs, she doesn't focus on the dollar sign. She focuses on the bigger picture of financial trends and indicators. What's important to her is that we are growing, that we don't stagnate as a company.
To keep growing, we are constantly brainstorming ways to develop and improve our products even more. Research and development are the lifeblood of Vickie Milazzo Institute.
CLNC®s have to see growth as a never-ending cycle. Even though you might be at the forefront of your profession now, if you quit growing and developing your CLNC® services, you can quickly fall behind. Vickie doesn't let that happen to her company because she is always innovating. In fact, Pitney Bowes recognized the Institute as one of the most innovative small businesses in the country.
This commitment to growing and innovating benefits Vickie in a big way. It keeps her passionate about her business. She says you reach a point where the money isn't enough to get you out of bed in the morning. Constantly working on new and exciting products and services is what thrills her and what gets her out of bed. (That and her 4:00am wake-up call from her personal trainer.)
Do the Right Thing
Vickie says success is in the details. She believes that if you're sloppy with the little things you do, you'll be sloppy with the big things. The real danger is that sloppiness doesn't stop with you. If you're sloppy, your subcontractors, vendors and employees will take that as a cue that they can be sloppy too.
At first I was worried about how vendors would perceive us if we were too particular. But one of our vendors actually told Vickie that she appreciated our high standards because they challenged and inspired her to do her best work.
Vickie is adamant about her high standards. For example, if an ad is printed incorrectly, she expects a discount, not because of the money, but because she wants the vendor to live up to his own standards and make good on the mistake. As a result, the people she deals with have started modeling after her – even the formerly sloppy ones.
Vickie has taught me to make sure I'm not accepting someone else's standards. Instead, I enforce my own. What I have observed is that people usually live up to the standards you set for them.
Exploit the Strengths of Others
Vickie is the master of using the strengths of her staff. She exploits us – in a good way. Many entrepreneurs only use their staff members according to their job descriptions. Vickie says that's a waste. She is excellent at recognizing the gifts of her employees or subcontractors and using those gifts for her company.
Vickie taught me that you don't just use your support team for what they think they can do. Instead, she urges me to notice their other talents. Then help them stretch beyond their self-imposed limits to develop and use those additional talents. The result is more career satisfaction for the team member and more productivity for our company.
When I was a brand new employee at the Institute, Vickie would ask staff members to present book reports to make sure we were continually learning. I'd never given a professional presentation in my life, yet I found myself describing mind-mapping to our staff of eight. (Today we are 27 and growing.) I was very nervous, but I actually enjoyed making the presentation and I was able to sell the idea of mind-mapping to the entire team.
At the end of my presentation Vickie asked me to give a talk for 250 nurses. I said, "Sure I can," even though I was thinking, "Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?" Vickie saw a strength I didn't see in myself and she immediately put it to use. Vickie mentored me through the entire process of becoming a confident public speaker. For the past eight years I have been speaking to larger and larger groups – even to audiences of 1,000 or more – with ease.
Most entrepreneurs would have treated that first presentation as just a book report. In fact, most entrepreneurs wouldn't have their staff doing book reports to grow their knowledge. But Vickie is all about helping her staff learn and grow, mentoring them as they feel their way into new and more challenging roles, and then getting the best out of them.
Delegate Like a Master
Vickie is not afraid to delegate. Although she is definitely a working CEO – in fact, no one in the office works harder than Vickie – her ability to delegate is unique.
A subcontractor mentioned how impressed she was that Vickie did not get caught up in the distractions of running a business. While they were meeting, Vickie delegated the technical setup to our technician. When something went wrong, she made him figure it out instead of wasting her precious time on the problem. She remained focused on the task at hand. The subcontractor confessed that although she owns her own business, she spends many hours struggling with technical problems in her office because no one else knows how. She'd never thought of training someone else to do it. Vickie had, and as a result, she and the subcontractor had a productive day despite technical difficulties.
Watching Vickie manage her business is watching a master at work. She has dozens of other strengths and talents that have helped her become a multimillion-dollar success. If I were going to describe all these traits, I'd have to write a book and, well, Vickie's already done that.* But the few strengths I've highlighted here are among the keys to her success. I hope you'll look for these same strengths in yourself and then tap into them to build your CLNC® practice to million-dollar success.
Evie Baron-Hernandez has more than 20 years of marketing, sales and customer service experience. Known as "the other voice," she is a marketing creative for Vickie Milazzo Institute. As a mentor to CLNC®s, she has trained thousands of CLNC®s to plan and implement their marketing strategies. Evie is also a faculty member for Vickie Milazzo Institute.
*For more on how to create your own million-dollar success story, see Vickie's bestseller, Inside Every Woman: Using the 10 Strengths You Didn't Know You Had to Get the Career and Life You Want Now (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), available at Amazon.com and wherever books are sold.
