Grow Business. Grow Self. "Grow Business. Grow Self."

So the title seems pretty lazy lol. I promise that it is not! This article is generally about growing business while growing yourself and discussing the general idea of growing yourself to leverage yourself to grow others, which grows your business. If that makes sense then stop reading now and go do those more important things that I have yet to learn and write about.

As a small business owner, I have a saying "I am the company and the company is me." Because of my massive theoretical gravitational wave bending ego? Eh. More likely because I have learned the value and importance of culture, habits, and intertwined finance on your personal/business life in all aspects and the ever-present and critical impacts that has on your employees. (Side note: Just replace 'employees' with 'family' and 'business' with 'home' for this article and it applies just about the same.)

Let's look at some examples:

• Attitude - My attitude needs to be the attitude I want all my employees exuding, whether with clients, field staff, or others in the company.
• Values - What makes us tick? Why would anyone want to work with us? As a company we need those internalized.
• Emotions - If we have the same values, we will have a cohesive understanding and response to situations. This builds bonds.
• Goals - Fundamental personal goals and metric based company goals. Some are hard and some are soft, meaning quantitative and qualitative
• Financials - stable financials in my company and my personal life help trickle down to to others. Stable financial employees means confidence and offers flexibility when things get tough.

That's a good starter list to exemplify the picture I am trying to paint. I am sure you can come up with your own.

What about personalities you ask? That's not on the list for me because people need to be themselves. They need to think the way they think and act the way they act. They need to have all those attributes listed above, but approach them and verbalize and internalize them in their way. I've considered hiring AI based humanoid-robots, but while that might make lots of money I think it would get really boring.

I understand that I am brushing up right against the cult of personality here, but the leadership and representative qualities portrayed by someone at the helm needs to be such that employees emulate them because they help make everyone better. Do I want 10 "Doms" running around doing all these jobs? Absolutely not! And neither do any of you (I can provide references).

What does this have to do with growth? Well... how can a company grow well and consistently (add people) if the employees have nothing substantial to impart? Or habits to pass on? Or goals to achieve so they can grow and begin growing the next incoming group? We all know the businesses that have revolving doors and while that might work for them, it doesn't work for me. The most significant investment I have made in my company is values and habits. (FYI, the financial return on values and habits can really suck for a while, but hang in there)

Hard skills can change over time. Soft skills seem to remain.

https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/resumes-cover-letters/hard-skills-vs-soft-skills

I want core habits and consistencies because when things in business get tough, we need to tighten up and work together. And when things in business go great, we need to tighten up and work together. Why? Because growth in all aspects can be summarized in a simple way, shared with me by a friend recently. Inspect yourself, as I try to do often, and honestly consider the idea below...

Your quality of character comes down to how you act in two scenarios: when you have everything you want and when you think you don't have anything you need.