Why LED: Final Article

Direct mentorship is a rare opportunity. When you get taken under someone’s wing, it changes things. Matter of fact, I’d argue that lack of mentorship leads to the failure of many careers that would have otherwise become successful.

Like an athlete with promising skills but no access to proper coaching that sees a career fade away before it begins, it’s no different in the business world.

This means we often aren’t aware of our own strengths. It takes someone outside our personal realm of reality to recognize what that means and enlighten us.

Turning back the clock a bit, sports played a major part in making me who I am and how my overall mindset was established. More specifically, being a pitcher in baseball gave life to my ultimate comfort zone – standing alone in the heartbeat of the game.

Each pitch having an individual outcome.

A razor thin margin of success or failure revealed with every spin of the pearl.

In this, my future may have been determined far in advance – for the world absorbs and responds to our internal attitude. Fortunately, I found someone who believed in my potential.

After several months of working side by side, my boss decided I was worthy of becoming something more than a sales rep. While he had previously hinted at having bigger plans for me, there wasn’t a big reveal until we were discussing business ideas over breakfast at a local café.

“Matt,” he said, “I’ve decided to give you your own franchise.”

Wait… What??

However, this would not be handed to me.

In leu of a major personal investment quite typical of other franchise models, I would earn it through sweat equity.

I truly had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Now, the biggest challenge isn’t what you may think.

It’s the fact that most folks don’t take lighting too seriously. The prevailing attitude is that anything will do, so long as it works. In addition, maintenance contracts mean lighting gets hardly a second thought from those running their businesses.

What if there was a better way?

There is.

My job, then, goes beyond selling LEDs. My job, my business, my responsibility, is to rewire the mindset about what great lighting means.

Not only that, but what it doesn’t look like.

I tried many approaches to become a guy seen for better lighting than anyone else. Challenge was, I had no marketing budget, no prospecting support, no relationships in the necessary verticals.

I was truly building from scratch.

From the outside-in, it was looking bleak. But why does anyone who fails in business, especially starting their own, hang on for so long? Until too late has already appeared to come and go?

Because of a vision.

A compelling narrative that shows the story isn’t over when an individual chapter is closed. That each chapter, whether a success or failure, is vitally important to the big picture.

It becomes ardently clear to see that only in due course does the meaning of our collective actions become realized.

There’s much that’s been revealed, yet there’s more that hasn’t. This expanse of potential is what drives me to persevere.

Have I made a massive mistake?

Or stumbled into untold fortune?

Stay tuned and we can discover how the story unfolds, together.?