Revenue Journal®

If you own or run a company, you're passionate. Certain things matter to you. Every day, in every interaction, your passion determines how you manage yourself and those who work for you - employees and vendors.

Your passion is a powerful force. If you manage it correctly, you will:

• Make the right decisions about what is important and what is not
  
• Allocate the right amount of energy to the important things
  
• Convey the right messages to employees and vendors about what matters
  
• Create and run a balanced company
  

What do I mean by a "balanced company"? The best way to explain myself is to describe what happens when a company gets out of balance. Important things get neglected, overwhelmed by trivialities. You will end up driving customers away because they keep having a certain type of problem as they try to purchase, use, or get service for your product. They will warn others to stay away. That little chink in your armor will become a fatal vulnerability. Soon, a competitor will identify your weakness and capitalize on it.

There are five types of people whose passion creates an out-of-balance situation. If you recognize yourself in any of these descriptions, you need make some changes to your behavior.

1. The ranter (passionate about everything). You get very passionate when talking to others about things you believe in, things you consider ridiculous, and things that you can't easily change. You can get just as passionate about the wine you had for dinner as you are the new product you are developing.

Those who work for you have a hard time deciding which of this week's passions are more important, and they never know what is going to set you off. They don't know what matters most, and are unable to prioritize their work. It's tough for them to make decisions, because decisions are driven in large part by "what matters most to the boss."

You are a sitting duck for a competitor who clearly and consistently prioritizes his company's efforts for the troops.

To mend your behavior, start working on having calm conversations with everyone, regardless of the topic.

2. The perfectionist (a passion for perfection). Everything has to be just right before you will give your approval. You spend far too much time fussing over the way you ship products, for example. While some of this is OK when you're first getting started, you'll never be able to scale up your operation as long as you obsess over every detail.

To change your behavior, assign an appropriate priority to everything, so you spend more time on the important stuff and less time on the small stuff. Learn how to say, "That's good enough."

3. The wall flower (a passion for product development, but none for promotion). You have a decent product, and your customers are happy, but you can't bring yourself to "promote" it. You have no desire to go public. When someone tries to get you in front of the press, you run and hide. Your passion is in the creation, not the promotion, of a product or service. You are extremely vulnerable to a competitor who can create a "good enough" version of your product or service and then promote the heck out of it. You will end up a has-been in a market that you created. It happens all the time.

If you are a wallflower, start forcing yourself to promote your product, using methods that actually require you to meet people and interact with them. Get good at it - as if it were a new product you were developing. Don't work on the next product until you have spent six months promoting your current product.

4. The over-promoter (a passion for promotion, with little patience for product and infrastructure development). You love to get people excited about new ideas. You write a blog. You send and receive a lot of emails. You are a communicator. But you are also responsible for running the company, and the "overhead" and "infrastructure" part of your company always plays second fiddle. Do you have trouble getting your invoices out on time? Do you glaze over when your accountant shows you spreadsheets? Your product, processes, and infrastructure are suffering.

If you are passionate about promotion, take an area of your business you have tended to avoid - such as accounting or IT - and force yourself to devote an hour to it each day. Get involved. Ask a lot of questions. Become an expert. Don't make changes until you are completely confident that you understand.

5. The last-interaction prioritizer (a passion for whatever just happened). You just got off the phone with a prospect. They weren't buying because of a particular reason. Now you have decided that your marketing efforts should be redirected to solve this problem. This is very different than what you thought a half-hour ago, when you were on the phone with your marketing vendor. You call the marketing vendor back and rant about this new problem and ask them when they can solve it, abandoning months of careful work.

You are most vulnerable to a competitor who has taken the time to get a 35,000-foot view of customer needs, has prioritized his marketing and sales plans accordingly, and calmly observes and documents data to the contrary. Over time, this data will be used to drive new approaches and strategies, but only after the original, also-on-target approaches have been allowed to work.

If you get overly excited about your most recent conversations, learn how to stay calm. Refrain from going to employees or vendors with your new ideas. Instead, write down what was important about that conversation, in a notebook dedicated to the purpose. Give the subject a priority number - from 1 to 10 - and look over what you have written down, a week later. You will find that many 10's are now 2's or 3's. Implement the ideas that really are worthy of pursuit a week later - after you have had time to think them all through - before you start setting new wheels in motion.

Oddly enough, the same passion that helped you to achieve your present success can stop you from increasing your revenue. Your own passion absorbs all of your energy and blinds you to the areas of your business that need attention.

Face who you are. Face your weakness. Then do three things: Change your own behavior (so you become stronger where you are now weak); surround yourself with people who compensate for your weaknesses, and let them do what is necessary.

I should warn you that you will not be able to choose these advisors wisely, nor should you trust their expertise, until you've spent some time applying yourself to your weak areas. This has been the undoing of millions of company owners. I've been hired countless times to "clean up the mess" after a passionate CEO or entrepreneur hired someone to cover their weakness - before taking the time to understand the subject more thoroughly.

Naive or uninformed business owners and CEOs are bread and butter for fast-talking marketing and sales consultants, website designers, SEO vendors, and agencies. Precious company funds are frittered away on campaigns and projects that will never work - and often cause real damage. You cannot manage what you do not understand, nor can you evaluate how well someone does something until and unless you know how you would do it yourself.

It's not that you should give up your passion. But you must balance that passion by devoting energy and discipline to your weaker areas. This will ensure steady revenue growth and the long-term success of your company.