I work with, and am inspired by, the many businesses and startups with whom I collaborate throughout the year. My blog establishes a global dialogue with individuals and teams who collectively seek to serve a positive purpose for business and society.
Their goal: creating their Legacy.
These business and technical professionals are motivated by incorporating intrinsic value into who they are as Business People of Worth. Their motivation is nothing short of the key to economic recovery.
Do you see yourself, and your professional efforts, in this manner?
Start by thinking how many lives you can touch with the output of your innovation and productivity. Then expand your thinking to how your output can be sustainable, for the people whose lives you touch and for your own and your company’s long term survival.
Does it take 10 customers / sustainers who are your source of inspired output? Does it take 100 customers?
Today’s obsession with entrepreneurship and startups tends to distort the true nature of how the global economy is shaping the sustainable size of those startups and businesses. The true ecosystem for tomorrow may involve smaller companies serving hundreds, and perhaps thousands, instead of millions.
Starting small, and staying small, can become the key to economic growth and business sustainability. That’s Business taking a page out of the book of Evolutionary Pathways. That model may be the basis of your Legacy.
Perhaps your professional goals should focus on determining how many engaged, loyal, and retained customers it takes to create a sustainable ecosystem for your startup or existing business.
That’s the beginning of creating your Legacy for the greater good of the many you serve and who, in turn, also serve you.
Your Legacy involves more customers than you currently have now. Your sustainable Legacy involves fewer customers than you thought you needed. When you grow the infrastructure for your business based on collaboration between service providers, you create the ecosystem for your business and your vendors’ businesses as well.
When you base the throughput and output of your business on serving customers who appreciate and recognize the set of trusted service providers you have assembled on their behalf, you collaborate with both sides of the selling and buying cycle.
When you do business based on a philosophy of serving others, you always reap far more than you ever thought you would gain.
When you value your collaborators, partners, and customers you constantly strive to bring something else – intangible, intrinsic, distinctive – to their tables on a daily basis.
How will you be building your Legacy, current and future? If your business development and startup efforts are focused on creating a sustainable legacy business, what happens to your business model and marketplace?
When you look towards the future with a perspective of creating a legacy for you, your vendors and your customers, what type of value proposition will you deliver? Tomorrow. The day after that?
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, catalyzes business transition, startup growth, and professional development. She focuses on establishing sustainable, legacy businesses and startups by creating revenue-producing collaboration strategies with and for non-traditional sellers, engineers, manufacturers, and technical startups.
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