What Keeps You Awake At Night?

Do you ever have trouble sleeping because certain issues in your business are keeping you up at night?

Have you ever thought about getting up in the middle of the night to get it all done, because so much is landing on your plate?

It’s not uncommon for entrepreneurs and business owners to spend time obsessing about their business.

Sometimes leaders and owners lose sleep because they are:

• Focused on the wrong metrics or issues in their business, or they
• Lack clarity in their organization, or they are
• Not communicating their expectations, or they simply
• Lack full trust in their team.

Whatever your reason…

Here is an easy solution:

In order to sleep better at night, you have to be able to work in your professional “sweet spot” (where you find joy in building your business), plus you have to hand off the other issues and responsibilities to your team.

And to do that, you have to over communicate what these issues are.

This example will explain what I mean:

A few weeks back Andy Tumolo, CEO of Maple Leaf Associates, and his team came down to my retreat center in New Orleans for a leadership reboot, to develop their go-faster strategy.

During the session, I went around the room and asked each leader what they thought kept Andy awake at night.

The team created a list of 7 critical issues.

Andy then shared what the true list was.

He only had 4 items, not 7. The team got three right, but missed one.

Andy then put his list in order of priority. Here they are.

1. Client Satisfaction (because it’s how he built the company.)
2. The Schedule (he does complex work which requires a very proactive approach)
3. Cash flow (connected to the schedule and other issues we uncovered)
4. People’s accountability in their roles (this drives everything)

This list may look familiar to you, though every owner has a unique situation and a unique list, and thus it requires a custom strategy to solve it.

For Andy’s team, we designed key scheduling protocol and key performance metrics, and a management system to proactively prevent these issues from falling back onto Andy’s plate.

Now Andy sleeps like a baby, and really enjoys working in his professional sweet spot, focused on growing the company and his team!

Your challenge: Be willing to communicate to your team what you think about (or worry about) on a recurring basis. Dig deep and share your inner needs with your team. Let them be responsible for your lullaby.