Who are the people you spend most time with? According to Dr David McClelland, a social psychologist from Harvard University, this will determine 95% of your success or failure in life.
And motivational speaker and entrepreneur Jim Rohn says: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
The people who surround you will encourage you to pursue your ambitions, or else discourage you. They will hold you to high standards – or low.
And they will also determine which attitudes and ideas you are exposed to, and which behaviours you come to believe are normal.
Whether or not this is true on a social level, I couldn’t say.
But in business?
Absolutely.
The fact is, you are only as good as the team around you.
If you surround yourself with people who are better than you, who know more than you do, who have wider experience to share – they will lift you, and your entire company, up.
If you surround yourself with junior members of staff whose experience is narrow, they will limit you.
Take the way you manage your company’s finances.
Last week, I mentioned that if you have never worked for a corporate or for a larger company, you might not know exactly what kind of financial management you need in place after you hit £1-£2 million.
You probably sense that managing your finances the same way you did when you were smaller is no longer viable.
You don’t have the financial information you need to make good decisions about your company’s future….
Your accounting department may be struggling to cope with growing volumes of transactions, billing and payroll…
And you may suffer from too many destabilising financial hiccups.
But at the same time, you have no idea what changes you need to make to professionalise your financial management and make it fit-for-purpose, now you are larger.
You can’t miss what you have never known. The problem is that if no one around you has ever delivered high-level financial management, they won’t know what you’re missing, either.
They won’t be able to tell you how to build the professional financial systems and processes you need if you’re to continue to grow – because they will never have personally experienced them.
They probably won’t even know what they look like.
That’s why, once you grow to £1 million or £2 million turnover, you have to recognise that the way you manage your finances needs to change…..
….And that your existing financial team may not be, or even know, the answer. You have to be able to think bigger — bigger than your existing financial provision believes, or even knows, is possible.
Want our help creating world-class financial management? If you’re interested, we should talk.
We help companies just like yours implement the kind of financial management corporates take for granted.
Your finances will run more smoothly, you’ll be able to make more effective decisions for your company and ultimately generate a lot more profit.
If those are on your agenda for 2019, get in touch with me today.
