Winning mindset, keep your head down
A week after winning the Super Bowl, MVP Tom Brady posted a picture of himself walking in the middle of a practice field with his trainer. In the picture, he’s carrying all his training gear, ready to put in more work, something most overachievers do when nobody is looking. On the message, he says “Back to work.”
In a sport in which the average NFL career is three years, the average age of a player is 26, and the number of Super Bowl rings for most players is zero, Tom Brady at 43 years old, has played for 21 seasons in the NFL and has won seven Super Bowl rings. Many people love him, and many people dislike and trash talk him constantly. Whatever your views on Tom Brady, though, one thing is certain: he’s able to focus on his trade with passion, by following his daily habits, hard work and a winning mindset.
In business, just like in sports, you will always have loyal customers as well as those who will trash talk your business.
It’s what you do with your hard work and daily habits as a business owner that will give you the longevity to continue to carry on, and to continue to build your loyal customer base for years to come.
Having a positive winning mindset while staying realistic about your personal abilities is an extremely important attribute for anyone thinking about starting and running their own business. Knowing your limitations as a person and as a professional, and when to ask for help when building a company, are all critical for an entrepreneur.
And, it takes a very mature individual to make an even tougher call, the tough decision to close a business when you realize it’s not a viable venture, whatever the reason. It could be from lack of support from the marketplace, a lack of leadership, you not being willing to sacrifice other areas of your life ... whatever the reason is, it takes a very mature individual to realize it and make the tough call.
However, once you decide to carry on in your business career quest, that positive winning mindset will carry you through the long and lonely journey most successful business owners experience during their careers.
There was a time in my personal journey as an entrepreneur that the feeling of defeat overshadowed my life. For about four years, my wife and I were giving 200%, everything we had, plus more, and there was not a sign of progress on the horizon. To the contrary, it felt as if we were going backwards in life, professionally and financially.
To this day, I have a clear image in my mind of my beautiful wife, Melanie, telling me with tears in her face “We are going backwards in life.” While emotions were high, her love and support for what we were building never vanished, and graciously, we were only a few months away from our tipping point, where all the years of
hard work we both put in finally started to pay off.
I like to describe it as the “slingshot effect.” We were being pulled back further and further, and boom, we were released. Had it not being for a positive winning mindset when everything seemed to be crumbling, we would not be where we are professionally and personally, 11 years after starting our entrepreneurial journey.
Keeping your head down and working on your trade is also an extremely important aspect of building a successful company. Forget about what the competition is doing, forget about what the naysayers are saying about you and your business. Just keep your head down and work on perfecting your trade, what you do, what makes you unique in the market place. Work on ensuring your team has clarity and direction regarding your mission. Your true loyal customers will notice your efforts and will support you along the way.
Recently, at our Emmaus restaurant location, one of our employees noticed two really negative Google reviews, one after another. The reviews talked about bad service at that location and how the quality of food had dwindled … the employees started to try to find out why this happened. Since our loyal customer base has showed tons of love and support at our Emmaus restaurant, the reviews did not make sense.
What our employees found was that those two same negative reviews were posted six months ago, and then again four months ago. The haters then went on to leave excellent reviews at 2 of our Latin competitors in the Emmaus area, saying how they used to go to our restaurant, but that now they were going to those competitors instead. Thankfully, we got Google involved and it was decided that those people were maliciously targeting us, and the reviews were taken down.
At first, I was really angry at those haters who were trying to damage our reputation. Then I realized what was happening; someone out there was feeling the pressure of our consistent execution and hard work. I shook it off and sent them blessings.
The beautiful thing about commerce, based on my personal experience, is that the marketplace doesn’t care if you are brown, like me, or Black, yellow, or white; when you focus on providing great value to your customers by continuously honing and working on your trade with passion and through following daily habits, hard work and a winning mindset, great things will always come your way. You just have to be patient and keep pushing forward.