My Top 10 Favorite Words in Business
As a business owner with a fast-growing business, I make dozens of decisions every single day. Understanding my values and what I am striving for is a huge component. As I hit the one-year anniversary, I revisited our brand and how we want to show up every day. We ultimately found the three key checkmarks that we need to hit for each decision are the following:
Is it Vibrant? Is it Fun? And, is it Streamlined?
That quick checklist helps me stay in alignment with our brand and our goals for our team and our company.
While searching that out, I thought a lot about the words I use, both for my own business and when I am coaching others in their businesses. I realized that the words we surround ourselves with and use every day can have a major impact on our emotional well-being, as well as leading our business and our team in the right direction.
Here are my 10 favorite words. How many do you relate to?
- Uplevel: Whether you are upleveling your business or upleveling your life, the term uplevel implies taking it up a notch. Succeeding more and living more, better, at a higher level than before. Every day, we should strive to uplevel in some way.
- Systems: As Michael Gerber says, “Systems run the business, people run the systems.” Systems help you not only create predictability and profitability in your business, but they also empower your team to have confidence they are doing things right. They also allow you to stop worrying about details and pay more attention to strategy and your life outside of the business.
- Improvise: Often, things don’t go as planned, and you have to improvise. Improvisation is one of the greatest skills an owner can hone. Mentoring your team and creating a culture where people feel free to innovate and improvise when something doesn’t work out creates masterful opportunities.
- Nuggets: As business owners, we are always busy, and so boiling things down to the bite-sized nuggets that you need to learn gets you knowledge quickly, and then allows you to move on to execution. This is key.
- Profit: Profit is not a bad word. Profit is what gives you options for your business and for your life.
- Resilience: Growing a business takes guts. You have to be resilient in your goals and in completing projects you start. Many business owners are “quick-starts”, but that’s not enough, because reaching the end-result is key to success. It takes time, energy, effort – in short, work, and resilience.
- Pivot: Growth is never in a nice straight line. When a product or service doesn’t deliver as you would expect, it is imperative to assess and pivot when necessary. This is a sign of strength, not weakness.
- Leverage: Whether leveraging technology, automations, or processes, learning to leverage your resources is germane to profitability and success.
- Repurpose: Work smarter, not harder, by repurposing as many assets as possible in your business. Film one video and then repurpose it into ten other marketing vehicles. Take one old article or interview or podcast and repurpose it into something fresh and relevant to your work. This saves hours of time and energy.
- Thrive: Do the things that make you and your team thrive. Make sure tasks are delegated to the appropriate team members so that they become part of how those team members thrive and not a drag on you. Find the silver lining in everything and appreciate it so that you can truly thrive in the moment.
Honorable Mentions:
- Strategy – a business without a strategy is a business that flails around and burns through its cash, its assets.
- Goals – if you don’t translate strategy into concrete, measurable goals you have not completed the strategy process. A strategy cannot be successful if people don’t understand what they have to achieve to succeed.
Interestingly, many of these words are also in our core values. Can you spot them?
- TEAMWORK: Accountability. Respect. Dependability. We believe each member of the team holds themselves and their teammates accountable so that dependability is always there and each person respects what others on the team do. We also find that communication and camaraderie in a fast-paced business that has fun and celebrates growth and successes makes it a place worth working.
- INTEGRITY: Honesty. Trust. Work Ethic. We believe that everyone thrives by having a work ethic built with full trust and honesty so we can be at our best. Being open to feedback and dedicated to building and nurturing good systems can be extremely rewarding to the team and the company.
- CUSTOMERS: Listen. Customer Experience. Meet Needs. Our customers are at the core of every successful business and it is important to listen to what they want so we can meet their needs while giving them an incredible customer experience that creates raving fans.
- EMPLOYEES/ TEAM: Productive. Loyal. Vested. We believe it is important to create an atmosphere where each team member can be productive and where they can hone their skills, so they are always learning, growing, and improving. We want our team to be vested in what they do, and we believe loyalty will ensue when each team member thrives.
- EXCELLENCE: Top Quality. Results. Our reputation is based on providing top quality services and products that are designed to help our clients and customers get the results they want.
- INNOVATION: Passion. Creativity. Thought Leaders. We know there are always better ways and we encourage our team to use creativity and their passion to help drive new products, services, systems and processes. Improvisation and creation are integral to creating a dynamic business that pivots as needed to support continuous improvement. It is also important to support the development of new ideas and not be afraid of failure as some new innovations may or may not work but we won’t know unless we try.
These core values are always a work in progress and as we grow, we will continue to hone these statements and the words we use in them.
What are some of your favorite words? Are they reflected in your core values and the core values of your business?