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Positive Enterprise Value Blog Entrepreneur Owner-Managers: What’s the Difference Between Average and Exceptional Results?
PEV Blog Average vs. Exceptional

Entrepreneur Owner-Managers: What’s the Difference Between Average and Exceptional Results?

March 16, 2022

2 minute read

Out Islands, Bahamas

In the forty years I have been working with high-performing Entrepreneur Owner-Managers, I have found there is one consistent difference between average results and exceptional ones. Know what it is? The difference between average results and exceptional ones is what you say no to. Saying no to bad opportunities or even mediocre ones is easy. Saying no to good opportunities is hard, but it conserves your positive energy for your zone of genius.

Look, we all have the same number of hours in a week, right? What separates high performing EOMs from ordinary ones is how they use those finite hours.

As North Americans, our upbringing, educational system, and mass popular culture teaches us to want to be liked, to conform, to be affable. But as an EOM, saying yes creates an obligation. As we start off in our enterprises, we all say yes when we are first getting started. We need to build revenue, so we say yes to every customer, we say yes to mostly all opportunities. Saying yes to any request feels good for the moment. So, we say yes to things to make the questioner go away, or because we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or to be polite. Yet, every time we say yes, we are saying no to something else.

You can’t bring massive positive change to the world by conforming, by saying yes. Saying no to what you are good at, even what you are excellent at, saved your energy for your zone of genius.

If you are building Enterprise Value for a capital gain someday, saying yes just leads to a diversified low value mush. Diversification within a business destroys Enterprise Value. You got in the EOM game to express yourself in the spirit you were intended to. You don’t make the world better by turning down your bad assery.

As a high performing EOM, I can’t imagine why you’d say yes to something merely because you think you should say yes. The bar for saying yes has to be high, and as you mature, get continuously higher.

Anyone can say no to crappy opportunities. Only a real master of energy will say no to good opportunities or even excellent opportunities. If you don’t say no to those, you won’t have the time for the ones that push you to your zone of genius. The most practiced EOMs say no with no justification.

As an EOM, you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.

What I am Reading / Listening to

Damascus Station (2021)
By David McCloskey 

Contributed by R. Taylor Breed

Wow! I just finished reading Damascus Station – what a ride! David McCloskey’s first novel is an absolute homerun if you enjoy espionage/intelligence/spy content. Written by a former CIA analyst, Damascus Station provides dramatic settings, exciting characters, believable spycraft, and more color on the Syrian war than I’d previously heard (even if some of it is fiction). With enough plot twists and storyline development to pull you through the pages, it was a thrill in the truest sense.

The entire story is genuinely believable, and I appreciated the setting and plot being different from the typical content used in spy novels these days. The protagonist was not superhuman, the solution was not science fiction, and the villains were likely based on real members of Syria’s leadership. In many ways, the strength of the book was in its accuracy, despite being fiction. I highly recommend reading Damascus Station – it will not disappoint.

Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote

“It was a challenging deal and quite a journey that we honestly wouldn’t have been able to make without the assistance and guidance of Bigelow. Still today it challenges people to understand what transpired. It was a great opportunity to leverage an investor that added a financial component into our business with a 51% ESOP, and in addition, then turn around and offer 35% growth of the business because we are going to make a substantial acquisition on the backside of the deal.”

-William D. Purington, former President & CEO of Maine Drilling & Blasting Group

 

 

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