And how do I make sure my business doesn’t go “SPLAT”.

The first part of the process for those who are participating in the review of the Path of the Lion was to complete an EnQ assessment. The results of this assessment serve to alert the participants as to which EnQ territories they might be tending towards, i.e. Lion, Fish Eagle, Baboon or Rhino territory.  The Lion is the most sought after territory in a business sense. As to be expected, a number of the assessments identified their participants as roaring lions. Upon returning the assessment results to the reviewers I received the above question: “So, why am I not rich yet?” which I thought was a very relevant question and worth taking a shot at.

The long answer is: read my book, Path of the Lion (which they were about to do anyway).

The shorter answer, for the purposes of a helpful blog, highlights the following 4 essentials:

•  First is our product and this does not need to be our passion but it does need to be profitable. For example the most profitable product in my educational publishing company is our mathematics textbook, due its content quality, retail margin and the sheer volume of sales. If the success of this book relied on my passion for mathematics, our company would be in very serious trouble! All too often we assume that business failure is the result of doing the wrong things with the right products. This can certainly be the case, but in my experience, all too often we are doing everything right with the wrong product. If we are personally attached to the product through our passion or our expertise, we have less chance of recognising this issue before it’s too late and we have dug ourselves a big financial hole.
•  Second is our leverage. Leverage is such an overused word but it’s central to creating wealth. Simply put, leverage means getting massive returns from modest efforts. In a business sense we should spend no more than 30% of our time on one business venture once it has been launched and correctly structured. (Bearing in mind that this can take years and links to the fourth essential).
•  Third is our awareness. We have established that we shouldn’t do all the work in our businesses but we do need to personally pull all the profit related strings.  The business focus plan chapter in Path of the Lion shows us how to do this and there will be resources available on my website within the next few weeks to provide additional support for this EnQ tool.
• Fourth is our tenacity. We all know that things don’t happen overnight and yet we tend to become impatient and disheartened far too soon in a business venture. Personally, I think that the technological advances and their impact on our expectation of instant gratification in almost every aspect of our lives, makes this far worse for business builders in today’s world. However there is no downloadable “app” for “profitable business” just yet and we all still have to go the hard way, which consists mostly of ‘learn by experience’; the most effective, yet also the slowest and most painful method.

For easy recall, note this anagram: the first letters of the above 4 elements spell “PLAT”. This is a little too close for comfort to “SPLAT” but illustrates just perfectly that the difference between profitable businesses and non-profitable businesses can be as small as one letter in a short word, figuratively speaking.

The online version of EnQ assessment will be available at www.enqpractice.com with the official launch of the book, Path of the Lion which is now imminent.