Employee development comes when you understand that the best way to learn is through life lessons. Trying to solve all of the problems that your business faces by yourself is not the solution. Your people need to fail in order to learn.

This industry is filled with micro-managers that can’t imagine letting anyone fail. Reviewing everything that happens in the business is an impossible way to grow. You need to hire smart people, give them the general direction of where you want to go and let them take you there.

I can’t tell you how many people I have met that don’t trust their teams and believe that they are the only one with the right answers. That is the furthest thing from the truth. In the end it comes down to trust and knowing that you hired a smart person that will figure out a good solution to the problem. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, was once asked if he was going to fire a senior executive after he had just made a $5,000,000 inventory mistake? His answer, “why would I fire someone that I just invested $5 million in?”

Your people decisions will determine the success in your business. If you don’t think you have hired the right talent, go find better people. But, if you do have great people on your team let them do their job, let them fail and let them learn from their own mistakes. You cannot control everything and the only path to growth is trust and empowerment. Let your people grow!

We have met thousands of business owners over the past 20 years and few pass the test as a true CEO. Most are very smart and very capable business people that put CEO on their business card. What is it that makes a CEO successful? In Break Points we talk about a number of issues, including their ability to communicate, ability to attract great talent and their ability to instill loyalty in everyone they touch. Great visionaries are usually very good at figuring out how to get from point A to point B, but great CEO’s know how to take hundreds or even thousands of people on that same journey.

We believe there is also a difference between a business owner and an entrepreneur. Most business owners take a skill set they have or a business that they know and turn it into a venture that produces revenue. There are millions and millions of business owners, and many of them create great companies that employ lots of people. The true entrepreneur, on the other hand, creates a business that is scalable and reproducible and owns IP (Intellectual Property) that brings exponential value to a business. The most profitable businesses we have seen are the ones that own something, not just resell other people’s products.

The challenge is to decide which products to invest in and how do you fund those investments.

I have met hundreds of owners that are in partnerships, and many that have been through the pain of exiting a partner out of a business. When you have that conversation about how the exit came to be and what it cost the organization, you can see the pain on the owner’s face. You can see the agony that they went through for months based on the decision they made many years earlier with less information than they needed to make that decision.

We tell our kids not to get married without really knowing their prospective spouse, but in business we see people running into relationships after just meeting each other. You seem like a great person and you compliment me in so many ways, until there comes a time when they don’t, and that is a very painful time.

Business partnerships are extremely challenging when they work, but the challenges of a bad partnership can kill even the healthiest of businesses. If you are at the point of considering adding an equity partner in your business, think twice. Do you really know this person as well as you need to and do you really want to get married? Partnership Pain is no fun, so do everything you can to avoid it.

You think you told someone what to do and they shook their head in agreement. It is now four days later and you are expecting that person to come back to you with a specific solution, at least that was your take-a-way from the earlier conversation. The only challenge is that this individual didn’t have the same clarity that you had. In addition they didn’t ask for clarification because they are a bit intimidated by the fact that the owner of the company approached them to complete an important task for the company.

Instead of asking you for clarification they approached a few others in the organization (who weren’t part of your discussion) to provide their input and the project has now taken on a whole new meaning that you had not intended. In the end a lot of time is wasted and you don’t get your desired result. So, why does this happen when we are so confident that we described the objective so clearly.

Andy Grove said it best when he said “Communications is not about what you say but about what the other person heard.” How many times have you said something that you thought was so clear and the other person obviously heard something very different, almost like you were having two totally different conversations. This is all part of human communications and how the lack of understanding affects your businesses every day. Learn more about how you communicate and become a more effective leader!

Why did you start your business? What do you want it to do for your life? How much money do you want to make? How much money do you need to make? If you don’t know the answers to these questions how are you going to get to your desired result? The truth is that you don’t have a desired end result, so you will end up wherever the wind blows you.

I have met thousands of business owners, and those that can clearly articulate where they are going and why have the best chance for success. I can’t count the number of times we have conducted a workshop where we discuss a concept called an “End-Game” and have people lost as to what they want from their business. The truth is that if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.

So, if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to business to produce why choose one direction over another? Why do you make the decisions that you make and how can your employees buy into your vision if you don’t have one? People want to be part of something special, and unless you paint the picture of the future then your employees just go to work every day. That is so empty, when they could go to change the world every day instead. Do you want to change the world? If so, it starts with a plan to at least pick the destination.

You can only plan and theorize for so long, at some point you need to have the horses to execute. We can come up with great strategies that would work in well-run companies with top talent, but when you try to implement the same strategies with companies that have less capable employees and leaders the results are less than satisfying.

We have spent a significant amount of time helping clients understand the importance of recruiting great talent, but it seems to go over their head. They believe that if they plan better or team more effectively than their company will improve. In reality, a complete exercise in top-grading their talent is what they need to do. It sounds so easy, but in the end it takes a lot of time and energy to turn a company around and point it in a different and more promising direction.

I can only tell you what it is like for me to work with really smart people and I can’t imagine directing a team of average and poor producers. Either hire the best and let them do what they need to do or don’t even get started. The difference between average performers and the best performers is amazing when you see it happen in front of your eyes. Great resources run circles around the average performers and the results they produce can be amazing.

Break Points is the culmination of 18 years of working with entrepreneurs and businesses. We believe that the message in this book has two main audiences; entrepreneurs/would be entrepreneurs & corporations that need to interface with small businesses. Building a successful business from scratch is not easy. Many have tried and failed, many have tried and seen some success and then there are the rare few who can actually cash out.

This book honors all of those that have taken the chance to start their own business to reach their dreams. The sad part is that many businesses never reach the visions of their founders. There are dozens and dozens of reasons why this happens, but Break Points identifies the issues that face every growing business and identifying strategies to move their business forward.

In addition to helping these business owners, we hope that Break Points will be an insightful read for corporate employees that need to interface with these companies. We focus our consulting work in the IT Channel where countless corporations are trying to sell their products through the tens of thousands of small businesses that we call solution providers. The disconnect between these organizations is something we continue to battle. Our program called Understanding Your Partners’ Business is focused on trying to help address this issue.

Having worked at a large corporation it is hard to imagine someone who has never worked anywhere but a large corporation having much empathy for a business owner from a sub 100 employee company. In our UYPB program we discuss the concept of loyalty and how loyalty is earned.

In our work with solution providers, the most successful companies are extremely sales focused. They understand that there is no company without a sale and they are very good at using technology to solve business problems. They are also good at identifying good salespeople to bring into their company and can interview effectively to recruit top talent.

The challenge is that the majority of solution providers don’t seem to have the same mindset. Many companies we meet are technically driven and are able to grow to a certain size, but once they reach 8-12 employees they hit a wall. The reason seems to be their inability to recruit sales talent. As a non-salesperson it is extremely hard to differentiate between good sales talent and wannabe sales talent. Much of this comes down to building a solid pool of candidates and interviewing effectively.

We have been working with an industry expert, Mike Schmidtmann, to develop tools and a system to recruit more effective sales people. Mike has a 5 step process that we have implemented with a number of companies which has produced some great results. These companies have hired better talent than they had in the past, and they have not hired some candidates that they would have wasted time on in the past. We will be launching this process as part of our Talent Tracks handbook and look forward to helping solution providers in the critical success area.

Many solutions are trying to figure out how they fit in the future of technology, specifically cloud computing. Do they need to build technology to support their clients? Do they focus on the application layer or just the tools to make their client’s businesses run more effectively?

Where this will all lead will determine the future for many solution providers. Will the average business partner loose their client base to other solution providers that can deliver data centers to their mid-market clients? Or will they be able to play a role.

The need to become your clients trusted advisor has never been more important than it is today. This is the first critical step toward success, but having a cloud strategy and to understand how you will migrate your clients in that direction could determine the future of your solution provider business.

At the low end of the market, companies like Google and RackSpace will likely acquire the most customers, but what about the mid-market client, the one that wants more attention to their applications and more handholding than Google and RackSpace might offer? This mid-market client has always been the most profitable place for a strong solution provider to play, so how do you guide them to their ultimate future?

The next few years will be critically important for you as the owner of a solution provider, so what is your strategy when it comes to cloud computing? Let us know, we want to know what you think.