I invest in small businesses and am the CEO of Skylink Group.
As an eight-figure small business owner, I’ve learned many lessons over the years, both good and bad!
This is why I want to help you improve your performance, profit, and potential without sacrificing what’s most important.
Join me, and GET OPTIMIZED!
-Nate Anglin
I spend $1,000,000 a year with a vendor, and they flush my money down their corporate toilet.
We all get sucked into the money pit vortex. Chasing vanity, lagging metrics like it’s the cure to the business failure plague.
Sure they’re important goals, but they add no direct value to a client.
Businesses are made up of tens, hundreds, thousands of humans, working together to achieve a goal.
A mission.
Yet, most goals are a financial metric, a sale, profit, volume, whatever.
My mom’s front tooth feel out before the wedding. She looked like a country bumpkin in a scene from the thriller, attack in the trailer park.
Or as my sister explained it, a redneck vampire.
She was horrified. Upset. She didn’t want to go. She was afraid of what others would think of her.
Life gets in the way they say. There’s never enough time.
And to that, I say bullshit.
I’ve been there. When I started taking over my company, I was forced to figure out what business really was.
16 hours a day clawing and scratching.
It left me no time for the things that mattered. It left me with no time for my inputs, as Nicolas Cole would say.
I gained weight. I sat at the computer, the phone, hammering out results.
At the time, it felt needed, but that’s not the way to live life.
It’s sink or swim they say, and I tell them, they’re full of shit.
It’s the mantra for a lot of small businesses. It was the mantra for mine.
I sank. I nearly drowned. That’s the problem with this view on business and in life.
You don’t just sink. You drown. You die.
The first is executing the vision, mission, values, and strategy of a company playbook.
The second is leading, coaching and managing a team.
I was reading Rand Fishkin’s book, “Lost and Founder” and he made an excellent point.
Not all individual contributors (ICs) are cut out to manage, and that’s okay. They still need a career path!
Management is unique. You have to have people skills!
Managers don’t always need experience in a given role. What they need is a skill to learn, coach, and manage.
If you’ve found yourself in a management seat, this is for you.
I was sitting across the table from an interviewee ready to make an investment.
An investment in them.
So, I asked the question..
I hired an MBA with thirty years of experience thinking that was important. I was wrong.
He was my prince. A savior. Until he asked…
Can I bring my dog to work?
As a pet-friendly fella that’s not tight on “corporate” rules, I said sure, why not.
I’ve done it in the past. And I still tend to bring in my sausage every now and again.
He’s a dachshund named Buster.
It was the first day of training and things we’re going miserably.
Most resumes are a load of crap.
They’re a 30,000 ft view of you, but more often than not, they’re one of two things.
They’re exaggerated or severely neglected.
Maybe someone will surprise me one of these days and have an exaggerated neglected resume.
At the beginning of my career, I was thrown to the wolves.
In school, they teach you NOTHING about management.
During my MBA, no professor ever sat me down have the management pep talk. We never role played. Nothing.
All of this is stupid.
Stupid because young, future leaders are teachable.
Coachable.
The problem? People don’t take the initiative.
If an alien entered your world, mentally whipped you and started demanding foreign prompts, how would you feel?
Exactly!
Out of this world.
As someone leading a team, you’re dealing with humans.
We often forget this. Don’t act like you haven’t!
I was recently at a business conference, and during lunch, I received a few questions regarding hiring and motivation.
I’ve made many of these mistakes which I’ll share with you now.
