More businesses, governments, and institutions are realizing that communication, design thinking, and passion are not just for artists. This insight may come with a sigh of relief to artists, innovators, and graphic designers. After years of having “passion” relegated to the back corner, business leaders are recognizing the value of courageous expression. Let’s look at 6 ways passion will boost your business.
Start with The End In Mind
Whether you’re just starting out or have been running your business for years, it pays to start with the end in mind. This may apply to any and every aspect of your enterprise. Questions you might ask yourself can include:
Where do you want your business to go?
Why did you start your business?
Did you start it to serve an under-served population?
Did you start it to share innovative approaches to seemingly impossible problems?
Did you start it to help people live a better life?
Take the time to get this target crystal clear. It shapes everything you choose to do next.
Understand Your Current Client
With personal passion, you’ll get inside the mind of your customer. You’ll know all their pains, goals, and dreams. If you’ve been in the shoes of your customer, you know their reality from real-life experience. For example, if you’ve been running an online business, you know exactly what expenses and payments are coming and going.
You don’t leave anything up to chance. You know which customers pay in advance, which pay in bulk, and which ones don’t pay without hounding. By understanding your current clients, you can do several things. You can make their life easier by offering payment plans. You can simplify transactions by automating payments. And, you can provide reports outlining all the ways they are saving money working with you.
Get Outside Input
As a passionate business owner, you understand the value of outside input. For instance, you know that an outside expert will see things that you may be missing. You may rely on a professional for shipping consulting, package audits, or logistics consulting. An outside expert can help you see fresh ways to streamline contracting, saving you hours of sweat going over forms and filling in boxes.
He or she will see the glaring opportunities to save money, save time, and improve services. This kind of thinking applies to many areas of business – from shipping consulting to technology consulting. If you’ve got an extra set of eyes looking at each aspect of your business, you’re sure to find savings and improvements.
Boost Communication with Your Team
As a passionate entrepreneur, business owner, or employee, you understand the value of communication. When you have clear and candid communication with your team, you’ll improve results. Open communication may be the single improvement that will improve the output of your design team. Designers are eager to participate in creating new processes and products for the business.
Yet, as you may have experienced, marketing and creative teams often do not get the full picture – at the start. By improving your communication processes, you can share objectives and engage everyone in designing successful outputs.
Think On Your Feet
Passionate leaders are creative, curious, and courageous. If you’ve got this ability, use it. If you need more of it, you can build this skill. If you could use more of it on your team, hire new talent. Recruiters consider improvising to be an important quality in hiring. You could call it IQ, or an “improvisation quotient.” When you’re improvising and thinking on your feet, you will come up with new ways to adapt and respond.
One of the great benefits of thinking on your feet is that you’re willing to do more with less. If you don’t have an unlimited budget, you’ll work with what you have. Many top companies started in garages with humble resources and a “can-do-it” attitude. Use that passion to take risks and do your best work.
Keep Evolving
In our ever-changing business landscape, we’re looking for new ways to learn and evolve. Work is changing in ways that require a new dimension of agility, flexibility, and innovation. People are working from home. Teams are experimenting with hybrid settings. Managers are seeking ways to stay in touch, motivated, and productive.
We are facing situations and shifts that require a completely new level of agility. As a passionate leader, model this way of working to your team, senior leaders, and customers. With the spirit of evolving, you and your team can win a competitive edge.
