Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
How to Make Your Business More Excellent With Rael Bricker
Show Notes
Background
Rael Bricker has found his purpose in sharing the experiences of journeying and achieving excellence with business owners and entrepreneurs around the world. From being 6000ft underground in a mine, to starting an education business (that grew to have 4000 plus students) to spending years working in venture capital, Rael Bricker has seen it all. He has listed companies on multiple international stock exchanges, and his financial services group has settled more than $3bn in loans over 20 years. He has a diverse work history combined with unique global research interviews with companies in more than 25 countries.
As his surname suggests, Rael is about laying the right bricks as the foundation to your personal and business success on the journey to excellence.
The Value of Peers
If the business owners you talk to are not in your specific field, this is not an issue – rather they can teach you new ideas and innovation that you would never have thought about otherwise. You can find this in a lot of businesses; Uber and Airbnb for example. The norm in your industry is not necessarily the norm in somebody else’s industry, and then you can bring in something completely new and fresh.
Functional Benchmarking
‘Functional benchmarking’ is a concept applied to businesses today.
A lot of businesses compare one business as a whole to a different business as a whole to find out what can be improved, and often they miss a lot of the smaller details with this approach. Functional benchmarking is a concept that works to break down your business into many functions and look at improving it in smaller ways. This also gives your business the opportunity to come up with something ‘outside of the box.’
Looking for an uncontested market space in a particular segment of your market is a great way to make an impact in your field as a small business.
What is ‘Excellence?’
Excellence is an acknowledgement that we can never be perfect.
That perfection doesn’t exist.
Being more excellent means showing up as the best version of ourselves, and our business by extension, every single day.
Every athlete in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics tried to show up as the best version of themself every day. There was no perfect ten scores. So they were never perfect, they were just getting better and better, becoming more excellent every day, and the benchmark they used was their own performance. That’s an achievement in and of itself, and that’s making them more excellent.
As a business owner, if you can do each day better than yesterday, if you can serve their customers better than you did yesterday or in your last interaction, then that’s pushing for excellence.
Do Your Goals Have Meaning?
A stand-alone goal with no meaning will not motivate you to complete it.
Imagination creates motivation.
One way to stay motivated in your goals is to start visualising how you will celebrate your success. Stopping to celebrate each milestone you achieve and enjoying your business journey instead of simply going from point A to point B means that you will both be motivated to achieve and you will enjoy your growth so much more.
