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What happens when you realise your path is entrepreneurship rather than employment? Lindsay takes up the challenge and shares an account of her journey as it unfolds…
I am feeling a deep sense of warmth. Like I know I’ve won a big prize, but it hasn’t been announced yet. Let me just revel in this, if you please. I deserve to bask in this warmth.
The warmth comes from knowing I have 2 big contracts coming up after the summer.
It comes from setting up a mini training with my best 15 potential delivery partners – to get them competent and comfortable with explaining and delivering Mirror Mirror to clients.
It comes having lined up 4 of those training sessions – 2.5 hours each; 2 x face to face in Den Haag and London and 2 x virtual – and everyone being keen to join. It comes from having developed and uploaded 8 x pre-read documents and 5 x pre-watch mini videos to a learning site and getting great coaching and feedback on those from virtual learning consultants Judy and Steve McCann.
It comes from having yesterday seen the final set of reports that will be automatically produced on our new reporting system – and those reports looking great.
It comes from knowing that having spent carefully and wisely, I have funds to do what I need to do for the rest of the year.
And it comes from multiple seeds starting to sprout on business developments and other fronts too.
It seems as if every call / skype meeting / interaction that I’m having about Mirror Mirror is energised, positive, productive and in the flow.
I counted up the number of people now in the Mirror Mirror ‘ecosystem’ as suppliers, contributors or partners – across Product Development, Business Development, Delivery and Management. They are 35 people I am working with, that I believe in, who are pushing forward with me to get this to fly.
I spoke to one of my ad-hoc advisors yesterday. An experienced ex-CEO with an outstanding track record of success. I’m lucky to get his time. His advice at this point was indeed:
- Push through. You know what you have to do and do it your way. Trust your gut and make your own decisions (after consulting others where you need to, of course). Because if they’re not your decisions, it’s not your logic and you can’t really learn from what doesn’t go wrong. You have enough experience. Find your leadership style and make it work.
- Make sure you trust that the people around you can honour your expectations – and if they don’t, stop collaborating with them.
- Be commercially savvy – .
My modus operandi so far has been to be so grateful for the inputs of anybody to helping develop this concept that the thought of rejecting anyone didn’t exist. But now it’s crunch time. I can’t fall back on that habit. Every spend has to work for me. Every delivery has to be excellent. Every week of work has to move this forward.
But it’s ok. I’m not tied into contracts I can’t get out of. I’ve spent a long time finding those 35 people. But ensuring high-quality contributions is now on my radar.
Mirror Mirror– We identify and close alignment gaps between people in organizations to improve engagement and performance.
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