It's been almost 49 years since I was hatched and I've only recently begun to find out the KEY aspects to my professional and personal self. But professionally is where my focus is now for this writing. Family focus is always a constant but with my career I'm hyper vigilant to work stronger, smarter and more strategically than ever. I strive for excellence each step of the way.
For the last fifteen years I've been going at what seems like warp speed in the business of sports and sports marketing. I never stopped to really think about the type of business person I wanted to be or am but always had random thoughts swirling around my head. It was only recently that I've been able to now know the core principles which are the building blocks of my professional self. I call it HIRE. Honesty, Integrity, Relationships, Excellence
HIRE is about people not myself. No matter what business you're in you will at some point have to deal with people. People are just that, people, and we're only on this great, green earth for a short amount of time so my feeling is that every day, every interaction, every action, every reaction should be the best it can with the highest quality. HIRE is not always easy in this world and what I've found is that it takes extra discipline. It takes an extra minute to write back in an email to someone, thank you for your time, but they'll remember that. It takes humility to tell someone, I don't have that answer yet like I told you I would but I will get it and haven't forgotten about you. Humility and honesty go hand in hand with integrity and neither are always easy but both are critical to success. Former FBI Director James Comey said, “Ethical leaders choose a higher loyalty to those core values over their own personal gain.” That really struck me as a succinct way of acting.
The biggest element I've understood is just how important it is to maintain good relationships in business and to achieve excellence. Creating and sustaining quality relationships can be attributed to having honesty and integrity. There are many other components but without those two as the bedrock you won't have good relationships. In business you never know when you'll want to reach back out to so and so which is why it's so important to never burn those bridges. I go the other way even. I push to build more bridges, stronger bridges and to cultivate relationships even when I don't need anything as well as strive to clearly communicate with people without leaving them in the dark. But, I don't push to create relationships because it's good for me or I'll see gain somewhere down the road. I build and curate relationships because it's the right thing to do. Because people are just that, people. We don't know what they're going through, dealing with and most people are just trying to make it through life. I've been at some pretty amazing highs and doing things most people only dreamed of and I've also been crippled with fear, balled up and crying like a baby as an adult man so I understand that business is about relationships and relationships are about people and no person is more important than another. This is probably why I have no fear to walk up to anyone at anytime and speak to them whether a bum or a billionaire.
Former Navy SEAL and successful entrepreneur Brandon T. Webb recently wrote a great article on excellence and it really helped shape those swirling thoughts into the pillars of my persona which I understand now. Read his piece here: https://sofrep.com/news/navy-seal-ceo-explains-why-excellence-matters-in-life-career/ One of the things I love about what he wrote was the line discussing some people are OK with 'pretty good'. That's fair but not part of my ethos and it took a long time to realize that. I write all of this in hopes to inspire somebody, somewhere to look within themselves no matter how old and identify the type of person they will be. Hopefully that person can realize what has taken me years to realize.....we can always go HIRE.