Ok, whatever you are doing stop…I mean it! STOP right now!!!!

I have a question for you!

Do you know WHY you are doing what you are doing…what I mean is, have you taken the time to dig deep and understand WHY your company even exists? What is its purpose and why anyone should care?

A couple of weeks ago I was sent a YouTube video. I get sent a bunch every week by clients and prospects..Hey James check this out it’s right up your alley or James, saw this and thought of you (I tend not to open those for fear of what may be inside).

Anyway, this particular one came from my own Business Coach…..”James, you really need to check this out, it’s about the WHY in all business’s and relates back to our clients Strategic Plan”.  Ok that got my attention. What happened next I was pretty unprepared for….the experience this 18minute video has had on me has been as profound as any I have had in the last 20 years of being in business.

The premise of this video is simple……Any business can tell you WHAT they do, some (not all) can tell you HOW they do it….but only a few can tell you WHY they do what they do! The purpose, the reason they even exist is seldom if ever articulated.

Think about the last conversation you had at, say, a network event.

It went something like this….” Hi, I am James..so what do you do? Well James, I am real estate broker and I deal in residential real estate in the $500K to $2.5m price range in Loudoun County”…..ok, NEXT!!!!!!! I may be exaggerating but you get the point….and I am NOT picking on real estate brokers. It is the same conversation everywhere.  Conversations even marketing materiel start with the WHAT and the then the HOW.

What if the conversation went like this….”Well James, I have a mission in life to make sure that  everyone should have access to the best possible resources and expertise they can afford when looking for their dreamhouse….this is one of the most important decisions they can make and I want to make sure that it gets treated as such, HOW I do this is by………………..WHAT they will get at the end of this is……………

If we buy into the message of the video (and honestly there is no reason not to!) then we need to adopt the mindset that PEOPLE buy WHY we do it not WHAT we do. This isn’t an elevator speech, this is s deep and meaningful reason or purpose as to why you do the business you do.

And by the way, I actually tried this out on my wife and business partner. I asked her why she loved to by Lexus? There are a multitude of other, high end manufacturers out there…why Lexus. She thought for a minute and said…..”It is their pursuit of perfection”…seriously! Every Lexus she bought, she felt, wasn’t just better than the last model..it was SIGNIFICANTLY better!! As she says “ I know that when I buy their cars, they will be better by design. Every aspect of the vehicle will be better than the last. Lexus’s WHY –to build towards the perfect automobile.

So, my challenge to everyone is this…….DEFINE yourself by WHY you do what you do and not by WHAT you do. Look at the way the really successful companies communicate, it is usually opposite from everyone else. You can feel the passion they have for WHY they exists, be it to go against the status quo as in Apple, Drive for perfection as in Lexus or change the world in which we live as in the Wright Brothers!

The video is START WITH WHY (The book as the same name) and the presenter/author is Simon Sinek.

Watch the video and or read the book and draw your own conclusions about your own business.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4