Every year, the calendar turns to the winter months.  In many parts of the country; that means snow, cold, and short days.  I happen to live in the Midwest and those three descriptive words definitely hold true.  One of the joys of winter in the colder climates is making snowmen with the kids.  (If you live on a beach, or a warmer part of the country, just bear with me and enjoy the visual I’m about to paint.

The process of making a snowman is simple.  When the conditions are right, start with a small snowball and roll it on the ground.  As you continue the process, the ball picks up surrounding snow and becomes a small boulder.   After you pack the boulder down to insure it doesn’t break apart, you start the process again and quickly stack a few of the snow boulders on top of one another; grab a carrot for a nose and a couple of pieces of charcoal for the eyes and mouth.  Bingo!  You have a snowman!

The parallels of building a snowman teaches us a few valuable lessons that directly correlate to business and competition.  Here are six things to pay attention to:

1. Being aware of the conditions and variables.  Midwesterners know that when it’s too cold outside, the snow won’t stick when you try to roll it into a boulder.  In comparing this to your business, you need to be acutely aware of the conditions of the market, your competition, and what your clients is essential to continued success. The conditions are ever changing.  While we know that Winter will come about the same time every year, your market conditions may never repeat themselves.  Sadly, a lot of businesses deny that change is coming or has already arrived and operate in a vacuum of denial.
2. When building the snowman, you will need help to complete the job.  If you have children, this usually means Mom or Dad will be employed to lift the snowballs on top of one another once they are too big for the kids to do so; the same is true in effective leadership.  Successful leaders surround themselves with a great team first. 

They don’t say, “When we do $1,000,000 per year in sales, we’ll get an accountant and really be able to grow!”  They understand the importance of building the right team in the beginning of the enterprise. 

If you are in real estate, this means surrounding yourself with mentors and other people as well as people to delegate non-revenue producing activities to.  This is an area that many entrepreneurs have a tough time grasping. 

You’ll often hear the same old statements like, “No one cares for my business like I do”.  Or “I need to do all of this myself to ensure it gets done right.”  If you are saying things like this; you don’t have a business-you have created a high paying job for yourself.

3. When building the snowman, and your business, you need to have the vision for what you want it to look like.  Great leaders invest time creating a compelling vision.  They often will increase the scale of the vision way past what others will think possible.  Think Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie.  I enjoy surrounding myself with people that help me increase the size of the vision.  This does not mean being around people that will always tell you what you want to hear.  Dedicate time for your vision and seek out the other like minded people who offer sage advice, experiences, and opportunistic heights.
4. Be aware of areas you hadn’t thought of initially.  Maybe you are rolling the snowball and picked up a handful of bright colored leaves left behind from the fall.  What a great accent and way to improve the look of the snowman!  Many times in business; we end up making more money on the ancillary areas than on the primary area.  For example, when Ray Kroc began building the McDonald’s empire, the focus was on the food production and dishing out as many hamburgers as you could.  He discovered that this didn’t create the wealth they needed to be solvent.  It wasn’t until they shifted the business to real estate and franchising, something they hadn’t even originally thought of, that the profits exploded.  Today, McDonald’s owns some of the highest value land in the world!
5. Look for ideas all around you. Many hotel chains have their senior management visit hotels and work in every position at the hotel.  From cleaning rooms, greeting customers at check in to serving food; this gives them great ideas on how to pick up and implement excellent changes.  I know of a successful businessman in my area who served a stint in prison.  Upon his release, he had to have a job.  He worked at a McDonald’s drive thru for 6 months.  In that time, he was employee of the month for 5 of the 6 months.  He now owns several very successful businesses and employs many people as a result of these. When asked about his experience, he simply says, “Working at the drive thru taught me the importance of building viable systems that can work in a time sensitive manner.  There is no way my businesses could be where they are right now without that experience.”
6. Tune up and refresh your ideas on a continual basis.  If you are building a snowman that is falling apart, or is so uneven it won’t stand on its own, you may need to let that piece go and start again.  Understand that you will come up with ideas that don’t work more often than ones that do.  Instead of dwelling on the ones that don’t work, let them go and learn from it. 

I would encourage you to give this formula a shot.  If it doesn’t work for you, fine.  If it does, great!  Let me know.   

Oh yeah, another word of caution: “Don’t eat yellow snow!”