By Taking the Pulse of Your Business.

I teach business owners to become the “Lion on the Hill” in their businesses. The analogy is of the natural male lion, who sits slightly away from the pride, looking fierce but appearing to do little else than dozing in the sun all day. This slightly distant but strategically “connected” positioning empowers the male lion to maintain an intimate awareness of his pride whilst staying focused – and most importantly, creative. Translating this analogy into an effective business leadership process is what we do through Path of the Lion – a series of sequential steps leading to an internalised and powerful level of Entrepreneurial Intelligence (EnQ).

I have been on the Lions Hill in my Educational Publishing (Allcopy Publishers Pty Ltd) business for many years – trialing, honing and adapting what and how I teach this process to stay relevant and effective as our business environment evolves. I am therefore seriously in touch with how to be a hill lion – yet, twice a year I go through a very manual and painstaking process of preparing our authors’ reports from the sales data of our range of textbooks, e-books and study guides. The process involves manually lifting the sales from the previous six months results from sales reports to convert to authors reports, involving over 300 titles and sales of hundreds of thousands of books.

There are so many ways, at the touch of the right buttons to draw this information, transcribe it any way I want and deliver it – without me having to do more than give it a cursory glance as it leaves us. “I don’t understand why you put yourself through this every year” my husband will always say, as I sit at my computers ( I have to work with two of them in tandem) sighing, grinding my teeth, poisoning my system with massive tea overloads and staring into space for long periods as I trawl through the detailed process. “ I do this so I can trust my instincts” I always tell him.

By doing the author reports this way I am taking the pulse of my business and programming my subconscious mind to drive my most important business decisions accurately. Let me explain further. Our decision-making process is driven largely by our subconscious mind – but our immediate reasoning is processed by the conscious mind. So it feels as if important decisions come from consciously weighing up the information we have at the time, along with a pro’s and con’s list when needed and in many cases a few scenario options. Few of us understand the enormous influence that our subconscious has on our conscious decisions – we often find ourselves in situations where the facts point us one way but our gut feel or instinct seems to point us in another. This gut feel comes directly from the information our subconscious has taken in, without our immediate awareness and is stored, ready to feedback to us at the appropriate time. Sometimes this is a clear “aha” moment and sometimes it’s just a nagging feeling.

Being a hill lion requires us to be able to trust our gut feel – and a well-informed one is always best. My authors’ process imprints the following into my subconscious mind, which is the strongest driver behind many of my decisions:

• Which titles are doing really well, which not so well and which are dying a slow death
• Which formats are doing well and which not so well – this feedback relates to language translations too
• Which sales staff are covering all products and which aren’t
• Which sales staff are covering all areas, and which arent
• Where the gaps are between our results and our expectations

When it comes to making powerful decisions about products, formats, and staff that can greatly influence our business results, I can trust my instincts – I don’t have to spend hours on every decision. 21 years on this still works. As a business leader, think carefully about what and how you are feeding your subconscious mind with the information that you will need to make powerful decisions, especially at critical crossroads when you don’t have a lot of time to ponder.