One of the defining characteristics of successful leaders is they are willing to pay a price unsuccessful leaders are unwilling to pay. Successful leaders pay a personal price in terms of time, money, self-denial, hard decisions, sacrifice, preparation and hard work.
Too many people want Easter without Good Friday. They want gain without the pain. They want the perks of leadership without paying the price of leadership. They want the public applause without the private preparation.
This is why I love Bryan and Shannon Miles, founders of several companies including MAG Bookkeeping. They are incredibly successful Christian entrepreneurs who have paid the price necessary for success. Recently, Bryan wrote about his journey.
Before you read his comments, if your organization needs bookkeeping assistance here during tax seasons, you know MAG Bookkeeping is willing to pay the price to make YOU successful. Now onto, Bryan’s thoughts:
No one ever told me that risk taking would come with so many upsides and downsides. It’s obvious when you enter into risk, you’re potentially sacrificing something for future gain, or at least the hope of it. While I’m grateful to have started a business that is succeeding, I was very naive to the cost and the toll of creating a new business.
I’ve also learned a lot about myself and my leadership through these past five years since starting our companies. One of those things is transparency. Transparency is important to those who care about you and are sincerely cheering you on. Below is my attempt to be transparent with you.
Over the last three quarters in our business Shannon and I have experienced some downsides and some upsides connected to the risk we took back in 2010. Oftentimes when I speak with people, they approach me with the lens of only success and want to talk to me about my successes in our businesses. They are surprised to hear me also share with them the rough patches connected to that success. When I share with them our struggles they slowly take off their rose-colored glasses and listen with an interesting look on their face.
Below are some struggles and some realizations we’ve encountered over the last five years in growing a business from nothing to something pretty substantial:
- A surprising phone call in 2013 from our accountant informing me that my federal tax bill was ten times what I was expecting, due to restructuring a business as a corporate entity.
- Spending two days in a hospital in 2012 because I thought I was having a heart attack. Come to find out – I was just under an insane amount of stress.
- Discovering that not everybody you work with is excited about your success.
- Getting two junk lawsuits thrown at us almost at the same time by an ambulance-chasing attorney and spending way more than I thought to beat the trolls away.
- Realizing that certain friends enjoyed watching me fail in new business attempts.
- Making senior leadership hires from the outside and making insane amounts of investment of time and energy, and not seeing the business results I was expecting.
- Facing down tough business decisions throughout the last five years and finding myself up at 3 a.m. way too many times. In many of those nights, God has been silent and fear has tap-danced in front of me. Before starting these businesses, I never had nights like these.
In Part Two of this series on Risky Business, I will share with you how I handled these struggles and how I have decided to react to these realizations. Taking risks is not for the faint of heart. It comes with a set of challenges that unveil themselves to you way after the decision was made to take the risk in the first place. Risk also comes with a large amount of reward and I’m grateful for that. In fact, Shannon and I have been quite rewarded by our risk, but you have to understand the costs.
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