Even if you’re not an owner but part of a franchise system, co-owner, executive, general manager, or manager of a specific department, you should be constantly looking to grow.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution that can help you achieve your growth goals. It can be best summarized by the Jim Rohn quote, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Maybe you’ve heard that quote before but never thought about what it actually means for your business and life.

In your business — whether you are happy with all of it, some of it, or none of it and whether or not it’s growing — the results are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Therefore, if you are struggling with growth, it’s possibly because most or all of the five people you’re spending time with are not helping you grow your business.

This is a wake-up call for a lot of business owners. If your business isn’t growing the way you want it to or the way it should be, the fastest way to turn things around is to start hanging around with different people.

You might read the above and think, “Well, that’s not very realistic because I can’t very well stop hanging around with my executive team and management, I hang around with them all the time, and I need them.”

So here are two ways to think about that:

First, perhaps it’s time to look at that group of people with a clear and honest review, and determine whether or not they are actually the right fit for where you want to grow your company. Perhaps they were perfect to get you to where you are today, but are they the right people to get you to where you want to be in the future? If they aren’t, you may need to have the hard but necessary conversation with them to release them from your company and put the right people in place.

Second (and this one is even more important and often overlooked), you don’t have to hang around with your executive team less, but you should find someone else to hang around with even more — someone who will help you to level up and grow your business. So, along with your executive team, you should find a mentor, coach, or expert who has grown their business and can show you how to grow yours. Then you need to spend a lot of time with them to soak up what they have to share with you.

This is a different way of thinking about it: If you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, and if you can’t diminish how much time you spend with a lot of those people because you have to interact with them each day, then you need to find a way to spend even more time with the fifth “game-changer” who can help you grow.

How to Find the Right People

Here’s how to find more of the right people to spend time with, to increase the average of those people, so you will grow.

Start by writing down all of the goals you have for business growth and the questions you need answered about your business.

Read books, blogs, and this magazine to find experts in the field who have done what you want. Connect with them. Get into their world. Attend their events.

Join industry groups or masterminds. If you are already part of one, consider whether it is actually serving you. Some HVACR business leaders end up participating in industry groups that don’t serve them, but this could be a powerful, simple way to hang around with the right game-changers and increase the average of the people you spend time with.

Be intentional and proactive, scheduling more time with the right people and professionally minimizing the amount of time you spend with the wrong people.

After that, it’s almost automatic.

Rohn was right — we really are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. If you want to grow your business, it’s simply a matter of getting around the right people. If your business has not grown as far or as fast as you wanted it to, then it’s time to take a look at who you are spending the most time with and make some adjustments.

Business growth is just around the corner if you make the right adjustments to whom you spend time with.  

Publication date: 11/20/2017

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