What is Your CORE Strategy?

A strong and well-developed strategy is essential for the success of any business. Staying focused and achieving your marketing goals can be difficult without a clearly defined strategy.

The question is, do you have a CORE strategy? Depending on your answer, a more pressing question awaits you.

If you do maintain a CORE Strategy, the more important question is: how is it working out for you?

I have three guesses:

1. Your strategy is lackluster, and it needs more tuning to go full throttle
2. Your strategy sucks, and it requires a complete make-over
3. Your strategy is awesome and you don’t need to change a thing. 

If your situation is neither one or two, congrats, you may be on your way to success. However, that’s often not the case for countless residential home service businesses.

As a Master Strategist, I’ve met some good and great business people. What separates the two is their CORE Strategy. The reality is that business success entails more than developing independent marketing, sales, and operations strategies that cater to your business. Instead, a real CORE Strategy also considers the welfare of people under your employ.

In other words, the success of your business hinges on the victory of your audience and your team. Unless your CORE Strategy embraces both, surviving and thriving in today’s competitive marketplace can be a struggle.

Having a solid CORE Strategy is key to long-term success. This article will explore the CORE Strategy and everything there is to know about it. Keep reading.

What is a CORE Strategy?

Strategy is a game plan. It’s how the coach instructs the team to win the game before the game even begins. Well played strategies pull businesses through during crucial moments.

In business, you develop sales, marketing, and operational strategies to attain your company’s vision. Often a step-by-step process, businesses use them to remain victorious amidst fluctuating marketing aspects.

But strategies are never stand-alone. Principles and purpose lay the foundation for these strategies. Without a greater purpose and guiding principles fueling your game plan, every effort is untethered and devoid of a worthy cause.

Let me tell you that boosting your bottom line is neither a great purpose nor a noble cause. Attaining revenue is probable, but achieving success is improbable.

Similarly, the CORE Strategy builds upon CORE Principles and CORE Purpose. By understanding these two pillars, you fully comprehend what it takes to craft your failure-proof CORE Strategy.

Let’s explore both of them below:

The CORE Principles

“CORE Principles are universal truths founded on a proven pattern of success.“

— Ryan Chute

Consider this: we always hire people based on metrics like educational attainment, experiential background, and attitudes. While this information provides valuable insights on what to expect from applicants, they rarely give a full-view picture. You can expect a level of performance, but only through first-hand observation do you truly know how they actually work.

CORE Principles, in a way, follow the same pattern. They are universal, not because I said they are. These CORE Principles were created because of a proven pattern of success across businesses and industries. 

In other words, they are tried, tested, and transcend industries.

The CORE Principle revolves around this universal truth: “Helping people win in a trustworthy and grateful manner.”

As you develop your CORE Strategy in marketing, it must embrace this CORE Principle.

Why?

Because when you honestly and genuinely care about making your customers feel victorious about choosing you, you build trust. Customers view you as a business they can trust — you’re NOT after their money but their full satisfaction.

Moreover, you fill your customers’ gratitude meter when you serve them at the highest level. Customers know they made the right decision choosing you above the sea of competitors, and they feel immensely grateful.

Trust and gratitude breed happiness among your audience, leading to loyalty, repeat business, and unsolicited positive word-of-mouth.

The CORE Principles also apply to your employees, and I’ll explain how in the following.

The CORE Purpose

It’s one thing to keep your audience happy, it’s another to have employees that are genuinely happy to serve.

Here’s the thing: a happy customer doesn’t necessarily make a happy employee. But happy employees will do everything in their power to produce that same happiness among consumers.

This is where the second pillar of your CORE Strategy comes in — your CORE Purpose.

If your CORE Principles are consumer-centric, your CORE Purpose is employee-focused. Your business leader is responsible for fulfilling and establishing this CORE Purpose in your enterprise.

A leader’s CORE Purpose is to protect and defend a happy, healthy, wealthy culture.

We have all heard happy, healthy, and wealthy used in various contexts. It’s not enough for employees to experience one or two of the three facets. Only by unifying all three do you see employees share, live, and breathe your vision for the company. Let’s explore each facet below:

Happiness

Everyone lives their own pursuit of happiness. While a distinct path for different people, it boils down to two things:

• Avoiding pain and suffering
• Achieving pleasure and reward

Revisiting the CORE Principles, employees trust that your company will give them a reason to feel grateful for their jobs. That’s what the two things above aim to alleviate.

Protecting and defending a culture that circles around avoiding pain and achieving pleasure are what spark gratitude. Furthermore, gratitude and happiness are the same because what makes you grateful also makes you happy.

It’s not necessarily a question of money — it’s more about what your company does to ease the burdens of living (note the Value Proposition – Money, Energy, and Time).

Healthy

What good is happiness if you’re in bad shape? Having healthy well-being is necessary to enjoy the things you feel grateful (happy) for.

There are three things people truly care about:

• Money
• Energy
• Time

Among these three treasures energy is the most coveted of all. First, despite time being a non-renewable resource, it is useless if you lack the energy to use it. Second, there’s no point in having money without any energy to spend it.

As it stands, your goal is to protect and defend a culture that values employees’ mental, physical and emotional welfare. That means respecting their boundaries and workloads. This gives them the energy to enjoy their hard-earned money and personal time.

Wealthy

Wealth is relative, but in their own ways, employees search for companies that can pave their way to wealth. After all, employees need to profit too. 

Wealth is more than just a paycheck. Wealth could be a positive energy that a workplace provides. It also refers to the abundance of freedom in working for a company. But ultimately, wealth is about money — having the financial capacity to realize our respective identity, purpose, and adventure.

Protecting and defending a wealthy culture is about paying employees what they’re rightfully due. After they pay all the bills, employees inevitably want some left over for themselves. Breaking even is not good enough.

When your people feel wealthy from their job, they feel empowered. All of their hard work pays off, and their efforts are satisfied.

Happy, healthy, wealthy employees are grateful for their work, leading to high morale and increased productivity. This makes them highly proficient, contributing with all their hearts to your company’s success.

That’s your goal. To produce a CORE Strategy founded on CORE Principles and CORE Purpose centered on helping people (customers and employees) win. It begins by refining and honing a company culture that facilitates the development of your CORE Strategy.

At Wizard of Sales®, we’re committed to helping residential home service business craft their CORE strategy. If you’re looking for Master Strategists to help fine-tune your culture, we can help out. Book a free call, and let’s talk about it.

The Laws of Grateful Leadership According to Steve Foran

If you review everything written above, you’ll see that gratitude plays a significant role in your CORE Strategy.

Why?

Grateful employees are productive and highly proficient employees doing fantastic work and producing staggering results.

Grateful customers feel valued and validated about their buying decisions, leading to repeat orders, loyalty, and unsolicited positive word-of-mouth.

Gratitude and happiness are highly correlated. Keeping stakeholders happy means giving them reasons to feel grateful for your service. With that in mind, grateful leadership is a concept every great leader possesses. And who’s better to speak about this than the proponent of appreciative leadership, himself, Steve Foran?

Below, we’ll look at some principles from Steve Foran’s book, “Surviving to Thriving: The Ten Laws of Grateful Leadership.”

The success in your life is handed to you on a silver platter

Does this mean we don’t have to do anything? Certainly not; that would be preposterous.

Success is a sought-after state for every business owner, and it does not come easy. However, one business owner changed Steve’s perspective surrounding this topic. Despite the successful company the business owner was running, he told Steve:

“I always thought I hit the homerun; now I realize I was born in third base.“

This epiphany began when he realized that a significant portion of his success was attributed to his employees. No business owner achieves great overarching success if not for the people under their wing. Once we understand the value and contribution of each employee, we see success on a silver platter. 

The problem is that our eyes are glued on metrics and results, and we overlook the people behind those numbers. When we express genuine appreciation for employees’ excellence, trustworthiness, and reliability, we tap into their maximum potential.

In my observation, companies that practice acts of gratitude and appreciate their stakeholders enjoy better:

• Net profitability
• Lower attrition rates
• Superior buying experience

You can find good in every situation

Our brains are naturally hard-wired to focus on the bad things. In a sea of positivity, we tend to concentrate on negative situations in hopes of addressing them. Steve calls this our “negative attribution bias.”

While to some, this is a good reactionary measure, there are things we just cannot control. Fixating unfavorable situations beyond our control only ruin our day and sour our mood.

Finding the good in virtually every situation we encounter is not a magic potion that makes the bad go away. Employees leave, and new competitors appear — these are genuine matters that business owners face daily. However, when chaos happens, business leaders need to be in their best shape.

Focusing on negative things only disrupts our quality of life. The executive function of our brain shuts down, and we can no longer serve at the highest level.

Finding the good in every situation is all about changing our frame of mind. This should be an integral piece of your CORE Strategy.

When leaders remain positive and grateful despite all the chaos, the positivity trickles down to the team. This boosts employee morale and builds their confidence. As a result, the negativities don’t get to your team and negatively affect their performance. Instead, your constituents show up in their best selves and are ready to serve at the highest level.

Gratitude is a leadership skill that you can learn and strengthen over time

Gratitude is an essential leadership skill in the workplace, as it empowers employees to show up in their best selves and fully invest in their work.

By fostering a gratitude culture, managers can cultivate trust and collaboration among their teams. This drives productivity and success for the company as a whole.

But here’s what you need to remember: gratitude is not a quick fix. Like building muscle, you establish a culture of gratitude through continuous practice. 

Instead of coming into work with an “okay, what now?” attitude, gratitude makes your team reflect on the happy things. Being grateful boosts their morale and makes them perceive work in a positive light.

Whether through regular expressions of thanks or charitable initiatives, leaders who prioritize gratitude reap its many benefits. This includes increased employee engagement, satisfaction, and performance.

As such, incorporating gratitude into your CORE Strategy is key to building strong teams and driving long-term business success.

A culture of gratitude is made from developing a daily habitual ritual

As mentioned above, gratitude is a muscle developed from continuous practice. You don’t need an en grande display of thanksgiving to etch this culture into your company. Simple daily practices are enough to instill gratitude among your team.

For instance, asking around daily, “what are you grateful for today?” shifts employees’ frame of mind. Whatever unfavorable things they may have encountered before work get wiped away as they ponder this question. You flip the switch of negativity and encourage them to think of the good instead.

This could be a customary daily practice in your company’s daily huddles.

Gratitude is the Linchpin for Happiness

At the core of every successful company is a strong CORE Strategy founded on CORE Principles and a CORE Purpose. 

You want customers to win in a trustworthy and grateful manner, which begins by making your culture the core of your strategy. A culture that favors your workers encourages them to serve customers better. The CORE Strategy is your big leap into establishing a culture that fosters happiness, health, and wealth among employees.

These people approach their work with positivity, productivity, and efficiency. When all of these things come together, you skyrocket the gratitude in your company, creating happy workers. More importantly, maintaining happy employees culls employee attrition rates and maximizes your company’s profitability.

It all begins with putting gratitude at the center of your CORE Strategy.

If you’re looking to change your company culture radically, establish a culture of gratitude and appreciation. We can aid you in that endeavor. Wizard of Sales® has helped countless residential home service companies develop their CORE Strategy around gratitude.

Book a free call, and let’s get down to business.