Starting and growing any kind of enterprise is a unique process. Leaders must learn to embrace the essential 5 pillars of success: Strategy, Skills, Team, Finance, and Support.

The Pillars for Success

Strategy: Leadership without a strategic framework for an organization will compromise the results, overwork the leadership and teams, and waste time and money. A strategy is a Solution Map defining where the organization wants to be and how to get there. Here are the key elements:

1. • Vision & Mission
   • Market
   • Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
   • Goals

Skills: Leadership, communications, and financial results are all grounded in effective relationships. Creating a culture of high performance starts with the first person (the leader) and is developed with intentionality with each addition to the board, the staff, the committees, the advisors, and the community advocates. Here’s the sequence:

1. • Lead
   • Learn
   • Grow
   • Influence

Team: Teams are essential to the work of any organization. Moving from traditional thinking to a culture of servant leaders will impact the results of the organization. Build the principles for the culture and the skills to lead the teams before inviting the first team member to join.

1. • Competency
   • Role & Responsibility
   • Culture Fit
   • Expectations

Finance: Create an operational budget in which each line item connects to a milestone in the strategy. Also, create a start-up budget from concept to launch. The missing element is the cash flow projection. Make notes on how to create each of these:

• • Start-Up Budget
  • Operational Budget
  • Cash Flow Projection

Support: The best leaders, like the top sports figures, always have a coach. The leader’s job is to define and lead the work. Over 90% of the skills and systems are hidden from visionary leaders, especially start-up leaders and early stage organization leaders, however, this need never ends. Always having an experienced coach is the essential step for accountability, sequence, skills, discernment, clarity, and referrals.

• • Mentor or Coach
  • Team
  • Mastermind Group
  • CFO/COO

Keep the momentum.