Area of Chosen Greatness

Foreign welcome to choose where to Be.

It is a pleasure to be with you today.

I am your host Coco Salman, five time founder, impact investor and creator of the Force for Good Business System.

Thank you for being here today.

It's such a pleasure and honor to support and serve you on this topic.

That inspires me and I hope will deeply inspire you as well.

So this concept we're talking about today is an area of chosen greatness.

We're going to unpack what that is, but what I invite you to consider is are you trying to lead without knowing where your company is meant to be great and are you feeling pressure to be excellent at everything but aren't sure where to truly go all in?

Is your team unclear about what great really looks like and where to focus their best energy?

Are you investing time and money across too many areas without out seeing breakthrough results?

Today I'm excited to talk to you about choosing an area of Greatness.

An area of greatness is really, really impactful for a business.

Your area of chosen greatness is the single area your company chooses to master above all others.

Where you choose to go all in with intention, investment and innovation to achieve world class excellence that refuels your purpose, profit and growth.

When you are great at everything, you're actually mediocre at all of it.

So this idea is where you identify an area to put 10x the energy to set your company apart and help you devote excellence in your brilliance at a level that would otherwise get lost in the weeds.

As founders, it's very tempting to make everything a priority.

An area of greatness helps put you and your team in alignment with about really what matters the most and where you choose to be great.

Today's masterclass is about helping you select that area.

I invite you to enter this conversation with childlike exploration and curiosity.

This concept of an area of chosen greatness is one I hope you wrestle with.

It is something that you will want to ponder with your team in the masterclass.

Today, I'm going to invite you to make a first choice and then come back to it.

An area of greatness that will propel every part of your company forward.

If you've been involved in our masterclasses over the last few weeks, we've been talking about the customer journey, we've been creating a shared avatar, and those are great places to start.

The assessment of where to be Great an area of chosen greatness sits at the center of three concepts.

The first is where your company is uniquely suited to be great and so it's not where you, the founder, is uniquely suited to be great.

It's where your company is uniquely suited to be great.

The second is where your audience longs for you to be great.

All right, where your audience needs excellence.

So the reason for the master classes around choosing your shared avatar and then doing the customer journey is to help you understand where you need to be great, where they need you to be great, where they long for your excellence.

So the two help you begin to figure out this question, where to be great?

And the third, and this is very important or prosperity cannot churn and is not sustainable.

This is where being great will also drive the economics of your business.

So where you're uniquely suited to be great, where your customer longs to be great, and what drives the economic success of your company, that is where I invite you to choose your area of chosen greatness.

One clear area of greatness is worth more than 10 scattered strengths.

Our focus today around greatness is part of the Force for Good flywheel, one of the many legs of the flywheel that allows us to get momentum going by taking the time to assess for your wisdom, your team's wisdom into this concept.

It's going to start to enrich your thinking, it's going to start to affect your behaviors.

And every day it's going to tell your customers and your team where you choose to be great.

And that is a really big piece of the Force for Good business system.

So our growth element is called the area of chosen greatness.

It's one of the legs, the flywheel.

And the tool we're going to use is called the area of Chosen Greatness identifier, which you can get right now at A Force for Good Bizarre Slash Weekly Dash tool.

This is free through July 20th and it's also part of the book A Force for Good.

Today we're going to use the Area of Chosen Greatness identifier and help you identify what your area of chosen greatness is.

Then you're going to identify a high leverage habit and a high potency action, which we do in every masterclass so that you put to work the wisdom you discover using the tool.

So why founders don't focus on an area of chosen greatness is they get scared.

They we fear narrowing our focus.

We think that when we focus, we'll lose opportunities.

Another reason is they feel pressure to be great at everything.

Especially in early stage companies.

Leaders may believe that excellence must exist everywhere.

Another reason founders don't do this exercise up front is their current success might be masking the need to choose an area of greatness.

When revenue is steady, the urgency to refine, focus or go deeper on focus may not feel critical until growth stalls and margins start to shrink.

It also could be they're just too close to the business.

So founders struggle to see the forest for the trees and may miss their own hidden jewels.

That's what we're looking for.

Oftentimes we conflate purpose with excellence.

So purpose is why the company exists, right?

You may think that being mission driven, purpose led is plenty.

However, transformational value for your customer that's repeatable requires more operational focus.

And the last reason is we get so busy, we haven't slowed down, take a moment and do the inner work.

We're on the hamster wheel, going, going, going.

We think in our heads that we can't stop, that we have to keep running.

And it's that very thought that is keeping your business stuck.

So the path to freedom, prosperity and impact starts with one bold choice.

And that is where to be great.

Why you should define this area.

Your resources are limited and greatness requires choice.

When you decide where to be great, you get to decide where to install 10x the energy and resources.

And it gives you the freedom to do it right.

Because you're doing this one area so well, you can invest the proper attention and time and money so that this part buoys your whole company upwards.

Your team is hungry for direction.

So much is stuck inside the head of a founder and everybody comes to work and does their best.

And then the founders feels like, I'm alone.

I'm making every decision on my own.

However, if you have a clearly defined area of chosen greatness, it ignites for your team alignment, accountability and autonomy.

It helps them know where to put their most important energy, focus and attention helps them see how they can be part of that piece of greatness.

Also, your customer needs to know why you're the one for them.

So this should be something that they long for.

So you're saying I'm going to be great as a company in this area and it will create clarity and differentiation, attracting exactly the right customers to come to you.

Because it's exactly that need important to them.

Your profit depends on your greatness.

The place where you choose to be great directly impact your ability to charge more, scale faster, or retain longer.

And the word or is important.

There may not be all of those things, but it should be part of your growth strategy.

Your company deserves to be known for something.

Legacy doesn't come from being competent.

It comes from being unmistakably Remarkable at one thing that matters.

So don't dilute your genius, distill it.

From the moment I founded Loomie, I was searching for that one clear way we should choose to be great.

And it really happened when we went through the 17 step customer journey.

When we mapped that out as a team, it became so clear to me.

Our shared avatar was Judy.

She was coming home to the hospital for the first time after her child had been in the hospital on a bench and had a tracheostomy.

Judy had never been home with this child.

They'd been in the hospital for over six months and now they were finally coming home.

Judy has two other kids scared to death to bring the child home.

So we were thinking about this customer and we went through the journey.

We discovered two outcomes that really, really was needed by Judy more than anything.

What Judy needs is for the person who scheduled to come in to actually show up.

From the 17 step customer journey, we discovered Judy needed us to consistently fill nursing schedules.

This led us to ask the important question, what's been specific Area of greatness would help us.

And after some deliberation, the answer was clear.

We needed to be great at hiring, retaining reliable nurses who genuinely love caring for others.

So this may seem obvious, right?

Really think about this choice.

We were a nursing agency, yet our area of chosen greatness wasn't about nursing or clinical operations.

It was about being remarkable at recruiting and retaining the right nurses.

And the right nurses were the ones who would show up.

I offer you this consideration.

Sometimes the company's area of greatness is the less obvious path of focusing on something other than the product or the service itself.

Call outs were extreme leaks, obsessed setting for our families.

So choosing to be great at hiring, retaining the right nurses was not only good for our patients and their families, but it also fueled our company's growth.

The more hours that were filled consistently by the nurses, the fewer complaints we would receive, which reduced the workload of our schedulers.

And the more hours we filled, the easy it was to oversee see that patient's care.

Which meant we needed fewer RN case managers to oversee their care.

After figuring out our area of chosen greatness, our primary constraint to growth was not needing more patients, but being able to hire enough high quality nurses who would show up for work every time.

Another example I'll share with you, a company that you've probably heard of, Southwest Airlines focuses on friendly service to frequent point to point locations.

Thus their aim, unlike most other airlines, their aim is not to be in every airport, going to every location Rather, they home in on specific hub locations and go back and forth between those locations constantly, especially those that don't have a lot of point to points by other airlines.

This lets them master the art.

This is their area of greatness, the art of getting in and out fast, which means each plane makes more profit per minute.

This is where they chose to be great.

They have also held true to their identity as a friendly airline and haven't tried to be a luxury provider.

This enables them to focus on a specific market who values a lower price in exchange for some of the perks and luxuries of other airlines.

This allows Southwest to sell lots of tickets at the lowest possible price to the customer they long to serve.

Another example, ikea.

This is such a great example.

IKEA unapologetically and proudly declares to their customers that their furniture will come in a box that customers have to locate and pull from the warehouse shelves themselves and requires at home assembly.

In exchange for this, customers are assured by a wide selection of appealing modern design at the lowest possible price point.

Because you have to do the work of pulling it out and putting it together at home, you get this better price.

So this model set IKEA apart from the competition, making it the most valuable retail furniture brand in the world, valued today at more than $21 billion.

So you see how this is an example where you remake the game.

You figure out what the customer wants and you find a place to really shine.

And this is the invitation to become great.

Some might call an area of chosen greatness a unique selling proposition, but I'm incredibly focused on the benefits of being intentional with language.

To me, a unique selling proposition sounds truly misguided.

It seems centered around success being defined by selling alone and being influenced by external factors rather than the internal of the company.

So that's not the energy we're looking to channel here.

Instead, claiming your greatness calls for patience.

Because it often happens during the journey to getting it right.

To see what your greatness really is, it can be tempting to try to expedite this process.

You're a business owner and you need sales.

You want to do the thing your customers want so they'll buy from you.

You might check out what your competition is doing, which which has its merits.

You might look to see what the headlines are talking about, which also has its value.

You might pull from what's trending on social media.

Not bad to do.

But finding where your company is designed to be great is a self reflective process, not merely an analytical exercise.

It's not about studying the quadrant of different things you could be great at by mapping out speed, position and cost.

Which has its merit.

It is found through the DNA already present in what you're building.

It comes from purpose.

Where does this fit in the larger journey of your four page growth plan which hopefully every week you're looking at updating, using these master classes to help you home in on an area that can spark new innovation and greatness in your company.

So on the four page growth plan, which is your strategic plan, everything you know to unlock the puzzle of growth in your business, it's your flywheel in four pages.

So each of the legs of the flywheel live on the four page growth plan.

On page one you'll see at the bottom of the page is a section called know who you serve.

And towards the bottom of the page is a section called area of chosen greatness.

And that is where we're going to focus today.

And at the end be able to come back to the four page growth plan and fill in the blank there.

We are going to go through the area of chosen greatness identifier.

And we're going to walk through the area of chosen greatness identifier.

And we're going to use one of the fictitious companies I like to turn to it's savvy kids and we use the shared avatar Julie.

Julie is a mother of five year old Pearl.

They live in Brooklyn and Pearl's struggling to learn to tie her shoes.

Here's the area of chosen greatness identifier.

We're going to walk through it and it's pre filled in so that you can see what it looks like.

And so you see here all the definitions on the first page.

It does say here it doesn't hurt to have a little bit of work done before.

As I mentioned before, this is one of those more contemplative advanced concepts.

If you had a chance to do some of these other exercises, great.

If you haven't, that's fine too.

Your wisdom is always here to support you.

So we're going to go straight into it.

First question is in what areas is your company uniquely suited to be great?

So think about your company for a moment.

Where are you uniquely suited to be great?

Start brainstorming right down, whatever you can come up with.

Think about what is the core purpose of your company?

What's your 10 year impact goal?

What is your hundred year company vision?

What are your company Values.

What are the strengths of your offerings and services?

What are the strengths of your operations?

So just brainstorm the list.

I'll just share some things for savvy kids.

Neuroscience based learning tools, toys and products.

Great product design, colorful products kids notice videos and games to be used with their products that encourage learning through fun and play.

Great customer service where parents can call in and get immediate one on one help.

Getting high visibility product placements with kids television brands.

They have fast and easy ordering process.

You have follow up products that help your child continue to grow in multiple ways.

Write down where your company is great and the second question is in what areas does your customer long for your company to be great?

Think about what they want, what they need.

If you've done the avatar exercise, if you've done the authentic customer definition, if you've done the 17 step customer journey, you will be able to see where to be great.

In the case of savvy shoelaces, the customer needs savvy shoelaces to be great.

Is making it super easy and low stress and fun for a child to learn a new skill making it okay for kids and parents to be who they are in whatever form they are right now?

Even if they don't succeed, there's still some goodness and fun involved in the product.

Kids feeling good about their abilities and progress.

These are the things they want, these are their needs.

So the third question is what drives the economic prosperity of your company?

When you think about what drives scale, what is it that drives profit?

What factors ensure that your company, your services, your products are competitive?

What is it that moves prospects and customers to say yes to you and to your company?

Is it lead generation?

Is it keeping customers?

Is it getting customers to use your product over time, retaining customers?

Is it upselling cross selling?

Is it educating them in a particular way when you get it right, what would set everything first for your customer to keep buying and for more customers to keep coming in?

Or where is it that your profit is a problem?

Because Ikea, their problem was well, if we create these really cool products and they're fully put together and we have to have a lot more space in our warehouses, we can't sell as many different types of SKUs.

We need a lot more people to work now it's too expensive.

So what drives profitability?

What are the big costs that you could lower or do differently through a different form of operations, a different deliverable to your customer would create something unique and re remarkable and less expensive.

Okay, and then for savvy shoelaces, that selling lots of product, selling multiple products to the same customer, that's going to be really important.

How are you going to create marketing?

Marketing, marketing, marketing.

Right.

What's going to trigger those sales?

Repeat sales.

And it helped Savvy Shoelaces really understand we can't just be in the sulacious game.

It costs too much to capture a customer and then just sell a single pair of shoelaces.

We need to capture the customer and provide more value to them in a myriad of ways.

And so they have to be selective about how they do this.

Right.

But this is what they're discovering as they go through the exercise.

The next question is where is there an intersection between an area where your company is uniquely designed to be great, where a customer longs for you to be great, and what is driving economic growth?

Start to think about where those three things marinate and come together.

So where would that be for you?

For Savvy Shoelaces, they came up with learning experts creating videos and games to be used with products that encourage learning through fun and play.

That could be part of their marketing, could also be part of their ongoing staying in touch with customers and helping them.

Another thing was making it super easy, low stress and fun for a child to learn a new skill.

In other words, a selection of physical products like Shoelaces designed for learning a new skill that bring parents and children to an online subscription for play based learning.

Think about it.

Where is there an intersection?

Maybe it's not something you're doing now.

Maybe it's a new thing you could focus on that would help you drive all three things where you're already great as a company, where customer longed for you to be great, and where you can really start scale economically, profitably, get your revenues to rise fast.

All right, now you're going to prioritize.

Write down three possible areas of chosen greatness.

One is Everyday Kids products redesigned for skill based using an online play based learning system.

So that's one.

Another one, with Everyday Children's products reimagined with neuroscience based learning principles.

And three, an exceptional learning platform based on neuroscience that utilizes Everyday Children's products.

Now we're going to take the priorities and we use the 10 tenants litmus.

You're going to ask these questions yes or no in each of the things.

It doesn't have to be that all 10 have to come up as yes necessarily.

But it should come up that most if not all are a yes.

It'll also help you see there's differences between the two.

The three ideas and it may also help you come up with your final idea.

All right, so is it in your company's DNA?

Is it already there?

When they came back and looked at this, for example, they realized that Everyday kids products redesigned for skill building using an online play based learning.

That's something that needs really is already part of their DNA.

But the other two things gotta know.

All right, so you're gonna ask yourself, is it already in our DNA?

That's tenant one, tenant two, it is somewhere you're already good.

Number three, it is aligned with your core purpose, your 100 year company vision, your 10 year impact goal and your core values.

If you don't have those specifically, that's okay.

Just have it aligned with what we believe the purpose and vision of our company is.

Number four, it matters to your customer a lot.

It has to matter to your customer.

Number five, it separates your company from the pack.

So you want to sort of say, is everybody already trying to be great at this?

If everybody's saying they're great at it, is it really going to help you drive the economic prosperity of your business?

It is one specific thing everyone can understand.

All right?

This is important because we try to cram a whole bunch of things into one statement and it ends up meaning that nothing is really great and it becomes convoluted and your team doesn't understand it.

So you want it to be clear and simple.

But illume, we were like, we want to hire really good nurses who come to work when they say they're coming to work.

And that's what we hired for all the other things in a business, all the compliance rules, everything else, those things are important, but they are not the most important.

You are willing to dedicate 10 times the focus, resources and investment of everything else.

Right?

That's another way to think about it.

Where would you be willing to inverse 10 times the focus?

Where do you need that?

And maybe it's something has to do with your product or your service operations or systems.

It could be related to technology or AI, who knows.

But it's got to be something that you're like, if I really invest the crap out of that, I'm going to meet the customer's needs and we are going to sell products, product and service.

Number eight, becoming great at this one thing will make everything else better, right?

So everything else gets better because you decide to be great at this.

It drives your economic engine so that now you can now invest in the other things you want.

It helps you get your place in the market so you're Distinct.

Number nine, it fuels profit.

So not just top line revenue but bottom line profit, it fuels profit.

And number 10, it can be measurable.

So sometimes this takes some creativity.

But you will need to transform this area of greatness into a KPI, a key performance indicator, a metric.

When I think about hiring nurses who are reliable and never to call out, we had a couple of KPIs that help us measure that.

First is how many hours a week are we filling?

How many nurses do we have?

We also looked carefully at number of call outs.

How many nurses are calling out?

How do we reduce the number of nurses that call out?

How do we fix the number of nurses that call out?

So those are all the metrics that helped us transform this area of greatness.

For Soulace's company chose Everyday Kids products redesigned for skill building using an online play based learning system.

What's your area of chosen?

Greatness.

Congratulations for coming up with that first concept of what your area of greatness can be.

Hopefully you have gathered some new wisdom.

The purpose of each Force for Good tool is to help you discover your wisdom.

Wisdom is what's needed in your business more than anything else.

The tools are designed to help you and your team collectively extract your wisdom and put it on page in a written format so that you can talk about it, bounce ideas and then add it to your four page plan.

Now you have defined one area where your team, your company, is ready to shine.

You've identified an area where you will invest for scale and prosperity.

You've identified the heartbeat of your company's future excellence.

See how this thing that you've designed, you are going to really dig in and want to be great at that.

Spending decades making this area better where your purpose becomes profit.

You've also identified where you build your company's reputation for greatness.

Congratulations.

Well done.

Greatness isn't about doing it all.

It's about doing what matters most masterfully.

All right, time to update your four page growth plan.

Go to page one and hit that corner spot.

Update it with your Arab chosen greatness.

Sit back with your four page growth plan and see if it affects any other parts of your plan.

And now let's choose a high leverage habit.

So a high leverage habit is a repetitive reinforcing behavior that makes greatness inevitable.

So this is the question, what weekly or monthly ritual will help you review a KPI or a few KPIs tied to your area of greatness?

So maybe you have a Google sheet or some other platform where you put your data and every week.

You look at this data and see how you're doing in terms of your greatness.

Ask are we improving this week and celebrate progress with the team.

So we want you to be doing that every week.

So Weekly team huddle with the Area of Chosen Greatness Metric Update.

Another is a monthly leadership roundtable focused on innovations in your area of chosen greatness.

It could be quarterly customer feedback report where you're focused on their feedback not just in everything but in your area of chosen greatness.

It could be a bi weekly greatness story in your company slack.

It could be your monthly monthly town hall on how you your area of choice and greatness shaped company outcomes.

These are examples of things you do not just once, but again and again to keep the idea of greatness coming forward.

The most aligned teams aren't following more rules, they're following shared greatness.

Let's now go to identify a high potency action.

This is a bold one time action.

Unlike a high leverage habit which is repeated, the high potency action is a bold one time step to create momentum to move this idea of greatness off the ground.

So what's one action you can take this week to bring your area of chosen greatness to life?

You can add your area of chosen greatness to the next all hands meeting.

You can assign a team member as a area of chosen greatness champion.

Always have it be someone other than you for these kinds of roles, right?

Because if it's you, then you're repeating this habit of you being the center of the universe.

The next idea is to redesign onboarding for new customers as well as for new employees to reinforce the area of chosen greatness.

You could create a customer facing statement about your area of chosen greatness.

You could run a customer survey about what they value most from your area of chosen greatness and how you can get better at it right away if you don't know what your KPIs are.

If you don't have your metric chosen for your area of chosen greatness, this is the first step.

Figure out what that metric is.

How you're going to collect that metric on a daily or weekly basis.

Weekly at a minimum.

If you're looking at your greatness only monthly, you will never be great at it.

You need 52 times a year to reflect on your greatness.

12 is never going to be enough.

So find a metric that you can track pretty easily, set up a system on a weekly basis and then decide who is going to be in charge of those metrics.

So that's a really important Winning first step.

If you get that step in, you have a chance at being great.

Now you can come in every week and you can think about being great.

Strategic clarity is an act of leadership.

That's why this is so important.

Choosing your greatness is how it begins.

So you did a lot today.

You chose your area of greatness.

You used the Area of Chosen Greatness identifier.

You integrated your Area of Chosen Greatness into your four page plan, identified a high leverage habit and committed to a high potency action.

And I love this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert and her book Big Magic, which if you haven't read it, it's such a great book.

But she says the universe buries strange jewels deep within us all and then stands back to see if we can find them.

And that, my friends, is what the Area of Chosen Greatness is all about.

Living inside each company, each person is strange jewels, pieces of greatness.

It's our duty to discover what those greatness jewels are.

What's next?

Make sure you have a copy of the book Worse for Good and review this section in chapter seven.

Chapter seven is all about the area of chosen greatness.

It also reflects upon the customer journey, the 17 step customer journey and the shared Avatar together.

This really helps you reflect on where your customer needs you to be great.

You get the Full Force for Good toolkit and it gives you all everything you need to create Full Force for Good system.

You can get it at a forceforgood Biz Book.

The next thing is to make sure you're signed up for our Tool of the Week.

And you can do that by simply going to a forceforgood Biz slash Weekly Dash tool.

And every week we launch a new masterclass like this one.

You can also go through the Growth Accelerator.

This is the most expedient path to building a system of exponential growth into your company.

It is an elevated model designed for women by women.

You'll have videos, tools, assessments.

You can do it alone or with your team.

And there are several different ways you can do it.

Tiered pricing starts at $599 and you can get it all by discovering Horseforgood Biz Accelerator.

So we come to the end.

Thank you for participating in this masterclass.

Just remember that the world is made better by women by business.

So let's all go make the world of.