17 Rockefeller Habits: An Approach to Growing Your Business

Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just commencing your journey in the world of business, there’s always something you can do to make decision making, planning and strategizing more effective.

As a solopreneur, the ace of all problems we deal with is to understand which matters need our attention the most. Learning to discern where to apply our primary focus will help you stay on track when you’re being hit by external distractions and curveballs.

Not prioritizing the matters that need your immediate attention while chasing the solution to fix temporary issues will derail your business growth like no other.

This is where a business owner is called to change their approach to business to see steady growth and great results. If you’re one of those extremely talented yet distracted people who bounce from goal to goal without accomplishing a solid result, this article is for you.

Today, we’re going to dive into John D Rockefeller’s principles of business. He was one of the most intelligent visionaries who led the way towards business growth through better management skills. Rockefeller is a reminder that management of an entire empire begins with managing yourself, your thoughts, habits and discipline.

No matter how successful a business you already have, these tips will help align you with your true potential even better.

What are Key Elements of The Rockefeller Approach?

There are three core pillars of The Rockefeller Approach in business. These are meant to lock down the ownership, management and workforce into alignment with their number one priority.

Be it a monthly approach or quarterly, the three pillars establish a common vision for the entire organization to work towards. By focusing on these three key elements, it is easy to create a sense of business discipline and routine when it comes to operations.

They are:

Goal Tracking:

How: Get the entire organization aligned with the first and only priority for the business to accomplish in a month or quarter for growth.

Running a business without a clear-cut goal in hindsight is equivalent to shooting arrows randomly hoping a bird lands on your lap. Unless it’s a lucky strike, such a haphazard approach wastes time and resources.

Before one can even commence business setting specific and attainable targets is the most important pillar to establish.

Your goal will define your core values, vision, and ethos. These, in turn, will keep your teams aligned and healthy.

So how do you keep a check on your alignment?

This is where goal tracking comes into place. Assign a big target by breaking them down into smaller, achievable targets to every employee and have them report the progress of their work quantitatively to rally all the teams together

Daily Check-ins:

To make sure that your teams receive their daily agenda and accomplish it, holding a short huddle every day before business opens will set a rhythm to receiving accurate information.

In the daily check-ins involve every member updating everyone else on their current activities and progress.

This is a military approach to holding briefings and keeps the staff sharper without an excuse to drift away.

This pillar makes sure that there is complete transparency in the operations of the company. Also, individuals are accountable for their goals due to public visibility.

Team Reporting:

How: The input of the employees is taken into account in real-time to recognize opportunities and roadblocks.

Since you have established a routine with continuous goal tracking and check-ins, you can now focus on creating a network of centralised communication for teams to report to. This structure of team reporting as a habit involves a run-down of their weekly progress, plans and the obstacles faced by an employee.

If there are any critical problems, they will be brought to light for all the teams to regroup and recalibrate their strategy to overcome them.

Top 17 Ways You Can Use Rockefeller’s Approach For Business Growth.

Now that you understand the core essence of Rockefeller’s approach, here are 17 ways that you can adapt to achieve effective results in your business.

1. Setting Core Values: Laying down the foundation of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ is of utmost importance in a business organization. With a sense of identity, the employees can align themselves with the company’s purpose to exist. Giving the staff a vision to look up to makes it easier to adopt a unified approach.
2. Goals Alignment: The other important question to ask and establish is ‘why we do, what we do’. Identifying the causes to serve creates a sense of purpose to the teams who can strategize the best way to keep themselves in line with their common goal.

Regular checks to ensure each staff member’s progress and activities are aligned with the collective and to course-correct when diverted is a necessary step in goals alignment.

1. Communication Rhythm: Having a constant flow of communication helps the organization be transparent in its activities and functioning. Running a structured network for employees helps in creating momentum to effective and channelled communication. It also helps in addressing minor problems and set-backs before they snowball into major ones.
2. Accountability: By handing individuals tasks of a large goal in small chunks creates a chain of accountability among the teams. When one process depends on the other, there is a very small chance of the members slacking as they are all held personally accountable for a part of the process.

As a domino effect, one employee’s goals are directly linked to the ultimate target. Hence, holding each team member accountable for their progress by receiving daily/weekly/monthly updates and logs is a necessary step to business growth.

1. Employee Engagement: Knowing the side to your employee’s story is a good way to improve functioning. Being heard and seen gives a sense of belonging to the staff and that leads to boosting their morale. Engagements could include asking for their feedback, group exercises and bonding activities to create a unified front.
2. Data Analysis: Data is the key to building the company’s future performance. By collecting data of the company’s past and current progress records, concerning the market, current demand, and competitor analysis. One will be able to organize a future course of action to attain their goal when they know what the trends are.
3. Grow the top line: Aim to grow the overall sales and revenue of your organization rather than focusing on the net profit. Concentrate on maximising your operational revenue, since your top line figures are the metric of your business’ overall performance. Your future potential will draw in more investors.
4. Reduce costs: By reducing avoidable costs, an organization can divert the resources to more productive channels. For example: when having in-house specialists for data storage becomes too expensive, it is best to hand over the data to fortified data security and analysis companies. It is cost-effective as well as efficient.
5. New lines of business: When one gets the opportunity to grow multiple streams of income, expanding into new lines of business will help immensely in growth. Having parallel and related brands or products will bring in more income as well as economies of scale.
6. Optimize: Try to streamline processes and operations wherever possible. Be it a production unit or a consultancy service, optimizing your time, labour and resources will boost the overall efficiency of your business.
7. Maximize: By reducing the price of your services, you can create the highest margins of profits through increased sales. The target is to provide a unique service and product and selling it at competitive pricing to increase the total sales.
8. Cost Fasting: To gain the maximum margin in profits, cutting costs of the processes and production go a long way. Where can you save on costs? Is it by outsourcing parts and services? Or by using alternative technology?
9. Customer engagement: To keep your goals on track, it is important to know what your ultimate customer wants and thinks. Customer engagement to understand their mentality, demands, spending habits and capacity will help you modify and realign those priorities.
10. Evangelize a product: To sell a product, you have to first believe yourselves that it is the most revolutionary product to be created. Your entire team should be strong advocates of the product and this comes from a strengthened belief in why it is the best.
11. Videos to educate: Creating promotional campaigns through videos to educate people about your services and products will leave a lasting impact on them. To be remembered, you need to be seen and provide something of value.
12. Educate Yourself: Growth is directly proportional to continuous learning. Find new methods and channels to keep yourself educated about new developments, technologies and the market to keep yourself up to speed with the world.

Wrapping Up

While business isn’t rocket science, it does need careful planning and a definite path to follow for guaranteed success. Rockefeller’s Approach is one such path that has been tried, tested and provided stellar results in the overall performance of top business leaders and their companies. When followed with discipline and the right attitude, it will work wonders on your growing empire too!