In the summer of 2019 during the building project I put on my posh suit and went to visit the council.
Through an introduction from a patient who’s also a business coach, I got the chance to stand in a room with my laptop plugged into a screen to talk to the business development officer and the deputy chief executive of that organisation.
The point was to tell them about the buildings we were building and to see whether they wanted to buy one (actually, ultimately two).
I told them a story about who I was, where I’d been and what I’d done.
I told them I’d lived in Rushcliffe for almost 25 years, got married and started a family here.
I told them that I was a governor at the local school and a football coach at the local football team.
I told them that I’d started a business which now employed 45 people which was building these units up the road and that 1% of our turnover was relocated into charities, some wide but many in Rushcliffe.
They bought the buildings.
They never bought the buildings at all, they bought the story and then we delivered what we said in the story and so, they bought the buildings.
Last week on Thursday I had a meeting with someone very important who might well read the blog.
I showed them round the practice for the first time and the site and told the story and we talked about opportunities that we could share and mutually beneficial projects and he bought it.
He never bought it in a cheap, bad, contrived false way.
He bought into it.
On Friday I met my friend Chris (Barrow) and I showed him round too. It was a bit of a special tour for Chris because he knows a lot of the insides and outsides of the whole thing.
We talked about mutually beneficial things that could work for both of us and he bought into it too.
He never bought into a spreadsheet or a balance sheet or a bottom line, he bought into the story.
The story of us working together or the story of me helping you if you have a problem with your teeth or the story of you coming to work with me to help someone else who has a problem like that is the most important part of building a tribe and a group of people who walk the same walk and talk the same talk.
No-one will ever be able to make me believe that anything other than the story that we tell is the most important part of the project.
Blog Post Number - 2785
Leave a comment