Even in a difficult economy, Jonathan D. Rosen says you can still steer with a steady hand if you’re always honest with your customers and employees.
“Sometimes that involves tough choices,” says Rosen, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Entaire Global Cos. Inc. “But if you have an honest dialogue … even if you’re delivering bad news, they’ll respect your perspective.”
Involving employees in every aspect of Entaire’s business, from vision planning to financial review sessions, has been a vital key to the company’s success. Since co-founding Entaire in 1997, Rosen has grown the company’s revenue to $16 million in 2008. The company, which works with business owners, medical practitioners and legal professionals to find solutions for their financial and retirement planning problems, has 33 full-time employees and 3,500 independent contractors.
Smart Business spoke with Rosen about how to create a plan that will allow your company to reach its goals and why you need to buy more lunches as your company grows.
Work backward toward your goal. The first step is dreaming about where you want the thing to be. If you look out five or 10 years into the future, what do you want that landscape to look like for your business? You draw on your internal resources and your external resources and your advisers, and you say, ‘If I were painting a picture, what would I want that picture to be?’
Then, you back up and you build pathing between where you are today and the end goal.
Along the way, you check and make sure you haven’t deviated from your course.
It’s a lot like navigation — you know where you are and you know where you want to go. It is a lot easier to make simple course corrections along the way than to get three-quarters of the way there and then realize you need to make a huge course correction.
You try to get more information sooner. Then you can create more landmarks, find more landmarks and get a real feel for where you are. So if it turns out that a course correction is essential, you can go ahead and make it now rather than later.
