Characteristics of Missionaries and Mercenaries

Missionaries:

• Purpose-Driven: Focused on the company’s vision and values, often motivated by making a meaningful impact.
• Long-Term Commitment: Likely to stay with the company through ups and downs, seeing their work as a calling or part of a larger mission.
• Team-Oriented: They prioritize collaboration and the overall success of the team over personal gain.

Mercenaries:

• Outcome-Focused: Driven primarily by personal benefits such as compensation, bonuses, and other perks.
• Short-Term Commitment: Their loyalty is as long as the benefits last; they may quickly move on if a better offer appears.
• Individualistic: Tends to prioritize personal achievements and recognition over team success.

2. Identifying Missionaries and Mercenaries in the Workplace

Missionaries:

• Look for employees who advocate for the company’s values and are enthusiastic about company-wide goals and missions.
• They often go beyond their job descriptions to help colleagues and advance the organization’s objectives.

Mercenaries:

• Identify those who frequently negotiate for higher pay or better titles without corresponding increases in their contribution to team goals.
• They may exhibit high performance but are less interested in collaborative projects unless these directly impact their personal targets.

3. The Strategic Use of Mercenaries in Business

When You’d Want a Mercenary:

• Special Projects: For short-term, high-impact projects where specific skills are crucial, and the commitment is finite.
• Scaling Operations: When rapid scaling is needed, mercenaries can accelerate growth given their focus on outcomes and deliverables.

4. Encouraging Missionaries to Thrive

Stoking Up Missionaries:

• Align Roles with Passions: Ensure that their roles are closely aligned with what they are passionate about within the context of the company’s mission.
• Recognition and Empowerment: Recognize their contributions in meaningful ways and empower them with the autonomy to lead initiatives.
• Foster a Purpose-Driven Culture: Strengthen the company’s mission-oriented culture, making the collective mission a central part of daily business operations.

If you want to join the conversation with other entrepreneurs, click here.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

I get between 30 and 300 messages on FB every single day. Usually, I ask, "what are your goals for the business?" and the entrepreneur answers, "I need more clients." But in many ases, they have lots of clients, and that's not ht eproblem. They're chasing the wrong metric. In fact, they're chasing the hardest metric. They should be chasing profit. How do you get more profit and impove that metric? Getting more revenue and cutting unnecessary expenses. You improve those 2 metrics. How do you improve the revenue metric? More clients, maybe...or maybe more rev per client, or maybe less churn. You improve those 3 metrics (headcount, ARM and LEG) But what if you just improved one of those metrics right now? Like ARM? well, every client goes up $10/mo. If you have 100 clients, that's 1000 more/mo. So you improve revenue. Since that revenue doesn't come with additional expenses, the new revenue is all profit. Bingo - you've improved hte metric you actually want to improve. Now let's look at the alternative. You want to improve revenue so you increase client headcount. Well, more clients comes with some expenses: staff, equipment, etc. A good benchmark is that 44% of your revenue, per client, goes to staff. So you bring on 10 clients paying $100/mo...and you have to add coaches and equipment. So maybe about $550 goes to the bottom line. You've improved revenue by $1000, but profit by only $550. Obviously there are a lot of factors here. BUT the key is identifying the right metric to improve. Professionals can actually grow a lot faster by increasing the frequency and value of their services than by increasing their client count. This is where a mentor helps: You start with the end in mind. If your mentor is asking "why do you want that?" it's because they're trying to guide you to the endgame - the picture of success that you have in your head. You might not even have taken the time to craft this picture, which is why you're chasing the wrong metric. Or maybe you know where you want to go, but haven't 'considered all sides of the coin. THat's where a mentor can help too: they can show you the easiest ways to get to your goal once you have it. It's up to you to track these metrics. and when you become a very good business owner, you can identify these opportunities for yourself. Until then, though, if you think that 'more clients' = success, I'd seek an outside perspective.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

When most entrepreneurs get their business running smoothly, they turn their eyes to the next thing: the next level, the next opportunity, the next location, or the next big idea.

This means they no longer spend all of their time caring for, feeding and protecting the Golden Goose. They might entrust its care to someone else...but that person doesn't have all of the context, experience or knowledge of the business owner.

We call this "moving from Farmer phase to Tinker Phase". When you leave your farm in the hands of someone else and start tinkering, you have to mentor the new farmer.

In this episode, I talk about the step that most successful founders skip: mentoring their team.

I tell you why it's important, and how to do it step by step.

If you want to join the conversation with other entrepreneurs, click here.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/