Thought Leaders 2016 With Marcus Lemonis
Question: Who is someone that you want to see? How are you going to make it a reality? What is something that you can do to be truer to yourself?
I’m a big fan of Marcus Lemonis, and his show The Profit is what I aspire to do: I want to develop a level of experience and expertise that would allow me to walk into any struggling business and, with adequate research of course, turn it around. I also want to do it for ownership, so I’m on the same team as the new owner, and we both want to make it succeed.
The event started off much differently than I expected. Marcus started off by sharing some very personal things about himself. He made clear that his intent was not to make us feel sorry for him, but to empathize with him. When someone opens up to you, you are much more willing to open up to them. This applies to any relationship in life, and we can all take a note on being more vulnerable and more willing to put ourselves out there.
More specifically, he applied it to business. He said that he sees a lot of small business owners putting on a façade, pretending to be someone they’re not. For many reasons, we are afraid of letting our customers, vendors, bankers, accountants, employees (and the list goes on) know the truth about something. To me, it seems like one of the biggest things that we’re all afraid of letting people know is that… we’re afraid!
But it’s hard enough to be ourselves in today’s world. We shouldn’t make things even harder by pretending to be someone we’re not. Not only will you get caught sooner or later, but you just won’t enjoy yourself as much along the way. Applying this to myself, I wore a suit to the event, and that’s very much not my style. Even my girlfriend said “you’re wearing a suit?” rather surprised. I had already thought about it, and I was trying to “dress to impress” and all that, and I thought Marcus would be suited up as well (I was very wrong).
I’m not saying that there aren’t times when I should wear a suit, but it is something I will ponder on a little further… I will do my best to always be genuine, starting with myself, and then with others, and I hope you do the same as well. Let’s be real human beings.