Building Businesses - Growth Mindset
Blenheim Chalcot and Agilisys Guernsey talk about growth mindset for your business - Scroll down to watch the event in full
The building businesses breakfast began with Charles Mindenhall, Co-Founder of Blenheim Chalcot talking us through the growth of Blenheim Chalcot, a venture builder focused on working closely with entrepreneurs to build their business. Over the years, Blenheim Chalcot has developed businesses in many different sectors while encouraging collaboration and innovation to help entrepreneurs further expand their venture.
"Growth mindset is all about handling failure, and your emotional ability to handle failure and fix it." Charles lead this discussion with an encouraging word for small businesses, likening a startups journey to a chain of discoveries. An upper hand on a daunting competitor like a large commercial enterprise that may only make small steps during their innovation process due to the fear of failure and its rippling effects. To be able to take advantage of having room to evolve and pivot takes only courage and a willingness to roll with the punches and learn from them.
"Growth mindset is all about handling failure, and your emotional ability to handle failure and fix it."
Charles Mindenhall, Co-Founder of Blenheim Chalcot
"To succeed you need this mindset to experiment all the time, the nature of experiments being failure." Charles stated, "how do you then deal with the embarrassment of failure?" the answer, OWN IT! Take your failure and without losing your enthusiasm learn from it and apply it to your business. This, in essence, is a growth mindset.
Secondly we heard from Richard Hanrahan, CEO of Agilisys on their journey as a venture support agency, providing long-term digital support to businesses as part of Blenheim Chalcot. Richard expanded on the evolution of e-commerce in the last year thanks to COVID-19 pushing forward our digital evolution, and how it has impacted not only larger enterprises but the opportunities it has now opened for smaller businesses. "The boundaries that used to restrain Guernsey enterprises have now gone, use the new technology available and learn new skills!"
Richard here refers to the surge in acceptance towards zoom meetings and events, the rise in online shopping and the need to travel expensively off the island to make any business connections being made redundant in the process. So how can you take advantage of technology and embrace failure to grow your business?
5 growth mindset tips you can apply to your business today!
1) Use data to build your opinions, how can you adopt productive reasoning into your business?
2) Own your mistakes! How do you take that failure and keep your enthusiasm?
3) Be less risk-averse, how can you make a change in your business (no matter how small) to take steps towards innovation?
4) Keep learning! What skills can you and your colleagues learn to stay ahead of whatever twists and turns the market may make?
5) Do the most important thing on your to-do list first. Whatever is the hardest, most uncomfortable daunting job you wish to put off, do it first!
