Dando Advisors

Welcome to The Warning Signs of Success™

January 5th, 2010 by Kirk Dando

My hope is this blog will become a must-read guide for you and other business executives who are absolutely committed to growing and developing their businesses, themselves and their next generation of leaders. It is a distillation of more than 20 years of my hands-on experience including:

• Serving as CFO/COO for a business we quickly grew to over $1 billion dollars in annual revenues and eventually sold,
• Personally interviewing thousands of business executives about how they grew their businesses and the difficulties they faced,
• Spending years in one-on-one meetings with hundreds of CEO’s, counseling them on issues they could not share with anyone else,
• Sitting on and chairing several high-profile boards of directors,
• Learning from my own successes that grew out of BIG and PAINFUL failures
• Building a thriving coaching practice focused on helping business leaders take their company and themselves to the next level, and
• Reading everything I could get my hands on about business growth and successful leadership.

My goal is to help you maintain (or rekindle) the excitement and optimism for passionately pursuing your dream and make a difference in your business and the lives of those you impact in your professional career.

The Warning Signs of Success™ is meant to guide you toward becoming the leader you most admire and to leave the legacy you most want to leave.  I’m including true stories and case studies that I believe will inspire you by demonstrating what has and just as importantly what has not worked for other leaders.

Yes, you can grow your business without learning everything the hard way. Finally, through this blog I hope to show you how to take your business to the next level and generate a new kind of wealth that is far more satisfying than money alone.

Issues the Warning Signs of Success™ Will Address

The Business Life Cycle™ — analogous to climbing Mt. Everest

• Understand why it is critical that you know exactly where your business is on The Business Life Cycle™.
• Learn why the solutions and systems you implement today eventually sow the seeds of decay as your company grows.
• Learn how to abandon past practices and to implement the systems needed to grow profitably to the next level.

The 12 Warning Signs of Success™

• Learn to recognize the Overly Obvious and Embarrassingly Simple root causes behind the challenges your businness must overcome.
• See through the confusion to understand the obvious and simple causes – you will wonder why you never saw them before!
• Understand how you can make the necessary changes to scale your business through the critical inflection points that every business encounters.
• Learn how to make big changes with honesty, fairness and stability.
• Learn from other people’s efforts by reading case studies.

Business Self-Assessment Questions

• Clearly identify the current realities of your business as well as your future goals.
• Understand how to move from where you are to where you want to be.
• Take the Deep Dive into Leadership – analogous to serving as the Sherpa guide for your employees.
• Gain inspiration and insight from thousands of business executives, business leaders, church leaders, coaches, athletes and other peo0le facing the same challenges you face.
• Learn how other leaders grew and developed their organizations and the difficulties they faced by reading case studies.
• Understand the undeniable trends that the all successful leaders use to transform their businesses, themselves and the people they are responsible for leading.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Warning Signs of Success™ is for you.  I invite you to send me your specific questions and concerns about issues you are facing as you work toward taking your business to the next level.  I will answer your questions (without mentioning names) on the Warning Signs of Success™.  Please enter your questions in Leave a Comment, along with any other comments you may have about what you have just read or what you would like to read about in future blogs.

Thank you for visiting, please come again!

KEY QUESTION:

What leadership skills or traits do you think are most critical to take a business to the next level?