Future CEO Blog: Be Strategic about your Future
Future CEO Blog: Be Strategic about your Future
by Larry Madrid
You don’t become a Chief Executive Officer overnight. It is a process of learning and doing. When an opportunity comes your way, you envision what that opportunity could mean to you if everything works out. I’ve found that being a good CEO requires being a visionary and a strategic thinker. And… I think everyone can become better at these skills.
As the CEO of Madrid Engineering Group, Inc. I am responsible for not only what is happening today at my company, but what my firm will be doing tomorrow, next month, next year, and even years down the road. So what does it take to do that? First, envisioning, and then strategic thinking. And you can start right now being the CEO of your life!
If you’re reading this, you’re probably saying “Mr. Madrid, you’ve got it all wrong. My parents are in charge. I have a curfew and if I don’t make it home on time, my mom will kill me. I’m not really in charge of anything.” But wait a minute. There are and have always been things that you are in charge of. You are in charge of your outlook on life. You can be easily defeated… or you can say ‘I will never surrender!’. You can decide to be happy or sad, angry or not. Listen, you’ve already made a bunch of decisions today whether to be positive or to be negative about many things. Those attitudes will either get you where you want to go, or they could prevent you from getting where you want to be.
Let me give you an example from my company. We were a phenomenally successful engineering company for over 10 years when we became one of the most trusted sinkhole specialists in the State of Florida. We would get assignments from our clients (mostly major insurance companies) to evaluate houses with some sort of damage to them. We followed the regulations and guidelines for sinkhole investigations, and took photos of cracks on the houses, dug test pits, and drilled holes that investigated the subsurface all the way down to limestone (sometimes more than 150 feet deep!), and more. Each job ranged in cost from about $8000 to $12,000, and we did hundreds of them per year. We were in high demand until… the state changed the regulations to make it harder for a homeowner to have a valid sinkhole claim. All of a sudden, they didn’t need us.
So I had a choice. I could have given up and told all my employees that they didn’t have a job anymore; or I could have decided to find another area of engineering for us to excel at. Well, I didn’t give up and neither did my team. Now we have offices around the state and we employ more people than we did during the ‘sinkhole years’. We also have more clients and we are capable of doing many more different types of engineering evaluations. So when the next time one of our clients says they don’t need us anymore (that could happen), we will have hundreds of clients who still do need us! That is what diversification does for a company.
How about you? You may not be in charge of everything (we certainly were not in charge of the legislature that changed the sinkhole regulations), but there are things you can take charge of right now. So be the Chief Executive Officer of your life! Take some time and really think about what you might want to do with your life. Then, with the end in mind, work through the steps it will take to get there. Also, do yourself a favor and write it down – a written plan has a much better chance of getting done than something that is at the back of your mind. Then take on the challenge of creating the life you want, one day at a time, one small task at a time, with a plan that you will eventually fulfill!