Start With Why

I've recently become familiar with the concept of the Golden Circle created by Simon Sinek. In a powerful TED talk a few years ago, Simon explains the concept of the Golden Circle and looking at your business based on three concepts:

• What
• How 
  
• Why

In every business we understand what we do, sell, or offer our clients and customers. Whether it's widgets, cars, or professionals services, if someone asks us what we do, we typically start with the this. In the case of nology our WHAT is offering cloud based hosting and IT services to businesses. This is easy.

If we dig in further we can articulate HOW we do what we do. What sets us apart from our competition and makes us unique. This is something not all businesses can easily speak to as this is more difficult than telling people WHAT you do. At nology our HOW is customizing technology solutions for our clients that enable any device, anywhere, anytime access to their data and applications with guaranteed uptime.

Now comes the hardest of the three, the WHY. Why do you or your company do what they do? This is not about making money or being successful, that's the result. The WHY is your mission and reason for existence.

Until recently we didn't have a well articulated WHY. We knew we wanted to help businesses become more efficient with technology, we wanted them to have guaranteed uptime and reliability of their systems, and we wanted them to learn how to leverage technology to drive sales and fast paced decision making. This was a good start but it took a brainstorming session over coffee with some of our partners at Move One Degree and Connect To Buy to really refine and articulate our WHY.

"Helping businesses work smarter, not harder with anytime, anywhere, any device access to their decision making applications and data." 

After discovering the power of WHY, we are putting this at the center of our mission and letting it dominate our conversations with clients, prospects, friends and family. When someone asks what I do, I now give them the WHY.

That's our WHY, Helping business work smarter, not harder. What's yours?

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Special thanks to Keven Ebben of Move One Degree for helping us find our why. If you'd like to see the complete Simon Sinek TED talk you can view it on Youtube. 

Brendon Liner is a founding partner and cloud integration specialist at nology networks, a Minneapolis IT and Cloud provider that helps businesses work smarter, not harder.