Her lifelong passion for helping entrepreneurs unlock their potential by discovering their vision and leadership style inspired her to create NFactor Coaching, combining the best practices from her 20 years of training and teaching in some of the world's largest business training circuits, including BNI and Peak Potentials.
Noel takes clients through a unique Vision-to-Profit process, identical to the thinking and habits that led many of the leaders of today's top companies (like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Sarah Blakely) from inspired start-ups to industry dominance. Noel facilitates this process, teaching Entrepreneurs and CEOs the unique traits (she has coined "E" traits) that UNLOCK their power to instantly lead and grow their companies with Vision with a convenient, online Trademarked 12-Week Shakedown.
This interview with Coach Noel will share powerful tips that help you employ the human elements of Visionary Leadership to build a brand people want to buy so that you can transform your company's vision into profit.
What is Vision?
A clear picture of your ideals in motion. Creating a vision is like producing a movie. You start with the audience's experience in mind, craft a story that engages them, write a script that captures that story perfectly, then hire the directors and actors that believe in and convey the energy of the project to each viewer.
What is the flow of Vision to Profit?
It is human elements that drive brand success. Personal buy-in from all parties. It begins with your leadership, your inspiration, why your brand exists, how it uniquely serves who it is meant to. This is translated into a vision that paints a clear picture of the ideals that will make it happen, a reference point for each decision and action.
When your vision is clearly communicated and backed by actions consistent with your ideals throughout your company, you build a reputation that your brand doesn't simply sell products but rather is an instrument for making a positive impact on people's lives. Selling is simple numbers on a ledger; Marketing a human message makes you socially relevant, focusing on personal impact. And the profit eventually matches the impact. You invest in people, and then people invest in you. Your company's growth is a social positive feedback loop that starts with you.
When you remove these human elements, business is just math — meaningless equations and numbers — and numbers don't work on people.
No amount of money can keep a business alive when it loses social relevance, but social relevance can redeem any company no matter how little money it has. You must surround the math with the functioning human construct of meaning.
Can you recall an experience where the Human Element made all the difference?
I learned a great lesson about connecting human elements and profit as a director/trainer in Business Networking International (BNI). The whole point of BNI is to build relationships of mutual trust among members to pass qualified referrals that help expand and grow each other’s business.
They do this by hosting visitor days in their chapters to bring fresh energy and referrals into the room with mixed results. One year I voted that we host a charity event instead of a regular visitor’s day. I had grown a medical practice primarily through veteran outreach/ PR marketing. I believed the members would see a greater return on their investment by picking charity over business as a venue. What happened amazed me, and I wasn’t alone.
The first surprise was the response from the invited people. Instead of being invited to “an exciting business networking event,” this welcomed to them — "This is a fund-raising event for your favorite charity. We would love to promote your business among our 1,500 local members and their contacts. Would you like to add a product or service to our live auction? Great! Did I spell your name and business right?"
Silent auction list was put into two 4-inch binders circulated around the region at each weekly chapter meeting for a month, gaining more bids, more donations of products and services, and ultimately more emotional buy-in, ultimately, more social relevance for being personally involved in the event. The physical event was icing on the cake. More members brought guests than previous events, guests who all bought discounted services that day, with 75% converting into regular customers. The region’s closed business doubled for the quarter in one day.
The greatest testament was the members who had spent years going to meetings “learning” to pass referrals to each other — finally opened up and actually did it.
NFactor Coaching is named for its advice theory: Each “N” Factor is a key that UNLOCKS your power as an entrepreneur.
Looking good (morally) is a social factor that unlocked their potential to grow their networks, not through a business process, but under the umbrella of shared values. Every attendee gave to a charity that day and saw others do the same. It made them feel good about themselves and their fellow members, opening the door to true networking, and the money began to flow in.
Human elements driving profit.
What made you choose Visionary Leadership as a coaching specialty?
Vision is the common denominator among the most successful leaders and brands in the business, but it eludes the other 99%. I like the challenge of uncovering vision as a hidden element of leadership success, of de-constructing it and creating a process that makes it accessible to emerging leaders around the world so they can build companies as instruments to make the change they know is needed, not only driving profit but also maximizing their positive impact on other people's lives.
What Visionary Leader inspires you most?
American President John F. Kennedy exemplified the finest qualities of a Visionary Leader when he announced America's top priority would be putting a man on the moon. These are his words as he looked to the sky, "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."
His challenge to followers, "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."
What his vision accomplished:
Americans looked up at a promising achievement, not around at conditions that led nowhere.
They understood that fulfilling the vision was impossible without their individual contribution.
They understood implicitly that it was a vote of confidence for Kennedy to choose the most demanding and rewarding goal, and it brought out the best in people because they were reaching for greatness.
As a true Visionary Leader, you do not determine the destination based on present resources or circumstances but rather pick the elevated destination and have the potential to achieve it fly back in time, unlocking peoples' capacity to achieve it, then the resources will appear.
In the end, it wasn't science, technology, or mathematics that closed the distance of 238,900 miles from the Earth to the moon — it was vision.
What is the first step in the flow of Vision to profit?
It's the way you think: Stop "running a business" and think like an entrepreneur. Use an organic process to figure out your most purposeful venture. Your inspiration is the spark that lights the fire that spreads through your vision.
Focus your inspiration: If you could only accomplish ONE thing in your business in the next 5 years, what would it be?
What is the one problem you wish to solve? What is the solution? Why do you want it? Who do you serve? Who benefits, and how?
Pinpoint the outcome that stokes your strongest personal desire.
This tells you the kind of industry and product you will operate with. Next, you need to think and act as a Visionary Leader. You know you are responsible for bringing your solution to the customer, now you need a bridge between the problem and the solution.
What is the transformation you envision for each customer?
How do you take them from their personal Hell to Heaven?
How are you going to enlist the help of others to make this transformation happen?
What are the intangible rewards that will drive their desire to make this work with you?
What is the arch that connects all the dots of the human side of your business?
There is an undeniable link between Vision and Profit:
Apple sells 5% of the product in the tech industry and makes 90% of the profit.
Amazon is larger than its next 9 competitors, put together.
Spanx was founded with $5,000 and grew to a $1 Billion valuation — without a single penny spent on advertising.
The Hidden Elements of success:
The most defining characteristic of each industry's top-performing brand is that they form their brand around sharing their human ideals. They project a picture of what "ought to be" and make it happen in their daily communication and decisions. This process allows them to harness the power of vision as a catalyst to create unparalleled loyalty both inside and outside their company, alleviating and overriding the normal pains and pressures of business (that keep their competitors locked in a lower level of function), resulting in an eventual reign of profit.
After analyzing a global study on the growth performance of over 30,000 companies across all major industries, the Brandz team revealed that companies that share their brand purpose could expect to make an average of two times the profit (demonstrated on a brand equity index) over their competitors that do not.
Writing and sharing your brand purpose can be a very effective exercise for defining your broader company vision. The first step can be telling the simple story of how your company or current venture inside a company began.
People love stories. If you tell the world why your brand exists, what the personal meaning is to you, it becomes a human story. It, therefore, becomes more emotionally relevant to consumers because they see themselves more as a character in an engaging story rather than a transaction number at the end of a terminal.
With all that profit, why do so few leaders create a company Vision?
Leaders without vision (the 99% with less successful brands) tend to see the principles of success backward.
They believe as a leader because you have exceptionally high engagement and profit, you get to add vision as a sort of "luxury" or a "bonus," like adding sprinkles to the top of a cake after it is baked, cooled, and frost. Whereas, Visionary Leaders with the most successful brands know that because their vision creates human engagement, people go the extra mile every day to live it. They get to add sprinkles on the cake: Profit.
I feel a need to examine this "Vision as a luxury" mentality as a possible driver of today's business leadership vacuum following the record-breaking mass exodus of CEOs in 2019 that continues today.
If there were one prevalent mentality behind this exodus, it would be the sprinkles on the cake analogy: Many CEOs are hired to lead companies to keep them profitable: To drive people to ultimately create a finished product and experience that uniquely satisfies the customer with a culture that benefits the people behind the effort but they only want to add sprinkles on the cake. They want a company to prove itself to them with numbers before they invest in its future. But few companies will ever satisfy this expectation because there is no sustained human investment in individuals or groups in accomplishing greatness, generating the profit numbers the ego likes to see. These people in authority want credit for a cake they are unwilling to bake themselves, and they can't have it, so they look for the next bakery. And on.
It is a great point of personal short-sightedness to examine in your own leadership expectations. As the head chef, when the numbers don't flatter your ego:
Are you rallying the kitchen?
Are you Leading to greatness for profit to follow?
Or are you the founder or CEO of a dozen dead bakeries?
How has the COVID era changed your personal sense of vision?
Entirely. In March of 2020, I found myself in the middle of turbulence, with the third interstate move that year, a divorce, and career change, all with a 3-year-old in tow. Then the COVID shutdowns hit my area. I could have collapsed amid total personal chaos, but instead, I thought about vision:
What is the most ideal life I can create for myself and other people? I asked myself, "If I could choose one positive impact to make, what would it be?" I love entrepreneurs. I love to see change unfold.
What could I give to this group of truly exceptional people?
The answer: More of what they already are. Emphasize the traits that make them successful at creating the positive change they know is needed because entrepreneurs don't only solve problems in industry; they drive the human race forward.
The best leaders will be born of the COVID crisis. Influencers have always looked for large shifts in trends, lifestyles, and expectations, and COVID is the BIG shift, leaving no one unaffected. One way of life has died, another way of life: Emerging.
The vision you create today will be a new horizon, and if you lead effectively, your company can be a bridge over the chasm of uncertainty and fear, drawing people toward the brightness of a new day.
The simplest definition is the most compelling.
As soon as you find your spark of vision, hold it up, and it will give Light for others to follow. Thousands of entrepreneurs and CEOs around the world have worked with Noel, discovering the keys that unlock their ability as leaders to create and implement a vision so they not only build a profitable company. But leave a legacy! If you are thinking about the total direction of your company or need a speaker at your next corporate event.
Book a free Discovery call. Download the free guide to starting the Vision-to-Profit process in your business and join Noel on the NFactor blog for more keys to UNLOCK your power as an entrepreneur.
Follow Noel on Facebook, Linkedin and subscribe to her Youtube Channel for more information.
