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Take off those blinders
and look around

WHY IS IT that most owners, who desperately want to grow their business, and dramatically increase their profits, end up trudging through their days like carriage horses with blinders on? The leaders in any given market, niche or industry don't act that way.

The answer lies in how often these effective entrepreneurs travel outside their business. Have you ever traveled outside your city? Outside your state?

Every time you do, you're exposed to different climates, foods, cultures, moralities and values. Your perspective gets broader and it forever shifts the way you look at your own hometown -- for better or worse.

Traveling outside your business will do the same thing.

Why?

Because the most powerful approach for your business may be commonplace in another industry. Solutions, strategies and answers that you're searching for in your own industry are often as common as dirt in another.

Traveling outside your business is how you gain preeminence in your niche and become a leader in your market. When you look at the great breakthroughs that cause radical shifts in the marketplace, virtually all come from outside the industry that person was in.

If FedEx, for example, hadn't borrowed the hub-and-spoke processing system from the Federal Bank, then your packages wouldn't be rocketing across the country and going door-to-door within a day.

TO HELP REMOVE any lingering roadblocks, and help you travel outside your business with greater ease, here are two simple steps that you can take to create innovative, market-leading changes in your business.

» Think laterally, not literally. Literal thinkers are like those carriage horses with blinders on. They travel the same track as the horse in front of them, ignorant of the opportunities that lie all around them in adjacent industries.

Lateral thinkers are always asking themselves, "What about this experience/strategy/procedure? Is it applicable to me?" They realize that the great breakthroughs in business will never come from within their own industry. They come from outside.

» Consult with owners outside your industry. Get together with a group of like-minded business owners from different industries, then regularly meet with them to discuss ideas and solutions that target different industries. It's a powerful process that helps you travel outside your business in a very convenient way.

Take the blinders off, start looking outside your industry for answers, and prepare yourself to be a leader in your marketplace.