The goal of our PowerLink peer forum sessions in October was to dig into each of our personalities to determine our operating style as a business founder. How do we lead? What kinds of personalities do we attract to help us on our teams? What kind of customers do we attract? Each participant in our forums are the owners of small businesses ($100,000-$5M). Each one has had some success growing their businesses to the next level. And every owner is intentional about achieving sustainable growth and profitability to $1M and beyond. But because we are all different, we operate our businesses to play to our strengths.
This month, we are addressing our core strengths as a leader and identifying our key vulnerabilities where we need help. We are using the DISC personality assessment tool that breaks down leaders into 16 different personalities (contact us at anita@powerlink.org for a link to the tool). Note that the illustration on this post uses Meyers Briggs as the assessment tool. Powerlink has been using another system, DISC, as our recommended tool because there are open, free tests on the Internet and we have multiple DISC trainers on our facilitation team. In our meetings in October, we had our participant share their DISC type and how it affected their business and influenced their leadership team. A few quick case studies:
A. Mary M (not her real name) started her business 25 years ago and has been growing a profitable business from her first year in business. Her basic personality is Problem Solver (DC in Disc). Every time she encounters a challenge in her business she persists till she finds an answer. Her main business is helping clients successfully launch new products in the commercial and construction industry. She was very successful at securing new clients with her leadership style. But her greatest challenge was leading her team, who was servicing those accounts. She admitted that she would sometimes get impatient and even angry, when her good employees would slow down, get confused or fail. About 10 years ago she lost a valued employee who got frustrated with her impatience and anger. She vowed to slow down and treat everyone more respectfully. She actually learned that same lesson as a mom and began to apply it to her employees. She also put a more people-focused person on her team to run operations. That helped her to grow even more and build a really solid team. Her DC personality brought in the revenue. Hiring an SCI to run operations helped her keep her team more settled and happier.
B. Brooke W. (Not her real name) is a confident leader, well spoken, excellent intuition with people, and is excellent at building people networks. She is in a traditional industry with lots of competition, but her excellent leadership and people skills keep her name floating in the region, and that allows her to do very little marketing to get referrals. She is a DI. She designed an extension to her service about three years ago that allows her customers to call her an unlimited number of times per month for a low monthly retainer. She also hates to solicit or cold call. So, she markets to her network to create buzz and then people call her. And once she helps them with the first problem, they stay clients for life. She has slowly built her business into almost 100% recurring revenue clients. She said she is having so much fun she may never sell her business.
C. George B (not his real name) George is the consummate storyteller, visionary leader. Think Steve Jobs from Apple. When we first met he was just coming out of closing his business and starting a new one with adjacent services in the same industry. He told us he always envisioned growing a company to hundreds of employees and impacting many more with his services. His greatest strength in rebuilding was forming his team. He was an ID in the DISC system and knew from previous experience that he needed to surround himself with detail-oriented account people who could manage the detailed systems and processes that he sold. He also needed very strong detailed people doing his financial management. They would sometimes need to be brave and experienced enough to disagree with him and convince him to move in a different direction. As he grew, he attracted more experienced people because he could afford to pay them well. It was his team that finally convinced him to balance his vision with stronger financial management. He was successful at building his second company to 10 times larger than his first company. He admitted that getting older, more mature and becoming a dad also really helped him.
Founded in 1991 in Pennsylvania, PowerLink has helped more than 3000 small businesses around the world to grow sustainably (meaning, they learn the patterns for successful growth and use them year in and year out) using an advisory board coaching model.
In November 2026, we will be doing our annual planning workshop to build our 2027 business plan, by first understanding and validating our long term personal and professional goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals).
If you want to talk to someone at PowerLink about your current business or a business relaunch, please email me at anita@powerlink.org to schedule a one- hour private meeting. There is no charge for the first session. You can also text us at 412.721.3186. If you do that, please give us a few details about you and your business so we can schedule you with the right person.
Have a happy and successful month!
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