I pride myself on both conforming to the rules and being a rule breaker. Now, I know what you must be thinking. That makes absolutely no sense and is severely contradictory. But, if you ponder that for just a moment longer, then indulge me for a few minutes, I promise to explain and make it worth your while.
There are the rules of ethics in my personal and professional life that I will never compromise. But when it comes to operating my business by the rules and coloring inside the lines, that’s where the conformity ends and my success begins. In my world, there are no bad ideas – everything is fair game. Thinking is neither inside or outside the box. In fact, there often is no box! If I played the game by other people’s rules, I would not be where I am today. If I did not take huge risks and rail against the odds, I would not have realized huge returns. Which is why I hold the subject of this week’s blog is such high regard.
Entrepreneur Barnaby Lashbrooke, who at only 17 years old, launched his first business from his childhood bedroom and a $150 GBP investment. His determination to keep his web hosting customers happy, combined with his inexperience of how things worked “in the real world” allowed him to take risks that put his company on the map. After only six years in business, he began receiving several low offers to purchase his company. Knowing he could do better, he sold it for $2.1 million GBP to a major British public company.
Lashbrooke started his second company but, it wasn’t going as well as the first. As he puts it, he was “working seven days a week, doing as much advertising that he can afford, but the business is barely profitable.” His staff and managers were doing all they could but he just could not get the business to work.
After one particularly rough staff meeting, Lashbrooke painfully realized that for the first time in his life, he was following the rule book. And by following that rule book, it changed who he was as a leader. He decided that if he was going to rebuild the company from the ground up, he would have to do it that day. So he did, and he began by ripping up the rule book.
Lashbrooke restructured his company into what is now Time etc, one of the most successful virtual assistant business platforms in the world. They employ nearly 700 freelance virtual workers across the United Kingdom and United States. For more than 13 years, Time etc has worked with more than 10,000 clients, and completed about 1.5 million tasks.
Lashbrooke shared his inspirational story in a 2017 TEDx Talk. In it, he points out that “we are in control of the rules. And, the exciting thing is, we can choose not to follow other people’s rules. And not only are we in control, but we can create our own rules. If we ever find ourselves stuck in our career, business or personal life, we need only ask ourselves this one question, ‘whose rules am I following?’ If the answer is somebody else’s rules, then just stop and imagine what would happen if you created your own.”
Why following the rules isn’t always good for you
Barnaby Lashbrooke | TEDxLeamingtonSpa | February 24, 2017
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