I must admit, I have fallen in love with the word “unrivaled.” I thought about it again this morning as I was checking my LinkedIn account and saw that an old friend had reached out to me to connect. We used to compete in tennis, and eventually became team mates. (Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.) As soon as I saw his invitation, I thought of his tenacity as a competitor and how it was unrivaled compared to the other players I competed with. There was just no comparison to how hard he would compete to beat you.
Reminiscing about our playing days brought me back to HORNE’s 2020 Vision. The first sentence reads, “We deliver unrivaled focused expertise.” Right in the center of the sentence is the word “unrivaled.” It means we that pursue our focused expertise with uncommon discipline and tenacity.
As leaders, we should always strive to be unrivaled. To do that, we must be focused on greatness. Achieving our full potential requires us to be unrivaled in our focus and passion to meet the needs of our clients, and our people.
Unrivaled sets a high bar, but one that will help us on our journey to being the Wise Firm. It takes fierce ownership by each team member to understand client expectations and to exceed them. It’s about 100% accountability and 0% excuses. It implies that without exception, clients can expect this level of service in all that we do.
The only way we can deliver each and every time, is by the power of focus! You cannot be everything to everybody. Being a focused expert means developing a depth of knowledge, a point of view, and a passion for excellence that is second to none. Focus is powerful.
Think about the sun and how intense it is. It is extremely powerful, yet we can stay out in the sun for hours at a time. We might get a little sunburned without sunscreen, but overall we are going to be just fine. You can take a much lower intensity light and focus it into a tight beam (laser), and it will burn a hole right through you in a matter of seconds. That’s the power of focus!
Focused expertise will open doors, bring value to our clients, and make a difference in their businesses and their personal lives.
Fifteen minutes a day, reading on a focused subject, can make you an expert in three short years. Imagine if we work within a focused area for three years what our level of knowledge will be. Will you continue to develop the uncommon discipline to have intense focus, to be unrivaled?
