Robin Sharma is a world renowned author and speaker who helps build leadership talent and inspires action.

Better Life Maids is a company not just dedicated to hiring and training employees, but building great leaders. One of the philosophies we have adopted is the Lead Without a Title system created by Robin Sharma and expressed in his 2010 bestselling book The Leader Who Had No Title. 

In the book, Sharma crafts a story of an ordinary man, who is given the gift of knowledge. The knowledge of what it will take to live an extraordinary life. A life without regret. Early on in the story the idea of the 10 Human Regrets is introduced and the idea that their are two ways to die, and that embracing that inevitable fact, and the truly short time we are here will force us to make a choice. That choice being to embrace life and living each day to the fullest, or to face these regrets on the last of our days.

These are the 10 regrets he lays out in the book, and I do think they concisely express many of our greatest regrets and fears. I think to truly live an extraordinary life you need to recognize these regrets so you can find a path in life that will help you avoid them. In a subsequent blog post we will discuss the ideas of the 10 Human Victories.

1. You reach your last day with the brilliant song that your life was meant to sing still silent within you.

2. You reach your last day without ever having experienced the natural power that inhabits you to do great work and achieve great things.

3. You reach your last day realizing that you never inspired anyone else by the example that you set.

4. You reach your last day full of pain at the realization that you never took any bold risks and so you never received any bright rewards.

5. You reach your last day understanding that you missed the opportunity to catch a glimpse of mastery because you bought into the lie that you had to be resigned to mediocrity.

6. You reach your last day and feel heart broken that you never learned the skill of transforming adversity into victory and lead into gold.

7. You reach your last day regretting that you forgot that work is about being radically helpful to others rather than being helpful only to yourself.

8. You reach your last day with the awareness that you ended up living the life that society trained you to want versus leading the life you truly wanted to have.

9. You reached your last day and awaken to the fact that you never realized your absolute best nor touched the special genius that you were built to become.

10. You reach your last day and discover you could have been a leader and left this world so much better than you found it. But you refused to accept that mission because you were just too scared. And so you failed. And wasted a life.

I hope that you can find inspiration to help you live your very best life, learn to Lead Without a Title, and craft a world class life full of victory and avoid these regrets. Please read more about this philosophy at www.robinsharma.com and pick up one of his many great books. The concept that one idea can change the course of your life is important. If you can take away just one idea from Sharma, or other great thinkers and writers you can continue to grow and challenge yourself each day.

You always here the saying that “good help is hard to find”. And to some degree it is true. We literally screen nearly 100 applicants for each new Better Life Maid that we hire. We actually use our CORE values to look for great traits when hiring new team members. It is amazing when you find just the right candidate who possesses most if not all of our CORE values and demonstrates them well during the screening process. These future Better Life Maids are rock stars of our company, because they understand that Better Life Maids success will lead to greater opportunities for them as well.

1. DELIVER WOW! It may sound cliche, but our best Better Life Maids are concerned with going above and beyond for our clients. During the interview process we ask them about a time they have gone above and beyond for a customer. Most people can’t cite a specific example because they only do the bare minimum. However the ones that we choose can distinctly recall a time that they delivered an exceptional customer experience. The truth is the best candidates have extremely high personal standards, and all we need to do is set them loose with the stated goal do doing whatever it takes to make a client happy.

2. BELIEVE. Great employees have a strong developed sense of self. They believe in themselves and their ability to be great. They also believe that their work matters and they are part of building something.

3. CREATE FUN. We like to have fun at Better Life Maids and look for people who have fun or interesting hobbies to join our team. We also look for people that exude positive energy and can use that do deal with stressful situations as they arrive. So much of any employees success with us comes down to attitude.

4. INTEGRITY MATTERS. Integrity is really not something we are willing to train into our employees. In fact we do a lot of screening and testing to see if a candidate meets our rigorous standards. You can’t take any short cuts here. Better Life Maids have  to be able to tell it like it is. It hurts our team if we have to find out they made a mistake from a client, before they tell us and give us the opportunity to make things right. One thing we teach our staff is that integrity is our lasting legacy. When we are gone, no one will care how much money we had, or the car we drove, but our integrity will be remembered.

5. SERVING. Being a service minded person seems like a pretty obvious trait to look for when hiring at Better Life Maids, but what I really am looking for is people that donate their time and talent in service to others. Some of our very best people work on relief efforts when natural disasters strike, have a long term commitment to a cause such as Haiti, and are often found giving their time to local efforts as well. Someone who knows how to serve others when they have nothing to give in return, truly understands how to give great customer service as well.

6. DEPENDABLE. Being dependable is a trait that is not always apparent right away during the interview process, it does help if they make the effort to show up on time or early. However, I can’t remember a candidate who hasn’t told us about how reliable, and how hard of a worker they are. References sometimes help here, but their really is no way to know if you can depend on someone, until you have to depend on them. People that are truly dependable, find ways to make it to work, they are on time or early every day, and you have to spend little if any time coaching them on tardiness or attendance. They do what they are supposed to do, because its the right thing to do.

7. LEARN & GROW. Truly great Better Life Maids are dedicated to growing as people and often they inspire others around them to do the same. They read great books, they share ideas, and they want to learn new things each day. You can find out a lot about your candidates by asking them what their ideal future looks like. Tell them to be honest and listen without judgement. I promise you might even hear some ideas you’ll learn and grow from. We also encourage this trait with all of our employees with a company lending library with inspirational titles from Robin Sharma, Michael Gerber, Napolean Hill, and many more.

8. PASSIONATE: Life is too short to live without passion. It can be hard to be passionate about cleaning toilets, but great employees are passionate about their job. When you are interviewing them, see how they feel about their current and past jobs. Most of them can relate some aspect of it that they loved. How about hobbies or activities that make them light up with joy when they tell you about them. Passionate people are fun, and their energy is contagious.

9. KIND. It should go without saying that we all want kind employees, but in our fast paced, social media world, many of us have forgotten how to slow down and smell the roses. In fact many of us have lost basic manners altogether. We really look hard for people who have great customer service skills and kindness. These team members tend to be some of the most beloved members of our teams. As the old saying goes, kill them with kindness.

10. BE GREEN! We look for team members who are interested in being good stewards for the planet. Many of our team members volunteer in organizations dedicated to green initiatives like organic farming, or community gardens. It is not a make or break characteristic, but we find that employees who tend to embrace ideas on environmental stewardship and care about the community and the world as a whole make Better employees in our organization.

The truth is what works for us, may not work for your organization, but if you know what the values are that shape your business you can begin to look for great employees that will mirror those values to the world.

>>Find out more about Better Life Maids and download our franchise brochure.

Tuesday January 22nd I will be speaking on the topic of Social Media Strategy for ARCSI the Association of Residential Cleaning Services International. Small Business Social Media Strategy is a pretty hot topic right now, and many small businesses are struggling to find the time, and return on investment that engaging in social media promises. I will try to shed some light on the subject and keep it interesting at the same time. You can watch the live broadcast at http://www.betterlifemaids.com/hangout. I will be using the “newish” Google + hangout tool to do so. Sharing in real time, while simultaneously showing the functions of what I consider to be one of the most useful, yet underused social networks. If you are reading this after the fact, the entire hangout will be uploaded automatically to the Better Life Maids YouTube channel for you to watch at any time.

The first key to any small business seeking to grow their presence on social media is to be “Likeable”. Dave Kerpen talks about this concept in his aptly named book Likeable Social Media. The concept is really pretty simple, have something interesting to say, and say it in a way that is fresh and fun. The truth is, that not all businesses are cut out to be on social media. If your business is terrible in the real world, it will be terrible on social media and perhaps social media will amplify just how bad you really are. You can see a post I did about Boner’s Barbecue and their epic social media fail of 2012. If however you have a great brand, with a great message to share, than social media will help you amplify that message. Dare to be original, create a unique social voice for your business, and tell your story.

There are currently an enormous amount of social media channels in use, and even traditional websites are starting to integrate social media features. The most popular and relevant social media sites for a small business owner to be aware of are Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Linkedin, and YouTube. Google + is probably the best social network out there right now, but it just doesn’t have a huge mainstream adoption yet. However techies and others at the “bleeding edge” of technology are there, so keep your audience in mind when deciding to add it to your main mix. Some of the up and comers are Pinterest which is currently the fastest growing and has some real appeal for visual marketing, Instagram which is a photo sharing service with all the catch filters, and don’t forget review sites like Yelp and Angie’s List which I include because of their community based approach to sharing information with peers. If you have a product based business, sites like Amazon are even social by the nature of their reviews and deep peer trust. In addition to these main sites, there are literally thousands of niche communities, and many of them may share some advantage for your business that is worth exploring.

To decide where to focus your energy with all these choices of social networks is a daunting task at first glance. However, once you identify who your audience is, the choice of appropriate networks to focus the most of your energy on will become more clear. For Better Life Maids, Facebook is our primary social networking site. We chose Facebook due to its very large audience, but also due to its demographics, and the way people use it. If your business markets primarily to other businesses, you may still use Facebook in your marketing mix, but Linkedin might be more useful to target and network with decision makers you  want to reach.

Start researching what other brands are doing on social networks. You want to be original, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look at what others are doing for best practices and inspiration. Hubspot produces some great e-books on getting started on various social networks including various Facebook guides. Obviously Hubspot wants to draw you into a conversation and perhaps influence you to purchase their blogging software platform. If nothing else look at what they are doing and learn. I think Hubspot is one of the best examples of B2C marketing available. Every post they do has a point and it follows a pattern: topic, content, keywords, target market, and offer. By following a similar pattern with your own small business social media strategy, you will craft useful and targeted posts and content that is engaging and help your brand to become “Likeable”.

By Matt Ricketts