Lessons Learned Business Earned

By Tony Renfro

As a young executive, I found there's two ways to learn: being tested by fire or directed by experience. Tested by fire is the hardest way to learn because I had little control over the outcome. Directed by experience allowed me to have a baseline to build on and direct my strategy. Lessons Learned Business Earned is my contribution to the business world to help people with short, specific guidelines for making better decisions, building their confidence, controlling their abilities, and directing their team. In this book, you'll be introduced to examples that have worked, suggestions to follow, and real-world experiences to build your own business arsenal.

Lessons Learned Business Earned is more than a how-to book; it will answer the why-to that will help you in many business situations. Read, enjoy, learn, and keep this book handy for future reference. If you are a PHD (poor, hungry, and driven), this book is dedicated to you!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886856101

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Lessons Learned Business Earned

Tony Renfro

ISBN 979-8-88685-609-5 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88685-610-1 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Tony Renfro

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Written for Business Professionals Looking to Unleash that Edge!

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Sweeping Up

Staying Motivated in Today's Demotivating World

Business Foundation—Your Bedrock Get Things Done or Your Career Is Done!

Career Management Goals and Direction

Lessons Learned from Military Decision-Making and Negotiating to Win

Confidence Knowing Yourself, Your Product, and Foe Alike

Success What Does It Mean and How Do You Measure

Family Tradition or Corporate World

Don't Play in Negative Politics

Presenting to Win

Motivation and Inspiration

Tooting Your Own Horn The Key to Promotions

Work for a Company for Life Use What You've Learned to Build Yourself

At Last, Your Plan, Your Building Blocks for Your Future

Leadership

About the Author

Preface

Open up your eyes. You have the knowledge and power to do anything from your own experiences!

That's a bold statement and an argument in this book that business experience can be gained doing anything. You can spend $50,000 in education to listen to a professor explain the lessons learned in many businesses through trial and error. You could ask an older, more seasoned veteran of your endeavor of trade for their sage of wisdom. But if you're like most people with many years of work in your past and still ahead of you, you already have a huge repertoire of business experiences to tap into.

Most people by the age of thirty-five to forty have had at least five jobs. But when you ask about their experiences with a specific matter, most cannot make the connections of past jobs to their future opportunities. We do not draw the dots of similarities. This book will help you understand the action and mindset of looking at each work experience as a building block to your current and future business acumen. So many times, we look at work experiences as negative factors that happen to us, and we try to forget. With a new outlook and positive reinforcement using my own personal experiences, you can quickly see the many benefits from learning a job well, applying it to your career goals, current position, and using those lessons to propel you forward.

The biggest obstacle in setting this mindset into place is you. There are many attributes to being a success in business. Dedication, energy, enthusiasm, a strong work ethic, follow up, honesty, and sometimes being in the right place at the right time. But a positive attitude is the main ingredient. Think about it; which, if any, of the attributes I've listed can stand a chance without a positive attitude? Not one! A positive attitude directed in the right direction can accomplish almost any endeavor. In this book, I will give you my experiences and how I have applied them throughout my career. You will get a view of the lessons for both employees and managers to offer some suggestions of ways to improve your outlook and, by using the Lessons Learned for Business Earned concept, explain your true business experiences.

Introduction

The year was 2002 and I had just taken a position as an instructor in business classes at a local university located on the Fort Knox, Kentucky military base. Our country was still dealing with the repercussions of 9/11, and the military personnel I came in contact were anxious and dealing with the unknown. While some were gearing up to head to foreign soil, some in my classroom were having their careers come to an end. Some with five years of service, others with twenty-five years. Some tempered by war, some tempered by the military structure.

I was excited to teach because I always felt my experience learned through trial and error in the business world would be beneficial for any aspiring student. As I do with all my classes, we started the meeting by going around the room and introducing ourselves. Our topics were what we do, for how long, our expectations of the class, and what were our long-term educational goals. This was an exercise most people hate. It's not only the fear of speaking in front of others but also the fear of talking about themselves. Most people are not geared to standing up and telling others what they do, their success, or their ambition. I don't know if it's a lack of confidence or the thought of being braggadocios. Regardless, I've watched very confident people stumble through this exercise.

The military soldiers spoke throughout acronyms of their positions as others nodded and understood the jargon. I'm an M1 armor crewman in charge of the TG (tank gun).

After listening to about five of these great men and women throw out these acronyms, I asked them to please tell what they meant, and since this was a business class and most were business majors, how what they do in their military career or other careers in civilian life, relates to the business world. Bam, they had major FUBAR—my altered definition from the military to fouled up beyond any reason. The military personnel, the bright and best, could not tie in their military experience to any business-related job. I was shocked that one of the best organizations for structure, the structure most businesses have borrowed from to create their hierarchy, these military personnel could not explain how being a tank gunman had anything to do with business.

This same scenario went on for about two years before I realized this was not something that was innate to a few but an issue of how people, in the military and nonmilitary civilian students in other job roles outside of the Fort Knox base, couldn't explain and tie in their previous experiences to business or other future goals. Besides military personnel, I had factory workers, human resource people, store clerks, mechanics, and restaurant employees who struggled to explain how their job experiences connected with their goals of getting a business degree. They knew they wanted a degree to better their opportunities, but they didn't see how their past experiences have set them up with future opportunities.

Naively, a lot of students believed they would be able to get a job because they could place a BSBA, MBA, or other initials on their resume. This helps, but they were consistently ignoring their experiences, such as the tank gunman, of running a tank—all of its instruments, being in charge of life or death, defending their territory, bravely helping to support their mission, being given these objectives and responsibilities at such a young age. All of these connected with today's business needs. It was then I dedicated time working with students in my classes to connect their previous experiences to the business world. If you were a cashier at a local gas station, in my classes you oversaw customer service, working directly to support and help your customers with their needs, handling financial transactions, and being sure that the customers' experience with you allowed them a positive feeling of the company you represented. As a cashier, that's a big responsibility, and any person should be proud of the experience they gained. If you don't think it's vital, try and get gas from a pump that doesn't work and just took your credit card.

Regardless of position in our engine of commerce, be it a