Are you in control of what you want to achieve in life? Are you steering yourself in a controlled way towards a goal or set of aligned goals? Or are you simply hurtling along without even checking the direction you are going in?

It is perhaps a cliché to write that endurance sports and outdoors activities are a metaphor for life, but there are some comparisons to be drawn. The most obvious for the purposes of this post is that in order to achieve what you want you need to have a plan – aimlessly wandering around will not likely get you to the summit and doing any old exercise that you want, when you want, is not optimal training for a marathon.

But so often in life we find ourselves careering down a path that we didn’t really choose in a direction that we simply fell in to.

In business as in life and endurance sports, direction is everything. But so is having the right people around you. In his (amazing) book From Good To Great, Jim Collins talks about getting the right people on the bus and then deciding on the direction. Obviously the bus is a particular type of bus – in the case of freestak our bus does communications for endurance sports and outdoors brands – but within those constraints, the direction is something that comes after the right people have taken their seats.

As Collins says:

You are a bus driver. The bus, your company, is at a standstill, and it’s your job to get it going. You have to decide where you’re going, how you’re going to get there, and who’s going with you.
Most people assume that great bus drivers (read: business leaders) immediately start the journey by announcing to the people on the bus where they’re going—by setting a new direction or by articulating a fresh corporate vision.
In fact, leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who.” They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.

Like many successful businesses we are constantly on the lookout for the right people to join us on our bus. In fact we are in the middle of a recruitment drive at the moment. If you think you are the right person for a seat, please get in touch. It’s proving to be quite a ride!