Steve McLeod is Founder and Chairman of Fire and Safety Australia, Australia’s leading safety training company. The company is built on an unwavering passion for safety education and a determination to make a change in the world. Working with clients such as BHP, Chevron, Santos, and training over 50 000 people nationally, Steve shares his secrets on how he grew his business from the ground up.
How Relentless Discipline Can Create Your Vision
Whenever we see success, whether it be an invention, a social change or a Maserati-driving entrepreneur, we have that moment of asking “How? What was the chain of events that made that happen?”
Although no two paths will ever be the same, there are commonalities with all success stories.
During his time as an active firefighter, Steve experienced many dire situations from the result of unsafe practices. Being passionate about safety and saving lives and therefore enhancing people’s existence by keeping them alive, he saw an opportunity to share his passion through educating organizations and individuals, to prevent the scenarios he witnessed as a firefighter.
But how do you sell knowledge?
Identifying a gap in the market combined with Steve’s personal experience about the importance of safety and how it can be achieved, the opportunity presented itself to offer a service to train those who didn’t know what he did. This gave birth to his “vision” of what needed to be achieved for his business to succeed.
One particular lesson learned along the way was making sure that his staff were sharing his vision, enthusiastically embodying the values he’d established for his business. A key question Steve will regularly ask himself is: “knowing what you know now, would you enthusiastically re-hire an employee?” The answer determines whether they should stay with you or not.
If the answer is “No”, and you do nothing about it, you’re the bottleneck holding the business back. You’re the person that has to have the courage to make the difficult decisions, to get the best possible team in place to achieve best success.
Steve McLeod speaking at WeTeachMe’s Masters Series
From the experience of years of growth and achieving goals with the ebb and flow of setbacks and successes, one trait fundamental to ensure the trend for growth continues failure scale is a term coined by Steve himself: relentless discipline.
After training over 400 entrepreneurs of different business sizes, the main reason I see people fail is they do not have the discipline required to do what needs to be done day in day out, week in week out, quarter in quarter out.
Having a vision for what you want to achieve, harnessing courage to take the steps toward that vision and embracing “relentless discipline” as your master are not only necessary, they are fundamental to achieve your definition of success.
Steve also is the director of a coaching and consulting company, Courage For Profit, and for detailed insights into his inspirational journey and gain insights on how to grow your business, watch his story on the WeTeachMe’s Master Series.
John FairhurstJohn Fairhurst is a freelance writer, editor and passionate screenwriter. He contributes various brand content copy as well as speech and publicity features when he’s not editing or writing screen stories for film and television.
