Last week I had the pleasure of delivering the keynote presentation at the Marketing Association of Credit Unions conference in Seattle. My presentation was called “Think Like an Entrepreneur,” and was focused on helping credit union marketing leaders understand the unique attributes of the entrepreneurial mentality–and then inspire them to strive to adopt those qualities.
In the process of preparing for the presentation, I had an interesting thought about the topic of “best practices” that I had never considered before. While I understand why business people like the comfort/peace of mind that following best practices offers them, I also know that I personally take “best practices” with a grain of salt. As I explored why I feel this way, I realized that my definition of best practices is this:
Proven ways to achieve, at best, the same results as others have achieved.
In other words, you might be able to do as well as someone else if you follow best practices. But that’s not what the entrepreneur’s mentality is all about. Instead, entrepreneurs want to far outpace anything anyone else has accomplished…not just match them. Thus, best practices to an entrepreneur are only minimally useful (in my opinion, of course).
So, I invite you financial marketing pros to reconsider the importance of best practices before believing by default that they should be followed. That is, assuming you want to think like an entrepreneur…
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