The Apex Profile is a product of the Crankset Group
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The Apex Profile is based on four years of research by the Crankset Group, and supporting research by others.
Why a business owner profile?
As business owners, all of us have spent years watching relatives, friends, and colleagues run businesses. Their input and feedback, our view of other businesses at a distance, and our own past experience have all worked together to create a way of running our business that is likely unbalanced.
Personality tests don’t help us understand how to run a business, which is much
more a product of all our past experiences and input than of our personality.
In fact, we have seen widely differing personalities with nearly identical Apex
business owner profiles.
There are three profiles. You will find that you have a preferred profile, but no one operates in just their primary profile 100% of the time. It is the one you default to under stress, but you can operate in your secondary profiles as you learn to understand them.
It’s simple. Completing your profile will take approximately 20 minutes.
Your business is out of balance.
Over a number of years of research, we have identified three basic Business
Owner profiles. All three of them have great strengths and significant challenges. People can start a business regardless of which Profile is their Primary. But because most of us are not balanced across all three Profiles, our businesses reflect a lack of balance that keeps us from paying attention to many things
outside of our strengths.
So, you thought you owned a business…
All three of the Profiles are incomplete and inadequate for growing a business to maturity by themselves. If we want a business that can run itself, there is a fourth profile that none of us express naturally, but that all of us must become if we want a mature business. That profile is very simply called Business Owner, for a very important reason.
Just because we built a business doesn’t make us Business Owners in daily practice. Until we express the Business Owner profile fully in our business, we don’t actually own our business, but are owned by the business—on the treadmill, employees of ourselves. Realizing we all have a fourth profile we’re working toward gives us clarity as to what needs to be done to get our business to the point it can run itself.
Discover Your
Business Owner Profile
Each business owner has a primary driver in managing and growing their business. Some are primarily focused by what the Market wants, others are focused by their passion for the Product (or Service) they have dedicated themselves to. And others are primarily focused by creating the most efficient, effective operational System possible.
All of us are a combination of Market Focused, Product Focused, and/or System Focused.
In building your profile, make sure you answer as you see things, not as you think you might want to see them. None of the profiles are better or worse than the others.
Get off the treadmill. Grow a mature business.
Learn your business strengths and challenges, how to use them to get off the treadmill and become a true Business Owner, and get back to the passion that brought you into business in the first place, so that you can build a mature business that will support your lifetime goals.
Personality tests don’t
help us run a Business.
There are thousands of profile tests to describe your personality. There is only one profile to help you know what you focus on, and how you run your business.
It has a lot less to do with personality than with the accumulation of our experiences. You can change and grow in how you run your business, independent of your personality.
There are 3 basic Apex Profiles
we work from that aren’t tied directly to our personality:
- Market Driven
- Process Driven
- Product Driven
We’ve picked up these work habits through watching everybody from our parents to co-workers to others around us who started businesses. Our picture is incomplete because those who influence us aren’t perfect either. So we pick up what we can and work from a very incomplete picture of what a business owner should really be.
Which Profile is my Primary
and my Secondary?
We’re all a mix of them, with real strengths & glaring weaknesses. Get started with the profile analysis to figure out what applies to you.
In building your profile, make sure you answer as you see things, not as you think you might want to see them. None of the profiles are better or worse than the others.
How does the profile
fit in team environments?
If you already have a team, you should take learn your profile to understand how to lead them by developing their strengths. If you are just forming your team, you should learn your the profile to help you understand what type of Apex Profiles you should surround yourself with. This is not a hiring or firing tool, but will be very helpful as part of the decision-making process.