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Running a business is a wild ride and there are a lot of surprises along the way. But I think the thing that surprises me most is that I have learned more about business and leadership in the last five years than I did in the previous 30 years. This is part one in a two-part series of the five most surprising things about business that leadership teams need to learn.

I took up crew rowing in an 8-oared shell at age 50 with a local community club here in my hometown. One thing I learned quickly is that we must each trust one another to do our jobs — and with perfect timing — or the boat simply won’t go fast, or worse, won’t go at all.

This has become the perfect team metaphor for me. Rowing relies more on the perfect cohesion of a team than any other sport. In a game like football or basketball, one star player can carry an otherwise mediocre team to victory, but that’s not so in rowing. No single rower can make the boat go faster by himself, but it only takes one rower being just the tiniest bit off to slow it down a lot. The same thing goes for your company’s leadership team.

People ask me all the time, “Ken, what’s the number one thing I can do to make my business better?” My answer is always the same: there is no silver bullet. There is no single trick that will produce a magical transformation; rather, it’s a series of tweaks – some major, some minor – that will lead to dramatic results.

After 30 years of studying and coaching successful entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that the most successful tend to have four habits in common, and these are things you can and should put into practice yourself. The first three are succinctly outlined in Optimize for Growth: How to Scale Up Your Business, Your Network, and You, written by my friend Jonathan B. Smith. You really should get this book; it’s a quick read, and it will explain how these practices work in concert with one another, and inspire you to make them part of your standard M.O.

Once there was a football team who overcame an upset loss to a rival and made it to the playoffs, only to lose in the semi-finals.

The following year, they lost to the same rival, again overcame the loss to make it to the playoffs, but this time, they won the championship.

Obviously, I’m talking about the Alabama Crimson Tide’s 2014 and 2015 seasons. They found themselves in the same scenario in two different years.