Yuh-Mei Hutt is one of Tallahassee’s most dedicated business leaders. Best known as President of Golden Lighting, her nationally reaching custom lighting company, Hutt also serves as Chair of the Domi Station Board of Directors. Fresh off of hosting a breakout session at the Chamber’s 2019 Annual Community Conference, she joins the podcast to discuss her career and the benefits she has discovered from operating with an exponential mindset.
Beyond business, Hutt has a heart for making the Tallahassee community a place where her young kids will want to live and work someday. She regularly tells others that “All the work we do in Tallahassee is for our kids.” Whether working on her company or on building a better community, Hutt is constantly seeking to implore a growth mentality into all that she does.
In this week’s podcast, Hutt explains how using an exponential mindset has helped grow Golden Lighting to new heights and even discover products to serve her current and future customer base.
“I’m trying to let my front line people manage the day to day, manage the current state (of the business),” she explains as an example of how she empowers decision making, one of the seven tenets of an exponential mindset. “The management team is trying to bring the department or company into a future state and my role as CEO is to consider the multiple futures for the company and to set the overall direction. Once you do that, you free up a lot more bandwidth in the management team to be able to move the company forward.”
A tech conference is where Yuh-Mei first discovered this new method of thinking. Since then, she has incorporated an exponential mindset into her work at Golden Lighting, her involvement at Domi Station and has embarked on a journey to inspire other businesses and community members in Tallahassee to adapt their mindsets to unleash exponential growth and position their business for success in a world full of disruptions.
“If you want to change what you do, you have to change how you think.” she says.
The 7 Tenets of an Exponential Mindset:
- Set Ambitious Goals over Setting Realistic Goals
- Follow the Vision over Following the Plan (11:30)
- Maximize Learning over Minimizing Risk (16:26)
- Personalize over Standardize (22:00)
- Empower Decision Making over Centralizing Decision Making (25:00)
- Expand Influence over Expand Authority
- Grow your Network over Make your Numbers (40:28)
During this episode of the Podcast, Yuh-Mei provides several examples of recognizable companies (Uber, Chipotle, Tesla) that deploy one or more of these tenets to their companies while also using unique analogies to illustrate the importance of each ideal.
To view the full slide deck, click here.
Golden Lighting Domi Station The Domi Awards
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