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think, and it’s at Level 4 that you will have to contend with these new challenges.
Level 4: Maintaining Success
    The fourth level, Maintaining Success, is the period during which owners build on what they learned at Levels 1, 2, and 3 in order to ensure their company’s continued success. Achieving this requires the owner’s constant vigilance in order to make sure that processes and procedures are adhered to and improved on, leaders are developed internally, and challenging goals and objectives are established and met. It also requires that employees be continuously held accountable for their results, performance expectations be achieved, and all of the company’s departments move in the direction in which the owner wants the company to go. In other words, the owner and the company’s employees have to do everything that was done at Level 3 to become successful in the first place, but do it at a higher level and a faster pace.
    When your company attains Level 4, you will find that it presents you with many challenges. But there is one thing you can do to help overcome at least some of those challenges: develop a mentality, a drive, or a thirst to compete at every level of your business, and pass that mentality on to others. Competing at Level 4 doesn’t mean being satisfied with being successful or average. It means putting unrelenting pressure on your competitors using the strength that only a strong, profitable, and well-run business possesses in order to compete in every market your business participates in, every day and all day. Competitiveness is like measles—they are both contagious—and if you want your company to be competitive then you have to lead the charge. In business there is no trophy for just showing up—the trophy goes to the business that understands and values the qualities competing brings with it. Competing aggressively becomes a way of life and a valuable tool in avoiding some of the traps you’ll find at Level 4.
    Continuing to be competitive at Level 4 is important because there is a surprise awaiting unsuspecting owners who think that once their businesses becomes successful they can take it easy and relax. The surprise is that they can’t. The simple truth is that success today does not guarantee success tomorrow, because your competitors will always want what you have and will fight to get it, and if you stand pat or relax, you will make it easier for them to do it. Unfortunately, it’s not only owners who tend to think they can relax once their companies have attained success: the people who work for those companies often start to think so, too. And the apathy that sets in, in both owners and employees, can have serious consequences for a business. Just look at sports. Championship athletes will tell you the first championship was extremely hard to achieve, but staying on top and winning another is even more difficult. It’s the same with business, and as an owner you have to overcome your own apathy before you can deal with it in your employees.
    In reality, if you own a successful business and don’t continue operating it with the same vigor you did to make it successful, it’s entirely possible—even likely—that your company will slide back down the slippery slope from Level 4 to Level 3, and you will again find yourself fighting for survival. Think, for example, about General Motors, the most successful company of the twentieth century, collapsing and filing for bankruptcy in 2009. Or think about Fannie Mae, a company described as “great” in Jim Collins’s bestseller, Good to Great (HarperBusiness, 2001), which not only failed in 2008 but took a leading role in creating the housing bubble. The point, of course, is that it’s one thing to create a successful business but quite another to keep it successful. Obviously, if two business giants like these can fail, so can any privately owned