I’ve noticed a pattern recently. In meeting with several leadership teams for the first time, I always ask the questions, “What do you want from your business? What’s your big goal?” And lately I’ve heard the same answer from business owners at three different businesses: "I want a business that can run itself. I want to be on vacation for a month and have no one notice!"

But how can you build a business that runs itself when your company has hit the ceiling?

Effective issue solving is a huge factor in running a successful business. Some company issues seem monumental and can stifle progress because of their perceived magnitude.

I think we could all agree that being open and honest is important in our personal lives. Our friends and our family members value it, and it helps us build relationships and establish trust with the people we care about.

And much like our personal lives, being open and honest can have a strong impact on the people in our professional lives, such as our employees, our customers, and our community.

I have already discussed how being open and honest builds the foundation of your business. Openness and honesty are used to communicate your business’s Core Values, and provide a list of expectations your employees live by.

But in addition to building a foundation, being open and honest plays a fundamental role in helping us resolve issues.

In film making, the 180-degree rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. However, I recently learned about a 180-degree rule which can  be applied to business.

I learned it from Rich Lucia who has built his speaking and consulting brand around the term Selling in the Now. Rich has applied the knowledge we have about our lizard brain, the amygdala, and it’s bias towards negativity, to harness it in a positive way in brainstorming and solution creation.