Genius Network Presents: Brian Tracy, How To Build A Great Business

Our presenter next is a dear friend of mine, Mr. Brian Tracy. I've known him now for probably about 16 years. Over 16 years, he's written a lot of books. Very amazing man, knows a lot, has helped millions of people. So I can tell you that Brian Tracy has sailed solo around the world in a 30 foot boat, that he's climbed Mount Everest with no oxygen tank, that he won three Olympic gold medals. But none of that is true.

However.

What is true about Brian Tracy is that he was a soldier of fortune in Africa. He ran for governor of California. His company generates millions and millions of dollars and he's spoken to over 5 million people at over 5,000 events. And he's going to talk about how to build a great business. This is one of his many books now, build a Great Business that he did with Mark Thompson. And so I want to give it up for my dear friend, amazing speaker and coach to so many millions of people, Mr. Brian Tracy.

Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much. Thank you. Awesome. Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here with you. I like Joe, like Joel. I've dedicated my life to being a small and medium sized entrepreneur. And I've devoted the second half of my life to helping other people to be successful small and medium sized business owners. And Carl Schramm of the Marion and Ewing Coffin foundation, the preeminent foundation on entrepreneurship, wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal two days ago and what he said was that there have been very few empirical studies into what actually makes a successful business, that most of what is taught in the entrepreneurship faculties of the universities is nonsense. In fact, he said that there's something 1687 Professors of Entrepreneurship and their primary focus is drinking their own bath water and telling that entrepreneurs have to have a business plan and if you have a business plan, you'll be successful. And they spent two years in their faculties teaching people how to set business plans. And 49 out of 50 businesses are started without a business plan, including some of the most successful businesses in the world today. So we are now just starting to learn what we really need to do to build successful businesses. And what Joe is doing here is absolutely marvelous because it can save you years of hard work, hundreds, even thousands of hours of hard work to understand how to do it much, much faster to shortcut. We say there's always a learning curve in anything. And what we want to do is we want to jump the learning curve. We don't want to spend years and years learning what we need to learn to reach a certain level of income. And so I have majored now in the last few years on doing seminars and talking and books and articles and programs for owners and would be owners of small and medium sized businesses. Now, I've got 45 minutes, so I'm going to have to condense what Sometimes I share in seminars for days, but I understand you're some of the smartest people in the world so that you could take a lot of information in a short period of time. Is that true? Did anybody not understand the question? So I'm going to try to bottom line several of the concepts. One of the first concepts which I thought was interesting was a little story that was in the papers recently. Warren Buffett, who is one of the richest men in the world, and Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world, and Bill Gates Sr. Were at a dinner party and the three of them are good friends and they were talking and a gentleman came up to them and said, you know, I was looking at you and you gentlemen are very successful. What would you say is the most important quality of success? And all three, according to a bystander, all three broke off their conversation and turned and simultaneously said, focus. Focus is the most important requirement for success in our fast moving world today. If you can focus, you can succeed, and if you cannot, you cannot. It's almost a black and white thing. Well, I thought that was interesting because the way Joe and I met is I put together a program some years ago called the Focal Point Program, which basically brought in business owners like yourselves and taught them to focus. And we spent three years going through every single aspect of Life. We had 82 exercises that dealt with family and business and marketing and product and service and competition and positioning. And it was focus, focus, focus. And my offer, which is not as good as Joe's, but my offer was that you will double your income and double your time off within 12 months or there'd be no charge for this program. And I never had to give a refund. In fact, many people doubled or tripled their income within 30 days just by learning to focus and just by thinking in terms of focus. So it's really, really important. I read an article about myself. It was a very successful entrepreneur in New Zealand. And the article was sent to me last week. I'm reading this article and he said the turning point in his life was when he went to a Brian Tracy seminar and learned how to focus. He was broke, he was unemployed, he had no money. And he walked out of the seminar a completely different person. And he had written Goals. He then looked around and as it happens, he saw an article on coffee shops and Starbucks success in the United States. And it said coffee shops are a good business to be in because more and more people like the idea of a specialty coffee shop. And if it has a WI fi, then they go there, it becomes a social center and so on. He knew nothing about coffee, and before the dust had settled, he owned 80 coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand. And then he says he got into a divorce and had to sell it for $50 million to share the proceeds with his wife. But he did not share, he did not sell off the worldwide rights to it. So he's rebuilding. Anyway, his point was at the end of the article they said, well, what would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be successful? And he said just two things. He said, focus and fail fast. Focus and fail fast. Learn quickly, try something new. And I thought I would just pass that on because it's sort of what I have discovered over the years is the faster you fail and learn, the faster you succeed. You actually learn to succeed by failing. You know Thomas J. Watson's famous line, if you want to increase your rate of success, you must double your rate of failure because success lies on the far side of failure. Well, over the years I've done a good deal of reading and I came across a concept that I want to share with you. And we were talking about this a little bit earlier and the concept is the question is, what is the most valuable and highest paid work that you do? It's a really interesting question because when I heard the question, I didn't know what the answer was. What do you think the highest paid and most valuable work is that you do? And the answer is thinking. Thinking is the most valuable work. Now I am the best selling author in the world in time management, also on goals, also on some other subjects. But I began studying time management about 30 years ago and I came across a word my studies and the word was consequences. And what it basically said is that something is important if it has big potential consequences and something is unimportant if it has low or no potential consequences. Number one reason for success is people focus on things that have high potential consequences. Number one reason for failure is people focus on things that have low or no potential consequences. Exactly what Joe was saying earlier, the famous Drucker quote. Very worst use of time is to work intently on something that need not be done at all. And one of the things that is holding back entrepreneurs, business owners, is killing them by the way, and it's wiping out an entire generation. It's this obsession with technology. I see people that are walking with their phone. It's almost like drug addicts that are mainlined. They cannot stop staring at their screen. They cannot stop pushing their buttons. I hate to say there are people in this room that had that problem, but the fact is that this obsession with looking at the screen and staying connected is killing people because it stops them from focusing. You cannot focus if you are distracted, like an attention deficit disorder dog. So you're constantly ringing and responding to bells, almost like a crazy person in a toy factory. And so, just as a quick aside, if thinking is the most important thing you do because of the consequences of thinking determine the entire quality of your life, then the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. And so the more time that you spend thinking and thinking well and thinking clearly, the more successful you are. Over the years, I've worked with some very powerful people, billionaires and multi billionaires, people who are on the Forbes 400 list, repeatedly, over and over. And I've had a chance to be with them during crises and at times where something was happening that was serious, it was a major problem. And I noticed that they all had one quality in common, is they all went calm. It's just they went calm. People around them were angry and upset and worried about what happened and who did it and so on. And they would just go calm, almost like a pond would go calm. And they knew. And I learned later, I didn't know why this was. I admired it, but I didn't know why it was. Is that when your mind is calm, your entire cerebellum, the thinking and deciding brain, functions at its highest level. Like turning up all the lights on a dimmer switch, it's functioning like a Christmas tree. But when you get upset and angry, what happens is your thinking reverts to your limbic or emotional system, and your ability to think clearly diminishes dramatically. And you make a lot of mistakes. That's why when you are facing a difficult situation, you have to use every skill, trick, game, whatever it is, stay calm. And that's why they teach you to meditate. And they find that meditators in business are far more successful because they can automatically trigger their mind into the calm of meditation when they're facing crisis. It enables them to think with greater clarity. Now, a couple of years ago, a man named Daniel Kahneman, a very fine man from reading him, who had won a Nobel Prize in psychology and neuroscience, wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And this book was a very esoteric book. And I don't recommend that you read it. It's 500 pages of hard slogging. I will give you the essence of. I will give you the essence. I do the reading, pass it on. I will give you the essence of the book. He said that there are two types of thinking. There's fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is intuitive, it's instinctive, it's automatic, it's reactionary. I think of it very much as how you would drive through busy traffic. You're not giving a lot of thought, you're just interacting. He said the other type of thinking is slow thinking. And slow thinking is where you just slow down the thinking and take time to think through issues. Now, if an issue has little or no consequences, then you can think quickly. You know, what do you have for lunch? What do you pick up on your plate from the buffet? Where do you park your car? The consequences of these decisions are almost non existent. But if it's a major issue, then you say, wait a minute, this requires slow thinking. Here is his contention that made the book a best seller is that the biggest problem that people have is that where they should use slow thinking, they use fast thinking. And entrepreneurs are extremely guilty of that. As we make important decisions that have long potential consequences, including affecting the lives of people and costing money and even leading to the bankruptcy of a business, we make those decisions with fast thinking, when in reality we should be making them with slow thinking. Now, I'm a great Drucker fan, as many people are, and Mike was saying something about hiring the right people. And hiring the right people to work with you is very important. And the biggest mistakes you make is hiring fast. You hire people quickly. The best decisions you make are you really take your time to hire slowly. And Peter Drucker said that fast people decisions are invariably wrong. People decisions. Hiring an important person for an important job has tremendous potential consequences. So therefore you need to take a long time. One of the things I teach, which is in my book how to Hire and Keep the Best People, is a simple rule that will increase your hiring accuracy to 90%. And I've taught it to Fortune 500 companies and they make it a rule within their companies to use Brian's rule, you cannot hire except by doing this. And I didn't invent it. I just studied the hiring practices of the companies that hire the best people and keep them the longest. And they all, at the beginning have a certain process that they follow. And they follow it religiously, no exceptions. And so their accuracy in hiring goes up to 90% or better because they think more interesting. Professor at the University of San Diego last year wrote a book on sort of, not sort of thinking fast and slow, but it was on decision making. What he said is the longer that you take to make an important decision, the better the decision will be. The higher quality decision. And Lord Acton once said, when it is necessary, when it is not necessary to decide, it is necessary not to decide. In other words, the professor said, buy as much time as you can for a decision, put it off. If you can put it off for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, put it off. Some of the best decisions that you make will be decisions that you will allow to steep for a while, like water and tea. So thinking is the most important thing you do. We call it thinking fast and slow. So remember, anything that is important, that has long term consequences is a candidate for slow thinking. Discussing it with other people, sitting quietly, going for a walk, letting it ruminate in your mind, sleeping on it. You know, they say, if it's a big deal, sleep on it. My mentor, the gentleman I told you about who owned 200 companies, I would come to him with a business situation and he would nod, he would absorb the information. He had a, what do they call it, an iron trap mind. He could hear something once and remember it forever. He could read something once and remember it forever. He was very smart. And yet he would always say, let me think about it for a few days. And I would think, well, let's do this, let's do that. It's obvious, using fast thinking, he'd say, no, there are a lot of ramifications to something like this based on his experience. Let me think about it. And after two or three days, and I'd be very impatient, he'd come back and he said, you know, I've thought it over and I think we should approach it this way. And then he would lay out, based on his experience, a plan of action that was genius. And I'd go, ah. I mean, I felt like a child. I was like a child with him. He was many years older than me, but because he took the time to think and combined it with his experience, and maybe he made a couple of phone calls to people who were more knowledgeable in that area and he would listen very carefully. He was a great listener. And then he would form a strategy. And his strategy led to millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars of business deal and I don't think he ever made a mistake in a business deal. And over and over and over again, he got into petrochemicals and built a $265 million petrochemical plant that yielded 40% returns on his investment from the day it was finished and started operations. And he knew nothing about petrochemicals except that somebody told him, this is a good business to get into. And he said, all right. And he began to do his research. And he's slow thinking now. The second type of thinking comes from Edward Banfield. Edward Banfield was a professor of sociology at the University of Harvard and one of the most brilliant teachers. I spoken to people who studied under him, and they said, he's one of those teachers that you're never the same again after you've studied under Banfield. Banfield had a focus on why it is that some people rise socioeconomically over the generations and other people do not. He wrote a book called Saying the Unthinkable or I'm sorry. He wrote a book called the Unheavenly City. And in the Unheavenly City, he pointed out that the difference between wealthy people and poor people is the length of time which they take into consideration when they make a decision. He said people who think short term almost invariably go for immediate gratification. He said people who think long term think of all the ramifications. Very similar to Kahneman's work, thinking fast and slow. So he called it long term perspective. And he said people with long term perspective, they think five and 10 years into the future. One of the marks of superior people is that they are long term thinkers. They make decisions very, very carefully. And with decisions that are long term in their potential consequences, they take a long time to make the decision. Days, weeks, they will buy all the time possible. So you'll find that all successful people are long time prospective thinkers. They think into the future and then they come back from the future. Like we talked about, future orientation, thinking about the future. They come back from the future and they say, what do I need to do today to create that ideal future? When I do strategic planning for corporations, which is a very interesting process, the first thing I do is I have them say, describe to me this company, if it was perfect, five years from now. And I've done this with billion dollar organizations, with all the key people around a table like this, this is the pattern that I use. And I'll say, imagine that a leading business publication, Wall Street Journal, Times, our Fortune, Forbes, was going to write an article on this company in five years. And they were going to send out their best reporters to fan out over the country. They were going to talk to customers and competitors and staff and people and suppliers, and they were going to come back and they say, omg, omg, this is an incredible company. This is a fantastic company. This is the best single company in this industry. And they're going to write an absolutely glowing, glowing story on your company five years from now. The question is, if that were going to happen, what would you want them to say? What would you want them to say? And we go around the room and we say, what would people say if this was the greatest company in the industry? Best products and service, credible customer service, fantastic it, Great leadership, best place to work, finest working climate, attractive, best place for people to get jobs at, incredible marketing, great selling, very efficient, high profit, high stock price. Then we go around the room and it's almost like kids at Christmas. What would you like for Christmas? And every time I've done this, whether I do it in Russia with Spare bank, which has 22,000 branches and 165, or in London with Prudential, which has activities in 120 countries and $72 billion, whatever it is, we have this almost like kids. And they're right. And I write it down, write it down, write it down. I use it on flip charts and I put it down. And then at the end, when nobody can think of anything else to say to describe this company, if it was incredible, I say, now let me ask you a question. People are settling down. I say, is this possible? And there's always a stop. And they look around at all these descriptions and they say, yeah, yes, not in a month or a year, but in five years, we could have the best products and great leadership and fantastic customer service and great IT systems and beautiful sales and a place to work and the best training programs and the best reputation in the industry and high stock price and. And increase profits. They go around. Everybody says these are all possible, right? I said, well, then let's organize them in sequence. What is an input? What is an output? First input, which we'll talk about in a couple of seconds, is really great products and services. So that's something we need to focus on because that's going to determine sales, profitability and stock price. So what are the inputs and what are the outputs? And that's how we go around and create a strategic plan. And then we just walk through what are the. What are the operational steps that we'll need to take to achieve this Ideal description of this company sometime in the future and who is going to be responsible for each different area and how will we measure success in that area and what will the schedule be? And everybody walks out of the two or three days completely wired. And this process, which I just explained to you, which all of you can use and you could even now probably teach, it really works like a dam. It is absolutely infallible. I've had companies whose goal was to double their sales in the next five years and they increased their sales 500%. And they called me up and they said, you couldn't believe it. Our goal was to go from 20 million to 40 million. We went to 105 million in five years with this stuff. Because now they're all thinking and they're all thinking with great clarity and they're all thinking long term. And we're forcing them to think slowly through each of these key areas. These are the individual building blocks of great business success. So there's three thinking tools I want to give you and then seven ideas. The first thinking tool which I start every single one of my MBA programs and I put together a three day MBA for small and medium sized business owners about four or five years ago when the economy hit the tank and companies were floundering for survival. So I put three and I took everything that I'd learned in my lifetime and put it together in a highly interactive program and called it the Total Business Mastery, the three day mba. And then I realized over time, hey, this is a great product. I could sell this to promoters who could promote it. One of my promoters in Iran sold it to 1,000 people in three weeks at five to $800 a person and made a fortune. And so I could put it together as a two day program. So I created the two day mba. And then I realized that sometimes people cannot promote two days or they don't have two days. So I created a one day MBA which I just gave in Dubai last week by the way. Extraordinary success. And it's just like an accordion. You take the one day, two day, three day, here I'm going to be giving you the 30 minute MBA. I'm going to compress it even more. So the three ways of thinking which I start off, the first way I start off every seminar is what I call zero based thinking. And everybody who knows me for any period of time knows that I harp on this. Zero based thinking comes from zero based accounting where you instead of increasing an expense in the next accounting period, you ask, should we be engaging in this Expense at all. Now with zero based thinking, you look at your entire world and you ask this question, knowing what I now know, is there anything that I am doing that I would not start up again today if I had to do it over? This is one of the greatest thinking tools I've ever learned, because in a time of turbulence, you always have an answer for this question. Each person has an answer. Some people have multiple answers. There's lots of things that they're doing today that knowing what they now know they wouldn't get into today. They wouldn't start them up, Products they wouldn't offer, people they wouldn't hire, investments they wouldn't make. And these are the greatest drags in life. These are sort of like a sea anchor, you know that you drop it and it drags, it slows down the boat. Well, how do you tell if you have a zero based thinking situation? And many of you were asked to write your problems, challenges, opportunities? The answer is stress is whenever you experience chronic stress, it's something that buzzes around when Joe's talking or somebody else is talking, you're busy thinking about that. You drive around and you think about it. Keeps you awake at night. It's something that pisses you off. It's something that irritates you and angers you and frustrates you whenever you have chronic, which means ongoing, continuous. This is a candidate for zero based thinking. So you ask yourself the question, if I was not now in this situation, knowing what I now know, would I get into it again today? If the answer is no, the next question is how do I get out and how fast? How do I get out and how fast? If everything. Whenever the answer comes back that I would not get into this again today, it's too late to resolve it, it's over. The only question now is how long do you suffer, how much emotional suffering, how much financial suffering do you make before you walk? And so the most important requirement for practicing zero based thinking, which a lot of people don't like to practice, is courage. I call it the C word. You need the C word. You need to have the courage to look at every part of your life and say, is there anything that I'm doing that knowing what I now know I wouldn't get into Now? The starting point of zero based thinking is always with your relationships. And those are both personal and business. Whenever I've given this talk, by the way, within a short period of time, divorces take place all over that city. People go home and say, geez, if I hadn't married this person, I would never marry them again today. And that's what's making me miserable. And many people are working their heads off on the outside to achieve success, but inside they're frustrated and unhappy because they're in a situation that knowing what they now know, they would never get into. So I call this a quink analysis. And I'm going to ask you to do this for the rest of your life and help other people do it. K W I n k Knowing what I now know. Do a Kwink analysis on everything. Do a quink analysis. In my company, what we say is we look at every single person and on a regular basis and we say, if we had not hired this person and they walked in today to apply for their current job, knowing what we now know, would we hire them? If the answer is no, they're gone that day. There's a little rule, by the way, that in one of my books, it says the best time to fire a person is the first time it crosses your mind. Because after that it's only pain and suffering. And the longer you keep them in place, the more likely they are to sue you. And the longer they sue you, the more it's going to cost. So therefore, if you find that you've made a mistake, belly up to the bar, have the courage to admit I made a mistake and cut your losses. There was a great book by an author called the Zurich Axioms some years ago, and it was Principles of Success. And anybody who's in finance has probably read the book because a very successful New York financier, and he was talking about the gnomes of Zurich, whoever they are, and the rules that they go by. And he said the number one rule for success in business, personal lives, cut your losses when you realize you've made a mistake. Bad investment, bad hire, bad relationship, cut your losses quickly. What do they say in Las Vegas? Cut your losses, let your winnings ride. So in life, that's what we do. And the faster you cut your losses, fail fast, the faster you can start doing things that are much more productive. The second area has to do with every part of your business. Joe and I were talking about what I think is a revolutionary new field. Though it's not revolutionary and it's not new, but it's business model innovation. And it's based on the concept that whatever business model you're using today is probably obsolete. If you're in any kind of a business that uses technology to market it, especially an information based business, knowledge based business, consulting services Training, anything else, Chances are your business is obsolete. The way that you and the business model is your method, your step by step process of generating profitability. Now there are some companies that struggle along, struggle along, struggle along, then find a new business model and the next year their business is up five or ten times. Profits are just overwhelming. They're living in big houses on the hill, driving Cadillacs and flying private jets. And you say, what on earth did they do? They changed their business model. And if you don't change your business model, if it's the wrong business model, two things are going to happen. Your competitors are going to come up with a new business model and eat your lunch and, or you're going to go broke. So it doesn't mean that your business model is wrong. It just means that you must be open to the possibility that your business model is obsolete. And that just means that there is a better business model, there's a superior business model, and your job is to find it. And again, there's no fixed answer to it. But I think that this is a great area of thought. I think this is a great area and it's sort of like a tool for you to have. I wonder if I need to change my business model, which is your way of generating sales, producing and delivering products and services, getting payments and achieving profitability. Well, so coming Back to the second is look @ anything in your business. Look at your products, look at your services, look at your people, look at the way that you advertise market and ask is there anything that you're doing today that knowing what you now know, you wouldn't start up again today? And the only question that you ever ask is, does it work? Does it work? Does it work? If it's not working and you can tweak it, then that's fine. If it's not working, have the courage to admit this isn't working and abandon it. Peter Drucker had a wonderful line. He said if the investing public knew how many $10,000 a day mistakes are made by executives because of their egos, he said there would be riots in the street. He said there would be riots in the street because people fall in love with their ideas or with their product or with their service or with their previous decisions and they don't have the courage and the ego strength to admit I made a mistake. It seemed like a great idea at the time. Here's a great question comes from American Management Association. What percentage of your business decisions will turn out to be wrong in the fullness of time? Can you guess what percentage wrong will turn out to be wrong in the fullness of time? About 70%. The average is 70%. Now, some people even do real well. They're wrong 90% of the time, sometimes 100%, I would say no politics involved. But there are senior people in our government who are wrong almost all the time. Their wrongness is almost criminal and it's dragging the whole country down the drain because they hate business. The people running our country hate business. They think that business is evil, that people who are in business are evil people and should be punished with taxes and regulation. If it's not working, just keep asking, does it work? Does it work? Does she work? Now the third area has to do with investments in zero based thinking, investments of time, which people hate to lose. Someone said earlier that people hate to lose. It's one of the greatest emotions. We hate to lose time if we've invested a lot of time in a course of action, a project, a business, a relationship. The second is emotion. If we put a lot of emotion into a course of action, a product, course of study, a relationship or money. We hate to admit that we made a mistake and that what seemed like a good idea at the time has turned out not to be a good idea. And knowing what I now know, I wouldn't get into it and have the courage to cut your losses and run. Now the reason I teach this first is because you can't make any progress unless you clear the decks. Unless you get this 800 pound gorilla that's holding you back out of your life. And then many companies that I've worked with, literally transformed, became multimillion dollar companies. When everybody said, all right, we're going to go through and do a quick analysis on this whole company and realize that half the things we're doing and half the people working here are not the right people for us at this time. And half the products that we're offering aren't selling and never will. They've been replaced by better, cheaper, faster products in the marketplace. So cut your losses. What happens when a big company gets into trouble? They bring in a quick analysis man and he comes in with a chainsaw and he shuts down all the factories and all the stores that are not profitable and the company goes from profits to losses in one year. Anyway. The second thinking tool that I teach people is WPO thinking, which is worst possible outcome in everything that you're doing. Always ask yourself, what is the worst possible outcome of this course of action? And can I survive it? If it were to occur. And if not, what could I do to make sure it doesn't happen? One of the number one reasons that we worry about anything in life is because of fear. And when you ask yourself, what is the worst thing that could happen in this particular situation? And then if you can say, all right, if that happens, I'll live with it, then your worry goes away, and your mind goes clear and calm. And now you say, now what can I do to make sure that the worst does not happen? And then you become proactive and you take charge of your life. The third thinking tool. I hope I'm not going too fast for you. The third thinking tool is called the principle of constraints, and it's one of the most important thinking tools ever discovered. It says, between you and anything that you want to accomplish, there's always a constraint, a limiting factor, or a choke point that sets the speed at which you accomplish your goal. So I was just talking, doing a teleconference a few minutes ago. So the question I said is, let's always set the goal of doubling our income. You want to double your income? Okay, want to double your income? Then why isn't your income already twice as high? Now, in business, we don't think of doubling our income. We think of doubling our profitability. What we're concerned with is net cash flow. We're concerned with the amount that we take home to our family at the end of the day. Not the gross, but the triple net. So we say, if I want to earn twice as much, and everybody in here can and can and will earn 2, 3, 4, 5 times as much sometime in the future, if I want to earn twice as much, why aren't I already earning twice as much? And the number one reason for most people is distraction. So they're so distracted, they're doing things of low or no consequences. But we found the 8020 rule applies to constraints. 80% of the constraints that are holding you back from achieving your financial goals are within yourself and within your business. They are not on the outside. They are not the competition. They are not the market. They are not the people in Washington or the taxes or regulation. 80% are within yourself. So the mark of the superior person is whenever they have a problem, they say, what is it in me that's causing this problem? Mike? And I know this very, very clearly. What is it in me that's causing this problem? In illness, by the way, 85% of illness is psychosomatic. As Dennis Waitley said, it's not what you're eating. It's what's eating you that's causing the problem? And so the starting point and the first thing a doctor will tell you or a psychologist is what is it that you're not dealing with? And you go back to zero based thinking. What is it that you have in your life that if you had to do over, you wouldn't do it? So ask yourself what's holding you back? And usually it's the quality of self discipline or it's a skill. Now, one of the things that changed my life forever was when I learned that all business skills are learnable. You don't have to be a genius to learn any business skill. You can learn any form of technology as Mike has proven that with his products. You can take a person who's basically shoveling shoe polish in shubokin and teach them how to be technologically sufficient, superior enough to earn a living from it. Every business skill is learnable. And so I say, what one skill, if you are absolutely excellent at it in your business, would help you the most to double your income? What one business skill, if you could wave a magic wand and wake up tomorrow morning superb in this area, what skill would it be? And you know, when you ask that question, everybody knows the answer, they know what it is. But here's the challenge. You don't like the skill because it involves rejection, embarrassment, ego, potential failure, loss. You've tried it in the past, you haven't been good at it. But nobody asked you what would be an easy skill to learn. They just asked you what skill would help you the most to double your income. And here's what we have found is that most of us are only one skill away from doubling our income. And all business skills are learnable. And if you study the people who go from the top to the bottom in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000, they found in 25 years of research, these people learn one skill at a time by climbing the ladder of success and the ladder of income. Like sniper. One shot, one kill. They don't try to learn 50 skills. They learn the one skill, focus, the most important skill. And they get their company focusing on the one skill that can help you the most to generate sales and profitability. So coming back to looking at my calendar, I've got 10 minutes. I talk about what I call the greats, the seven greats in business. And actually my three day seminar has the ten greats, but the seven greats in business. I will give you briefly. First of all, successful companies have great leadership. And leadership is the ability to get results. But it's also the ability to allocate resources, which means it's the ability to make decisions and to make hard decisions. Because if it were easy decisions, everybody would be a leader and everybody would be rich. So making decisions, using thinking, slow thinking, using long term thinking is the critical job of the leader. Drucker says the first job of the leader is to ask what results are expected of me. And then I add to that, of all the results that are expected of you as a leader, what is the most important result that you need to get to achieve the sales and profitability for which you are responsible? One of the rules we learn in business, we never complain about anybody or anything in our business because we're the boss. We're the ones who decided this. We don't complain about your staff because you hire the person. If you don't like the person, get rid of them. Don't complain about them. You just sound like an idiot. You know, it's like picking up food from the buffet down there and saying, I don't like this food. Well, I never have liked this food. I've always hated this food. Well, why did you pick it up? Well, I don't know. The fact is, you never complain about something in your business if you're in charge of it. If you don't like it, change it. If you don't want to change it, shut up now. Which allows me to jump actually forward is one of the marks of superior entrepreneurs is they're intensely solution oriented. Is whenever something goes wrong, they immediately go calm and they say, all right, what's the solution? What's our next action? What mediocre people do is they say, who did it and who's to blame? How did this happen? They go on a witch hunt. And of course that makes them become angry and frustrated. But superior executives, when something goes wrong, problem with the customer, problem with money, problem with bills, problem with product delivery or defects, they say, okay, all right, how do we solve this? What's the solution? Now here's a wonderful thing is your success in life will be determined by your ability to solve problems. My friend Colin Powell said, leadership is the ability to solve problems. Success is the ability to solve problems. And how do you become really excellent at problem solving? I just finished a book, by the way, called Creativity and Problem Solving that Amicom is publishing in New York at the end of this year because I did years of research on the subject. Here's the point is the way that you solve problems is simply to think about solutions. What Are all the possible solutions? Be intensely solution oriented. Don't allow yourself to get bogged down, negative, upset, unhappy about the problem and who did it. Focus on the solution and the actions that you can take. And when you start to think about the solutions, remember Helen Keller's wonderful line, when you turn toward the sunshine, the shadows fall behind you. When you start thinking about solutions, we could do this, we could do that, and you could do this, and I could do that, we could do. When you start thinking about solutions, your mind goes calm, your creativity turns on like lights, you start to have more energy, you start to feel more confident, and so on. Are you with me so far? Thinking about problems makes you negative and shuts down your brain. Thinking about who's to blame is even worse. But thinking about what you can do and the actions you can take puts you back in charge. Well, the second principle, and I talked about the second great is having a great product or service. And this to me was and is a revelation. And it's so simple, it stares you in the face. But 90% of your success in business will be to have a great product in the first place. And this is something that many people miss. They think if I have a good product and I pay thousands of dollars and go to really clever seminars, they'll teach me some marketing gimmicks and tricks so I can con people into buying it. And they spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to advertise or market what is a mediocre product. And I had a good friend, Mitch. And Mitch owned three first class restaurants and he did no advertising for the restaurants and the restaurants were always full. And when people said, where do you want to go for dinner? Let's see if we can get into one of those restaurants. And so I asked him, I knew him very well because we worked in the same organization. Dr. Allard, my mentor, owned the three restaurants and Mitch was a part owner and he ran them and he could just start an excellent restaurant. I said, what is your secret to promotion? How come these restaurants are always full? And he said, we always put it on the plate. I said, how do you mean? He said, we put superb food at good prices on the plate and just stand back and the restaurants are full all seven days a week. And I always thought that's the key to success in business. Put it on the plate, put it on the plate. Put the quality, put everything into the product or service. Now the Inc. Magazine does a story on the Inc. 500, the 500 fastest growing companies in America taken over a three year period and every year they update it. The last edition which came out a couple of months ago, showed that the number one fastest growing company grew 42,500%. 42,500%. Unbelievable. It grew so fast. Others grew 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 times in two or three years. All new companies are reasonably new companies. All companies started by people who like the people in this room. And they grew 5, 10, 50, 20, 100 times. Wow. What was the key? So they went back and they did had outside researchers analyze it and you know what they found is all the companies put it on the plate is every one of them was obsessed with quality and obsessed with quality as their customers defined it. And they were close to the customer. They lucked tight to the customer. As I was sharing. His idea about, what was it called? What was your wtc? What did you say about customers, Joel? Think like a customer. I was sharing that on my conference today. Think like a customer. The very best companies. Think like a customer. What do customers want? What do customers need? And you know the key to success is make your customers happy and then make them happier than your competitors. And then every single day wake up and think, how can I make my customers happier? And they went and they interviewed the CEOs of the 500 fastest growing companies. And every one of them was obsessed with customers. They thought about customers, they talked about customers, they visited customers, they called customers, they went and saw customers, they personally responded to customer complaints. They were just obsessed with it. Which again repeats that 90% of your success will be the quality of your product or service. Now how can you tell if you have a great product or service? Well, it's a very simple test. And this is the test that predicts your future more than any other test for the rest of your business career. How often, how many people, after they have used your product or service, turn to another person and say, geez, that's a great product. Jeez, that's a great service. Jeez, that's a great company. Cheese. Those are great people. How many people say this is a great product? What percentage? 50%, 40%. Average in America is about 30%, 35%. Top companies, companies like Apple that come out with an ipod, an iPhone and an iPad. People consume the product. The next time they come out with an iPhone, they sleep on the sidewalks in rows of hundreds to be the first purchasers. They come out with an iPad, they sleep, hundreds of are sleeping on the sidewalks to buy it and pay outrageous amounts. And then they start showing everybody else isn't this a great product? And then they have apps. Look at this app. Look what you could do with this app. How many people have an iPod? Five. An iPhone? Five. Okay. How many of you showed other people the panoramic thing, how you can take panoramic pictures. Isn't that a great concept? You know, it used to cost thousands of dollars to have panoramic cameras that could take a panorama. And now you've got it in your iPhone as one of a hundred or a thousand different things you can do. So people who buy their products become their preeminent salespeople. They're running around grabbing people and bothering them and showing them the product or bragging about the product in a movie. By the way, the movie companies only have enough advertising for the one weekend. They could take big ads for one weekend to get people into the theater quickly. After that, the movie will either grow or die by word of mouth. And your movies that are successful by word of mouth, everybody's talking, have you seen that movie? Have you seen. You've got to see that movie, honey. I just heard about this movie at work. Let's go. Tonight. You weren't even planning to go to a movie. And you go there on Tuesday night and the theater's full. Have you had this experience? You see, and everybody's talking about it. The most important key to our success. So go back to the INK study, and I'm looking for corroborations in. In the INC Study, they had researchers say, what is the very best place for a company to invest if they want to increase their sales and profitability? And the answer came back after looking at everything else is invest in improving the quality of your product. Invest in improving the quality of your product. Make the product better and better and better. Make your customers happier and happier. Make your customers so happy. I say that the key to success is to get your customers to buy from you first rather than from your competitor to buy again because they are so happy and to bring their friends. And if that becomes your operating theme, we could talk about this all day, is get them to buy from you, buy again, and tell their friends. Then you're going to be successful, you're going to be wealthy, you're going to be respected, and more than anything else, you're going to be just as happy as you can be. Nothing gives us greater joy than. Than to make our customers happy. Number one is become a great leader, which means set clear goals, be decisive, take responsibility for results. Number two is offer a great product and never be satisfied with the quality of the product, constantly strive to make it better in the eyes of your customers. And here's one of the great revolutions in marketing which I think is so important, is the very best companies, the four stages of the epiphany. The. The lean startup are going to their customers and saying, how do you define a great product? Would you buy this? Would you pay for it? What would you want more of? What would you want less of? What can we do to improve it? They're even doing this with what they call the minimum viable product idea, is they take a product idea to a customer before they even make the product, and they work with the customer shoulder to shoulder to develop the product. So the customer says, this is a great product, then they produce and market the product. So number three is you want to have a great business plan, but a great business plan simply requires that you think through on paper the critical aspects of your business, and especially you analyze what it's going to cost, what you can sell it for, what kind of profits you can make, who are the people that you will need. There's a great story of Napoleon's generals all around this large table with maps of Europe spread out. And this is when the French armies were conquering everywhere. And they were talking about what cities or what municipalities, what duchies that they were going to attack with the army next time. And Napoleon would come in from his office, which was nearby, and he'd say, what are you doing? He said, we're talking about we're going to move the army from here, we're going to move it to there, and so on. And he'd say, well, gentlemen, he said, I'm afraid that we can't do it. We don't have the horses. And you've heard the expression, we don't have the horses. It comes from Napoleon. And what he was saying was that the entire army was driven by horses, cavalry and horses to pull the wagons with the supplies and everything else. And they could get more men by recruiting on the march as they did. They recruited. As they went through a village, they recruited people. Join the army, see the world, that sort of thing. Join the army. See the cannons, but the horses, those were scarce. And so the whole success of the army was determined, could they get the horses? That's why when Mike talks about getting the right people is, where do we get the horses? We got the ideas, we know what needs to be done, but where do we get the horses? So these are the things that you think through in a business plan. What kind of Technology will you require and what will it cost to set it up and who's going to run it and operate it? What kind of advertising, publicity, promotion will you require? How much will it cost? What kind of returns will you get? So a business plan, and there's many people, I'm sure you have lots of business plan models that are quite common, is a business plan forces you to think long term and to think slowly. And you'll always make better business decisions if you think long term and you think slowly. The fourth area has to do with having a great marketing plan. And a great marketing plan is what you talk about all the time. But there's a rule in advertising. I used to work for a large advertising agency. And the rule is the fastest way to kill a product, a bad product, is to advertise it or to market it. Because if you market it, what happens? More people use it. More people use it and are angry about it. Then they tell more people and the product dies. So the fastest way to kill a bad product is to promote it. And many people think, oh, no, the way I can get my money back is I can sell it to people before enough people know how bad it is. No. Do we have confusion? We have the Internet. Today, everybody in the world can know how many troops appeared on the streets of the Crimean with balaclava masks on their face. And they know that in three seconds. I was just in Russia, where in Russia, they control all the media and they tell people that they were attacking the Ukrainians backed by the CIA, are behind all the problems in the Ukraine. And the Russian, poor Russian people just are being sacrificed. So I'm just sending in some of my troops to help protect our. I said to my friend Sergei, I said, sergei, that's nonsense. Not a word of what you're saying is true. It's totally false. The only people in the world who believe what you're saying are people within Russia who have no access to news on the outside anyway. So I'm getting off track. My point is that marketing means how do you attract people to your product or service? There's a difference between marketing and sales. You know what it is? Imagine that I were to say to you at midday, this group, I say, is anybody here hungry? You raise your hand. All right, that's marketing. I'm interested in your product or service. I'm interested in the product or service generally. But anybody here like to save money, make money, lose weight, be happy, pick up girls, you know, whatever it happens to be. Then the second part is now I have a restaurant. Let me tell you why you should come to my restaurant to satisfy your hunger rather than to go to the competitors. So those are the two. It's the marketing is to attract people who raise their hand who are interested in the benefit that your product or service offers. And selling the conversion is to get them to buy from you rather than from your competitors. So they are very different functions. You can't sell if you can't attract interested prospects. So marketing is a very complex process and you guys talk about it all the time. So you need a great marketing plan. How can you tell if you have a great marketing plan? Answer is you have a steady stream of interested prospects who are calling you, emailing you, coming in your door, sleeping on the street in front of your business each night to get to be the first ones to come in in the daytime. Number five is you need a great sales plan. And a great sales plan, of course, is a sale that consistently and predictably converts customers or converts interested people into customers. Now, here's the rule. If you have a professional sales process and all 100% of all successful companies have a professional sales process, if you speak to the salesperson, I'm working with an international company that has a branch in Warsaw, and if you speak to the salesperson in Warsaw or the salesperson in Los Angeles or the Salesperson In Johannesburg, 100% of them use exactly the same sales process. The first contact will be a telephone contact to offer you a benefit and to try to set up an appointment. And the words will be word for word. The reason this company did this is almost went broke because everybody was selling their own damn way. They would say whatever fell out of their mouths whenever they ran across a prospect. And they realized that without a sales process, we have a great product, which they do, that's killing them. So they systematized the sales process. Their sales went up 1000%. It's been proven that if you go from random selling to a proven sales process, and of course you have to debug it, you Increase your sales 500% with the same number of prospects. I've seen people get their closing rates from 1 out of 10 to 9 out of 10 by simply improving the sales process. And so selling is really important. It's one of the things we focus on now. There's two more points that I want to talk about in terms of grades. One is generate great numbers. And this is one of the most important parts of business. All business activities and results can be expressed in numerical form. Everything right down to the number of telephone rings or number of seconds it takes for a person phoning to make connection with a person who can help them. Jeff Bezos, who, as you see, got best entrepreneur businessman of the year. Both Forbes and Fortune, they're obsessed with measuring every single activity. And they look at the seconds, the number of seconds that it takes. When we first bought from Amazon, they would advertise five to seven days ups. Today, they offer one to two days max in cities like San Diego, where they have warehouses. You can order in the morning, it's delivered in the afternoon. Books, tapes, courses, clothes. It's Zappos. Overnight. They can deliver overnight. Because why? It's because they're obsessed with shortening the amount of time it takes to make customers happy. And the shorter the time, customers really value speed, and they'll pay top dollar for someone who'll make them happy faster. They've determined that. So look at the numbers, and the question is, what are the most important numbers in your business? What we teach in our longer courses is about 35 numbers in any business. Some of them are unimportant. Some of them are extremely important. And there's five to seven of those 35 numbers that are the A numbers. And then there's one number that's the most important number of all. And we call this. Or Jim Collins, who wrote Good to Great, calls it the economic denominator. And when I started doing my coaching programs with entrepreneurs, one of the first things we taught was to identify your number. What is the most important number in your business? The number that most accurately predicts your success and your future. And most people get it wrong the first three to five times. What is your number? What is your most important number? The number that you just basically obsess with all the time. And one company went from struggle, written up in Entrepreneur magazine, went from struggling to bankruptcy. And then a friend of his asked him, what was your number? What was the number you were focused on? Well, we weren't focused on any number in particular. We didn't even hardly keep track. So they were just selling, by gosh. And by golly. And at the end of the day, they were bused. He had to go home and live with his mother the age of 26. So he said, no, you have to pick a number. So he sat down and he said, hmm. And he picked a number, and it's called net contribution margin. In other words, exactly how many net dollars and cents do we make from each sale? And then we compare those sales. That's after 100% of every expense of cost of customer acquisition and lead generation and delivery and everything else. And then they compare those against the others and they reemphasize. In other words, net contribution margin. This year he'll hit $100 million in business. And he's laughing. He said, changed our whole life to finally figure out what our number was. So a question I always ask people. What is your number? Do you know? Do you know the most important number? Do you know what most entrepreneurs say? Sales. Sales. Everybody knows that. Just sales, really. What if you're losing money on every sale, then the more sales you make, the faster you go bust. And you know that many companies are losing money on every sale because they don't add in all the costs of the sale. They leave out their own labor, they leave out rent, they leave out utilities. They leave out delivery costs. They leave out defects. They leave out packaging theft. And so there's, boy, are we selling a lot. Yeah. Well, how come you're losing more money every month? Did you see these companies, by the way, that announced they had 11 billion in sales last year? They lost 3 billion. You see them all the time. They say, how could you lose 3 billion if you sold 11 billion? Do you know why? It's because they don't know the numbers. And what they're doing is they're probably working harder and harder to sell more and more products of which they're losing more and more money. And nobody sat down and done the attributable cost. Okay, the last of the seven, and this is the one I love. And this is the future, by the way, the front end of business, the first bookend is having a great product or service to start with. The last is to have a great customer service experience. And I cannot tell you how important this is. This is what Joel and I have worked on all of our lives. Make our customers so happy at the beginning and so happy with the product and happy afterwards. It's the key to repeat business. It's the key to rapid growth. Every successful company, without exception, is obsessed with taking good care of their customers once they get them. And if they have a customer complaint, the head of the company doesn't sleep at night. They are so upset about customer complaints, they'll go out and personally visit them. The company president will phone an unhappy customer and talk to them because they consider customer happiness, like Tony Hsieh, to be the most important thing in the world. What Tony says is that we're not in the shoe business. We're in the customer happiness. Business. We just happen to sell shoes. And if we were selling something else, we'd still be in the customer happiness business. What was that worth to Tony? Sold it for his idea, translated into Zappos, sold it for $1.2 billion and took home 350 million. Not a bad idea. Make your customers happy. Does it work? Yes. How often does it work? 100% of the time. So you'll find that the very best companies, the ones that you really like and want to go back to, are the companies that make you feel happy. They make you feel good as a result of having done business with them. They take good care of you, and as a result, you go back over and over again and you bring your friends. So those are the seven greats that we talk about here. Great leadership, great product or service, great marketing plan, great sales plan, great numbers, great business plan and great customer service plan. And if you have those, here's the interesting thing is you're missing one of them. It's like dialing a seven digit number. If you miss one of them, your company will go broke. Miss any one of them or get them wrong. Get the wrong answer or miss it completely, then your company goes broke. So now we know scientifically, basically more and more of exactly what you have to do to build a high profit business. And the wonderful thing is it's all learnable. You can learn any one of these skills. Anything I just explained to you is as simple as ditch water. All you have to do is just say ah. And what is it you think? Yeah, I could do that, I could do more of that, I could improve that. We could do that. So I hope this has been.