How to Build a Great Business, Reduce Distractions, and Get Focused with Brian Tracy - I Love Marketing Episode #399

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.

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It's an honor to be here with you. 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. 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've 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. So I'm going to try to bottom line several of the concepts. One of the first concepts which I thought was interesting, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Bill Gates Sr. Were at a dinner party and, 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 focus and fail fast. Learn quickly, try something new. And I thought I'd 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. 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 in 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, is this obsession with technology. I see people that are walking with their phone. It's almost like drug addicts that are mainline. 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. I can. Attention deficit disorder. Dog. 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. 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 a crisis. It enables them to think with greater clarity. 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 is to. This is the 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. Some of the best decisions that you make will be decisions that you will allow to steep for a while, like water and tea. 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. 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. And they say, what do I need to do today to create that ideal future? 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 and called it the Total Business Mastery. The three day mba. So the three ways of thinking which I start off, the first way I start off every seminar is, 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. These are sort of like a sea anchor, you know that you drop it and it drags, it slows down the boat. How do you tell if you have a zero based thinking situation? The answer is stress is whenever you experience chronic stress, it's something that buzzes around, 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 ever 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. The number one rule for success in business personal life is 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? You know, 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. And the only question that you ever ask is, 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. 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. 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, or money, we hate to admit that we made a mistake. 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, is because of fear. And when you ask yourself what is the worst thing that can 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 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 is always a constraint, a limiting factor or a choke point that sets the speed at which you accomplish your goal. 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. They are 80% are within yourself. 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. 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 asks you what would be an easy skill to learn. They just asked you what skill would help you the most to double your income. The seven greats in business. I'll 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 that 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. So one of the marks of superior entrepreneurs is that 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. 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. 90% of your success in business will be to have a great product in the first place. 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. Because 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 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? 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. 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. My point is that marketing means how do you attract people to your product or service? There's a difference between marketing and sales. 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. 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, there's two more points that I want to talk about in terms of grace. 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. What is the most important number in your business? The number that most accurately predicts your your success and your future? 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. 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.

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