When You Change Your Game You Will Change Your Business

I use business as a creative exploration. It's a creativity. It's not what I am or who I am. Even though I'm known as an entrepreneur, to me it's just an outlet for creative expression.

Don't spend all your money, kid, because it's really, really hard to make money and it's 10 times harder to keep it.

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.

Yeah, well, it's about changing your game. And you know, back in 1974, when I first started coaching, I developed a role model. And the role model was the microchip, which people were just talking about the microchip around 1974. And the microchip basically takes the speed of information and puts it into a smaller space. So the constant evolution of microchips technology over the last going on 50, 60 years now has constantly pumped more and more information to more space. Well, since that was taken care of by the microchip, I decided to focus on another area and take the most actionable wisdom and pack it into the shortest period of time. And so in order, what this does is that as you do this, you actually increase your impact on the planet. And so my thing just little quote here from George Bernard Shaw, that progress is impossible without change. We know that the microchip is causing change. The question is, are you changing with it? So it really requires of mind shifts all the time, actually changing your mind. So I'm going to pack 41 years of coaching. Well, my original attempt was to pack 41 years of coaching into 50 minutes. That was my goal. But as I got thinking about it over the last month, I decided to pack it into 30 minutes and then leave some room for your wisdom in response to what I'm showing you. So I've taken my entire coaching career and broken it down into three graphics. One of them is a circle, the other, the other one is four boxes and the other one is a curve. So I'm going to go to the circle first and what this circle really represents. And what I want you to do is to actually get your pen out because we're going to actually write here. And the thing I'd like you to do is to consider this circle all of your time and all of your activities as they're presently devoted to your business. So the circle represents just where you are right now. And so in 15 minutes, I'm going to get you to change your mind. About where you are right now. And then I have four boxes I'm going to show you, and in 10 minutes, I'm going to show you how you're going to change your mind about what you're going to do during the next 90 days. And then the upward curve that I spoke about, in five minutes, I'm going to show you how you're going to change your mind about what you're going to do for the next 25 years. So. So this is basically what I'm going to do in the next half hour. So the first thing I want you to do is to imagine this circle that actually has three parts. And what this circle really represents is your emotional reaction to different things that you're actually doing right now. Snapshot of where you are right now. And what A stands, what the first outer circle stands for, we call this A. And the second one we call B. And the third one we call C. And A stands for everything in your business right now. All the time that you're spending that really irritates you. So this is the irritating part of your life right now. How many of you can relate to that right away? Okay.

Yeah.

And it's very important to actually tell the truth about what irritates you, because if you don't tell the truth about what irritates you, you can't actually do something else. The second part of what your life is right now is B, and this is the okay part of your business. And usually the okay part of your business is related to cash flow. Okay. How many of you are okay with cash flow? Okay, it's not irritating, but it's also. Some of it is not very exciting. Okay. And then the third part, C really represents the part of your business where you're spending your time and your action with that is really fascinating and motivating. Okay. So you're very fascinated with this. It's new, it's got a lot of promise, and it's very motivating because it looks like it's going to be really big. It's going to be a lot better. Okay, how many of you have all three of those right now? You have irritating.

You have.

Okay, good. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have you actually do a little list of the three most irritating things right now. Okay. And people can be irritating. So how many of you have people who are irritating? Yeah, situations. How many of you have situations that are irritating? Right. And how many of you just have activities or tasks that are very irritating? You know, maybe obligations. How many of you have obligations that are irritating?

Yeah.

So anyway, it's just your truth and I'm just going to give you an example of three of mine. And one of mine is spending any time with entrepreneurs who don't have any ambition.

Okay?

It seems like a wasted effort to me. How many of you realize that being an entrepreneur is a life sentence? How many of you know you can't go back? How many of you know they won't have you? How many of you wouldn't hire you? Okay, so that's really. So I tell people it's a life sentence. There's no out out. And so don't do your life sentence in an irritating fashion. Actually get rid of the irritations. That's why you became an entrepreneur in the first place. Okay? So the second one for me is meetings that don't have any impact. Okay? So we have a tool in Strategic coach which is called the impact filter. And, and what I require is that before we have a meeting, I want your impact filter the day before. Because I don't want to spend half the meeting trying to figure out what the meeting's about. I want to know what the meeting's about the next day. And I don't ask anyone to meet with me unless they get an impact filter. And then the next one is non strategic days and hours. So I have a time system where I only do three important things a day, okay? So sometimes I get my three important things done by 11 o' clock in the morning and that's my day. The rest of the day is not for work. Okay? And the reason why I figure three hours, three things a day is that in a five day work week, I get 15 important things done. How many of you, if you got 15 important things done in a week, that's a good week.

Okay?

And I work 210 days a year. Babs and I. Babs is she who decides. So anyway, she who decides decided about 25 years ago that we'd take 155 free days a year. So we have. Which gives me 210 days. And if I do three important things, that's 630 important things. 630 important things in a year. How many of you, if you did 630 important things in here, it would be a good year. And do that for 25 years and good lifetime for a life sentence. Okay? So that's yours. Now I want you to write down right now where you are. This is October 26, 2015. It really irritates you now. And there's a huge bonus for telling the truth here. Okay? Just tell the truth about what irritates you, okay? If you don't tell your brain what irritates you, your brain can't take action. Your brain can't see any solution to it. So just write it down. The moment you write it down, your brain starts finding the solution. Could be big or small. A lot of people won't write what irritates them because they think there is no solution. But the truth is, there is no solution until you write it down.

So.

Our brain just wants to know what to work on. And you're the only one that can tell it. That's it. Now I'm going to move on to okay. And for me, okay is I like intro sales presentations. We started off where I had to travel all over the world actually to do sales presentations. Now they're closer to home and they don't irritate me, they don't excite me, but they're great. I mean, they're great for cash flow. And I'm still in a position where that's important for my company. So I do it. But it's not. I'd like to see a future where I don't have to do this anymore. And that's usually what okay things are for you. You'll do it right now. Another one is coaching the basic concepts. We've been coaching for 41 years, and I personally coach 6,000 people. And there's basic concepts related to time and money and relationship and purpose. And I don't mind coaching those. I mean, I'm more excited about the new stuff that's being created, but I'll do it. And then the third one is there's new knowledge products that I'm creating. And there's parts of the process that's okay for me. Lots of parts of the process are fascinating and motivating, but there's still some things that are okay. Okay, so this is a good area. This is a tremendous area. And what we want to do, as part of the logic of what I'm showing you, this ABC model is you want to always, every 90 days, be eliminating your current irritating. And then you want to systematize and automate the B's. The okay part. So that's kind of a progression. Eliminate the as, systematize and automate the B's. The Four Seasons Hotel has a great line which is systematize the predictable and humanize the exceptional. So the more you can systematize the predictable part of your business. It frees you up to humanize, which means creativity and all sorts of new kinds of innovation. And it's really great. And then the third one, C, is what I love. I've come up with this fabulous new idea. I'm so excited, and it's been about the last six months where I've discovered how you can score mindsets. And basically what I'm really discovering is that the whole world actually runs by mindsets. It doesn't run by products or services. It actually runs by people wanting to graduate in their lives to a particular type of mindset. And I figured out how to create the mindsets, but not only that, I can teach anyone else how to create a mindset, A scorecard for mindsets that are important to you. So I'm very, very excited about this. Next thing is we have a part of the program which is called the 10 Times Ambition Program. And I really love it because I'm about 90 days ahead of my clients and I have to constantly come up with new stuff. And I'm very excited about that. And my final one is I've got a whole group growing number of my 10 times clients. A lot of them are in the room right here. Joe very much so. I've got Dean graziosi here. I've got Stefan Visenbach. I've got lots and lots of people here. And they're really changing games for other people. So I really, really love Robin. Robin's over here. Robin's a game changer. So I really, really, really love working with people who are game changers. And my definition of a game changer is that where all of your competitors actually become your customers and promoters. When you have changed the game of the entire industry, then your competitors actually become your biggest customers and your biggest promoters. And you can tell that's one of the telltale signs. How many of you would really like to do that? You would actually. Yeah, that's a huge thing. I really don't like competition. I like everybody else to be competing, but I just really don't like doing it. I'm the fifth child of two fifth children, and we kind of. I wasn't born with a competitive chip, so I was just born with a sneaky chip. Sneaky chip. I know how to bypass trouble. And I never thought competing was really a good use of time. So the big thing here now, how many of you. This is clarifying. It's kind of clarifying where you are. And you do this every 90 days. This gives you 90 days of work and you can make a big shift. How many of you, if you eliminated the A's, automated and systematized the Bs, and then focused a lot more time on the Cs, this would be a.

Big deal for you.

This would be a big shift. Okay, well how are we going to figure out where we are right now? So what I want you to do, you'll notice the little boxes right under A, B and C. Your activities. What I want you to do is say what percentage out of 100% of your time right now? What percentage are you spending in A? What amount of time are you spending in B and what amount of time are you spending in C? And these are my real numbers for this quarter. And what I want to tell you is no matter how good you get at getting rid of as next quarter there will be a new bunch of as that irritates you. Some of the OK's right now will become irritating next quarter. And the reason is because as you get more and more into fascinating and motivating, okay, things become irritating. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay, so what I want you to do now is this is where you are right now. And what I want you to do is say what percentage of your time next time in 90 days do you want to be spending on A? And for me it's zero. Okay, those activities, what percentage of those activities do I want to be spending? And I want to drop it down to 10. So I've gotten rid of 10, I've gotten rid of 10% there. And so next time I want to spend 90% of my time on this. Okay, really good. How many of you can see the shift? That's a big shift. 20% of your time being shifted to fascinating and motivating. That's a big deal. How many of you can get excited right now by the prospect of doing that? Yeah, that's really super. Now I'm just going to have you come down below this and I want you to say how you're actually going to do this. Okay. So one of our things is that this scorecard concept that we have, we've really developed it very well at the 10 times ambition level. And now over the next quarter I wanted to go throughout the program, everybody on a scorecard, impact filter only rules. Okay? So sometimes I let people meet with me without an impact filter and I'm getting mad as hell and I'm not going to put up with it anymore. And so the next quarter, no meet, no impact filter, no meeting. And the next one is just to Reinforce my three things a day. Okay? Three important things. And, you know, if you restrict the number of things that you do in a day to a fixed number like 3, you only have one way improving, and that is the. Since you can increase the quantity of things that you're doing, you have to increase the quality. Okay? So I'm an enemy of busyness on the planet. I'm a huge enemy of busyness. I think busyness interferes with people's growth of ambition, and I think busyness interferes with people's sense of courage. You can fool yourself by being busy that you're actually making progress, but it's a bit of a treadmill. And then I'm just going to put these in more of this as my information. But I want you to say the three things that you're going to do to automate and systematize B. And then with the 90% that I have here, and you have another percentage, what I want you to do is to actually say what you're going to really focus on and what these activities are. So we've identified nine possible areas for growth, and we've identified nine activities that would lead to growth. And this is really super. We're really moving very, very nicely here. Okay, so this is cool. And now if you could only do one thing over the next quarter. If you could only do one thing, I'll let you. I know some of you are writing furiously. Okay. 60% of my client base historically have been addicted. And so I've found that with ADD people, you got to do it really fast and you got to get them to write in small boxes that you can keep them almost forever and have them only write about themselves. I find the greatest way to engage another human being is have the entire conversation be only about them. How many of you are quite engaged when it's about you? Yeah, that comes from being a fifth child.

I have a rule.

I'm number 21. So when I meet a new person, I automatically assume that they have 20 more important things in their life than meeting me. Then if they are going to move me up into the top 20, it's because I'm creating value for them that actually engages them, but it has to be about them. So that makes life a lot simpler. The worst illusion in life, that any of this was created for you. Okay, so what I want you to do now is zero in on the one thing that would actually be a game changer. What would be a game changer here? Okay. And you can only pick one. You'll do more than one, but I want you to have your focus on one. Okay? So for me, it's the. I have three game changers, and I want to get them into a digital platform. So not only do they have a scorecard, but they have a digital platform. And by December, January 31st, I want three of my game changers with a scorecard in a digital platform. Okay? And I'm working with Stefan here, bright guy from England. Not all of them are. You know, They stick out. All right, that goes for Americans, too. All right, so how many of you. This is revealing. So this is kind of like a really, really fast way of taking a look at your quarter. Now here's a real tip for you. How many of you have teams? Okay, go back. There's an extra blank one of these in your pack. Go back and do this with your team and allow your team the movement now to get rid of the irritating work. And a lot of the irritating work really is what your company used to do, but it's not really necessary. You know, it's kind of like your wardrobe. 80% of it, you haven't worn in a year. Okay, so why do you still have those clothes around? Okay, just get rid of it. And how many of you have people in your life that are like clothes? 80% of them. 80% of them, you feel some sort of obligation, but you actually don't act on it. So we get rid of that. Okay, now we got to do another thing. So we're going to go to the four boxes right now. And this is a little thing that I discovered probably over the course of my life. But most people want a change delivered to them so they can always stay in a state of capability and confidence. And that's what perfectionism, by the way. Perfectionism is absolutely the enemy of entrepreneurism, because perfectionism is the demand that you be guaranteed up front with success before you'll actually commit yourself to it. How many of you have done that where you absolutely demand that success be guaranteed to you before you'll actually commit to the project? Okay. And the world doesn't work that way. It needs you to actually commit before the success can actually be created. And what that requires is courage. Okay? So commitment requires courage. So I want you to take the game changer breakthrough from the previous one, and I want you just to write from the bottom of the ABC page, write what you have in the bottom box and put that at the top.

Okay?

And so we have the create one on one game changer coaching process by December 31st, okay, so we'll have that in place. And then this is really part of getting them digital. Okay? And then my commitment now, a commitment is the statement to yourself that I am going to commit to this even though I don't have the guarantee of success. And that's what entrepreneurism is, that you commit yourself before you have a guarantee of success. Okay? And I've coached entrepreneurs all over, all over the world from 60, 70 different industries. And one of the things I notice is when entrepreneurs start to die is when they start thinking of having a courage free future. When you start thinking you're going to have a courage free, the universe notices. It's a bit like the Terminator. The light's going out like this and the universe starts wanting the parts back. When you tell the universe, I want a courage free life, the universe wants the parts back.

Okay?

And you start dying. Okay? In life. So with mine, by the end of 2015, I used all my experience from individual game changing coaching sessions over the past two and a half years to create a unique process that standardizes everything I know will be working for all existing and new game changer sessions in 2016. Okay? So game changer is the scary part of my life right now, okay. And I'm really. I just have to create it out of courage right now. The moment you start creating stuff. And each of you can analyze the five biggest breakthroughs in your life with this card. Okay? Every time you took a big breakthrough in your life is because you committed before there was a guarantee of success which required courage. The difference between courage and confidence is that confidence feels really good. Courage doesn't. How many of you, when you're feeling really shaky and you're feeling really, really scared and you're saying, oh, this is really terrible. Actually, it's courage. It's actually courage. And that's why a lot of people don't like courage, because it feels lousy. Okay? But the more you commit 100%, the shorter the courage that's required. That's really interesting. So I'm into short courage. I've tested long courage, and I like short courage. I like courage. That's maybe 24 hour courage. Okay? 15 minutes is even better. 15 minutes is better. You know, then there's some people, crazy people like Peter Diamantis, who has a lifetime of courage. Lifetime of courage. I'm not. I'm not that advanced yet. Okay, then the courage is that I hate going back. First of all, I have to go back and do an activity that I actually hate. And I Have to collect all my notes over the last two and a half years. And I got to organize them because I'm the only one who knows where they are and I'm the only one who knows how they actually connect with each other. So part of courage is for a while doing a particular type activity that moves you to the next level. But you're going to have to put in the time to actually do that. How many of you have something right now that it requires a very unpleasant activity on your part for a period of time. But if once you get it finished, then you never have to do that again in your life. And it puts you in a position where you can take a jump. Yeah. And so everybody thinks about courage, you know, like in a very heroic, medal winning terms. But a lot of courage is just what it is in your life right today that is required to go through to get to the next level. There are 7.3 billion people on the planet right now. And each of them got up during this 24 hour period and they're facing something that represents the next jump for them. Okay, so one of my goals, I'll talk to you a little bit later. Is that this is an exercise that's going to be online. It'll be an online app by the end of this month, probably by November 1st. And it's for phones, it's for pads, and it's for computers where you can just download this and use it. But what I'd like you to do is to distribute it to everybody in your network. Because I have a goal, and this is my influence from Peter Diamantis, that by 2039 we have a billion people on the planet using this exercise to basically grow on a daily basis. It'll be one out of nine people. And if you have one out of nine people actually going through courage on a day makes everything better. Just makes it. What they're doing, I have no idea, nor do I care. I just want them moving forward on the thing that gives them courage. That's all I want to do. And then once we get this, you get a capability out of it. So it's the commitment and the courage that actually creates capability. So it's a bit like the commercials. Apply, lather, rinse, reapply. This is the same thing here, okay? So the same thing is you have to. Commitment creates courage. Courage creates capability. Capability creates confidence. So the next one is confidence, okay? And see, this is what people really, really want. But they want confidence given to them. Nobody can give you confidence. You have to Create confidence by going through commitment, courage, and developing a new capability. And it's the three of those. And once you get the higher level of confidence, then you can commit at a higher level. Okay? And as long as you keep doing this for the rest of your life, you'll always be young. No matter what age you are, you'll always be young. People get old when they try to have capability and confidence without commitment and courage, okay? So that's just how the world works and what it means to be truly human. Okay? So that's it.

So I've.

This is what your next 90 days is about. How many of you, if you did this during the next 90 days, that would be a real breakthrough. Yeah, yeah. And I've got a lot of people here. You know, we have 300 in the room. And each of you is working on something else. And it's you working on something else that makes the world go round, okay? Because you influence a lot of other people while you're doing it, okay? It's not big stuff. It's the thing that you have to deal with right now. Okay? Now I'm going to take you to the next one. And this is an upward arrow. This is really important. So I did the 90 days. You've just done the ABC to set this up. And then you did the four Cs. And now I'm going to show you that if you do the ABC and you do the four Cs every day or at the beginning of every 90 days, that just locks you in just for the next 90 days. So in my program at Strategic Coach, the time period I get everybody to think about is 25 years, okay? So for me, I started a new 25 year period last year, 2014, and I'm going to 2039. But for you today, what you're doing, you're doing 25 years from 2015 to 2040, okay? So last year I was 70. So my next growth period, and this will be my biggest growth period, is from age 70 to age 95. So when I'm 95, I'm more energized. I'm a lot smarter, I'm a lot more ambitious than I am right now, okay? And the reason I want to do that is because I want to do it. People say, well, why do you need to do that? I say, I do not need to do that. I want to do it. Okay? Most of you in this room are beyond the borderline of need. You're into the world now of want, okay? And want doesn't have anything to do with other people thinking about what you should do. Want is simply, this is what I want to do. And the reason why you want to do it is because you want to do it. How many of you that's actually relieving? There's no justification in the world of wanting. In the world of needing. There's total justification because you're expecting other people to do it in the world of wanting. Strictly your game. So you got the 90 days and then you do 100 quarters like this. So you do the ABC. So this quarter, which goes right up until the beginning of 2016, you do that. Okay. And then you jump to a higher level. And then the beginning of the next 90 days, you do that. And you do this for 100 quarters in a row. How many of you think it would really take you somewhere? Yeah. And remember, each One of those 90 days is just 1% of 25 years. So if you blow one, it doesn't really matter. So what I do is every quarter I do five things. This is my number one thing. But I actually do five things. Five multiplier projects. And it's like compound interest. See, people really grasp compound interest when it comes to money, but they don't actually understand compound interest when it comes to capability. So every 90 days I want to ratchet up my level, first of all, of operating in the area of fascinating and motivating. And I want to ratchet up being in a continual cycle of commitment, courage, capability and confidence. And do that every quarter. And it's like investing now in something that's going to keep paying over. One of the big problems of living in the microchip age is people's reduced time frames. And if you reduce your time frames, time speeds up. If you lengthen your time frame, everything slows down. Okay? Okay. So this is October 26, 2015. I'd like to take you down back to October 26 in 1990. And what I'd like you to do is tell me the three things that were really ticking you off that day. Nobody remembers. How many of you though can remember what generally you were really excited about in 1990. How many of you can get a handle on that? So here's a tip. Our brain only remembers excitement. It doesn't remember getting ticked off. That being the case about the future, don't try to remember getting ticked off in the future. Just remember. See, the only memory worthy things that are things that are fascinating and motivating, nothing else is worth reminding. Doesn't last more than a couple Days.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I've enjoyed book that's come out. And if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. What's your perspective on business? And how would you define this word success that everyone throws around?

Yeah. Wow. So how would I define business? That was the question.

Yeah.

Or perspective on business. And how would you define success?

Yeah, my perspective on business, for me, I use business as a creative exploration. It's a creativity. It's not what I am or who I am. Even though I'm known as an entrepreneur, to me it's just an outlet for creative expression. I have an idea. What turns me on is having an idea and manifesting it in the physical world. So I have an idea and I'm like, oh, this would be great. Let's make it into a product and then let's share it. That's marketing. Right. And I really look at business and like Poo Pourri, I call her a living, dynamic organism. So we do marketing a little bit backwards. We don't have a target consumer.

Why is it a she versus a he?

Poo Pourri.

Well, that's just where she was. She was a woman. I mean, it was just very clear to me.

So women do poop.

Women poop.

Yeah.

But, you know, so what it is, is we talk about. Everyone in our company knows women. What she would do at any moment, what she would say, how she would act, whether she. So that helps keep decision making. Almost like in a holacracy environment where people would know, oh, Poo Pourri would never do that. Poo Pourri would. So we look at the brand as an energy within itself.

I mean, what you're saying and doing right now is so interesting. I mean, does that strike you as kind of interesting, what you just said?

Yeah.

Like what a. A unique and very smart and strategic way to interact with your company because it gives a whole nother life to it. And it's so funny because it's poopery.

Right.

But I really like what you're saying. I mean, it's the whole thing about energy.

Yeah.

Because, you know, even when people say time management. Because one of my questions for you is that. But it's really energy management.

It's energy management.

And it's how you. I mean, it's like time management. Well, you know, everyone here has got the same 24 hour franchise as everyone else. And they're going to eat and they're going to have meals, they're going to have commute time, they're going to have bathroom time, they're going to have sleep. You know, everyone's got these things, but it's what they do within it in that energy and how they contain it and what they generate. Because I don't think success just happens. You generate it, you create it.

Yes, well, actually, so I had a conversation a few years ago with Dr. Bruce Lipton because I had this theory that ideas are alive. And I called him and I said, are ideas alive? And he said, why do you ask? And I said, because it seems to me the ideas that are alive within my being and my body, man, I get excited and I feel like a physical sensation. Those seem to work out more than the ones that I create with my strategic mind, because that's what someone told me I should do. And he said it was a great question. And he said everything's alive, everything's an energetic vibration. So. And then he taught me about resonance and dissonance. Are you guys familiar with resonance and dissonance? So resonance is when you take two energy waves and you put them together and they're both traveling at the same speed and the same height. Those two together create more energy together than they do apart. So imagine that you with the amazing idea, create more energy together. Right. Than you do apart. So I'm going to get back to your question because it's so fun. Dissonance is when you take two energy waves and they're traveling at different states, speeds and different wavelengths. Those create less energy than they do together. That's the reason that job's killing me. My relationship, whatever, it's literally draining your life force energy. So what's really fun about this is I started thinking about resonance and these alive ideas. So if an idea is alive, it's a living, energetic vibration. So what I'm talking about, a business, being alive is not far fetched. So you put that with me. Those two together create more energy. So what I'm doing as a business person is I'm looking and censoring and sort of going, where are the alive ideas? I'm reading the room.

Yeah, you know, that's awesome. I got to show you this tool. We haven't done it in a couple of years here, but I created a tool for genius network called Anatomy of a Successful Business. And it shows like a human Body, just like a doctor would point the brain, the heart, the nervous system, the muscles, the skeletal structure, the lungs, the stomach. And I have lines where it's like go and fill up all of the different areas of a business, what you think. And it's funny because some people will put the heart is the marketing or the marketing is the brain, or the people are the heart or the lungs happen to be the finance. And it's interesting because everybody has a different perspective on how they think of what the anatomy of a successful business. Because if you look at the anatomy of a successful human, it's all these different parts that are working together, which is why health is so important to have a healthy organism. But when I have people do it in business, it's so interesting to see the different ways people would frame a business like they would a body.

That's cool.

Yeah. And you're giving me a whole different meaning of this now, like thinking, wow, based on what you said, it's a whole different way to interact with that. But the whole point is I want people to feel like, yeah, how do you make something more alive?

Yeah. And what I love about this when you talk about success. So the way I define success is, is my organ, is my child, my business happy, healthy and are they thriving? And they are. Right. I mean it's so amazing. Whenever I have people come to me and they ask about should I get involved, investment or whatever. And I really have them feel into with each investor, like you're going into a relationship. It's not about money. There's so many that fail because they make these bad investments. There needs to be resonance. When there's resonance, like it's golden. Those are Those case the 1 or 2% that just fly and make it. The other is not resonance. And I just say walk, don't take the money.

Do you know how many startup entrepreneurs are going out and raising money if they actually took seriously what you just said, how much grief it would prevent, how much wasted money, time and effort and energy. And there's so much because there's no such thing as a good business deal with a bad partner. And a lot of them, they just go into it simply because it's money.

Yeah. Now the thing with resonance also though is it's based on your subconscious mind as well. So we can get into a whole thing here, but you're going to resonate. So it's also a way to kind of co create with life and co create with your business. If you keep creating a problem, you can kind of Go in and go, oh, wow. What's happening in my subconscious mind? Right. And how am I creating this? Okay, good. So I know what I just kind of came out. You know, I've been doing this for 13 years and growing my business, but I really did it through a lot of medicine journeys. I went down to the jungle the first time 12 years ago, but I really started looking at everything as energy. And that's when I found out about money as energy. Because I thought I wanted to be a shaman. I'm called to be a shaman, as every person that goes down to Peru thinks. It's like, this is my calling. And the shaman said, actually, you're going to be able to do that. Money is just energy, and business is the greatest way to move money through the world. And you're going to affect more people by doing business, by running that energy in the world than you are down here pouring ayahuasca to 20 people at a time.

That's awesome.

Which I thank him. Now.

What do you think of the advice? Do what you love.

Oh, it's the only advice, like, literally in our company. If we don't love it, we don't do it, and we don't do it if it's hard. So we only do stuff that's easy. So we have a rule that literally we have. We'll be in meetings. We need to start filming this. We talk about it all the time. We have meetings and someone will say, I think we're in struggle. I'll say, okay, what's happening? And they'll tell us when it's in struggle. Like, I've literally. It doesn't matter. $250,000 contracts. I can tell you story after story where I'm like, cut it. Quit it. We just don't do it if it's hard.

Yeah, well, you know, my whole elf thing, easy, lucrative and fun.

That's it. I love that.

Yeah. Versus hard.

Annoying, lame, and frustrating. If someone or something is half and it could be hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating. But if you're, you know, all money is not created equal.

So for us, hard. When it starts to be a struggle, it's not exactly a stop. It's definitely. It's a pause. It's a yield sign. And that's why I want to go. Tell me what's going on. Right? Because we want to kind of stop and sense in. And there's so many stories I could tell you that validate how this is, you know, But I always, like, if the phone won't, I can't get a call through. I literally notice that if the Skype, if the zoom won't work, I really notice that energy, like, oh, this will be interesting to see what happens. And almost every time there's either no connection or. And I'm really walking around. If I am an energetic being, just like dating, I'm walking around in business kind of going, does this feel good? Does it not? Because what I know is that whenever I lost everything before, it didn't feel good.

Were you checking in with those other things also in the past when they failed, or were you kind of disconnected?

No, I was super disconnected. I thought from just here up I had no access to any of my intuition or my body. I remember the first time a therapist said, where do you feel that in your body? And I literally said, what body? Like, what are you talking about?

Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, because it's all, it was all mental.

Well, you know what I mean, look, you've done a lot of, you've done a lot of work. And the personal work is parlayed into the business success.

Well, to me, they merge. You can ask anyone in our company, anyone, they'll tell you that. Literally, I look at the business, I think business is the greatest catalyst for your own personal growth because then you can go, what's going on in there? And then, oh, what story do I have? And how can I create a different reality and people? You know, for me, success is what I'm constantly opening up to. You know, there's a level of where you have to keep expanding to be able to receive. Right. I just got interviewed like the Forbes richest self made women. And I'm like, what I mean, like literally I'm on the floor crying just two nights ago, just going like, okay, like just taking all that in. Like, okay, this is it. Like, this is keep going bigger and bigger and bigger. That takes as much muscle as I think anything else in life does.

What does money mean to you at this point?

You know, it's what does money mean to me? I don't know. Money's energy. You know, I have a, I've written three books and I've never published any of them. So somebody needs to kick my ass. And one of them is called Rich as Shit.

Rich as shit, yeah.

And it's just, well, don't worry, I already got your number. I pinged that about 30 seconds in. I've just been waiting for the right energy. But anyway, yeah, so it's rich as shit. So that was what I, that's one of them. Because Money is just energy, and it's not all of the energy. So, for example, my life is rich and I happen to have money. So what I do is I work on my internal state, my internal compass. And when I'm rich here, my experience is it just keeps being richer outside myself. And that's the way I want to live. I don't want money where this doesn't feel good.

Yeah.

I just don't. It's not a part of my being. So I focus. I do inside out. I focus here. Yeah. And I want people to be focused on being energy rich. Because there's so many people that may have what we consider success, but they're miserable. They are not rich inside themselves, energetically. They're in relationships that drain them. They're in careers that drain them. They're doing stuff that doesn't turn them on. So I say dive into what turns you on, man. I mean, that's all you got to do. Then you're rich. And to me, it's a natural occurrence. We can all get into metaphysics here and the way universe works. But abundance is the natural outpouring of that state.

Yeah. Well, look, let me say it this way then. You got this stuff you said, bullshit, bullshit. We'll talk about shit here. So you got this spray. You spray it in a toilet, okay. Or wherever you. There's a pond of water that has a porcelain, like jail or whatever you call it. And it makes the smell of poop not go. And you sell millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of this stuff. And I've always loved that. Entrepreneurs are people that solve problems, problems for a profit. However, there are people out there that make profits creating problems. I can point to tobacco companies, I can point to food companies. I can point to alcohol companies. I can point to a lot of different companies that actually make profits off misery, Right? And then there's entrepreneurs that solve problems for a profit. And if you really identify a problem, you can wrap your head around it. You can use your artistic, creative energies, you can use your resourcefulness, and you can solve this problem and you can put it together and assemble in all the right way. You have a quote unquote successful company, which is what you've done. And so rich as shit. We've had quite a few people that have had New York Times best sellers that actually started Ingenious Network. Now, you've already written this book or it's partly written or what?

No, it's pretty much written. I had two ghostwriters write it too. So anyway, it's written first time I put it out.

What would, what are the obstacles that would prevent one from putting the book? And I'm not saying this, don't take this as a no, I like this.

I'm like, okay, yeah.

So like, I'd like to. I mean, I think you know all of the things that you know and talk about from what I know you, from what you're talking about right here, you've got really important, valuable stuff that would help a lot of people. And I want to see that out into the world. And I think rich as shit is funny. I mean, it just sounds kind of cool and I'd love to like see this happen. And I'd also like, in a certain way, putting you on the spot here of what will it take for this to be made. Put it out in the wild and let it start helping people.

Probably partnering with Tucker. That could be step one, I don't know. So it's a little bit of a complex system because I love this question about games. So I had a download about six years ago, there was no plant medicine involved at that point. And I saw this game that actually elevates computer consciousness. And I am now working with one of the top game developers in the world. So I kind of see the book and the game sort of coming together. So I mean, I could just put richest shit out right now. But really this is about the game is the game of life. Right. Because we're all playing it, whether you believe it or not. You know, at some point you'll be on your deathbed and you're like, oh shit, I figured it all out. So my thing is, why don't we figure out and realize that we are co creating with the universe and that we are actually playing a game all the time.

So part of it is this, assembling this game and putting it out together.

Yeah, because look, is it packaged together, is it not? It's like a timing.

Yes. So do you know choose the Muse headbands? So Aria Gartner, she spoke at our Genius Network annual event last year. She's a sponsor again this year at the event. And when I first did a two and a half hour interview with her probably like four years ago, and she has, I think the largest database in the world, the brain research. And she had raised over $50 million when she was first starting that company. And she said something really interesting to me when we were doing the interview a few years ago and she said, a good idea will not die. You cannot kill a good idea.

It's alive.

Yeah, yeah.

And I was sitting and she's like, you know, and she said, it will keep coming up, and if your idea is good enough, even if you're not able to launch it, it will keep coming back because it's just ready to go out into the world, Right. And it may not be right now.

So the whole rich.

Ish.

Because a lot of times I don't want to say, susie, let's make sure richest shit is published in the next six weeks.

That's one approach.

Because you will get things out there and then see what happens. But at the same time, you know, I just want to whatever degree I could, positive pressure, like, let's make this thing happen.

I know in my being. So my prayer with Poo POURRI for the 13 years I've been in business has been, show me what this is for, right? Because, come on, it's kind of a cosmic joke. It's like anybody that's on a spiritual level, it's like, I make. Actually, the company's worth More like 700 million right now, but $700 million from selling a poop spray, like, it's just kind of stupid. I mean, think about it, like, really from a deeply spiritual being. It's like really, like. It's like some big plot twist. So I've always wondered, like, what is this for? And I know that it is only to have a platform of some sort of credibility for me to be able to share. The message that I'm telling you guys right now is that we're all energetic, spiritual beings and our business is no different. Everything. That's it. And I know that.

So when you think about your life in business, in your opinion, what games are worth playing and what games aren't worth playing, how would you respond to that?

Well, I play zero games as far as what games are. You know, I had a guy come over the other day and he wants to do business. And I said, you know, I need to be honest with you. You're married. And I actually have a lot of energy running in my body when you're around. Like, that's the conversations I have. I said, I just want to let you know if you feel a distancing, that's what's happening within me. And I want to put this on the table. So I don't play any games as far as, like, I'm going to be able to get something or not get something. I play the opposite game of I want radical transparency and honesty. But we're always playing a game like, it's all a big game. And if it all is a big game and if this all is a big illusion, you know, like, let's us play the best damn game we can, right? And I'm working on those parts of seeing where I don't step up. And that's like, why aren't you speaking on the big stages, Susie? You know, so I gotta look at those little parts of myself that think.

So what's the best piece of business advice you've ever received? And how did it change your business path and your direction?

I think it was, well, I received a couple of them. First. The first one was somebody said, don't spend all your money, kid, because it's really, really hard to make money and it's 10 times harder to keep it. I think that was one of them. And I think the other one was, you know, it's all about the numbers. There's only two ways to do business. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And don't do anything because it's an ego play. Increase sales or decrease cost. That's it. And those things probably have been the ones and everybody else knows all the other ones. Of course, do what you love. Of course, do your research and everything else. But the room knows that already.

So FUBU has. It's had 6 billion in global sales. What are the key elements, secrets and requirements of building like a $6 billion brand that people here can utilize well.

In the days that we built it? I think that there are a couple of things. First of all, you know, in business, it's purely about distribution. I think that you can have the greatest idea in company or whatever the case is, but you don't have a way to distribute it. It's a pipeline. It's a challenge. I think that to understand and don't fall in love with your product where you think that you're creating something new. Because we will never create anything new. It will only be a new position or a new angle on it, a new price. You know, I would say Twitter was, as I shared with you before, it was a note on a pigeon's leg a million years ago. And I didn't put three sleeves on a T shirt. I just created a movement around it. So it's always a different positioning. And I think those are the ways. And then after you get to a certain level where you have brand equity, I think it's creating a large amount of really amazing strategic partners. Licensing, whether it's a territory or licensing a different angle of your project. Is important. I'm not going to understand what they necessarily want in Japan, even though they want Fubu in Japan. It's a different culture as well as I can do my men's business. But you and I were two guys. If you wear a 32 and I wear 32, there's two size, 32, there's 32 long, 32 short. If I sell a pair of seven or a pair of eight jeans to a female, there's 17 sizes because the thighs are too big. The butts to this, it gaps over here. So I would license that business to an expert in that area because I don't have a lifetime to learn the ladies business as well. So I think that strategic partners are very valuable.

Okay.

Okay. So what do you see as the biggest opportunity right now in the marketplace that you may not want to fully share, but you just know there's huge opportunity for entrepreneurs who can take advantage of it. That would be worth 10 times the 10,000 to 25,000 people invested to be in this room.

I think that. And I don't mind sharing. I think that there are influencers and people all around the world right now that have, you know, pseudo celebrities. And I think that we are going back to the days of the proprietor. You feel like you're dealing directly with the proprietor. No longer is there three, three forms of separation between you and something you're consuming. You can consume something from a proprietor. And I think that the days that I grew up of needing the rappers and the artists to wear something and talk to the manager and do this and that, and then needing the TV to air it, I think it's a different time now where there are kids in the middle of Australia sitting there on Instagram with 10 million followers, but they're not moving anything but content. And then if you have something else, whether it's a pen, a jacket, a book, a cup or something like that, and you brand that, you branded to that kid, and the average is a half percent or 1%. Go aheads. And converts. You can sell something every single week. And if you end up creating, creating infrastructure where you have 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 of those kids, you can create a total movement.

Awesome. So who do you privately turn to for advice, if anyone? And why you, Jay?

Who else? You know, I turn to my kids because, you know, I've gotten to the point where, you know, these. These little brats of mine were on Snapchat. They were talking about Uber, they were talking about this and that. And as adults, we ain't going what.

The hell you doing?

You should go. No, what the hell are you doing? Because, you know, that's just where it is.

You know, that's actually really good. Okay, what is your business model and model for living as successful of a life that you can, and what's the most critical single element you focus on within it?

Having fun by far. And I've gotten to that place in my life where it is, and many people in this room may say, well, you know, you have enough money to have to have fun what you're doing. But I really look back to the days and even when I started fubu, when I started fubu, even due to the frustration of the fact that we felt nobody wanted to support this community, most of my friends where I grew up were drug dealers and things of that nature. And at that time, to be a designer in 1989, 1990, the perception of a designer was they're either Italian, older white, Caucasian individuals or they were gay. And I have no issue with anybody's sexual preference. But I decided that I love to dress and I wanted to do it and I had fun doing it. So now, even when I'm at this stage in my life of having fun, I'm excited about people I work with and people I have fun with. It's not because I have the wealth, because once I stopped chasing my friends and hanging out and wanting to be cool and make the money and get the girls, and I just stopped and told some tell a bunch of rough guys, hey, I want to make a couple of little hats. It wasn't easy, but when I did that, when I did that, I found success and I found peace. And then, you know, and that's just why I operate business. And hopefully that answered it. And I'm sure everybody up here has said the same thing.

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. You don't complain about your staff because you hired 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 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. 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, 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, 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. 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. The last edition which came out a couple of months ago, showed that the number one fastest growing company was. 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 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 a customer 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, 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. Geez, that's a great company. Geez, 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 purchases. They come out with an iPad, they sleep. Hundreds 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 it 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. 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? 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. For corroborations. In the INC study they did 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 healthy. 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. Is nothing gives us greater joy 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 company. 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? 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 law 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, 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, get it 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, pickup 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 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, it's killing them. So they systematized the sales process. Their sales went up 1,000%. If 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. That'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. You pay 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, 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, and that's after 100% of every expense of cost of customer acquisition and lead generation and delivery and everything else. And then they compare, compare those against the others and they re emphasize, 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 in 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. 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 you see. 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.

What is the road less stupid? How would you describe it.

If I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you've ever made in your whole life, how much money would you have? And there's not a person in this room that if I gave them the ability to unw any one of three financial decisions wouldn't have more money. It turns out that the key to making more money is to doing fewer stupid things. That's true. I don't need more good ideas. I need fewer ideas that I think are good, that I've executed on. And so I've had the experience over the last 47, 48 years of being in business of having done some smart things where actually it wasn't that smart. But in reality, I was lucky. I happened to catch a big wave. And I mistook catching a big wave with being a good swimmer. And it's what Warren Buffett is very famous for saying. Most of you have heard it. You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. And so the key is not can I make it? The key is can I make it and keep it. Those are two entirely different skill sets. And in fact, they are almost diametrically opposed. What it takes to make money is very different than what it takes to keep it. And most people are so obsessed with making it that as they become more successful, they do stupid things, which winds up sabotaging their overall success. And I know this story firsthand because this is one of the reasons I appreciated you so much, Paul, and Your presentation is because I've had the experience of losing a lot of money, $100 million of my money that I made. I didn't inherit it, I made it. You were better off than me because you cut the bleeding at plus 600,000. I didn't cut the bleeding until I was minus 50 million. So I went from plus 100 million to minus 50 million in a matter of 24 months. And when you do that, it takes your breath away. I mean, that's a major, major event. Not only because of the size of the money, but also because the loss is so devastating. And I had so much of my net worth. I have my self worth entwined with my net worth, which is a deadly combination.

How old were you during that time?

40. 40.

And that was during the. For real in real estate.

Real estate, yeah, a lot of. And what led to the loss? Look at your losses. It's not necessarily pleasant to think back on, but everybody's had some kind of loss that they've sustained as a result of a bad decision or excessive optimism. Unexamined assumptions, unexamined assumptions, faulty expectations, excessive optimism are killers. Arrogance is killers. Hubris is a killer for creating and sustaining wealth. So the goal to me is not to get it. The goal is to get it and keep it. You can get lucky and make it. And I know lots of people who got lucky. But the problem is they weren't able to keep it because they didn't have skills that would allow them to sustain. So the truth is, to me, sustainability of wealth is the holy grail. Making it. I can catch a big wave, I can get lucky. I can happen to hit a crease in the market at exactly the right point and you know, we can wind up being, you know, affiliate associated with you or Tony Robbins or any number of other people. And you know, there's a degree of luck in all that and there's a skill set in all of that. And so I'm very much about, let's make sure that if we're going to all this effort in order to create the success and people do stupid things in the creation mode as well. People oftentimes think that if I just improve my product that that would somehow allow me to create business or financial success. And yet the truth is it doesn't require a great product in order to make a lot of money. If I ask you to think about your favorite restaurant, the place you would go to have a huge celebration, you're thinking about it, you know, where it would be. There's not One person in this room that's thinking about McDonald's, not one. And yet nobody has made more money in the history of mankind in the restaurant business than McDonald's. How did it happen? Is it because their cheeseburgers are so good? No, their cheeseburgers are horrible. Right? They are. Their French fries, on the other hand, are really good, but the cheeseburgers are horrible. What allowed McDonald's to make a lot of money was not an obsession with the product. It's never, write this down. This will be a takeaway. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. Southwest Airlines, their whole business model is put butts in seats and fly those butts from point A to point B safely. No mention of your luggage. Right. Your luggage is immaterial to the airlines. Whether it makes it or not, we don't care. Let's just make sure the person gets from point A to point B. Doesn't even have to be on time. Southwest Airlines has made more money in the last 10 years in the airline business than the rest of the airline industry, cumulatively since Orville and Wilbur Wright. Now you think about that. One airline has made more money than everybody else since Orville and Wilbur. How'd that happen? Is it because their planes are so good? Is it because their first class section is so roomy? Is it because the food is so outstanding? Is it because the hostesses and stewards and stewardesses. Is it because they're so good looking?

No.

I can't tell which is older, the stewardesses or the airplanes. Right. It's never what you. Southwest Airlines success is not based on what they did. It's how they did it. You name me any product or service. I don't care what it is. Give me one week. You could say chewing gum, shoelaces, seminars, pins, socks. Name me any product or service. Give me one week, and in one week I'll come back and name you one person who's made millions and 100 people that have gone broke with the exact same idea. The problem is, as entrepreneurs, we become obsessed with the product. We become obsessed with the. Either the quality and I'm not opposed to great products. That's not the message. The message is, what is it? As a business person, what is it that we're focused on? The artist side of me wants to focus on the product and making it better and longer lasting and prettier and more robust. And I'm good with that. We need artists the operator side of me wants to get busy and get a bunch of stuff done. I just, I got so much to do and holy cow, if it's going to get done, I'm going to have to do it myself because I don't know how to hire a team or keep a team or have a players or create a culture or I don't know any of that. I just got a lot to do. That's the operator side. The business person side says, wait a minute. The job is not to react to the problem du jour. What I need to do is leverage and structure. Write those two words down. That's the difference between a solopreneur and one person army. A solopreneur and a business owner. A business owner has mastered two things, structure and leverage. And without structure and leverage, there is not a way to create a sustainably successful business. I'm going to say the structure part a different way before I talk about leverage.

Yeah.

Opportunity without structure is chaos. The Achilles tendon of most entrepreneurs is structure. They hate it. That's why they started their own business, is because they hate the idea of having structure. And yet structure is critical for scaling. I hear a lot of people in here talking about scaling or scaling is just a Silicon Valley word for growth. That's all it is. How do I grow this thing? Okay, well if I'm going to grow this thing, I need structure in order.

To be able to do it.

Otherwise I got kind of a fire drill working with a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff and it's not necessarily the most productive thing that needs to happen. Leverage, one of the highest forms. When I talk about leverage, most people think, oh, he's talking about debt. In reality, I'm not. I mean debt is a financial instrument, it's leverage. But, but the more powerful form of leverage is who's on your team. So I'm going to ask you a question. If I gave you an opportunity to build a world class team of A players and the only people on your team were a players. I mean, seven footers, these are the Kevin Durant's, they can do it all. If you only had a team of A players, how many of your existing problems that you have right now would go away, disappear? It turns out the problems that most of us are dealing with are not even really the problem. Unison where I need a little whiteboard, if I can get one right here. Joe just handed you a piece of paper a second ago and said thank you and said write down one of your biggest problems. So I'm going to ask you right now to write down on your piece of paper one of your three biggest problems. Maybe you just did that. Maybe you can refer back to that piece of paper. Maybe you're not going to have to share this. We're not going to talk about it. It's not going to be anything. So you may want to write really, really small so that nobody else can see. Write it really small and just write down or revisit one of your three biggest problems that you think you have with. With your business. Let me give you a thought. The exercise is over. You don't have to complete writing it down. The exercise is over. Every person here has an is line. This is reality. This is the way it looks. This is point A. Point A. And the problem that most people have, in my experience, I know I have this problem, is that I'm not particularly honest with myself about the reality of my situation. I sugarcoat it. When I was at the University of Texas, every day I'd walk past a little message etched in granite over the doors of a building. And the message was, you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. So you know this, right? And every day for four or five years, I walked past this saying, and I went, I don't know what this means. What does that mean? You should know the truth and the truth will set you free. Well, the reality, it dawned on me later is that as long as I'm lying to myself or not telling the truth, I have no opportunity to make change. So it's why addicts don't stop using is because they say, well, I don't really have a problem. I can stop anytime I want. Yeah, I know it's a little. I know it's a little bit. But, you know, the reality is it's. I'm functioning right. It's why alcoholics or poor people pick a topic. People don't tend to tell themselves the truth. This is point A. We also have point B. Point B is ought. This is the way I'd like for it to look. This is point B. And it turns out that most of us are experts on point B. We have massive clarity on the way we would like to. For it to look. Because we've done all this visualization, we've done all this goal setting where you make a goal and then you make it vibrant and then you turn it into black and white. Then you bring it closer and farther away, and then you put music around it. And so we're really good at Visualizing what ought, we tend to suck at what is. And when asked what our problem is, we describe the gap. The gap between where you are and what you want is what you typically describe as the problem, when in reality, this gap is not the problem. This gap is the symptom. I just ask you. Joe just asked you the last exercise you did. Write down one of your three biggest problems, and everybody got busy real quick. We knew what the problem was because we were visualizing the gap between where we are and what we want, when in reality, that's not the problem. That's the symptom. The gap sits right here. This is. Sorry. The problem sits right here. This is the problem. This is the obstacle that I need to overcome in order to move the needle on my is line. In order to move the needle on my is line, I need to get clarity on what it is that's truly blocking my forward progress. What's blocking my forward progress has nothing to do with where I am versus what I want. What's blocking my forward progress is the obstacle that sits right here. And it turns out, Joe, that the hardest part of thinking time is getting clarity on the problem. That is, if you don't have clarity on the problem, that is, you'll be tactical instead of strategic. So I say I'm 10 pounds overweight. What do I want to do about it? Well, as long as I view the problem as being 10 pounds overweight, which is not the problem, that's the symptom.

Hello.

Hello. Are you with me that? Being 10 pounds overweight is not the problem, that's the symptom. But as long as I identify being 10 pounds overweight as being the problem, then what I will lurch to is, okay, should I buy a jump rope or should I join a gym? Should I buy Oprah's latest diet book, or should I get a personal train? Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll get a piece of home exercise equipment. That's what I'll do. If I just had a peloton bike in my house, then I would get in shape, which is why most home exercise equipment and most diet books don't work, because it's a tactical response to a tactical question. As long as I'm dealing with the symptom, I'm going to be dealing in tactical. And once I say it's not a tactical issue, I need to be strategic and think strategic and identify the problem that is. So here it is. And then I'll stop. Joe, if I don't have Clarity on the problem, that is, I'll build a machine for the problem that isn't, which is what we do 99% of the time. We identify the gap, call it the problem, when in reality it's a symptom. And we're highly tactical in our response because we have a tactical question that we've asked which winds up sabotaging our results. If you tell me your sales aren't high enough, I'm going to say that's a symptom, not a problem. If you tell me you don't have enough profits, if you tell me you have a crummy culture, if you tell me you have weak employees, if you tell me your balance sheet is screwed up, I'm going to look at you and say, all those are symptoms. What's the problem? So if I gave you an opportunity to rethink the problem that you identified a minute ago, is that really the problem? Really? Is that the problem? Is that the core root underlying problem that's blocking your forward progress? Or is there something below that, something buried where you got to get busy and figure out what in the world is going on? So business, to me is an intellectual sport. It's chess. Money and business does not respond well to emotions. Warren Buffett said it. Optimism is the enemy of the rational investor. It turns out in business, optimism is your enemy, which is why one of the pieces of advice that you gave is so good, Paul, which was, we all need a board, we need advisors, we need people that we will listen to. The higher you go, or the higher you want to go, the greater the requirement to have somebody around you who will tell you the truth. Because I can't smell my own breath. I can smell your breath, but I can't smell mine. I can't see my own swing. I can see the shot. I can't see the swing. I need people around me, watching me swing, who will give me advice. And then I gotta be willing to hear that advice. As long as I'm arrogant, right? Unwilling to listen. It does no good to ask. So business is an intellectual sport, and the people that win the game sustainably have got skills and tools, which is why I wrote the book the Road Less Stupid.

Yeah.

I love how you refer to businesses and what you build as the machine. How would you, if you, as simplistic as it may sound, what do you mean by that? Everyone here is building a machine. And your comment about building a machine for the problem that isn't. It seems to me that the vast majority of entrepreneurs, because of the failure rate and the stress level and just the really not getting ahead in any way financially that they spend an enormous amount of activity accomplishing not much of anything except getting tired and worn out and frustrated. So if that's the case, you've developed a process which is thinking time, which we'll get into. Which is why I believe your book is so good. And it's so beyond just a book. It's a map, it's a plan and a path. What is this machine though? If we think of we're all building a business, it's a machine, it's an intellectual sport, it's a chess game. How should one, how should everyone here think about this machine that is their business?

There are two types of business models. There's the Michael Jordan model and the Michael Dell model. Both of them will work, and both of them you can get filthy stinking rich. One is not right, one is not wrong, one is not good, one is not bad. They're just different models. Michael Jordan, Tiger woods have a personal services model. It's all on them. There's very little leverage because Michael can't delegate the jump shot to win the game. Tiger can't delegate the two foot putt on 18. He Tiger has to make the putt. You can make a lot of money in that kind of model, but there's not as much leverage as there is the Michael Dell model. The Michael Dell model is Michael hadn't put together a computer in 38 years. He put together a couple of them and then realized very quickly, unless he had some people on his team that he could leverage, that he wasn't going to get to the success that he was capable of or that was available to him. Depending upon which model you're talking about, the machine could look one of a couple ways. The Michael Dell model, where it's not a personal services type of model. Michael Dell model relies on three things. It relies on a strategy, a plan, not an idea. Not an idea. One of the fundamental mistakes we make as business owners is we wind up executing on ideas instead of plans. We have an idea of what we want, but there's no yellow brick road. This is oz. We're in love with oz. I've heard so many business owners tell me over the years, this is my dream, this is my vision. I go, I'm good. You're telling me about Oz. Build me the yellow brick road. Show me how to get from where you are to Oz, and then I'm on board. But just because you become very adept at describing Oz doesn't give me clarity that I need to be an investor or to support you if I don't have clarity on the plan. So the plan, the strategy is number one. What does strategy mean? Southwest Airlines, here's how they made all their money. Here's how they made more money. It's one sentence. This is one sentence that's going to tell you how Southwest Airlines made more money in the last 10 years than the restaurant rest of the airline industry. Cumulative. Southwest Airlines at the very beginning said this. A plane on the ground makes no money. How hard is that? What a brilliant insight. And so they built the entire organization around keeping planes in the air. And it turns out the key to keeping planes in the air is to become an expert at baggage handling. The core problem that Southwest Airlines had to figure out is how do you get the passengers and the baggage on and off the plane as quickly as possible? Because the faster we get them off the plane, the faster we get the new ones on. Faster the the plane takes off, more money we make. One sentence that's extraordinary. So plan and a strategy is number one on machine. Number two. You got to have people. A, players. You take a great strategy and you have B, players, C, players. If anybody in here have an employee, anybody in here ever been disappointed with the performance of an employee? I'm going to give you a hint and we may talk about this more. You get what you tolerate. You get what you tolerate. In fact, I'll say this, I'll say this even louder. This could be the most important thing I say. Nothing can change until the unspoken is said. Nothing can change until the unspoken is said. And the truth, here's the truth. For us as leaders, the greatest failure of leadership is a lack of courage. A lack of courage to say what needs to be said. I tell my employees we own businesses and I tell my employees all the time, I refuse to lower my standards in order to accommodate your need for mediocrity. I will not do it. This is the standard that we have. And what we're going to do is we're going to help you build a yellow brick road so that you can be successful. Every. Every employee you have, every employee you have, has. For all of us has the exact same outcome. They're all optimizing for the same thing. Every one of our employees wakes up the morning and they want to be successful. There's not one person who wakes up in the morning and says, today I'm going to try to do the worst job that I possibly can. My job as the. As the owner, as the leader is to support my team in being successful. That's my number one job. And so I'm going to coach. I'm going to build a yellow brick road. I'm going to have performance standards, but I got to have eight people if I. So I've got a lot of tabs open right now in my brain, so I'll come make sure I come back to machine. What's the definition of an A player? There's three or four things. Number one, they have a high internal emotional need to succeed. High internal emotional need to succeed. I'll say this a different way. Pros don't have to be motivated, amateurs do. People ask me all the time, how do you motivate your employees? I say I hire them. I'm giving you an opportunity and I've built you a yellow brick road that if you stay on the yellow brick road and hit my standards, you and I are going to do well. If you can't hit my standards, I understand this is not a good fit. You're not going to be able to stay here and be successful, which I know you don't want to. You don't want to come to work for the next five years and be unsuccessful. So let me help you go find someplace else where you can be successful, because it's not here. Because here, this is what we produce. If I don't have standards, which is all part of the people, if I don't have the standards, then I'm going to be promoting people or giving raises based on loyalty or longevity or likability. Oh, my God. This person has been here since day one. You know, in fact, the first month they were here, you know, they were here. We didn't even pay them. They've made it. And so I wind up creating this story that becomes a substitute for performance. At the end of the day, I don't want the story to get in the way of the facts. I'll tell you what sabotaged you. It sabotaged me. I substituted a story for the facts. I'm really good at spinning those stories. So are you. That's where those unexamined assumptions come from. So that's number two. Number one is I gotta have the plan in the process. Number two, I gotta have the people. Number three, I gotta have the structure. And part of the structure, probably the most important part of the structure is gonna be the culture. Culture is not perks. Those are two different things. Perks are how many jelly beans are in the kitchen and whether you do or don't get to bring your dog to work. Those are perks. Joe has heard this story. I was giving a speech in Oslo and there were some very well known famous entrepreneurs who had done very well. And one woman came on stage who's very well known, and started talking about how important culture was in her organization. And the example that she used is. And we just built our employees two nap rooms. I hadn't gone on stage yet. I'm sitting on the front row. And when she said this, I looked up and I said out loud, so if I. I didn't mean to, but I'm sure she heard it. You must be kidding me. Nap rooms have nothing to do with culture. Nap rooms are a perk. Besides that, I'm not paying my people to come to work and sleep. That doesn't even make any sense to me. But apparently it did to her. And so I look at culture as, how do we treat each other? How do we talk to each other? Culture is accountability. The Navy Seals has got one hell of a culture because they're accountable. They get stuff done. They do what they say they're going to do. They're on time. That's a cultural issue. And so I would ask you, as you're thinking about a machine, what's your plan? What's your leverage? Tiger has leverage. He's got a plan, but he also has leverage. It's just not the same kind of leverage that Michael Dell has, but he has leverage. And they both have structure. Michael Dell and Michael Jordan, Tiger woods, they all have structure. There's a culture, there's a way we do things. The whole idea of the machine is that I pour gasoline in and it runs, which is not the kind of business that most of us have. Most of us have a business where we're this, we're crankers, we're hand cranking. And then I hear people talking about, I want to scale my business. And if you scale a crank business, you wind up with more crankers because there is no machine. It turns out scaling a crank is a bad idea. But we're addicted to this idea of growth and getting big and scaling as if big was the same as rich. Big is not the same as rich. Those are two different words. And when I look into the cockpit of most businesses, there's one lever that the pilot has at his or her disposal. Who's running the business? The pilot. And that lever is the accelerator. Anything that goes wrong, okay, first thing let's do, let's mash down, let's get big, let's amp, let's scale, let's add more this, let's do this, let's get a social media web. And pretty soon I got all these tactics storming at me and I'm going, what is the real problem here? What is the real problem I've got? You know, J.C. penney thought the, the idea was to get big and you see where they ended up. And the list, Kodak, the list is long of businesses who somehow mistakenly believe that the most important thing is how do we grow it when a react. I'll say it this way. Sometimes gains are a result of losses avoided. If you could rewind the clock and avoid 08, 0, 9 and 10 had we just been able to dodge that bullet, we can't always. And so one of my jobs as a business owner is to think in terms of risk. So the machine is three things. I gotta have a process. I gotta have a strategy and a plan. I gotta have the people to execute and I gotta have some structure so that I pour in gas and this thing goes. It doesn't require me in order to double the size for me to spend two times faster. That's a crank business and that's a business that if you try to scale it, you wind up tired. So that's a machine.

You've got your book here. The greatest business decisions of All Time. So which one in your opinion is the greatest?

Yeah, we did. We actually identified 18. We decided not to put them in order except to name the number one. And it was Henry Ford. And by the way, this decision not only changed the company, changed the industry, but we think is the reason why the United States became the wealthiest country in the world. That's that butterfly chaos effect that we think this decision made. And that was in 1915. Henry Ford deciding, man, I can't get enough labor. I don't have enough people who can afford to get our cars. He's having both the demand and, and a supply chain problem. And so he came in one day and doubled the wages of his employees from $2.50 to $5 and the rest is history. That allowed them. Tens of thousands of people came to Detroit, wanted the jobs. Now that they're getting paid more, they can afford then to buy the cars. And it changed people's view of labor from just being this input into a manufacturing process to, to being something that you really invest in. You know, let's speed forward. We were talking about today, the Container Store. You know, here's a company named one of the best places to work every year. We've had the list at Fortune magazine. And Kip Tyndall, whose book Uncontainable, everyone's got to read. You know, here's a guy that's figured out, you know, we're all talking about $15 an hour wage. Like, we got it. He's been paying 20 bucks or more for decades, twice what the industry's paid. Yet he's getting three times the productivity because of the amount of training that he's doing for folks. And this is a company selling empty boxes. It's hardly Google or Facebook. And that's why I want this book, everyone to read who are just us mere mortals trying to build decent companies. And so that single decision, decision Henry Ford made, was so powerful for many reasons, and one that we ought to be thinking about more today.

I agree, I agree. Which leads me to think of having decades past. You can look and see the ripple effect, positive or negative, of certain decisions. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link. Link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. What is a recent entrepreneurial, be it decision or what someone is doing that you're looking at saying this is a total game changer? Is there anything that is the most recent business decision that you've seen someone do that you think is just maybe is. Is comparable to that?

It is. It's crowd sourcing.

Crowdsourcing.

Yeah. We talked about what, you know, we have these unicorns. How did Mark Zuckerberg do in 11 years that normally takes companies 100 and all of these, and they all have Amazon, all of them have one thing in common. And as they figured out how to get the most people on their bus behind their business model, you know, let's look at Facebook. You know, the. The valuation is tied to the number of Facebook pages that are up there. And what's brilliant is none of his employees are having to do that heavy lifting. It's a billion. Three of us that are doing are working literally for Facebook free of charge. And those of you out there that have got employees, they're probably working harder for Facebook than they're working for your own company. The value of Amazon is the fact that they got a website that lists a bunch of products. I mean, how many of Those exist on the planet is the fact that they convinced millions of folks to take the time to give feedback and stars and rating. So it becomes the preferred place for us to go to see what the crowd is saying about my book, this product. My wife won't book a trip, won't book a hotel until we go to TripAdvisor to get specific feedback based on whether you're a family couple, alone one, a romantic one, an adventure. They've done that heavy lifting, even Google. Let's look at Google. You know, we are all just here to solve the customer's problem. And our problem is I'm searching for an answer and they give it to me in nanoseconds. Now, the old way is I'd have some geniuses typing fast, you know, well, that's kind of Encyclopedia Britannica. Wikipedia kind of figured out a different business model. And that's all Google's done. They figured out a way to tap into the collective intelligence of everybody on the planet that's been on the Internet and deliver us an answer. But you know, I told you my favorite story. The Father son team in Australia, if you want me to share that, to me, because there you've got mere mortals, and to me it's the story of 2015. So this father and son beekeeper team taps into a big wave and we think you ought to go with the trends in the market. And one of those is that we're all getting really fed up with our food being poisoned by some companies we could name or not name here on this video. And so we're all wanting to get closer to our food source. And these guys said, you know, one of those is honey, but it's like a pain to kind of keep bees and you know, you get stung and they get disturbed. So they invented this little 3D print $600 product called the Flow. And like any entrepreneurs in Australia, hey, how can we figure out to pre sell a few, you know, thousand of them to raise the 60 grand or 70 grand we need to get this thing going. You know, last century we'd go around and find our friends and our family and fools to, you know, kind of help us out. But instead they took advantage of these cool technologies. We have Indiegogo being a case. And by the way, it's not crowdfunding. Everyone calls these crowdfunding sites. These are pre sale sites. You know, we're getting customers to pre buy our products and services. And so they launch in February and in three hours they hit a million in revenue, which by the way what it takes to get into EO in 14 hours. 11 hours later, they hit 2 million. They doubled their revenue in another 11 hours. And when the campaign was done 60 days later, they had sold over $12 million of a $600 product to over 36,000 people around the world. Here's a father son team in the bowels of Australia whose global over 10 million in revenue in 60 days.

That ever happened.

That's right. But what the backstory is is they did the heavy lifting leading up to that campaign and identified about 3 million through all the kind of database work that you can do. 3 million who they thought would be potential buyers of that. So that when they were ready to launch, they got that word out. And that's why they had such success.

Yeah. Which is key because everyone that I've ever spoken with that has done a very successful crowdfunding, crowdsource campaign campaign, they always say it is a marketing game. You have to be able to reach people. You got to know how to get the message out there. Which of course is what makes that so key.

Well, and by the way, that's why we talk about in scaling up, the fundamental functional weakness that literally constrains scale ups is marketing. Where people miss is you don't need marketing only to get new customers. You need it for investors, attract advisors, and most importantly, to attract talent, which right now is the universal constraint for most companies around the world.

Right, right.

Let me talk about that. Because one thing. You live in Barcelona.

Yes.

I mean, you've had all kinds of roller coasters, I'm sure, in your career, and you live very far away. You, you have a routine. You said earlier that routines create freedom. And your emphasis is so much about getting the right person. I remember a conversation I had with Richard Branson on Necker Island. I've done six trips to Necker island and I was in his kitchen with him and I just said to him, I go, when's the last time you went to a grocery store, Richard? And he's like, I don't think I've ever went to a grocery store. And I'm like, what do you mean you never bought beer for Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten or something? He's like, I don't think I've ever been in a grocery store. And I'm sitting there like, how is that possible? He's lying. There's like, no way. And so I said, I go, when's the last time you did your laundry? And he looks up and he's like, really thinking he Goes, I've never done laundry. I'm like, what about when you're a kid? He goes, no, my mom did my laundry. He goes, joe, you don't do those things. You hire other people to do it. Then he went on to say, he goes, one, one hire, one great hire will save you thousands of hours in your life. And of course, Richard doesn't do a very good job explaining what he does and how he does it. I've interviewed him a lot. But that one piece of advice about hiring other people was huge. Now, most entrepreneurs don't get the importance of that, but you are constantly instilling, finding, putting the right people on the bus. Your buddies with Jim Collins, I mean you really understand this talk about that and then how you actually run a company living in Barcelona and some of your routines. But I think it's so key to get into the minds of people, how critical of a decision, getting other people that are talented and skilled to assist you in whatever your enterprise or business or career is.

Yeah, well, and you just pointed out what is the other key constraint to entrepreneurs startup being able to scale up. The reality is 76% of the companies in the United States are home based. 96% never get to a million in revenue. And the fundamental reason is the entrepreneur knows they're the best at doing things and doing everything. And it is impossible for many of them to let go and trust that somebody else can do even a piece of that as well as they can. What's even worse is they try to get somebody else to do something for them and they didn't choose that person correctly and that person screws it up and now they've been burnt. And once you've been burnt, you don't want to go back again. And so you're stuck having to do everything. And you only have 168 hours in a week. We don't get any more. And so, you know, Jim Collins said you got to get the right butts and the right seats. But we thought we ought to put together a list of seats. And so we built a tool called our face tool, the function accountability chart. And it lists what are all the functions that have to exist in any business. You know, who's going to run it? Sales, marketing, operations, accounting. And you know, when you're a startup, it's your name next to all this. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. And all growing a company is, is figuring out which box you can delegate next. And it's this ability to delegate that none of us were Taught how to do. I didn't take a course in my MBA called delegation. And there's a real art and science to doing that correctly. And most people think delegation is here. You do that, but that's called abdication delegation. My best analogy is that thermostat I got started in the H vac business, and we got this complex air conditioning system in here. But if you didn't have that thermostat, Joe, right over there on the wall that was constantly monitoring what's going on here and giving feedback to that system, we'd either be freezing to death or burning up here in Phoenix, Arizona, on a day. It's 102 outside. So you've got to put in thermostats within the organization to make sure that you close that loop on the activities that you've got people working on. And then, like Richard said, you've got to then say, all right, what are the things? And Marcus Buckingham helped us here. Marcus, he helped me more than almost any thought leader when he said, when he properly defined what is a strength and what is a weakness. Because let me tell you what gets entrepreneurs in trouble. They're too good at too many darn things. That's what got them into business, because they are wicked talent, talented. But that becomes their weakness. And when Marcus said, look, a strength is not just because you're good at it, but it gives you strength. It gives you energy. A weakness, even if you're good at good at it, is a weakness if it makes you tired. And for me, I know how to run a company. I know how to do all the stuff that we do, but it wears me out. And I had to decide that, you know what? I love teaching. I don't love to do any of this other stuff. I need to find people who love what it is that makes me tired. Be more specific. You know, I've put PowerPoints together for my presentations. It absolutely wears me out. And so I went out to a crowd sourcing site. 99 designers. I've never met her. She's worked now with me for seven years. I found this woman, Jun Yee. She's part Korean, so highly creative, part German. So it gets delivered now, and I just send her, I need a slide that shows a bus that has a bunch of people coming on it. And I send her the idea, and magically in my in basket, within hours, it shows back up. And so that's what entrepreneurs have to do, is get a piece of paper out, make a list. And you know what, if you like to Shop and I know guys who do. It's almost a meditation, relaxation thing. Then keep doing it. But if that wears you out, if that makes you tired, find somebody else to do it and just continue to keep removing. There's this key word again, constraints that are draining the life and energy out of you and make sure that you spend your time on the stuff that gives you energy and then you're going to be jazzed.

I mean so much of performance and happiness and results. Creation is just literally the proper allocation of your energy in the right places.

That's correct.

I was talking to Dan Sullivan a while back and he says that there's no such thing as bad work in the world. There's this bad work for certain people. Someone can look at someone like a gardener and say I would never want to do that or I would never want to be a janitor. And the reality is that's great work for people that get energy from it and are really skilled at it and love it. Part of it is just realizing what makes you tick doesn't make the rest of the world tick. And there's tons of people that you can hire that have enormous skills. I think it's.

But I think we need to come back to when you get down to the nitty gritty, what entrepreneurs and most people know how to do is how do I source those people. We're very clear. If you need to hire someone to do something, you need to get at least 20 high quality applicants. It's a pure numbers game versus just hiring the first. First person comes along and fogs the mirror. And then once you've got those applicants, how do you choose the right person? And the feel good interview is actually terrible. You'd be better off letting a dart choose than us doing the standard interview. Most of us fall trapped to. And so, you know, we're big fans of top grading. It's the only formal mechanism, methodology that that guarantees at least 90% plus if you do it right, you've chosen the right person. And if you choose the right person, your life is golden. You choose the wrong person and your life is miserable. And so that's what we detail in the book is how you do those two things.

What I hope is that when someone watches one of my interviews or listens to it and I'm talking to a bright person and the person actually can help solve problems, help them get to their bigger future where they want to go, that they have some pain because usually if they don't feel some pain and some hurt, they're not going to do shit about it. I mean, there has to be either some great inspiration or there has to be some frustration and annoyance. And you're like, I'm kind of sick of it. You know, Dan Sullivan has this line where he says, irritated oysters make pearls. And you know, I want people to be in a pissed off state, but also not just letting them know, what do you do with it? Okay, yeah, I don't know what to do. But you have literally created just so much solutions for entrepreneurs. So what are some of the things that people will get out of scaling up? And also what does gazelles really offer people?

Yeah, well, and what we wanted to focus on, what Geoffrey Moore says is provide 100% solution. There's so many parts and pieces out there that's frustrating for business owners to kind of pull it all together. So we thought, look, let's give business owners a hundred percent solution. Let's go get him the coaching support, let's get him the education, let's get him the technology tools, literally tools we've got in the cloud that you can run on your mobile devices so that we can help them kind of automate these components that are necessary to manage the chaos that comes with trying to scale up the business. Now, we do that in how we started the interview in these four areas. Let me give you the test. First thing, why would you look at the people side of the business? Well, there it's purely your gut feel about are you happy? Because our happiness is really tied to the people we work with. I can tell you when you're not happy because you're having an issue with your partner. You've got a salesperson who's mucking up the attitudes of the rest of the salespeople. You got a customer who's got too big a piece of. You got a supplier that has you constrained. You've got a bank that is in your way of being able to scale up. You've got issues at home, you got a sick child and challenges with your spouse if you don't get or you just can't hire enough talent to keep up with the growth that you're able to handle. If you got one of those, you better focus your energy on getting that fixed. And we built tools, whether it's your personal plan, your face tool, the processes in the organization, we help you source employees, how do you manage them, how do you retain them? These are all the nitty gritty things around people. Now, generally you're happy with the relationships in the business. Then we look at strategy. And strategy is very simple. Are you growing top line and gross revenue dollars as fast as you would like? And by the way, you can grow too fast. As Andy Grove said, more companies die from indigestion than starvation. But for a lot of companies, that's not a problem. I mean, you're not growing fast enough. That tells me your strategy is wrong. You don't have enough of what people want that they literally are beating your door down and standing 10 million in line on a Monday to want to buy your phone. So then we have tools to help you really figure out this industry dominating competition crushing strategy that allows you to have a monopoly because that's what businesses want. Government doesn't want you to have it, businesses want it. And there's the essential tension of capitalism. So we help you figure that out. Now, if revenue's grown as fast as you'd like, then we look at your profitability and how much just raw time you're having to put in the business. Let me tell you what's sad, Joe. I've had so many friends like double, triple the size of their company over 2, 3, 4, 5 years, yet the bottom line didn't come with it. They're actually making less money, absolute money, let alone a percentage, and working more hours. And at some point you wake up and say, what am I doing all of this for? And most of them rightfully so fire everybody, get rid of their fancy offices and go back when it was them and assistant working out of a spare bedroom and they were having more fun and making more money. And that usually is because they're sloppy in execution. And I got to say, most entrepreneur companies are sloppy. And by the way, we know one simple metric, revenue per employee. It's crazy predictive. But I ask people today, how many employees do you have? Multiply it times 100,000 and you pretty well have guessed the revenue. Large companies, these big bloated bureaucratic machines that we make fun of, generate two and a half times more revenue per employee than most of us mere mortals do. And that's simply because we have sloppy process within the organization. And if you come back then to what frustrates people you hire is they join your company and they have to both work with idiots. You didn't hire the other people, right? Or I got stupid process things are frustrating. We can't even get an invoice out the door. We can't even get our product or service out the door without us having to work 18 hours, days, eight days a week to make up for this slop that's around here. And so we really help companies tighten up that execution. And then look, you can get by with decent people, decent strategy, decent execution, but not a day without cash. And we're not talking about making payroll. That's important. But do you have the kind of financial muscle necessary to do some of the stuff we talked about today? You need to lock up that constraint. You need to get, you know, you need to buy one of your key suppliers. There are a couple of key acquisitions you need to make. You've got the cash to bring on that chief marketing officer. That's necessary if you're constrained by those cash resources to do what you absolutely need to do. Man, you age so much faster. And so we look at those four areas, we got tools, tools in every one of those areas to minimize the pain that entrepreneurs feel when they're trying to scale up.

Awesome.

Awesome. Well, I remember the first time I interviewed you, which I don't know how many years ago it was, it might have been a decade ago, I asked you about deadlines and you said that there's this misnomer that entrepreneurs work well under pressure, but under pressure they just work. Do you still believe that to be the case? Do you have any thoughts? Because a lot of entrepreneurs put themselves on the firing line way more than they need to because they don't prepare in their just, you know. And look, I'm speaking from a guy who has gone through enormous amounts of, you know, add, distractible shiny object pursuits taking on. I've become better than I ever have been. I think meditation is done more to help me than many things. But what are your thoughts about the behavior of these crazed entrepreneurs that are driven like crazy, but their drivenness is causing them enormous pain, broken relationships, poor health, all that sort of stuff.

You know, my thoughts are just what you said. And it's recognizing that this is both the source of our strength and the thing that gets in our way that the entrepreneur has to sort out. Joe, we don't have enough time in this interview to unpack all of that kind of stuff that we just described. But I want to come back to this thing on the deadline. Let's take this big, hairy, audacious goal, this ten year goal. Jim, never meant for that to have a deadline. You don't have to get it done in 10 years. It's just like a North Star that you've put out there that you head towards. And a lot of entrepreneurs beat the deadline and others take longer. It's just the fact that you know what the finish line is, and some folks run the hundred meter, you know, sub nine seconds, and some take a little bit longer. But hey, we got to at least get across the finish line, and that's why you got to set those. Those finish lines.

Okay.

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