MBA2158 Must Read: Mastering The Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish

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Hey oh. Welcome to the 100 Army Show. Valuable business lessons delivered daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a must read episode in our must Read Episodes. I share with you a book that I've read that's influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its takeaways, its intelligence, insights and why you should read it too. Today's must read is Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. This is a classic business book that I wrestled with when reading it. There are more than a few things in this book I disagree with and actually that's a good thing. It's good for you to read books that maybe don't share the same opinion as you. It's either going to help you see their perspective, change your position on that topic, or it will reconfirm your conviction on disagreeing with it. But because this book actually has a lot of great insights when it comes to scaling your business. Things that you need to know before you grow that are not mentioned that often in other business books, it makes it to the show as a must read. I'm going to share with you today what are my favorite takeaways from this book? A little bit about why this book was written. What are some of the things I disagreed with and what are some of the things you're going to have to look out for, kind of ignore when you read? And what are some of the gems you do not want to miss when reading it? So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is a book all about how to grow your business, how to scale, what are the challenges to look out for, what are the things that are going to stop you from growing and how to overcome those obstacles. There are three big habits that Vern, the author, goes deep in in this book and here are those three big habits. Number one is priorities. What are the priorities in your company? How do you set priorities? Are they clear to your company? Do they know what the priorities are for the year, for the quarter? That type of stu goes through a lot of different examples with different types of businesses at different stages in their business, explaining the importance of how to set and communicate these priorities across your company. The second habit is real time data. Does your company, does your team members, everybody on a team know what are the numbers they're shooting for? Do they have a scoreboard? Do they know how to win? Is that data maintained and updated and communicated? Does your team have a daily metric? Do they have a weekly metric? Do they know how to win in your company? And the third habit is rhythm. Does your team, does your teams in your team have a cadence, a rhythm? In engineering they call these sprints, they call them cycles. Do they have a sense of rhythm where they know they're getting things done and they're growing? So with these three habits, they really talk about the idea of strategy. And in a business, when you are getting started and you're just getting your first few customers, you're getting traction. This is fine to have, you know, little or no strategy because you're just hustling your way to validate your business. But once your business is starting to make money, it's starting to be profitable, you start to grow. You now have to have a lot of weight on strategy, so you actually have to strategize what you actually work on. And he talks about in the book that there is basically two things that checks if your strategy is a good one or not. Sort of like a test that you.

Can put your strategy through.

And the first test is, whatever you're planning to do, whatever activity you're looking to do in your business, does it really impact the customer? Does it actually help them achieve their goals? Make the experience at your business, at your company, at your product better, because this will lend itself to helping you achieve your goals, the goals that you set out. And the second test that you'd have to put your strategy through is, does this strategy help increase your differentiation with your competition? Does it help you become more unique, more of a market leader? Or are you just doing things to catch up with your competition? So test number one is what I'm about to do, the strategy I'm about to implement in my business, is it going to actually impact my customers, help them in a positive way to have a better experience? And then two, is it going to help me differentiate myself from the competition? So I want to start today's lesson with those two big takeaways, the three big habits that they talk about in the book, as well as the test to see if your strategy is worth doing or is actually helping your business. And the reason why I want to start with that is because this is the bulk of the book, and it actually is the best value in the book because it actually explains how other companies have implemented these strategies or implemented these tips in their own business. Now, there are a few things in this book that I just don't agree with. It's a little bit outdated. Some of the examples will not resonate with you. Because he'll give examples like, hey, when your company is this size, you need to invest in a better phone system for your office. You know, this is not the 90s. And he kind of states it like, this is like a rule of thumb, which makes this book not really age well. And there's a few other examples like this in the book. The other thing you have to look out for that kind of rubbed me the wrong way is there's a lot of blanket statements like when your company hits this number of employees, like 50 or above, or when your company's making X amount of money in revenue, then you should be doing this or focusing on this, or you should be investing in this. This is not always true for every business, and this is my experience. Every business is different. Some businesses can run very lean, some businesses just cannot run very lean. It's the nature of the product, the industry they're in, all that kind of stuff. The prevalence of remote work and being able to hire talent from across the world allows you to really get a lot more for your money and also allow you to expand and grow your team at different stages in your company. And in general, people are able to do a lot more with less people because of automation, because of software, because of the tools that are available to us. So there are some pieces of advice here that just don't apply to today's modern business world. But this should not stop you from reading the book, because there are classical lessons on growth and scale in your business that you need to know that you actually need to have a heads up on. Even if you have a small company now, eventually you're gonna have to make some hires, you're gonna have to grow, you're gonna have to think about these things and it's good to know them before you have to do them. More importantly, the book explains what are the barriers of growth? What is stopping you from actually growing? Some of the things that we do day to day in our business is actually hindering our chances from scaling and growing as a company. And I really like this part in the book. The first thing that will stop you from growing is having an issue with delegating to others. This is wanted, criminal, number one, right? This hit list. This is something that we all, as entrepreneurs, as business builders, have to work on as soon as possible. Learning to delegate, learning to find people to do the work that you are doing now at equal or better quality than you're doing it. The ultimate idea of being a CEO, a leader of the business, is to be a visionary, is to be somebody who sets out where we have to go, the destination and the whole team's job is to get the company there, is to do the test, to get there. Your job is to be a coach, to lead them along the way and to see your business as an investment, to be an investor, to kind of say, hey, I have this idea, I have this product, it's selling, people want it. How do I sell more? How do I get more customers? How do I put the right people in place to make that happen? You don't do the work. Your job is to plan and to execute that plan with your team, you get them to do the work. Why? Because if you do the work, then no one's planning, no one's seeing what's going on on the horizon. No one is actually worrying about the growth of the business and finding great talent. At the end of the day, your job eventually becomes a really good recruiter. Somebody brings in the right people to the team, kind of like a GM of a sports team. The second barrier to growth is systems and structures. The systems in place that you have, your SOPs, your standard operating procedures. Some of the things that you do right now in your business is not built for scale. If somebody has to ask you a question every time they need to do something, or they need your authority, or they need you to log in for them, or whatever it is, that is a broken system, you need them to be able to know where to find that information. Do it for themselves, ask somebody else, not you. You can't be the bottleneck. They need to know who's accountable, who to go to if they have questions. And there's levels to this. In the beginning, it's just the day to day work that they're going to start being autonomous with. But then the management levels need to be also delegated to and also have a system for so that you're not doing evaluations for every team member that you hire. And the last barrier to growth is data driving predictions. You need to be able to predict what's going to happen in your business before it happens. You need to be able to know where to move towards, what to double down on. And you can't do that without information. Without data, you only can manage what you measure. That's what Peter Drucker says. It's so true. So you have to have data that's built into your company so that you can measure growth. Very simple example of this in our modern online world is any link you put out there in the world on social media, mention on an interview, on a podcast, maybe a link that you put on a sales page. These need to be trackable links so you know where this person came from and you know where your efforts are actually paying off. You can measure what's working and what's not, otherwise the decisions you're making are just all hunches and guesses. You need to use data to drive your decisions and be able to predict where you should be, invest your time, money, efforts in the future, and what your business is going to look like 6 months, 12 months, 24 months from now. So you can start thinking about expanding.

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One of the things that this book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, stresses is one of the things that stops people from growing is knowing how to plan, how to have a strategic plan. And that's why they offer a one page strategic plan. And it starts with something called the planning pyramid and how everything builds upon each other. So you're looking at goals for the next 25 years, but then 10 years and five years and three years, then one year, then one quarter all the way to what is the plan for every day? What is the goal for every day? So that we can work backwards and hit our 25 year plan. This is something that you should share with your management team. So if you have a small team of managers, maybe two or three people that manage different departments, or maybe it's just you and your founder or whatever it is, or maybe it's just you. But the point here is that you have to have this discussion either just by yourself or with other people that are managing other people in your team about your goals, about the strategic plan so that they can cascade it in their own teams and they can communicate, hey, this is what we're working for, this is what we're working towards. And this one pager includes a lot like making sure everybody's on the same page with their core values, doing a SWOT analysis so you can know what your strengths and weaknesses are, opportunities and threats. Why, what's the purpose of all of this? Targets, brand promises, all kinds of stuff that are going to allow you to start thinking big and planning for the future. My advice is, when you do this type of work, this kind of strategic planning for the long term, don't do it when you're under some sort of pressure or it's a crunch time in your business, you're doing a launch or something like that, you need to have a moment where you can step back and not feel rushed. You might want to take a day to do this with your team and see this as an investment, guys. There's so much more I can share with you when it comes to mastering the Rockefeller habits. There were a few moments in this book where I cringed a little bit because it was outdated or some things I disagree with. But all in all, I'm glad I read it because it's a great reminder and I actually think it's one of those books that talks about a lot of things that don't get talked about a lot like what stops you from growing and the stages of growth and how to scale your company and how to delegate and all that kind of stuff. I do have one tip though. Get this book on Kindle or on paperback. Do not get the audible version. Don't get the audiobook version. I got it on audiobook and I didn't enjoy it that much. I think personally the narrator's voice itself is he's fine and he does his level best, but it's not a polished audio version. It's not a great production. So pick it up on Kindle or paperback. You're going to enjoy the book a lot more. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow. Share it with your friends and family on social. Just send them over to 1000- MBA-NET, our website so they can subscribe and get access to over 2,000 business lessons in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Sometimes when you're digging for gold, you're gonna get dirty, right? It's not gonna be fun. So you're gonna be things you're not gonna like. And that sometimes happens. When you read a book that's a classic, that's great in a lot of ways. You don't have to agree with everything. You don't have to love every bit of it. Some pages are gonna be boring for you and that's okay because it's worth it to even just get one golden nugget. And this book has plenty of them. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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