How To Build A Business That Works | Brian Tracy #GENIUS

The number one reason for success is that people focus on things that have a high potential for consequences. The number one reason for failure is that people focus on things that have little to no potential consequences. Exactly what Joe said earlier. Drucker's famous quote. getting caught up in something that you don't need to do at all i have dedicated my life to being a small and medium

business

owner and have dedicated the second half of my life to helping other people be successful small and medium

business

owners and carl schramm foundation marion and ewing coffin the preeminent foundation on entrepreneurship wrote an article in the wall street journal two days ago and what he said was that there have been very few empirical studies on what actually makes a company a successful business than most of what is taught in universities entrepreneurship faculties is nonsense in fact if he told you there is something in 1 687 entrepreneurship professors a and their main focus is drinking their own bath water and saying entrepreneurs should have a plan and if you have a business plan you will be successful and they spent two years in their colleges teaching people how to set up business plans and 49 out of 50 Companies are started without a business plan, including some of the most successful companies in the world today, so now we are starting to learn what we really need to do to

build

successful businesses and what Joe is doing here is absolutely wonderful because it can save you years of hard work and hundreds even thousands of hours of hard work to understand how to do it much faster to short cut we say there is always a learning curve in anything and what we want to do is jump the learning curve we don't want to spend years and years of learning what we need to learn to reach a certain level of income, so I've specialized now for the past few years in doing seminars and speaking and books and articles and programs for small and medium business owners and prospective owners.

I have 45 minutes now, so I'll have to summarize what I sometimes share in seminars for days, but I understand that you guys are some of the smartest. people in the world so that you can take a lot of information in a short period of time is true, did anyone not understand the question? So I'm going to try to summarize several of the concepts, one of the first concepts I thought of. it was interesting it was a little story that came out in the papers uh recently warren buffett who is one of the richest men in the world and bill gates who is the richest man in the world and bill gates senior were at a dinner and the three of them are good friends and they were talking and a gentleman came up to him and said he knows he was looking at you and you gentlemen are very successful what would you say is the most important quality of success and all three?

According to a passerby, the three of them broke up their conversation ion and turned and at the same time said focus focus is the most important requirement for success in our fast moving world today if you can focus you can succeed and if you can't you can't. almost a black and white thing well i thought it was interesting because the way me and joe met is I put together a program a few years ago called the focal point program that basically brought in business owners like you and taught you to focus and we went through three years reviewing every aspect of life get 82 exercises dealing with family and business and marketing and product and service and competition and positioning and it was focus focus focus and my offer which is not as good as joe's but my offer was that you will double your income and double your free time within 12 months or there will be No charge for this program and I have never had to give a refund.

In fact, many people have doubled and tripled their income in 30 days simply by learning to focus and think about ter. focus ms so its really very important i read an article about me i was a very successful businessman in new zealand and the article was sent to me last week i am reading this article he said the turning point in his life was when he went to a

brian

tracy

seminar and he learned to focus he was broke he was unemployed he had no money and he came out of the seminar a completely different person and he had goals written down then he looked around and saw an article about coffee hit stores and starbucks in the united states and he said coffee shops are a good business because more and more people like the idea of ​​a specialty coffee shop and if it has wi-fi then they go there it becomes a social hub and so he didn't know anything about coffee and before For the dust to settle he owned 80 coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand and then he says he got divorced and I had to sell it for $50 million to share the proceeds with his wife. he poses but he didn't he didn't share he didn't sell the world rights so he's re

build

ing anyway his point was at the end of the article they said well what would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be successful ? and he only said two things he said focus and fail fast focus and fail fast learn fast try something new and i thought i'd pass that on because it's something i've discovered over the years is the faster you fail and learn the faster you really succeed you learn to succeed by failing you know thomas j watson famous quote if you want to increase your success rate you must double your failure rate because success is on the other side of failure over the years i have read a lot and came to through a concept that I want to share with you and we were talking about this a little bit earlier and the concept is the question is what is the most valuable and highest paying job that you do is a really interesting question because when I heard this question I didn't know what it was the answer what do you think is the highest paid and most valuable job you do and the answer is think think is the most valuable job i am now the world's best selling author on time management or also goals and a few other topics, but I started studying time management about 30 years ago and I found a word in my studies and the word was consequences and what it basically said is that something is important if it has big potential consequences and something it doesn't matter if it has low or no potential consequences The number one reason for success is that people focus on things that have high potential consequences The number one reason for failure is that people focus on things that have low potential consequences or null, exactly what Joe was saying earlier.

Drucker's famous quote The worst use of time is to work hard on something that doesn't need to be done at all and one of the things that is holding back entrepreneurial business owners i By the way, it is killing them and wiping out an entire generation. It's this obsession with technology. I see people walking around with their phone. It's almost like drug addicts who are on the main line. They can't stop looking at their screen. say there are people in this room who had that problem, but the fact is that this obsession with looking at the screen and staying connected is killing people because it prevents them from concentrating, you can't concentrate if you're distracted like a dog with attention deficit disorder attention. so you are constantly ringing and responding to bells almost like a madman in a toy factory and so as a quick remark if thinking is the most important thing you do because the consequences of thinking determine the whole quality of your then the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life and the more time you spend thinking and thinking well and thinking clearly the more successful you will be.

Over the years, I've worked with some very powerful people, billionaires and billionaires, people who are on the Forbes 400 list repeatedly over and over again, and I've had the opportunity to be with them during crises and at what times. it happened that it was serious it was a major problem and I realized that they all had one quality in common: they all calmed down, it's just that the people around them were angry, upset and worried about what happened and who did it etc. on and they would just calm down almost like a pond had gone and they knew and I learned later I didn't know why this was I admired it but I didn't know why it was that when your mind is calm the whole cerebellum, thinking and decision brain

works

At the highest level, like turning on all the lights on a dimmer switch, it

works

like a Christmas tree, but when you get upset and angry, what happens is that your thinking returns to your limbic or emotional system and your ability to think with clarity drops drastically and you make a lot of mistakes that's why when you're faced with a difficult situation you have to use all skills trick games whatever keep calm and that's why they teach you to meditate and find that the meditators in business are much more successful because they can automatically turn their mind into the calm of meditation when faced with a crisis allows them to think more clearly now makes a pa r years old a man named daniel kahneman a very good man at reading uh he won a nobel prize in psychology and neuroscience uh he wrote a book called thinking fast and slow and this book was a very esoteric book and i don't recommend you read it it's 500 pages hard work i'll give you the gist of i'll give you the gist i do the reading pass it on i'll give you the gist of the book he said there are two types of thinking there are fast thinking and slow thinking fast thinking is intuitive is instinctive is automatic is reactionary is much like how you would drive through heavy traffic you are not thinking much you are just interacting he said the other type of thinking is slow thinking and slow thinking is where you just slow down your thinking and take the time to think about the problems now if a problem has little to no consequence, so you can think quickly you know what you have for lunch what you pick up on your plate from the buffet where where?

Do you park your car? These are the consequences of these decisions that are almost non-existent, but if it's a major problem, then you say, wait a minute, this requires slow thinking. Here is his claim that the book became a bestseller. The one thing people have is that when they should use slow thinking, they use fast thinking and entrepreneurs are extremely guilty of that, as we make major decisions that have potential long-term consequences, including affect. affect people's lives and cost money and even bankrupt a company we make those decisions thinking fast when in fact we should be making them thinking slow now i'm a big Drucker fan like a lot of people and Mike was saying something about hiring the right people and hiring the right people to work with you is very important and the biggest mistake you make is hiring fast you hire people fast the best the best decisions you make are really we take your time hiring slow and peter drucker said that quick decisions by people are invariably bad.

The decisions of the people. Hiring an important person for an important job has tremendous potential consequences, so it must take a lot of time. people it's a simple rule that will increase your hiring accuracy to 90 and i've taught it to fortune 500 companies and they make it a rule within their companies to use

brian

's rule is t This is what you can't hire except by doing this and I didn't make it up I just studied the hiring practices of companies that hire the best people and keep them the longest and they all at the beginning have a certain process that they follow and they follow it religiously with no exceptions so your accuracy in hiring it goes up to 90 or more because they think more than the interesting professor at the university of san diego last year wrote a book about not thinking fast and slow but it was about decision making what he said is the longer you take to make a decision important decision, better decision, higher quality decision and Lord Acton once said when it is necessary when it is not necessary to decide it is necessary not to decide, in other words, said the professor , buy all the time you can to make a decision, put it off if you can put it off for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, put it off.

Some of the best decisions you make will be decisions. the will let you sit for a while like water and tea so thinking is the most important thing to do we call it thinking fast and slow so remember anything important that has long term consequences is a candidate for slow thinking discuss it with other people sitting quietly taking a walk letting it ruminate in your mind sleeping on it you know they say if its a big problem sleeping on it so there are three thinking tools i want to give you and then seven ideas so the three ways of thinking i start the first way i start every seminar is what i call zero based thinking and everyone who has known me for any length of time knows that i insist on this zero based thinking comes from zero based accounting zero where you instead of increasing an expense in the next accounting period,He asks if we should participate in this spending now with zero based thinking, he looks at his whole world and asks this question knowing what I now know, is there something I'm doing? that i wouldn't start over today if i had to do it all over again this is one of the best thinking tools i've ever learned because in times of turmoil you always have an answer to this question every person has one answer some people have multiple answers there are plenty things they are doing today that knowing what they now know they wouldn't get involved today they wouldn't start them products they wouldn't offer people they wouldn't hire investments they wouldn't make and these are the best drags in life these are like a sea anchor you know you drop it and drag it slows the boat down well how do you know if you have a zero based thinking situation and many of you were asked to write down your question problems?

Like opportunities, the answer is stress. Anytime you experience chronic stress. It's something that buzzes when Joe is talking or someone else is talking. He's busy thinking about it. Drive and think about it. He keeps you awake at night. Outside, it's something that irritates him, angers him, and frustrates him every time he chronicles, which means he's a candidate for zero-based thinking, so he wonders if he wasn't in this situation right now. Knowing what I now know, would I do it again today if the answer is no? The next question is how do I get out and how fast how do I get out and how fast if it ever comes back the answer I wouldn't like? this again today it's too late to figure it out it's over the only question now is how long do you suffer how much emotional suffering how much financial suffering do you do before you walk and therefore the most important requirement to practice zero based thinking that many people don't like to practice it's courage i call it the c word you need the c word you need to have the courage to look at every part of your life and say is there something i'm doing knowing what? now i know i wouldn't go into zero based thinking now always with your relationships and those are both personal and business every time i give this talk by the way within a short period of time divorces happen everywhere that the People from the city go home and say wow if I hadn't married this person I would never marry her again today and that's what makes me miserable and many people are working hard abroad to achieve success but inside they are frustrated and unhappy because they are in a situation that knowing what they now know they would never get themselves into so I call it a quick scan and I am going to ask you to do this for the rest of your life and help other people to do it k-w-i-n-k knowing what I now know do a quick analysis especially do a quick analysis in my company what we say is that we observe each person and on a regular basis and say if we had not hired this a person and they will enter today to apply for their current job knowing what now to know if we would hire them if the answer is they do not leave that day there is a small rule by the way that in one of my books it says that the first is the best time to fire a person person is the first time it crosses your mind and because after that it's just pain and suffering and if the longer you keep them in place the more likely they are to sue you and the longer they sue you the more it will cost So if you find out you've made a mistake, have the courage to admit I made a mistake and cut your losses.

There was a great book by an author called the zurich axioms a few years ago and it was the principles of success and anyone who is in finance probably read the book because a very successful financier from New York and he was talking about the zurich zurich gnomes and whoever they are and the rules they follow and he said the number one rule for success in business personal life cut your losses when you realize you made a mistake bad investment bad hiring bad relationship cut your losses fast and what do they say in las vegas you know cut your losses let your profits flow so in life that's what we do and the faster you cut your losses fail quick the quicker you can start doing things that are much more productive the other, the second area has to do with every part of your business, joel and I were talking about what I think is a revolutionary new field, although it's not revolutionary or new, but it's business model innovation and it's based in the concept that any business model you're using today is probably obsolete, uh, if you're in any kind of business that uses technology to market, especially an information-based business, knowledge-based business consulting services, training anything else your business is probably outdated uh the way you and and visit and the business model is your method your step by step process to build profitability now there are some companies that struggle fight fight fight then they find a new business model and next year their business has increased five or ten times the profits are staggering they live in big houses on the hill driving cadillacs and flying jets p rivados and you say what the hell did they change their business model and if you don't change your business model if it's the wrong business model two things are going to happen your competitors are going to come up with a new business model and eat your lunch and either you're going to screw up then doesn't mean your business model is wrong it just means you have to be open to the possibility your business model is outdated and that just means there is a better business model there is a superior business model and your work is to find and again there is no fixed answer but I think this is a big area of ​​thinking I think this is a big area and it's like a tool for you to have I wonder if I need to change my business model which is your way of generate sales produce and deliver products and services get paid and achieve profitability so coming back to the second is to look at anything in your business look at your products look at your services look at your people m go the way you advertise in the marketplace and ask if there is anything you are doing today that knowing what you now know you wouldn't start over today and the one question you always ask is if it works works works works if it doesn't work and you and you can tweak it then it's ok if it doesn't work have the courage to admit this doesn't work and drop it now the third area has to do with investments in thought based on zero investment of time people hate wasting said someone before that people hate Losing is one of the biggest emotions we hate wasting time if we have invested a lot of time in a course of action a project a business a relationship the second is emotion if we put a lot of emotion into a course of action a product a course of study a relationship or money we hate to admit that we made a mistake and that what seemed like a good idea at the time turned out not to be a good idea and knowing what I know now I would. n the courage of c take your losses and run now the reason i teach this first is because you can't make any progress unless you clear the decks unless you get this 800 pound gorilla holding you back from your life and then A lot of companies that I've worked for literally transformed into multi-billion dollar companies when everyone said okay, we're going to do a quick scan of this entire company and realize that half of the things that we're doing and half of the people who work here are not the right people for us right now and half of the products we are offering are not selling and will never be replaced by better, cheaper and faster products on the market so cut your losses.

What happens when a big company gets into trouble? bring in a quick analysis man and he comes in with a chainsaw and shuts down all the factories and all the stores that aren't profitable and the company goes from profit to loss in a year anyway the second thinking tool I teach people is a wpo thinking that is the worst possible outcome in whatever you are doing, always ask yourself what is the worst possible outcome of this course of action and what and can I survive if it did happen and if not what could I? do to make sure it doesn't happen one of the main reasons we worry about anything in life is out of fear and when you wonder what's the worst that could happen in this particular situation and then if you could just say all right, yes that happens i'll live with it then your worry goes away and your mind becomes clear and calm and now you say what can i do to make sure the worst doesn't happen and then you become proactive and take charge of your life the third thinking tool i hope i'm not going too fast the third thinking tool is called the principle of constraints and it's one of the most important thinking tools ever discovered it says between you and whatever you want to achieve there is always a constraint, a limiting factor or a throttle point which sets the rate at which you achieve your goal so i was talking about doing a conference call and a few minutes ago so the The question I said is always let's set the goal of doubling our income. i'm going to double your income ok i want to double your income so why isn't your income double now now in business we don't think about doubling our income we think about doubling our profitability what we are concerned about is net cash flow we will be concerned the amount we take home for our family at the end of the day not gross but triple net so we say if i want to make double and everyone here can and can and i will make two three four five times as much sometime in the future if i wonder double why am i not making double already and the number one reason for most people is distraction so they are so distracted they are doing things of little or no consequence but we found the 80 Rule 20 is applies to restrictions 80 of the restrictions that prevent you from reaching your financial goals are within you and within your business they are not outside they are not the competition they are not the market they are not people onas in washington or taxes or regulation 80 is into you so the mark of the top person is whenever they have a problem they say what is causing this problem in me mike and i know very well , very clearly, what is causing this problem in me. in a disease by the way 85 percent of the disease is psychosomatic as dennis waitley said it is not what you are eating it is what is eating you is causing the problem eh and so the starting point and the first thing a doctor or a psychologist is what is it that you are not treating and you go back to thinking from zero base what is it that you have in your life that if you had to do it again you would not do it so ask yourself what is stopping it and, in general, is it the quality of self discipline or is it a skill now one of the things that changed my life forever was when i learned that all trading skills can be learned you don't have to be a

genius

to learn any trading skill you can learn any form of technology mike has shown that with his products you can take a person who is basically shoveling shoe polish in chibokan and teach him how to be technologically superior enough to win e life with it every business skill can be learned and so I say what skill if you are absolutely excellent in your business would help you the most to double your income what business skill if you could wave a magic wand and wake up tomorrow morning excellent in this area what skill would be and you know when you ask that question everyone knows the answer they know what it is but here's the challenge you don't like the skill because it involves rejection shame ego possible failure loss and you have tried in the past you have not been good at that, but no one asked him what would be an easy skill to learn, they just asked him what skill would help him the most to double his income and this is what we found. that most of us are just one skill away from doubling our income and all business skills are learnable and if you study the people who go from top to bottom in the fortune 500 or fortune 1000 that they found in 25 years of research, These people learn one skill at a time how to climb the ladder of success on the income ladder like a sniper one shot one kill skill that can further help you generate sales and profitability.

Hey I hope you are enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book out and if you want to get it absolutely free there is a link below in the description or you can wait until the end of this video or you can just go to joesfreebook. com and you can get a copy there. the seven the big seven in business i will give you briefly first successful companies have great leadership and leadership is the ability to get results but it is also the ability to allocate resources which means it is the ability to make decisions and make difficult decisions because if it were easy decisionseveryone is a leader and everyone is rich, so making decisions using slow thinking using long term thinking is the leader's critical job Drucker says the leader's first job is to ask what results are expected of me and then I add to that of all the results expected of you as a leader what is the most important result you need to achieve in order to achieve the sales and profitability for which one of the rules is responsible what we learn in business we never complain about anyone or anything in our business because we are the boss we are the ones who decide this we don't complain about your staff because you hire the person if you don't like the person get rid of them don't complain about them you just sound like an idiot you know what is is is like or is it like picking up food from the buffet down there and saying i don't like this food well i've never liked this food i've always hated this food well why did you pick it up nicely?

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 skip. it's actually one of the marks of superior entrepreneurs is that they are intensely solution oriented is that every time something goes wrong they immediately calm down and say ok what's the solution what's our next action what mediocre people do I mean who did it and who is to blame how did this happen they go on a witch hunt and of course that makes them angry and frustrated but top executives when something goes wrong problem with a client problem with money problem with invoices problem with product delivery or defects they say ok ok how do we solve this? what is the solution now? your success in life will be determined by your ability to solve problems my friend colin powell said that leadership is the ability to solve problems success is the ability to solve problems and how you become really excellent at solving problems by the way i just finishing a book called creativity and problem solving that amicom will publish in new york at the end of this year is because i researched for years on the subject this is the point is the way you solve problems is just thinking of solutions what are all the solutions be intensely solution oriented don't get bogged down negative upset unhappy with the problem and who did it focus on the solution n and the actions you can take and when you start thinking about solutions remember helen keller's wonderful line when you you turn into the sunlight the shadows fall behind you as you start to think of solutions we could s do this look at that and you could do this and I could do that we could do when you start to think of solutions your mind calms down your creativity sparks like lights you start to have more energy you start to feel more confident and so on with me until now thinking about problems makes you negative and turns your brain off thinking about who is to blame is even worse but thinking about what you can do and actions you can take puts you back in charge well the second principle and i talked about the second one the second degree is having a great product or service and this for me was not a revelation and it's so simple it stares you in the face but 90% of your success will be in business will be having a great product in the first place and this is something that a lot of people miss, they think that if I have a good product and when I pay thousands of dollars and go to really smart seminars, they will teach me some marketing tricks and tricks so that I can trick people into buying it. mpre and them 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 not advertise for the restaurants and the restaurants they were always full and when people said where do you want to go for dinner let's see if we can get into one of those restaurants so I asked him I knew him very well because we worked in the same organization Dr.

Allard my mentor was owned all three restaurants and Mitch was. a part owner and he ran them and he could start a great restaurant i said what is his 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 is help we put out great food at good prices on the plate and we just go back and restaurants are full 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 in the product or service now ink magazine does a story on the inc 500 the 500 fastest growing companies in america taken over a three year period and every year they update it the latest issue that came out a couple of months ago was showed that the company number one fastest growing was that it grew forty two thousand five hundred forty two thousand five hundred percent amazing it grew so fast huh others grew 5 10 15 20 30 50 times in two or three years all start-ups are reasonably new start-ups all companies started by people like the people in this room and grew 5 10 50 20 100 times wow what was the key so they went back and did it, outside researchers they looked at it and they know what they found is all the c The companies put it on the plate is that every single one of them was quality obsessed and obsessed with quality as defined by their customers and they were close to the customer they were they were locked closely with the customer like me was sharing um uh uh his um idea about um what was it called what was your wtc what did you say about customers well joel yeah think like a customer sharing that at my conference today think like a customer the best companies think like a customer what customers want what customers you need and you know that the key to success is to make your customers happy and then make them happier than your competition. and then every day I wake up and think how can I make my customers happier and they went and interviewed the CEOs of the four of the 500 fastest growing companies and every single one of them was customer obsessed they thought about the customers they talked about visited customers called customers went and saw customers they personally responded to customer complaints they were just obsessed with it which again repeats that 90% of your success will be the Quality of Your Product or Service Now how can you know 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 someone else and say wow that that's a great product jesus great service wow that's a great company jesus they are great people and how many people say this is a great product what percentage 50 percent 40 percent the us average is about 30 percent 35 percent the main companies that companies like apple that go out with an ipod and iphone and an ipad people consume the product the next time they go out with an iphone they sleep on the sidewalks in lines of hundreds to be the first buyers go out with an ipad they sleep hundreds are sleeping on the sidewalk s to buy it and pay outrageous amounts and then they start showing everyone else its not a great product and then they have apps look this ah look what you could do with this app how many people have an ipod 5 and an iphone 5 ok how many of you showed other people the widescreen?

How can they take panoramic photos? Isn't that a great concept? your iPhone as one of the 100 or a thousand different things you can do to get people who buy your products to become your preeminent sales people are running around grabbing people and hassling them and showing them the product or bragging about the product in a movie at night way movie companies only have enough publicity for a weekend they might take big commercials for a weekend to get people to the theater quickly after that movie will grow or die by word of mouth and their movies they will be a success. ful word of mouth everyone is talking have you seen that movie yes you said you have to see that movie honey i just found out about this movie at work we are going tonight you weren't even planning on going to the movies and you are going there tuesday night the theater is full you had this experience you say and everyone talks about it the most important key to our success so go back to the ink study and i'm looking for corroborations in the ink study they did the researchers say what is the best place for a company to invest if you want to increase your sales and profitability and the answer came after looking at everything else is to invest in improving the quality of your product invest in improving the quality of your product make the product better and better make your customers be more more and more happy make your customers so happy i say the key to success is to get your customers to buy from you first instead of your competitor buying from you Buy again because they are so happy and bring their friends and if that becomes their operating theme we could talk about this all day is to get them to buy from you buy again and tell your friends then you will be successful you will be rich . you are going to be respected and most of all you are going to be as happy as you can be as nothing brings us more joy than making our customers happy number one is becoming a great leader which means setting clear goals being decisive. taking responsibility for results number two is delivering a great product and never being satisfied with the quality of the product is constantly striving to improve it in the eyes of your customers and this is one of the great revolutions in marketing that I think is so important is the best companies the four stages of epiphany the lean start talk to their customers and tell them how you define a great product would you buy this you would pay for it do what you want more of what you would want less of w What can we do to make it better?

They're even doing this with what they call the minimum viable product idea: they bring a product idea to a customer before they even make it, and they work shoulder-to-shoulder with the customer 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 you to think out on paper the critical aspects of your business and especially you look at what it's going to cost what you can sell for what kind of profit you can make who are the people you'll need there's a great story of napoleon's generals around this big table with maps of europe spread out and this is when the french armies were conquering everywhere and they were talking about which cities are which municipalities which duchies that they were going to attack with the army next time and napoleon w would come from his office which was nearby and say what are you doing he said we are talking about let's move the army from here we are going to move it to there and so on and he'd say ok gentlemen he said I'm afraid we can't do it we don't have the horses and they have listened The expression we don't have the horses comes from Napoleon and what he was saying was that the whole army was led 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 how they did they recruited while passing through a village they recruited people join the army see the world that kind of thing during the arm cannons are seen but horses were in short supply so all the success of the army was determined if they could get the horses So when Mike talks about getting the right people, it's where we get the horses, we have the ideas we have, we know what needs to be done, but where do we go? t the horses so these are the things you think about in a business plan what kind of technology will you need and how much will it cost to install and who will run and operate it what kind of advertising promotion will you need how much will it cost what kind of return will you get then a plan business plan and there are a lot of people I'm sure you have a lot of business plan templates that are pretty common is a business plan forces you to think long term and to think slowly and You will always make better business decisions if you think long term and 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 that I used. work for a big advertising agency and the rule is the fastest way to kill a product a bad product is to advertise or market it is to find it because if you market it what happens more people use it more people use it and they are angry about it then they tell you to more people and the product dies so the quickest way to kill a bad product is to promote it and a lot of people think oh no the way I can get my money back is by selling it to people before enough people knowthe bad is not true, we have confusion, today we have the Internet, everyone in the world can know how many troops appeared on the streets of Crimea with the mass of balaclavas on their faces and they know that in three seconds they were in Russia, where in Russia they control all the media and telling people they were attacking the CIA backed ukrainians who are behind all the problems in ukraine and poor russians are being slaughtered so im just sending some of my troops to help protect our i told my friend sergey i told him sergey it's nonsense not a word of what you're saying it's true it's totally false the only people in the world who believe what you're saying are people inside russia who don't have access to news about the outside anyway so I'm digressing my point is marketing means how you attract people to your product or service there is a difference between marketing and sales, you know what it is imagine i told you at noon this group i say is there anybody here hungry raise your hand ok that is marketing i am interested in your product or service i am interested in the product or service in general but anyone here likes to save money make money lose weight be happy pick up girls you know whatever so the second part is now i have a restaurant let me tell you why you should come to my restaurant to satisfy your hunger instead of going to the competitors then those are the two is marketing is attracting people who raise their hands who are interested in the benefit offered by your product or service and selling the conversion is getting them to buy from you instead of your competitors, so they are very different functions that 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 and you have a great marketing plan the answer is you have a constant stream of interested prospects calling and emailing you when they walk in your door and sleeping across the street from you Fact number five is you need a great sales plan and a great sales plan of course is a sale that consistently converts customers and predictable or convert interested people into customers.

Now this is the rule if you have a professional sales process and all 100's of all successful businesses. have a professional sales process if you talk to the salesperson and you work with an international company that has a branch in warsaw and if you talk to the salesperson in warsaw or the salesperson in los angeles or the salesperson in johannesburg 100 of them use the exact same process of sale the first contact will be a telephone contact to offer you a benefit and try to make an appointment and the words will be word for word the reason for this the company did this almost went bankrupt because everyone sold in their own way, they said what came out from the mouth every time they met a prospect and realized that without a sales process we have a great product that they make that is killing them so much they systematize the sales process their sales went up a thousand percent if it is proven that If you go from random sales to a proven and clear sales process, you have to refine it, you increase your sales by 500 with the same number of prospects that people have seen. s get their close rates from 1 out of 10 to 9 out of 10 just by improving the sales process so selling is really important it's one of the things we're focused on right now there are two more points I want to talk about in terms of grace one is generating big numbers and this is one of the most important parts of business all business activities and the results can be expressed in numerical form everything down to the number of phone calls or num number of seconds it takes a fake person connect with a person who can help them jeff bezos who as you can see was awarded entrepreneur entrepreneur of the year by both forbes and fortune are obsessed with measuring every activity and they watch the seconds how many seconds it takes when we first shop on amazon they would advertise five to seven days to today they offer one to two days max in cities like san diego where they have warehouses you can order by l tomorrow, delivered in the afternoon. books tapes courses clothes are overnight zappos that can deliver overnight because they are obsessed with shortening the amount of time it takes to make customers happy and the short time customers actually value speed and they will pay a lot of money for someone who will make them happy faster it's just they have determined so look at the numbers what are they and the question is what are the most important numbers in your business? in we teach in our longer courses about 35 numbers in any business some of them are not important some of them are extremely important and there are five to seven of those 35 numbers that are the a numbers and then there is a number that is the most important number of all and we call it or jim collins who wrote from good to great calls it the economic denominator and when i started doing my training 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 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 you basically obsess over all the time and uh one one uh company went from fighting for any fight written in Entrepreneur magazine went from fighting to bankruptcy and then a friend of his asked him what it was his number what was the number r you focused well we didn't focus on any particular number we didn't even keep track so they were just selling for god and god and at the end of the day they were broke he had to go to home and lives with his mother and is 26 years old.

So he said no, you have to pick a number, so he sat down and said hmm and he picked a number and it's called the net contribution margin, in other words exactly how many net dollars and cents we have. they make from each sale and then we compare those sales after 100 of each customer acquisition cost expense and lead generation and delivery and everything else and then compare them to each other and re-emphasize in other words contribution margin net in this year they will reach 100 million dollars in business and he laughs he said it changed our whole lives to finally find out what our number was so he asks I always ask people what your number is you know, do you know what is the most important number? know what else Entrepreneurs say sales sales everyone knows only sales really what happens if you lose money on every sale?

The more sales you make, the faster you'll go broke, and you know that many companies are losing money on every sale because they don't. don't add all costs of sale leave out own labor leave out rent leave out utilities leave delivery costs leave out defects think packaging theft and that's why we're selling a lot, Yeah, well how come you're losing more money each month? Did you see these companies? By the way, um, that announced they had 11 billion in sales last year, they lost 3 billion and you see them all the time. How could you? 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 that they're losing more and more money on and nobody sat down and did it did Attributable cost ok the last of the seven and this is the one i love and this is the future by the way the business front the first bookend is having a great product or service to start the last one is having a great client. service experience and I can't tell you how important this is this is what Joel and I have worked on all our lives making our customers so happy at first and so happy with the product and happy afterwards is the key to repeat business is the key to rapid growth, all successful companies without exception are obsessed with taking good care of their customers once they get them and if they have a complaint from a customer the boss of the company doesn't sleep at night they are so upset about the complaints from customers to go out and visit them personally because the president of the company will call a dissatisfied customer and talk to him because they consider customer happiness like tony shea to be the most important thing in the world what tony says is that we are not in the shoe business we are in customer happiness business we only sell shoes and if we were selling something else we would still be in customer happiness business ent. idea translated to zappos sold it for 1.2 billion dollars and took home 350 million not a bad idea make your customers happy it works yes how often it works 100 times so you will find the best companies are the ones you really you like them and want to come back to are the companies that make you feel happy make you feel good as a result of doing business with them take good care of you and as a result you come back again and again and bring your friends those are the big seven of the ones we talk about here great leadership great product or service great marketing plan great sales plan great numbers great business plan and a great customer service plan and if you have those here's what's interesting is if you are my Selecting one of them is like dial a seven-digit number if you forget one of them your business will go bankrupt you will lose any one of them you will get or get it wrong you will get the wrong answer or lose it completely then Then your company will go bankrupt so now we know scientifically basically more and more of exactly what you have to do to build a highly profitable business and the wonderful thing is that everything can be learned you can learn any of these skills anything that I just explained to you is as simple as getting rid of the water all you have to do is just say oh and what do you think yeah I could do that I could do more of that I could do better we could do that ok I hope you found that amazing and helpful video so if you want to get a free copy of my book i want you to click here and if you want to see more videos that will be helpful and awesome click here go ahead they are here do it now come on thanks watch