Naveen Jain learned about building good relationships from Eastern philosophy.
Real relationships are built when you are able to be vulnerable. And because you are vulnerable and you are at the emotional level with people, it releases oxytocin, which is actually a true sign of bonding. And bonding only happens when you are able to make an emotional connection with someone rather than just an intellectual connection. When you have close bonding, it also creates the trust. And then you are able to have deep conversations. And when you build the trust, the business gets done. So what I realized is being honest and true to yourself and being vulnerable even though every business book will tell you, “Don’t let them see you sweat. Man, don’t get emotional.” I don’t have a problem talking about my life. And I find more business gets done with more people because I’m able to build real deep relationships.
Build relationships based on trust. This is something Naveen can’t stress enough:
To me, the most important way of doing business is through building trust. That means getting to know the person. Trust takes time. I am a person who is willing to spend time with someone to get to know him as a human being before I do business with them.
The thing I am going to tell you is the secret to success. People do business with people. It is me doing business with you. It is not my company doing business with your company.
Here is what I have realized. If you go against your gut feeling of trust, those businesses never last. If I don’t like someone or I don’t trust someone, sooner or later I will find a reason not to trust you and get out of the business.
If you trust someone even though they’re a hiccup, you say, “You know, I trust you but this thing that happened, can you fix it for me?” And they will do it. They’ll go out of their way to fix it if you trust them.
Life is too short to fight with people. So build and nurture relationships that you have.
— Dilip Shanghvi #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Skill 4: Communication
Communication skills are built on your people skills and allow you to be more effective in your business endeavors. Communication and storytelling are indispensable in public relations, marketing, and also sales.
Build relationships based on trust.
— Naveen Jain #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Great communication skills will help you in every stage of your business.
Probably the best communicator I have met during this project is Petter Stordalen. I asked him what he would do if he had to start from zero again with no money. “I would find the best hotel manager ever in Norway and convince him that we should start a company together.” It sounds so easy when you can use your words properly.
Petter is also an excellent storyteller, a quality most self-made billionaires possess. A good example of the power of storytelling is the hotel the Thief.
When we made the Thief, everybody said, “Just to name the hotel the Thief, people will think they are robbed. Because you say it will be the most expensive hotel in Oslo. You have the highest room rate. People will say, ‘I stayed at the Thief; I was robbed.’”
And I turned out to be the other way around. Storytelling is everything. This used to be the island of the thieves, the robbers, the prostitutes. The last criminal that was executed in Norway was hanged here. So we have the story. This is the island of the thieves, and we made this hotel with The Horse Thief, the original artwork by Richard Prince, one of the world’s most famous photographers, in the reception.
One guy told me, “Petter, why don’t you have security in front of that picture? What will you do if somebody steals it?”
Just imagine, The Horse Thief stolen at the Thief Hotel in Oslo. It will be on CNN, Wall Street, everybody will talk about it. It’s perfect marketing. The only people who will cry will be the insurance company.
We were sitting in the restaurant, on the wall was an interesting painting. I asked Petter how much it was.
This painting? It’s $2 million. Andy Warhol, original. Where is the security? Nothing.
Condé Nast is the most famous traveling magazine. We have been featured there among 50 Top New Hotels in the World, we have been in the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian. Because we started the storytelling before we started the hotel. We had Sir Peter Blake to the hotel. We had a book about all the people who haven’t had a great life but finally succeeded, and we said, “This was our beginning, and this is the biggest move ever from the island of the thief to the only new five-star hotel opening in Oslo in the last hundred years.”
And now, all the stars want to stay here. We made magic before we opened.
This is the power of storytelling.
People do business with people.
— Naveen Jain #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
You may say, and what if somebody isn’t born an extrovert? Is it possible then to learn to communicate effectively?
Some billionaires among my interviewees are born introverts. Nevertheless, they managed to hone their communication skills during their career. Kim Beom-Su had a technical background, but he did a lot of projects when he worked for Samsung and did street marketing around universities, “so doing these things, I think I’ve overcome a lot of that.”
Skill 5: Selling
Without sales there is no business! If you want to be successful in business, become a good salesperson. All the billionaires I interviewed are excellent salespeople.
Jack Cowin considers selling a significant skill that determined his success. He learned to sell in his childhood enterprises. “I remember as a kid, in the middle of summer, selling personalized Christmas cards with your name on it that you’re going to send out.” When he was going to university, he perfected his selling skills.
I got involved in a business selling nursery stock—trees, shrubs, plants—door to door, farm to farm. One of my professors said that one of the things he found very unfair was the fact that I was making as much money during the summer as a salesman as he was making a year as a university professor.
Even in a communist country like China, selling skills are key.
Interestingly, Cho Tak Wong, the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2009, learned to sell during his first job in the very same industry, namely selling saplings.
Chip Wilson learned to sell from his entrepreneurial grandma.
She was telling me about when you do a sale, if you go to make an appointment with someone, you always ask for two times. Because if you only give them one time, they can always say, “No, I’m busy,” but no one can ever say no if you give them two times.
These early lessons paid off quickly in his childhood.
Money was tight. If I wanted money, I really had to go out and work for it, and I was very creative around that. I would set up a circus or I’d set up the basic lemonade stand or I’d sell things and have the rest of the kids in the neighborhood pay to come in and participate. I remember selling Boy Scout tickets, or selling something for the swimming club, selling soap dishes and this and that. I was always the number one salesman.
I asked Chip why he was so talented in sales.
I was excited by the sale and by perfecting my pitch. It’s interesting. I think I had a personality that loved people, and maybe I had a little bit of my grandma in me.
Good selling skills help you in every business. Even if you don’t have anything, you can still make money if you can sell. When I asked Peter Hargreaves what would he do if he had to start from zero with no money, he answered: “I’d design a website to sell something. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.”
I asked Peter what made him so successful in selling. “You’ve got to make it easy for people to buy. People find it very easy to leave their money on deposit in the bank. That is very easy. They make some money; it’s very easy to leave it there. So you’ve got to make it just as easy to move it into the investments we provide.”
Manny Stul, the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2016, learned a very important lesson about sellin
g early in his first business.
Going right back to Day 1 when I was trying to sell to all these people on the phone. There were so many people I was contacting, I couldn’t remember everything that I said. So I developed a card system.
These days you’d have a computerized system for that, but in those days I would document on that card—say I was ringing you, Rafael, and I’d put the date that I rang you and the time that I rang you on the card, and I would write down everything relevant to our conversation. It was a kind of a CRM system. I’d write down about your marathon running, the last date that you went on a marathon run, whether you’d had any injuries, etc. I had hundreds, thousands of these. It’s impossible to remember everyone unless you’ve got a photographic memory, which I don’t. I wrote down both business and personal data, everything relevant. What I tried to sell you, what I didn’t try to sell you, your intake and what had sold, what hadn’t sold, etc.
So the next time I rang you, I had all this data in front of me. I’d just started the business and had been going for a couple of months, two or three months, and within that framework that’s when I learned immediately never to lie. Because next time I talked to you, I didn’t want to get caught lying. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to sell you anything. So that was a pretty big lesson for me, and I’ve maintained that lesson ever since. It makes life so much easier and less complicated.
Skill 6: Leadership
It is not possible to create billions in value without help from others. Billion-dollar companies have thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of employees. You need to be able to attract people and focus their actions in the right direction. You need to be able to lead them.
Leadership means getting things done through others. It is the business master class. It encapsulates all the elements from attracting people, inspiring them, and motivating them to take action to managing and leading them. It is the most advanced of the universal business skills, a skill that billionaires excel at.
It is no secret that business is a team sport. And in team sports the best team wins. Trying to win in business playing alone on your team is like trying to win a Soccer World Cup playing alone against the best teams in the world.
Leadership is about building and developing a winning team.
Jack Cowin explained to me when I talked to him in Sydney:
Business is a team effort. It’s not just money; it’s the involvement of other people in the process. Some people are very successful because they’re strong individual performers. A 100-meter-run guy can run very fast. Team sports are different than that. If the coach says “you run that way” and you run the other way, you’re getting yanked off the team. You’re not going to be on the field too long.
Luckily, Jack realized he needed people on his team at the very beginning of his business career, when he burned his fingers during the KFC franchisee training.
They were teaching you how to cook chicken, and you take the drumsticks and you have to dip it in the boiling oil, you’ve got to sear it so the skin doesn’t peel back. Anyway, one of these pieces of chicken fell out of my hand, and this hot oil burned my hand. So I had a “eureka!” moment. I realized that if any success was going to depend on my cooking ability, it was going to be ill-fated because there’s no way I was going to be able to successfully do this and be the operations manager.
So I said, “I have to hire somebody that knows how to do this, who can be an operator.” And so I did. I found a guy, a Canadian who had worked for a franchise group in Saskatchewan in Western Canada. I said, “Look, come, I’ll make you the operations manager.” He did. My job then became, “how do you build the business?” I’ve never operated one of these stores in the 46 years I’ve been here. I’m incapable of doing it. I couldn’t do it.
So don’t try to do it alone. You need people to complement your skills.
You need others to be able to help you do your best. As the business gets bigger, you become dependent on other people. One of the things that I’ve realized about myself is, you’re good at some things, you’re not so good at some other things. So if you have a dream of building a business that has size and some substance to it, you need to build a complementary team of management, of people that magnify or compensate for whatever skills you have or don’t have. So put together a complementary management team of other people that complement whatever you do. If I’m really good at finance, that’s not going to be as important, but if I’m bad at finance, I really need a good strong CFO.
Business is a team effort.
— Jack Cowin #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
In leadership, billionaires use their knowledge of human nature, their relationship and communication skills. It’s a skill that you build over many, many years. You will find some elements of effective leadership throughout this book. It would fill another book to describe all the details that make up a great leader and describe the billionaire leadership methods. I may write it one day.
As the business gets bigger, you become dependent on other people.
— Jack Cowin #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Have you learned all of the Six Skills of Business Mastery, my dear reader? Which of those do you still need to develop to become outrageously successful in business?
- Drifters develop skills that don’t generate wealth.
- Millionaires have developed only some of the Six Skills of Business Mastery.
- Billionaires have mastered all Six Skills of Business Mastery at the highest level.
For more stories on this topic, go to:
http://TheBillionDollarSecret.com/resources
CHAPTER 7
The Six Habits of Wealth
The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.
—Warren Buffett
In the long term, your habits will determine your future. You first need the foundation of the following habits if you want to be really successful in business.
Sergey Galitskiy, the internationally most respected Russian entrepreneur, told me: “The most important thing is the foundation. What you should be most interested in is not the result, but the foundation that you build. Result is always what follows.”
Habit 1: Get Up Early
Getting up early is the number one common habit of the most successful entrepreneurs. All my interviewees name it as an important component of their success.
The self-made billionaires that I interviewed get up on average at 5:30 a.m. with some variation to it.
Result is always what follows.
— Sergey Galitskiy #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Why is getting up early so important?
There are several advantages. Early hours, when the world awakes to life, have something of a primal energy around them. You may have felt this energy at the sunrise. You have time for yourself, time to think in silence, and time to work undisturbed. This, coupled with your fresh mind and body, makes you extremely productive during these hours. And you get this great feeling of doing something, of progressing when others are still asleep. It can even propel you through the rest of the day, giving you additional energy boost.
But keep in mind: It’s not the short sleep that makes you successful in business. It’s getting up early. Some billionaires sleep for three hours only, some need as much as eight hours, but all of them get up early. Those that need to sleep longer just go to bed earlier.
How to get up early?
The best method I have heard so far is the one Manny Stul, the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2016, gave me:
Do you know what got me out of the habit of long hours? About 40 years ago, I could sleep half the day, no problem. A friend of mine asked me to go to circuit training in the morning, early. He said he’d come and pick me up. He’d pick me up at 5:30 a.m., we’d be there at 6:00 a.m. I said, “No, no, you go.” He said he needed me there to motivate him. I said “Yeah, not a problem. We’ll do it for a few weeks, and then you’ll be motivated.�
� So I set the alarm and I’d wake up and struggle getting out of bed. After about two to three weeks, I was waking up without the alarm, automatically. And I never got out of the habit, ever. Doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, I wake up early in the morning and exercise for an hour.
Indeed, a sports commitment in the morning is the best way to get up early.
Habit 2: Keep Healthy
Whether in business or in life in general, health is extremely important. Without health, life is a misery and no amount of success will make it better for you. There is no point in doing business if you aren’t healthy.
Jack Cowin told me he had once given a speech with the title “If I knew then what I know now” with 13 different points. “The first one is, if you lose your health, nothing else matters. Your health is the most important. I don’t care how wealthy or how important you are or how much power you’ve got; if you lose your health, nothing else counts. So you’ve got to look after your health. Include techniques such as meditation or physical training into your life to maintain your mental and physical health.”
If you lose your health, nothing else matters.
— Jack Cowin #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Exercise Regularly
The number one method to keep healthy is a strict exercise regime. Each and every one of the billionaires I interviewed, whether he is 40 or 80, exercises regularly.
Most of them include sports in their morning routine like Petter Stordalen, who believes running with his wife and dog is the best way to start the day.
Years ago, I decided that I will train every morning, and I have no ambitions to compete or anything.
My wife and I are usually up around 5–6 a.m. and out jogging for 10km by 5.30–6.30 a.m. I have always been an early riser. I have never enjoyed sleeping in. Using energy creates energy in my book.
I have always enjoyed it, but when I met Gunhild it became one of the foundations in our life together. It is a good way to update each other on our busy lives, and so many great ideas and beautiful sights have come from this tradition.
The Billion Dollar Secret Page 10