The one thing I found I was good at was business, and I think if you find something you’re good at, it’s wonderful if you can do it.
— Peter Hargreaves #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Sometimes you achieve everything you wanted. Manny Stul reached that point with his first company in 1993.
I wanted to get out. I tried to sell the company. I wanted to sell for six, seven million. For me in those days, that was a fortune. I couldn’t sell for a variety of reasons. Going public was the last option.
I asked Manny why he wanted to sell.
I’d had enough. I’d accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. I didn’t necessarily want to retire; I just wanted out of the gift company. You set yourself certain goals—everything I did up to that point, up to about a year before, I did with passion and drive.
It’s like climbing a mountain. You really want to climb that mountain, and you do everything in your power to achieve impossible things to actually get there. Once you get to the top of the mountain, in your eyes, now what? That’s the way I felt.
Manny was bored to death. Fortunately, he was able to list his company on the stock exchange, and after an escrow period of 18 months, he got out with a lot of cash.
He wants his children to find what they love to do, find their passion.
So many people spend their lives going through the motions, where they’re in a job that they hate or they’re doing stuff that they dislike. That’s no way to live. You have to really enjoy what you’re doing. It’s very, very important. You lose a lot of your life energy if you’re expending it doing stuff that you don’t like and don’t enjoy.
Enjoy what you’re doing, and if you’re not enjoying it, you’re probably on the wrong train. You’re going in the wrong direction. Get off the train.
— Jack Cowin #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
And you, dear reader? How do you want to outwork your competitors? Are you enjoying your business? How passionate, how proud are you about it? How diligent are you? Do you work long hours going full speed? Are you taking the hard route or trying to shortcut it?
You lose a lot of your life energy if you’re expending it doing stuff that you don’t like and don’t enjoy.
— Manny Stul #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
- Drifters are lazy and passionless; they take the easy route.
- Millionaires are hardworking but inconsistent; they don’t give 100% and are distracted by consumption; their passion often isn’t aligned with their business.
- Billionaires are passionate about what they do; they are diligent heavy-lifters who outwork everybody around; they create instead of consuming; they take the hard route and go full speed.
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CHAPTER 15
Are You F.A.S.T.?
Efficiency is doing things right;
effectiveness is doing the right things.
—Peter Drucker
To be particularly successful, you have got to have done a lot of things right. You have got to run a great operation; you have got to be efficient and know how to treat your employees. That’s how Peter Hargreaves sees it.
F.A.S.T. means Flawless execution, Absolute focus, Speed, and Time management, in short: efficiency. How efficient, how F.A.S.T., are you in your execution?
Execution Is King
Everybody has ideas, but what counts is the execution.
In real-life business, it’s not the most brilliant idea that wins; it’s the company that can perform best in the marketplace.
Petter Stordalen, the Scandinavian Hotel King, likes to say, “Execution is everything. You can be a professor at Harvard Business, but if you don’t have the execution, you will never succeed. People think a strategy or a market position is the most important thing for success, but I say no. That’s maybe 15%, 20%. Eighty percent of your success is execution, the ability to actually put your ideas into life, into reality.”
Execution is everything.
— Petter Stordalen #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
One of the most important qualities of a businessperson is the excellence in execution.
As I wrote before, for Cho Tak Wong, the auto glass manufacturer from China, his success secret has three words, and execution is its final element: “belief, vision, and execution.” Execution power is central to his business philosophy.
Eighty percent of your success is execution.
— Petter Stordalen #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Time Is Key, Speed Is Critical
Realize that time is your most important asset. It’s not money. You can always make money even if you lose all of it, but you can never bring back the time you have lost. It’s better to save time than to save money.
Billionaires realize how important speed is in their business, and they excel in it. Michał Sołowow, the wealthiest person in Poland, told me, “Speed in business is in my view one of the critical parameters.”
This is how being fast helped Frank Hasenfratz win General Motors as a customer and got a multimillion-dollar contract:
I was introduced to a manufacturer’s rep who represented General Motors. That would be fantastic, to get into General Motors. And he walked me through the shop, and he said, “This is what we want outsourced. We’re not going to make it in-house.” They were the spindles for the cars. “How many?” “8,000 a day.” Holy shit! How many machines will I need? So I gave him a price. I said, “Do you want to think about it?” “No, the price is right.” We got the job. First automotive job, big job. We built a brand-new plant for it.
That’s the power of speed in business.
One of the most spectacular feats Petter Stordalen pulled off happened in 1992, in the deepest recession, when the famous Steen & Strøm department store in Oslo filed for bankruptcy. Steen & Strøm is the Harrods of Norway, an institution with almost 200 years of history. It defines retail business in this country.
Petter decides to make a bid for the store. His plan is to divide the store up into 52 departments and rent them out to tenants within nine months.
On Monday noon, the decision is announced. Petter wins and celebrates the victory with his team.
Then the phone rings again: “Petter, you need to go down to Steen & Strøm right away. The old management, assuming their victory, had gathered the employees and wanted to present their plans. When they learned the news, they left leaving the employees gathered on the ground floor. You need to go there now and present them your plan.”
Employees demand quick solutions and ask when the store is going to reopen. Surprised, Petter, in his youthful zeal, announces to reopen on Wednesday, 3 p.m. and promises a great opening campaign.
I think: I will not even be able to get an ad in the newspaper. It’s like 1 p.m. Monday already. How shall I manage?
He also realizes he spent all the money for the inventory and the brand already. His team gets nervous as there is no chance for a successful opening with no budget and within 48 hours. He tells his team:
The good thing now, we have two options. Both options will give you a place in the Guinness Book of Records. The first one: If you only sit here on our ass doing nothing, we will be the fastest bankruptcy ever. We will go bankrupt before we open the store.
They certainly don’t want this to happen.
The second one, when I told the investors what we should do in nine months, we have to do it before Wednesday.
Within these two days, Petter manages not only to sign the tenants for the 52 departments, but also to make them move in and prepare the opening sale.
By selling the inventory and the store equipment to them he manages to regain almost all of his investment on day one. For Petter, it is like selling strawberries again.
The next hurdle is the advertisement for the opening campaign. He manages to place a double broadsheet opening ad at the biggest newspaper way past the deadline by promising he will plac
e 50 colored pages over the next six months. Petter even gets interviews in the headline news. He says it’s going to be the biggest opening sale in Oslo’s history.
The opening is indeed a fantastic success. There are more people in the store than ever before. So many that the escalators stop working due to overheating and the fire department orders to open all the outside doors due to the danger of fire.
At the end, Steen & Strøm goes from losing $6.5 million a year under the old management to $5.5 million profit in the first year under the new owners.
Petter with his team manages a complete turnaround practically in 48 hours! An epic performance, never achieved before or after. It is something business schools in Norway analyze and marvel about to this day!
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For me, the most impressive billionaire in regard to efficiency is Sergey Galitskiy, the founder and CEO of Magnit, the largest food retailer in Europe. They have 17,000 stores now, and when I interviewed Sergey in Krasnodar, they were opening five new supermarkets each and every day. Can you imagine that? Do you realize what is needed to open just one supermarket? First you need to find land, then to negotiate and buy it, then you need to get all the permissions, then build the store, then install all the systems, hire and train people, organize supply and logistics, then actually supply it and market it to the customers, then you can open it. And they do it five times each and every day? How is it possible?
It wasn’t in the beginning, but Magnit was steadily increasing its capabilities, skills, and efficiency. At the end, they managed to reach this velocity.
The never-ending increase in efficiency is deeply rooted in Magnit’s culture. Sergey’s business partner, Vladimir Gordeychuk, says you have to move faster and faster; otherwise you die.
If you stop, you die. You have to move. You have to run. And right now you have to run quicker and quicker. It’s very difficult to be upper position, to take upper position.
Six Billionaire Efficiency Strategies
Efficiency means also to care for the outcome and not do something just for the sake of doing it.
That’s something that Ron Sim has paid attention to since his school times.
When I was in my primary and secondary school, I used to look at something and I’d process it. “What if I do this? What if I do that? What if I don’t do it?” And my friends would say, “You think too much. Just do it.” Which is not wrong, but not right either.
As I aged, I noticed that is actually my sense of analytical power. It’s the source of the thought process that helps me to decide whether to do something or not.
I ask myself, “How to do it to achieve the best result?” Whereas they don’t think of the best outcome. But I think of the best outcome. And is the outcome sustainable? A lot of people just do it, but they don’t care about the outcome.
These are the six efficiency strategies that allow billionaires to achieve more in less time and with less effort:
1. Set Goals
Have your goals written down. Chip Wilson stresses the importance of deadlines and “conditions of satisfaction.”
I do everything with “by when” dates, so there’s got to be a conditions of satisfaction with a “by when” date on everything I do, even for myself, so I know that if I’m promising to do something by a certain date, I’ll do it. And I have to have integrity even with myself, so if I say I’m going to do something by a certain time, then I have to do it, and I have to do it in the way that it’s expected to be done.
There’s got to be a conditions of satisfaction with a “by when” date on everything I do.
— Chip Wilson #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
This is the advice Ron Sim gave his children:
Life is a long journey; if you don’t stay focused, you’ve got no goals, you’re a lost man. If you’re not hardworking, you’re going to be a useless person. If you’re not disciplined, you’re going to get yourself in trouble. So keep focus.
2. Plan Regularly
Michał Sołowow, like every billionaire, prefers planning over dreaming.
On the lower level, I don’t have dreams, I have plans. I have plans of various kinds, which relate to the companies, things we do. I have all sorts of plans that are not surprising or above average, which are rather being realized. I mean, they are in the domain of plans.
Most billionaires, like Jack Cowin, plan daily.
I have a day timer, a calendar which dictates where you are, what you’re doing for the year, and then you kind of reflect back. I do daily planning as to what I’m going to do today, and over top of that, probably three or four bigger goals of things that I want to do.
Life is a long journey; if you don’t stay focused, you’ve got no goals, you’re a lost man.
— Ron Sim #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
3. Prioritize
Billionaires use various prioritization strategies. It’s important to set your priorities, then choose a prio strategy that fits you and be consistent in using it.
Prioritization Strategy: Most Important Stuff First
This strategy is probably the most popular among the efficiency gurus, and it is broadly applied also by many billionaires.
Kim Beom-Su, the Korean mobile services dominator, belongs to those billionaires who use this strategy to prioritize their projects and tasks.
I tried to continuously question what I do. What is the most important thing right now? What is the most important person, what is the most important task I need to deal with right now? I’d think in those terms and try to do those things and delegate the rest, so that’s kind of my style, and so I don’t feel the need to manage my time. If I have a lot of time on my hands, that means the company is doing well, and if I get busy, that means things aren’t going so well.
Prioritization Strategy: Most Difficult Stuff First
This strategy, which Brian Tracy calls “eat that frog first,” is used by even more billionaires than the first one. They do the hardest tasks first.
Lirio Parisotto describes this strategy as follows:
The first things I need to do are the things I don’t like to do. Why? Because it makes the other things easy. When you delay it for tomorrow, then if you have to do it tomorrow it’s even worse. So if you have something to do you don’t like, someone you need to call and you don’t take this call because you know that person would complain, or you have trouble or you don’t like the person or you need to fire someone who’s disgusting, then it’s the first thing to do. At the end, we need to stay with just the easy things to do, things that are pleasurable.
Peter Hargreaves asks himself two questions every morning: “Who do you least want to speak to?” and “What task do you least want to do?”
Invariably, those are your two top priorities of the day. You should immediately speak to the person you don’t want to speak to and complete the task you didn’t want to do. Those two things were clogging your mind, and you will have a great day from then on.
The first things I need to do are the things I don’t like to do.
— Lirio Parisotto #BillionDollarGoldNuggets
Prioritization Strategy: Most Urgent Stuff First
You would think this is the old-style way of doing things, but this strategy is actually used successfully by some billionaires.
Ron Sim’s prioritization consists of three steps: “Urgent—Sensible—Logical.”
Cai Dongqing told me, “Normally I will deal with things according to how urgent it is.”
And some billionaires switch to the urgency mode if needed.
Prioritization Strategy: Higher Potential First
Some billionaires have developed a more sophisticated strategy to prioritize their projects and tasks. They give priority to things with bigger upside.
Tony Tan Caktiong is the World Entrepreneur of the Year 2004. He describes this strategy quite clearly:
So
metimes it depends on urgency, if it’s really needed. But most of the time it’s more about what are the projects. Then we will look at the big ones that have the bigger potential rewards, and we go for them.
Sergey Galitskiy goes one step further. He keeps an eye on the risk/reward ratio and recommends to differentiate the strategy depending on the size of the company: When small, focus on the things with most upside. When big, focus on the things with most weight.
4. Focus
Every entrepreneur has hundreds of things to do and thousands of ideas to follow. If you don’t focus on what you want to do and push through to finish them, then the things you want done just don’t get done. So it’s important not only to prioritize and decide what you need to do, but also to decide which things not to do. Also, don’t get distracted by urgencies.
“Be a rifle, not a shotgun,” as Jack Cowin puts it. “Beware of prettier girls, new theories, and diversions.”
Tim Draper told me:
Something my dad taught me was you go after one thing hard and do it till it’s done. Just focus until it’s there, until you’ve achieved what it is that you wanted to accomplish. I believed in that, and I do believe in that.
Michał Sołowow learned two important principles in his business career.
You know, there are several things that a person learns in life, and they become principles. The first one is: “Decide on which of the things you don’t do,” that is, in fact, to concentrate on important things. Often the ability to say “no” to something that potentially looks attractive is difficult, and doing everything is impossible and simply causes a distraction. And that distraction, that is, the lack of concentration on important objectives, indeed means that you do everything but nothing comes out of it in the end. The second principle is that, if you cannot understand something, then you simply shouldn’t do it. I mean, if I cannot understand something, for example some market, things, events, and I cannot understand that quickly, that means that I shouldn’t engage myself with that.
The Billion Dollar Secret Page 22