by Ryan Blair
So far in my life I’ve gone from fat to skinny and from poor to prosperous. Having made both journeys, I can tell you that there is no effortless strategy for either. I’ve had the chance to ask world-champion athletes, billionaire businessmen, award-winning actors, and platinum record–selling musicians about how they achieved success; and what I have found time and time again is the same response: the journey to the top of your chosen field is filled with effort and sacrifice, self-teaching, and total commitment.
Here’s my advice while you’re poking around this book looking for wisdom and inspiration. Understand that I’m not saying all motivational speakers are bad. I happen to despise the term because I don’t think that the title “motivational speaker” signifies accomplishment. I’ve met many motivational speakers with whom you would not pay to trade places if you knew the truth about their prosperity. I believe there are a variety of messengers who will come into our lives with quality content. These messengers are not all bad, but you have to do your homework before buying from one. First and foremost, verify the credentials they have to teach you about their subject.
Remember, it’s not just about past success, but also about present success. The shame is that most of these motivational speakers are out of touch with the times. Perhaps in the distant past they did something remarkable. Somewhere along their journey of life they decided to make a career out of talking about it as opposed to doing it. When you’re really doing it and building wealth, you don’t have time to give motivational speeches, unless of course there’s something else to be gained from the speech than a measly stipend.
Unfortunately, the best messages of motivation and the best know-how for prosperity can only be found in taking action on a daily basis, fighting the competitive battle, so to speak. The people taking action are both students and teachers of the subject, something I’ve found to be a rarity in the industry of “motivational speaking.” So-called “mentors” who offer up tidbits of advice for a fee are all hustlers, and it’s not bad to be a hustler, but instead of buying a $10,000 weekend seminar on how to be successful, I’ll give you all you need in ten steps.
1. Work your ass off.
2. Don’t give up, ever.
3. When faced with defeat, rise to your feet!—Dr. Dre
4. Keep angling until you find your angle, then play your angle.
5. Sacrifice. (See chapter 11.)
6. You’ll survive, no matter how bad it is—it isn’t so as bad it could be.
7. Shake off your mistakes, but try not to repeat them. (See chapter 12.)
8. Be grateful—most people don’t even have a dream.
9. Remember that you are not safe. Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.—Will Rogers
10. Go big, have fun. If not, you either quit, die unhappy, or have a midlife crisis and blow your success.
I know these aren’t exactly the Ten Commandments, so in the next chapter I’ll talk in greater depth about the philosophies I’ve used to build my businesses.
4
PHILOSOPHIES FROM THE JAIL CELL TO THE BOARDROOM
You don’t have to be brilliant to be successful. I know plenty of people with less than three-digit intelligence who have eight-digit bank accounts.
But you do need to have solid philosophies and some kind of spirituality or enlightenment that will give you the foundation upon which you can build everything else, such as work ethic, integrity, and character. You also have to have rules by which you operate your business—the Golden Rules, I like to call them.
These are the principles that affect the way you think and the way you act and react. These aren’t necessarily moral rules, though those are certainly important. The basic principles of business ethics are generally the same across the board. They don’t vary much from business to business (though whether everyone operates by these universal standards is, unfortunately, another issue entirely). Your Golden Rules of business are a little different. They should be the ideas that shape your philosophies for management, sales, and networking, and for how you regard failure—and these are going to vary from person to person.
I’d like to share some of my Golden Rules so you can see that they are not really anything earthshaking but just a collection of quotes, concisely phrased ideas, and general reminders I keep close to me as I make decisions for my company. I’ve picked them up over the years, reading them in magazines or trade journals or hearing them from other people, and one or two I’ve come up with on my own. I just like how they capture various points.
I’ve divided them into five categories, depending on which area of my business they speak to: Communication and Management Rules, Business-Model Rules, Customer Rules, Strategy Rules, and Personal Rules. In short, they are rules to guide my thinking and help steer my decision making, and they are just as valuable to me as my business plan. These are the philosophies that work for me in any situation, from the jail cell to the boardroom.
GOLDEN RULES
Communication and Management Rules
Life is theater; everyone is an actor—some in the lead, some in the supporting cast.
This is an allegory I came up with one day while trying to describe the nature of teamwork. The lead often gets the attention and the accolades, but that does not mean that he or she is more important than the smaller roles that make the play possible. It simply means that each performance has a story that needs to be told and a certain number of characters who have a designated purpose within that story to help to tell it, move it forward, and get it to its conclusion.
The same is true in the business world. Everyone within a company shares a common goal: to create a superior product for the customer and, by doing so, earn a return for the shareholders. However, not everyone can be in the boardroom, nor can everyone be on the showroom floor or on the assembly line or making the sales pitch. It doesn’t make any one role more or less important, because each is absolutely necessary to achieve the overall product. I think it’s helpful to remember, too, that while the lead roles usually get more applause, they are also the ones who tend to get trashed by the critics!
Never ask a question you don’t already have the answer to.
This lawyers’ maxim is one that has an important place in business. Just as a lawyer does not want to be thrown a curveball in front of the court while examining a witness, a business owner does not want to be caught off guard in front of potential clients or investors. I can remember vividly when I broke this rule in a SkyPipeline board meeting. As the CEO of the company, I asked a question of the board, and I did not know the answer to it. Needless to say, I didn’t like the response to my question. Afterward, my attorney, the late Joe Nida, pulled me aside and gave me this golden rule.
As a side note to this rule, though, I want to add another maxim: If you don’t know the answer to something, say so.
If you are unsure of the answer to a question, say, “I don’t know, but I will get you the answer by [day, time, date].”
I’ve seen countless executives in the boardroom (including some of my own, unfortunately) attempt to answer a question they didn’t know the answer to, answer a different question, or evade the question altogether. If you don’t have 100 percent accurate information or all the details in front of you, just say you don’t know. I’ve made the mistake of guessing the answer to an important question, and it has often come back to bite me. One time I was asked where I expected a market to be a year later. I had no idea, but I gave an answer anyway, and my answer was way off. At the next board meeting, the same question came up again, and this time, my answer was totally different. The board noted it, and I noted that I would never answer a question I didn’t have the answer to. You only have one chance to establish credibility. Don’t blow it by attempting to have all the answers.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking down your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then star
ting on the first one.” —Mark Twain
Because I don’t have an aptitude for thinking four or five moves ahead, I have to attack the first things first and worry about everything else down the road. That being said, this quote from Mark Twain offers some of the most valuable advice I have ever encountered. It seems simple enough, but it’s often hard to remember when you’re facing a mountain of seemingly impossible obstacles with your business. The key is not to view everything as one huge, looming project. Instead, focus on all of the individual elements that make up every bigger challenge, and then prioritize them.
Create a good old to-do list, and start working your way through it. If something seems too daunting to face at the moment, skip it if time and circumstances allow you to, and move on to the next item. When you get through your list, circle back to the beginning, and start with the projects you passed over the first time around. Each item you are able to check off creates a sense of accomplishment, which in turn creates momentum. But you have to be willing to take that first step, to tackle that first obstacle before you can hope to make any progress on the rest.
When you feel you have failed at something, ask yourself:
Why did this happen?
What could I have done differently?
How can I do it better next time?
What changes should I make in my strategies?
What can I do to improve my planning and preparation?
While it’s important to move past our failures and not let them hold us back, it’s equally important to make sure we learn from them so we don’t repeat our mistakes. I really like the checklist above because it is fairly comprehensive in terms of evaluating the problem while focusing on the positive. It allows me to hold myself accountable without beating myself up. I call this process the postmortem, whereby we go back and evaluate our failures to make sure we learned our lessons so we don’t repeat the failures.
I suggest keeping a notebook specifically for lessons you learn the hard way. Take the time to actually record the answer to each question so you have a written reminder of what went wrong and what you resolved to do differently. Share these questions with your employees, too. If your whole team is continuously focusing on improvement, failure will be a valuable tool for learning rather than a roadblock in the way of progress.
Master taking action.
To become a “master” of something, you must work with focus and purpose. That is my goal each time I set out on a new project or explore a new industry. I want to master it. I want to immerse myself in it so I can know everything I possibly can about it.
But that kind of dedication isn’t limited to learning. I also strive to become a master of action—someone who is never content to sit by the sidelines but who is always engaged in the process of selling, networking, expanding, negotiating, researching, and exploring. In short, I want to be doing. I have resolved never to be content with simply watching my business; I want to be covered in its mud and grease and blood and sweat and tears. So if I go down, I’m going to be fighting when I do.
Never express a negative emotion in an e-mail or text message.
Under no circumstances should you communicate negative emotions via e-mail. These conversations should be had in person or over the phone. John Tolmie, the CFO of ViSalus, has what he calls the twenty-four-hour rule. If he feels he might respond emotionally to something going on in the business, he sleeps on it and responds the next day. This is outstanding advice for any business leader.
You can’t control the conditions in which a person is reading your message or how he or she will react to it. What if that person is reading it during significant family stress or after just having lost a loved one—would you still send it? You never know what’s going on with people on their end, so you can’t know how they will interpret your words. Don’t leave difficult communication to chance.
Don’t forget that once something is written down, it becomes permanent. Do you really want someone to have a tangible reminder of when you flew off the handle? Always, always fight the urge to fire off an angry e-mail or text message. You will come across as more collected and professional, and you will not regret your decision.
Praise in public and reprimand in private.
You’ll earn the love of your team when you praise them in public and single out individuals for a job well done; however, if you have something critical to say, I strongly suggest that you do it in private. Public embarrassment is a sure way to drive people to perform at a lower level. Imagine your fear if every time you made a mistake, you were embarrassed in front of your peers and colleagues—people whom you respect and admire. You would likely stop taking risks or putting in extra effort, and would probably perform only to satisfactory standards. The last thing you want as an entrepreneur is an employee who is only satisfactory.
Coach John Wooden lived by this rule, and so does former Louisiana State University basketball coach Dale Brown. Coach Brown once told me about the way he would inspire Shaquille O’Neal to perform at a higher level when Shaq was playing college ball. If Coach Brown observed Shaq underperforming, he would pull him aside and say, “When you played Kentucky, you dominated your opponent—he couldn’t stop you, Shaq! This guy you are up against is not better than you. You need to play like you did against Kentucky. You are better than this. You are not playing like the Shaq I know!” But he would never, ever criticize Shaq’s playing in front of anyone else.
To this day, Shaq credits Coach Brown’s mentorship with much of his great success. If you don’t learn how to convey disappointment effectively and if you criticize people publicly, you will eventually find that you’ve driven away your most talented people. But if you can motivate your team in the right way by celebrating accomplishments and quietly addressing shortcomings, you’ll have their loyalty and respect.
Business-Model Rules
1. You are a model-driven company. Test your assumptions, and revisit your model routinely. Rip the model apart every time you look at it.
2. Create a retention-based sales model; ideally, pay a long-term residual.
3. Know your customer.
4. Be as close to your customer as you can be.
5. Cherry-pick your new markets.
This combination of statements is a great one for any of my companies because it is full of action words like “test,” “rip,” and “create.” It encourages each employee to get fired up about the product and the market, and it challenges everyone to be an energetic force in the growth of the business.
If you are not passionately engaged in the process, how will you ever really understand what it is that you’re selling? I want employees who are willing to look critically at the product and who will offer suggestions. I want employees who are constantly looking for ways to improve our offerings and set higher goals. I want employees who care enough to invest themselves by taking an active role in our company’s growth.
Marketing exists to create sales.
It sounds like a fairly self-evident statement, but sometimes it is easy to get wrapped around a promotion or an ad campaign because it is clever or catchy but not necessarily the best way to reach the consumer. Even in a campaign intended to build a brand image, the ultimate goal is to increase sales. The simplicity of this statement is a good reminder to me that marketing, as well as everything else within our company’s structure, needs to be focused first and foremost on creating sales.
The best formula for increasing sales: Exposure × Conversion = Result
Essentially, what this formula represents is the effectiveness of your marketing and of your sales force. Exposure is how you let people know about your product. Do you use direct mail? Viral marketing? Traditional media ads in print, radio, and television? Do you use social networking applications? How do you spread the word about what you have to offer, and how effective is each approach? This is what will determine your overall sales numbers.
The goal, of course, is to increase your rate of exposure whi
le increasing the rate of conversion (i.e., how many people actually purchase the product). Methods of advertising do not yield equal results and can be dependent on any number of outside factors. Internet outreach, for example, can spread the word among young people but is not so effective in an older demographic. And while it can provide great exposure, it does not translate to a very high conversion rate. Direct mail usually only yields about a 2 percent conversion rate. From my experience, radio advertising has a conversion rate of about 0.5 percent, which is not bad, but it depends on which stations you select when determining whether you’re able to reach the right demographic. Direct presentations consistently have the highest rate of conversion, but that rate is largely dependent on how skilled your presenter is and how compelling the reasons are to buy now as opposed to later. A good presenter can have a conversion rate of 85 percent; the challenge is that a direct sales presentation is not always an easy option to arrange for many products.
Whatever the case, this rule is an important one to remember. It is not advertising alone that will increase your sales. A strong and wellresearched marketing plan is a crucial part of the formula as you seek to reach potential customers in a manner that is relevant and effective for the sake of making the conversion to sales and getting the results you desire.
“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” —Charles Darwin