Part II

So this critical idea got everyone’s attention, and a bit later in the presentation another participant wanted to know something very important. “Since,” he said, “we’re all hard working and pretty lazy at the same time, what does it take to make this kind of change and to make it last?”

My answer is simple. You’ve got to have a big goals and an inspiring vision if you want any kind of meaningful change. Otherwise, why bother?

I have a lot of experience with this . My company, Axcelus, charges annual retainers from $36 ,000 to $120,000 to advise clients and insure action that rapidly grows revenues and profits. If reaching your business goals would give a 10x or 100x return on that kind of investment, well of course it makes sense.

But on the other hand, if your goals too small, if your vision is too mild, it may not make any sense at all.

In my book, Be Unreasonable (McGraw Hill, 2007), I tell my readers they must be uncomfortable if they’re going to get anywhere.

Why?

It works like this: That feeling of “uncomfort,” by definition, comes from doing things you have not done before. If you’ve done something before, especially if you’ve done it a lot, then whatever it is will feel comfortable. If it’s new and different, it won’t.

And your current level of results – revenues, profits, difference-making, whatever – are the outcome and sum total of all your current actions – that means the comfortable ones. If you keep doing those comfortable things, you will get the same results, no matter what.

If you want different results, greater results, rockin-the-house-down results, you’re going to have to make changes in how your company does things — often quite a bit – and that change is going to make you uncomfortable. QED.

So what?

Nobody in their right mind is going to make themselves uncomfortable without a good reason, and that reason is best provided by a powerful vision backed up by strong goals. Have something you’d be willing to walk over broken glass and hot coals to get there.

And you’ll do the things necessary.

Without that, odds are you won’t.

Part I

Yesterday I was speaking at one of our 37 Fatal Business Mistakes workshops.  I was talking about the kinds of changes a business owner needs to make if he or she wants to quickly speed up their business’ growth.   One of the most powerful recommendations I make is that you to figure out where you are continually spending your time, and lump those activities into things that make a big difference, and things that don’t.

If you shift your time and focus from one group to the other, the results will be huge.  For instance,  one CEO (we’ll call her Dana) told me that she spent about 8 hours a week out of 55 on accounting and payables issues.  Of course there is no excuse for this, but since recognition is the first step on the road to recovery,  knowing where the time goes can be very good thing.  I asked what she would do with the 8 hours if she freed herself from “payables.” 

She said, “Oh, that’s easy.  I’d close more sales, and there are plenty of deals to close.”  Wow, what a revelation.   So I asked one more thing: what would those sales be worth?  “Conservatively,  “$70,000 – $80,000, a month,”  she said without batting an eye.

Not bad, around $900,000 additional annual revenue for an no-cost behavioral change.  Who wouldn’t want to do that…

I just discovered this note left over from writing Be Unreasonable:

“All unreasonable ideas violate some accepted wisdom.”

That’s a pretty good acid test. If you want to know if your ideas are “unreasonable” then make sure your are contravening something that you were heretofore certain was true.

I just read this following passage in Gary Kasparov’s new book, “How Life Imitates Chess.” He has been writing about the phase of a chess game called “nothing to do,” and how greats such as Petrosian and Karpov used this time to eke out small positional advantages.

“In life, there is no such obligation to move. If you can’t find a useful plan, you can watch television, stick with business as usual, and believe that no news is good news. Human beings are brilliantly creative at finding ways to pass time in unconstructive ways. At these times, the true strategist shines by finding the means to make progress, to strengthen his position and prepare for the inevitable conflict. And conflict, we cannot forget, is inevitable.”

Think about these phases in your own business, where you are sitting around, waiting for something else to happen. Could they be used to strategic advantage?

Start here: Answer the question, “What am I trying to accomplish?”

Then, “What are some of the ways that can happen?” This will give you the high order possible strategies.

Next, validate that this is, in some way, possible. Use internal and external market research.

Your research opens up the Gap Analysis, and starts to answer the question, What is needed to get THERE?

Consider, “How different is that from WHERE YOU ARE NOW?” and “What are the ways to close the gaps?”

Prioritize which gaps are most important AND most closable AND Have the biggest payoff.

Now: DO THOSE THINGS FIRST

The decks are finally clear. Here are four ways to make a breakthrough:

1. Figure out what’s working and find a way to do it much more, or much better.
2. Figure out what’s not working and fix it.
3. Figure out something from a different discipline and apply it to your own GAP
4. Invent something new, completely of whole cloth.

It’s been a very distracting few weeks, and I keep telling myself that I have to post, otherwise the blog might get stale. Perhaps it’s a time management problem, but of course, that can be fixed. Perhaps business is just too good, and I certainly don’t want a fix for that!

In any case, I was reading Jerry West writing about… what else, blogs…

He referenced something that I feel should be pasted backwards on my forehead so that I can see it every time I look in a mirror. It’s an old Chinese proverb:

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is today.”

I watch a lot of movies – all sorts, but in my movie tastes I’m not that evolved. I especially like eighties and nineties action pictures.  I really like movies like the Die Hard series and Lethal Weapon, even the new version of the Bourne Ultimatum.  And what I’ve learned from watching of these kinds of movies is that the hero – the one who kills all the bad guys – does not win by hunkering down, staying in hiding and waiting for them to come to him.  He wins by running right out in front of the villains – charging towards them with everything he’s got and screaming at the top of his lungs.  He lunges towards the competition firing – as they say – with both barrels.   He puts himself at tremendous risk and doesn’t quit until it’s over.  That’s the unreasonable approach.

Since the publication of Be Unreasonable, my consulting and speaking activities have multiplied dramatically.  While I didn’t have a ton of “free time” before the book came out, I seem to have less and less at an increasing rate.  This is not a complaint, just an observation.  I’m finding that my time is at a premium, and my goal is to use it as effectively as possible. I wrote a while ago that “time management” was a myth, and that you couldn’t really manage time per se.  I still agree with this.  But without a doubt you can have a great effect by choosing what you do with the limited time available. 

I’m now practicing what I call ‘unreasonable time management.” This means my goal is to only do things that matter, and which contribute, and not doing anything that doesn’t bring me closer, in a measurable way, to reaching my goals.  I’m dropping all obligations, all “shoulds,” and even all things that I promised to do, but simply do not make sense.  Each day I’m reviewing my time commitments and making new decisions. 

Also, I’m holding to the discipline of only doing those things which are on my calendar.  Which means that if I want to get something done, I have to schedule it.  What’s nice about this approach is that all things have to get scheduled, and as they get scheduled, nothing (or at least fewer and fewer things) are happening by either chance or inertia.   I’m not perfect at this, but I’m getting better.

They say that time is money.  I’m not sure I agree, but it does seem that they are freely exchangeable.  Right now I’m trading in both directions.  Sometimes it’s my time for money, other times, it’s my money for time.  Either direction involves a choice. 

Are there really only three ways?

I’ve been wracking my brain to find a new one, but there’s no way around it.  Although there are hundreds of specific approaches, when you distill them all down, there are only three ways to expand a business.  Three main ways, and only three.  What are they?

1. Sell more to your existing customers
2. Find more new customers
3. Merge or acquire your competitors

You might ask, “What’s the point of talking about three when there are ‘hundreds of specific approaches’?”  That’s a reasonable question - it’s easy to think consolidating them obscures the opportunity.  But in fact, it’s just the opposite.

You see, most people don’t think much — about anything — and when they do they don’t never pay attention to how they’re thinking. So they never develop tools for how to do it.  Generalization is one of those tools. Generalization allows you to crunch (maybe it’s the opposite of crunching) a whole bunch of information into a few manageable pieces you can more easily manipulate in your mind.

That’s what we’ve just done here. Now that you realize there are only three ways to grow a business - whether you are measuring growth by sales, or cash flow, or profits, or market share, or number of customers… whatever, you can examine each of these three more carefully and see how they apply to your business.

And that’s what you should do next.  At least, that’s what I tell all my high-paying clients!

I just had a fast lunch at Panda Express (you know, you can substitute steamed vegetables for rice or lo mien, making this almost healthful). At the end, I cracked open my fortune cookie which said:

Counting Time Is Not So Important As Making Time Count.

I had to re-read it a few times to be sure, but I find it profound. Perhaps not the first part, but Making Time Count. That’s my new time management mantra.  Make sure that the time I have available, whether it’s 4 hours a week or 60,  is well used and never squandered.

There are people who argue that “time is not money” but I actually think it is at the very least, freely exchangeable. Time can definitely be converted into money (if your marketing systems are any good) and money can - within limits - be converted into time.

Make it count.