In May of 1804, Lewis & Clark were given the mission by President Jefferson of finding a water passage from St. Louis to the Pacific ocean. How they approached fulfilling that mission is one of the best business start up examples in history.

Lewis and Clark were masters at planning as you go – what we call the 2.1 Planning Process. They only knew 2.1 things:
1) Where are we? – St. Charles (St. Louis)
2) Where do we want to end up? (the Pacific ocean)
2.1) What are the next few steps? (get a boat, hire a crew, leave)

Just the next few steps
You never get all of step “3)”, which is HOW to get all the way from step 1) to step 2). You only get “2.1)”. Traditional business planning teaches us that HOW you get all the way from 1) to 2) should be planned before you leave. But it’s voodoo, nonsense and fortune telling.

Just like Lewis & Clark, we never get all of step three, and you definitely don’t get it before you leave the dock. All we get is 2.1 – the next few steps.

On the third day of the trip, Lewis and Clark’s main vessel nearly capsized which would have ended the trip. Their experience even on waters others had traveled before was vastly different. Sound familiar? The other guy’s business experience won’t be yours – don’t let him tell you how it should go.

Lewis & Clark planned for the first few miles and could only guess at what they needed to take with them beyond that. All they could do is plan the next few steps and get moving.

Movement beats planning
They took off with 38 men and three boats but could have easily taken 1,000 men and 100 boats. Looking back from the future, we know this wouldn’t have helped them, and all that over-planning would have in fact made it even harder to move quickly, support such a large contingency and survive the winters.

This is where we miss it big time – over-planning before we even get moving. Lewis & Clark only figured out what they needed as each new obstacle presented itself. After planning as best they could for the first few steps, they simply had to be willing to make constant and quick adjustments or they would have perished. Every business has to have the same willingness to get moving and take soundings as you go.

Long-range planning doesn’t work
If you read the adventures of Lewis & Clark it reads like everything from a sappy novel to a National Lampoon comedy to an Indiana Jones movie. No business plan would have uncovered 1/100th of what actually happened.

They thought it would take 12 months, but 2 1/2 years later they stumbled back into St. Louis where people had long since written them off as dead. They thought they would float in big boats all the way to the Pacific but ended up in wagons, then canoes, on horses, walking, back in canoes, back on horses and wagons, all the while hoping they would find locals who they could trade with to get these things. They were making the whole thing up as they went along.

On they way back, only one month from the safety of St. Louis, Lewis was shot in the touche by the near-sighted, blind-in-one-eye Private Cruzatte who thought he was an elk. You just can’t make this stuff up. And you can’t plan for it either.

Pursue the first thing to find the real thing
Businesses almost always find what they will succeed at by failing at their first objective. Lewis & Clark had one main objective, find a navigable passage from the midwest to the Pacific Ocean, connecting the Mississippi to western oceanic trade. They utterly failed in their main objective. Yet pursuing that objective led them to multiple huge successes; mapping thousands of miles of land, treaties with Indians, identifying and naming hundreds of plant and animal species and opening up a whole new land for exploration. They gave courage to a whole generation who would follow in their steps, and rough maps to begin the journey.

And as with any business, those who followed the same route as Lewis & Clark had entirely different adventures. No two businesses can follow the same plan, even in the same industry.

Move the boat, then make the map
But the best correlation between Lewis & Clark’s adventure and your business is the answer to this question:

When did they get their maps?

The answer? When they got back.

Take the first step, then do it again and again
The best way for you to know how your business will unfold is to know exactly where you want to go, leave the dock and get moving, be flexible and adaptable, make it up as you go along, and grab the opportunities as they unfold. The thing you thought would be your main business will almost certainly grow into something you could have never seen from the dock.

Don’t know what to do to get all the way from here to there? Figure out what the next step is, even if it is a guess, and do it. Then do it again and again. Always know exactly where you want to end up, and take a thousand first steps to get there.

We usually find the good stuff by wading through the muck we thought was the good stuff. A map would take all the fun out of it. You’ll get your maps when you’re done.

It turns out the health benefits of Giant Corporation, Inc. aren’t anywhere near as helpful as a high density of locally owned and very small businesses. The counties with the fewest locally owned businesses have the highest mortality, obesity, diabetes and other bad health indicators, and those with the most locally owned businesses have the best health rates in America.

Isn’t big, better, though?
One of the many assumptions of the Industrial Age was that Giant Corporation, Inc. could provide better for your family and your community than a bunch of local-yocal small businesses. So why doesn’t it work out that way?

Giant corporations are the best at talking a good game. They have PR departments. Joe’s Java Shop doesn’t. In communicating that big is better, the giants employ the Disraeli principle (There are three kinds of lies; lies, damnable lies and statistics). They point to better individual health benefits as proof they take better care of you than the locals.

But what they don’t point to is where their heart is, and it’s not in the local community. It’s not even where their corporate headquarters is. It’s with their investors and making them as much money as possible. Where is the heart of the local business owner? Right where they live. They are much more inclined to build a community infrastructure that makes life better for all of us than Giant Corporation, Inc.

Ownership is Powerful Voodoo
We all understand that locals take pride in their communities. But it’s much deeper than that worn phrase. They take ownership. Everyone who lives there takes ownership, not just the business owners. They all “own” the local community in a very real way. It’s their brand, their identity, their view of the world, their “team”. People who live locally give back to their local communities.

Local Business is the Benefactor
Why does Toledo, Ohio have one of the top five zoos in the world? Why are there such fantastic museums in Kansas City, Missouri? What makes a small town in Colorado the healthiest community in America (with no corporations to take care of them)? All of these are because of locally involved business owners, not giant corporations.

With rare exceptions, the new wing on a local hospital is going to be named after some local business owner (or wealthy doctor) who donated millions to make it happen. The same is true of parks, museums, playhouses, live theaters, and soup kitchens. And service oriented clubs like Rotary, Kiwanis, Elks, Lions, the farmers market and the local flower club are all started and populated with people who live in the community, who have a deep commitment to the health and beauty of their local communities.

The research also shows small businesses with fewer than five employees are more likely to promote great local hospitals, recruit physicians, promote community health programs and activities and support local farmers’ markets.

Not so much
Your mother told you to work for Giant Corporation, Inc. so you could have great health benefits and a pension plan. But benefits, salaries and pension plans from large companies have dropped 33% in the last 30 years and the LSU research says there isn’t much of a gap anymore between big and small businesses (Professional Employment Organizations – PEOs have done a lot to fill that gap).

Challenge your local government
Do you want a healthy community? Own your own business and make sure your local government isn’t worshiping at the altar of big business tax breaks, special land deals and exceptions to rules that local business owners will never see.

We’re made to live locally. It’s great to see research proving it. Again.

90% of the answer is asking the right question. Are you asking the right questions? In the right order?

Successful business owners ask Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, much differently than reporters use them. TIMING (asking at the right stages) is very important, and the FOCUS of the question is, too.

Here’s the order in which you should ask them as you start, grow and build your business:

WHY – the most important, least asked question (in both the long and short term). Why are you doing this? What is the end game? If you don’t know why you are in business (it’s not the money, it’s never the money), or why you are buying that copier (“it’s shiny” is the wrong answer) you are done from the start. Everything starts and ends with WHY. Ask it EVERY TIME you ask one of the other questions if you want to be successful.

WHAT – the favorite question of the “craftsperson” – the easiest question to get lost in. We’re taught to ask this question first – “What am I selling?”. If you answer WHY first, you’re much more likely to come up with the right WHAT to sell. Know WHY, then ask WHAT.

WHO – Once you know WHY you are in business, and WHAT you are selling,
a) WHO is your target market (hint: it’s not everyone who can fog a mirror)?
b) WHO will work with you? (they don’t have to all be employees).
c) WHO will you buy supplies from?
The best answer to all of these is whoever will provide the lowest maintenance, highest profit culture for you. Ask WHO long before you actually need any of these people – it’s a culture question and if you don’t have a great grasp on WHO before you need them, you’ll hire for skills. Never hire for skills, only for culture.

WHERE – Has multiple long-term and short-term uses, but is rarely used well. Answer it after WHY, WHAT and WHO.
a) “Location” WHERE – used to get a lease
b) “Marketing” WHERE – Know WHO, than ask WHERE to find them? Make it about a) demographics, b) associations, c) strategic alliances, d) cohort groups (similar demographics). The best “Marketing WHERE”? – WHERE do most of your future clients come from? Invest there!
c) “Direction” WHERE – closely related to “WHY” (knowing WHY informs WHERE you are going. Knowing WHERE you are going only helps if you put a date on WHEN you will be there. WHERE ARE YOU GOING?? (WHY?) Extremely Important.
d) “Sane Assessment” WHERE – Do you know clearly where you are right now? a) Strengths/Challenges b) decision-making skills c) leadership style d) business strengths/challenges (market, product, revenue, profit, cashflow).

WHEN – one of the least asked, best questions. We don’t like WHEN because it holds us accountable to do something, which is why we should fall in love with it. Just like with WHY, ask WHEN every time you ask another question, and employ the Three-Step Decision-Making Process:
a) Make a decision (that is not a decision yet)
b) Put a date on it (when)
c) Go public – declare the date and ask someone to support you getting there.

HOW – the worst, most asked question in business planning. HOW is a buzz-kill; it focuses on the fear of the POSSIBLE, not the PROBABLE. It will uncover 127 things that COULD go wrong (possible) without telling you which four of the 127 WILL actually go wrong (probable). It also gets us involved in all kinds of nonsensical preventative planning for things that will never happen while we ignore the four things that are already a problem. HOW is paralyzing unless it is always used in conjunction with MOVEMENT and the other five questions. There are two uses of HOW, one bad, one good:
a) “Long-term HOW” – you should almost never use HOW to answer a long-term question, such as “How do we get all the way from where we are to where we want to be three years from now?” That’s fortune telling and voodoo. Business planners love this question, but no question is of lower value than “long-term HOW”.
b) “Short-term HOW” – this is actually a great question – “How do I get from where I am to the next step?”, because you are asking it about current realities that actually need a HOW to solve them. Use HOW for short-term implementation, not for long-range planning.

WHY, then WHEN; rarely HOW.
Ask WHY first. Always. Then get used to asking WHY and WHEN with every one of the other questions. Only ask HOW when addressing the next few steps. Never ask it about the distant future.

If you get in the habit of asking WHY and WHEN with every question, and asking HOW only about the next few steps, you’re much less likely to run into problems, and much more likely to build a great business.

Which one of these questions do you need to focus on right now in order to build your business? WHY? And WHEN will you act on it?

The #1 indicator of success in early stage business is “Speed of Execution”. Get moving. (See last week’s post.)

But the #1 indicator of success in growing a successful sustainable business that makes money while you’re on vacation is quite different. Speed of Execution is still important and always will be – always keep moving. But in the daily grind of building a business, “be the bull dog” becomes the main attribute of success. Never giving up, staying in the game. What fancy people call “Time in Market”. What I call “Being Relentless”.

Being Relentless
The bull dog was bred to help butchers bring down bulls that were essentially wild after years of living on the range. Their job was to grab the nose or face and not let go under any circumstance – no matter what. A couple of them would bring the bull to its knees with their weight essentially attached to its head, and the butcher could rush in and do his job. Bull dogs were trained to not let go or the butcher could die. That’s why we call people “bull dogs” – for their relentless focus and commitment to attach themselves to something no matter what – never letting go. Relentless.

Ships, Bridges and Parachutes
There are a lot of mechanics to building a business. None of them matter if you do not plan to be relentless and never let go. Too many business owners go into business with an escape route in place.

In the 1500s Cortez scuttled his ships to let his men know they weren’t going back – Mexico was their new home. To build and grow a business, we need to sink our ships, burn our bridges and shred our parachutes. If we have one eye on where we’ve come from and one on where we’re going we won’t have the focus, commitment and relentlessness we need to be successful. Having a foot in two worlds is dooming us to failure because when (not if) things get hard, we will take the parachute, run back across the bridge or take the next ship out. It’s human nature.

Trapeze Moments and Turtles
Ray Kroc said, “If you don’t want to take a risk, get the hell out of business.” I would add that if you don’t want to let go of the trapeze you have a death grip on, don’t pretend you want to get to the next one. Growing a business is full of trapeze moments where the only way to get where we want to go is do a full release of the present AND the past, and to hurdle ourselves toward the next thing.

But most of the time it’s the tortoise that is our best model of success. The tortoise beats the hare not because the tortoise is faster or smarter, but because the hare gets distracted with shiny objects and interesting diversions masquerading as new initiatives when the original initiative has no momentum of its own.

We kill our businesses more often by simply moving on to the next great thing before the first great thing is on auto-pilot. Sadly it’s most often simply because we got bored with the first shiny object. You can’t afford to get bored – that’s what children do. Be singular in your focus. Go after the nose of your business like a bull dog, grab it and don’t let go until you’ve wrestled it to it’s knees.

Lack of Vision = Tired
Or we get tired. You can’t afford to get tired, and if you have an utterly clear view of where you are going, you won’t. People with a clear vision for the future are motivated enough to get through the bumps and bruises and tired days. Be relentless.

I’m not smart. I’m just relentless. Being Relentless is the #1 indicator of success in the long haul of building a business, especially when combined with Speed of Execution.

Of course it’s hard. Of course money is tight. Of course you have too much on your plate. Of course nothing is going right. If you know where you are going and have a clear grasp on your Big Why, you’ll push through all that.

No Escape Hatch
Sink the ships. Burn the bridges. Shred the parachutes. If you’re not all in you’ve already built in all the excuses you need for quitting. If you’ve made that commitment, be relentless. Never give up. The smartest person doesn’t win. the fastest person doesn’t win. The biggest person doesn’t win. The last guy standing wins.

Sure, go ahead and be smart, fast and big if you need to. But do all of that with a focus on just one thing:

Being Relentless. After Speed of Execution gets you started, it’s the #1 indicator of success in growing a business that will make money while you’re on vacation.

Are you the bull dog? Do you have relentless focus and commitment to attach yourself to your business and not let go?

Be Relentless.

The SCORE blog post says figure out 1)what you’ll do 2)who your competition is 3)your overhead 4)how much money you can make 5)your potential profits, and 6)your funding. If you follow these six steps, you’re almost certainly going to fail.

It’s well-meaning advice, but doesn’t reflect how it really works. I’ve started and grown seven businesses, two that are international and made enough mistakes to figure out some basics. Here’s how I would start a business:

1) Take your product or service to market, put a high price on it (it’s always easier to come down than go up) and see if someone will buy it. If this doesn’t work, don’t do any of the other steps above – they are a waste of time if you aren’t already selling something. And if it does work, most of the other steps above will force themselves on you at the appropriate time.

Finding someone to buy your product or service is the first and only thing you should do before you do anything else. It should have been #1 on the SCORE list.

2) DON’T do a business plan (steps 1-6 in the SCORE blog) – they are nonsense and fortune-telling, and they keep you from going out and trying to sell your product to see if you have something viable. They also make you think you know what you’re doing, which keeps you from seeing great opportunities and obstacles. And they uncover 127 things that COULD go wrong (not WILL go wrong), which causes you to spend precious time and resources mitigating things that will never happen, and paralyzing you with all the bad things that might happen if you go into business.

The second worst thing you can do starting a business is to do a business plan. The absolute worst thing you can do is follow it. Check out the story of Webvan – a $2billion startup that is the classic case of a company that built an incredibly elegant business plan with brilliant management, then followed it right off the end of the earth (and they didn’t do #1 above until they were $1 billion in debt). Do a 2-Page Strategic Plan instead.

3) Figure out your profit margins. How? See #1 above – sell something at as high a price as you can – well above your minimum margin. Again, you can always come down. I worked with one client whose product cost $.35 all in (including marketing). They made a few of them, put it on the market for $8.50 and it didn’t sell. Over a period of a couple months they got the price down to two for $6.50 and they sold like hotcakes. Once they knew that their margins were huge, they had real data to determine their profitability. Do not determine your profitability in the ivory tower of a business plan – it’s voodoo.

4) Never take outside money unless there is no other way. 84% of the Fortune 500 companies never took VC or other early stage funding. It’s a myth that you need money to grow your business. VCs want you to believe it’s a must because they want to grow your business REALLY FAST so they can sell it out from under you and run off with cash. They’re building cash cows, not businesses.

5) Do NOT figure out your competition. You don’t have any competition except your own head. Do NOT look at what other people are doing to find out how to be successful. If you don’t have enough creativity and uniqueness to enter the market without looking at what others are doing, you shouldn’t be in business. See my blog titled Your Competition, Isn’t.

Doing it Wrong and Fixing the Process
I worked with a business owner recently who made the mistake of consulting with SCORE and doing everything they recommended. He had 80+ products defined and produced, a warehouse, financing, a great retail location, and $250,000 in inventory. When he finally started taking his products to market, the market wanted them packaged in entirely different ways and amounts and at different price points, and about 70 of his products were not selling.

We recommended he dump the warehouse, the retail shop and 75 of his products, and get on an airplane to major retailers, get their feedback, and learn his “business plan” in the trenches. With this approach his overhead is nearly gone, and he is now making money and profit. He would have been out of business in six months the other way. He can build all that other stuff after he makes some money.

How to Start a Business – redux; Sell Something.
Real businesses do not start with thinking, planning, researching, compiling, statistical analysis, building a “great” product in a lab, marketing, vetting your competition, estimating your overhead or finding a possible funding source.

Real businesses don’t start that way – not HP, Apple, Honest Tea, Google, 37Signals, Facebook, a plumber, or just about any other real business you can name. Read Bill Hewlett’s quote under HP’s Early Days here – he went and sold something (a few really stupid things) – this is how you start a business.

Go sell something. If it doesn’t sell, do what Hewlett and Packard did, sell something else. Don’t do anything else first. Once you have something that sells, your “business plan” will unfold in front of you in real time, in the real world. It’s counter-intuitive and doesn’t follow the mantra of the MBAs or the SBA/SCORE who think you should get it all figured out ahead of time, but it’s the way real businesses are successful.

Stop planning – get selling (quickly and inexpensively, on a very small scale).

Since I had never run more than three miles, I had a five month schedule for preparing for the marathon. I was very disciplined about it, it didn’t matter if it was late at night or raining, I kept to my schedule for those five months and finished my marathon.

20 years later I was only running casually one or twice a week, sometimes less. I was able to keep my exercise going with other sports, but really didn’t have a long term commitment to running. 20 years after the marathon Diane was running four to five times a week faithfully, every week.

Discipline vs. Diligence
I had been DISCIPLINED to prepare for the marathon for five months, but Diane was DILIGENT to keep running a few miles every day, year after year. We hear a lot of talk about discipline, but diligence trumps discipline every time, and is much more desirable in growing a business that lasts.

Tony Robbins says we over estimate what we can do in a month, and greatly underestimate what we can do in a year. Diligence takes the long haul into account and sets us up for long term success. It’s about being the tortoise, not the hare. Diligence keeps us from getting distracted by each new shiny object.

Discipline is motivated by short-term goals. Diligence is motivated by long-term goals, deep values and belief systems.

Discipline is about building a habit. Diligence is about building and sustaining a life and a legacy.

Discipline is about WHAT WE DO. Diligence is about WHO WE ARE.

Things are great; things are not great; things are great…
Why are there so many peaks and valleys in businesses? Too often it’s caused by being too committed to very short term impact (discipline) and not having a good grasp on how to do anything about the long term (diligence).

The priority – the long term
Henry David Thoreau said “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” In business, we get a shot at quiet desperation every time we commit to a short term shiny object that we just got excited about. Emotion and shiny objects are a great for recipe for short term shooting stars, but diligence keeps us grounded, stable, shooting for something significant with our business.

Short term goals that aren’t connected to any significant future for our business contribute to quiet desperation – moving from one short term, random, unconnected objective to another. We can look very disciplined about short term goals and never get anywhere. Longer term objectives for our business get us focused on something significant and create quiet resolve.

Investor owned and publicly traded businesses rarely get the opportunity to actually build a business on what would be good for the long term. As a privately owned business, you have the ability to build something that will make an impact for decades to come and create a great legacy by simply being diligent to make decisions that are best for your future, not just your present.

The tortoise really does win. Keep moving, plod along, never give up, stay the course – be diligent.

Diligence beats discipline every time.

He who aims at nothing, hits it every time.

Small businesses have one over-riding fear – there is a customer out there that I might not get. I need them all and can’t afford to miss even one. That fear is the basis for the worst, most common marketing practices – going after every kind of fish at once in the hope that I might catch one.

As the old Russian proverb says, “A man who chases two rabbits catches none.” We fish wide, when marketing success comes from fishing in a very narrow, specific way for a narrow, specific customer.

Which Fish?
A good fisherman decides which kind of fish they are going after. It’s the FIRST thing they do. We think we do that, but we we’re really doing is deciding to go after all fish that are wet. A realtor will go after anyone who MIGHT buy a house ANYWHERE within an hour’s drive of their house. A financial planner will go after ANYBODY with two nickels to rub together. A photographer will go after businesses, families, pets, weddings, events, and landscapes.

Why? Because if we don’t go after every fish that is wet, we might miss one. And we’re hungry. We need every fish we can get. We’ll guess what? The best way to ensure you won’t go hungry is to PICK ONE fish and only one, and pursue it with relentless focus.

Once a fisherman chooses one very specific fish (not just “bass” in general, but “small-mouth pond bass”, they then study that one type of fish thoroughly – what they look like, where they live, when they eat. They study what they need, what they want, and what they like (sometimes all three are different). They know everything about that fish, and as a result, they set up their entire strategy and all their equipment to find that one fish.

Contrast that with the local business owner who aimlessly throws money at advertising, direct marketing, and public relations just to see what happens. And they advertise all over the place to everyone who is a possible client.

A successful business owner picks ONE very specific type of client, and builds their entire marketing strategy around that very narrow niche. The rest of us go hungry.

GOES HUNGRY. . . . . . . . . .BUILDS A BUSINESS
A woodworking guy. . . . . . . . . . The stair rail guy
A financial planner. . . . . . . . . . .Focus on teachers.
A realtor.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . To a specific niche.
A contractor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .I do bathrooms; nothing else.
A photographer. . . . . . . . . . . . . .I shoot pets, period.
An insurance agent. . . . . . . . . . .For single women.
A travel agent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cruises – period.
A computer tech. . . . . . . . . . . . . Mac and only Mac.
A bookkeeper. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . For doctors only.

A Meaningful Specific or?…
Every one of the above are real business owners who are highly successful because they know who their fish are – a VERY narrow niche. I could also name a thousand I know who don’t focus like this. They are all violating Zig Zigler’s question – “Are you a wandering generality or a meaningful specific?” All of the generalists are struggling, and all of them are spending more money on marketing than any of the above specialists.

Probable vs. Possible
The key? Don’t go after POSSIBLE clients, people who MIGHT buy. Focus on PROBABLE clients and people who WILL buy, and do it in the smallest pond you can define. It will make the fish much easier to catch.

It’s a very serious game and it will transform your business and your lifestyle. Everything we do should be filtered through this one question, “How do I make more money in less time?”

Most of us started out as employees, who make more money in more time. We then transferred that bad habit to owning our business. Stop it. An employee thinks that way, but a stakeholder won’t (employees are obsolete – I’ll suggest in a future post why this is a bad habit for staff and stakeholders, not just owners). If you as a business owner want to build a successful business, you can’t afford to employ this old Industrial Age habit, either.

So the central game you play to realize your vision and accomplish your mission (and to get a life) is:
a) continually increasing the revenue of your company while
b) continually reducing the time you have to spend on bringing in that revenue.

Every successful business owner at every size of company, small to large, plays this as their main game.

All of us probably put together a spreadsheet at the beginning of every year that shows how you intend to make more money that year. It shows a graph with a line going up. How many of you also put together a similar spreadsheet with a line going down that shows how much less time you intend to invest in your business in those 12 months? See my recent post about two partners THE URL HERE who, after 20 years in a $40 million business decided to do this, and ended up getting five and a half months a year off.

There are two questions you need to ask regularly in order to play the game of “More Money in Less Time”:

1) “Is this (whatever I’m doing right now), the highest and best use of my time?” The answer to 75-90% of what we’re doing will be no. It’s rarely the highest and best us of our time – we’ve just been doing it since starting the business and haven’t bothered to get it off our plate.

If the answer is no, then the second question is:

2) “How do I do this for the last time?” If you are serious about getting things off your plate, you’ll come up with 1-10 ways to get things off your plate that don’t belong there. You only need one. If you’re afraid, distracted, have a big ego (nobody is as good as me at this), or dozen other excuses, you will find 1,000 ways to not get this off your plate. There is always a way to get it off our plate, but if you’re looking for ways to not do it, you’ll find them.

This is the most important game a business owner (and their management staff) can play. We waste more time and money doing things others should be doing than just about any other way. And if you want to get off the treadmill, this is THE game you must play above all others.

If you apply these two simple questions to everything you do for one month, it will change your business and begin to give you the answers that will allow you to make more money in less time, get off the treadmill and get a life.

If you think your situation is unique and you can’t do this, please share it below and we’ll help you see you can do it, too.

The business owners in my post from last week are going to take five and half months off every year now. I take every Friday off, every other Monday, the last week of every month, and one month a year, which allows me to work in Africa to solve poverty. Our (not my) business grew by 41% last year and is projected to grow by 50%+ this year.

You can do this – just play the game, “How do I make more money in less time?”

They haven’t changed who they are. They aren’t smarter, better educated or more enlightened than they were for the last 15 years. But somehow they’re going from a lousy lifestyle to a great lifestyle in just 15 months.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

For years they intended two things and hoped for one. See if you can relate:
Their two intentions for 15 years:
1) To work really hard.
2) To make some money.

Their one big hope for 15 years:
1) …and we hope it all works out.

They got exactly what they intended – hard work and some money, but not what they hoped for – a life. The fatal assumption coming out of the Industrial Age is that if we just have money, we’ll somehow get a life, too. These guys are living proof that money doesn’t equate to a great life.

So how did they make such a life-changing transformation of their business in such a short period of time? Simple. They changed their intentions.

1) They no longer intended to work hard. Why in the world would you make that an intention? But we all do.

2) They intended to get a life, not just hoped for one, then started making all their decisions to accomplish that objective.

3) And they intend grow the business and make more money in less time.

Peter Arnell wrote a book called “Shift” where he described how he went from being a 406lb man to a 150lb man. The first step – “I decided to do it.” The strength of that initial decision determines the outcome. If you are tired enough of the treadmill, you will intend to get a life. The partners in this business made a clear and final decision that things were going to change, and change radically. If you’re not at the end of yourself yet, you won’t make this decision.

The second thing Peter did to go from 406lbs to 150lbs was even more important. He said “from that moment on [after making the clear and final decision], I saw myself as a 150lb man.” He even went out that week and fired some clients who he felt were the clients of a 406lb man. He wasn’t hoping, he had clear intention to get to 150lbs and saw himself already there. And every decision he made going forward was filtered through the question “Is this the decision of a 150lb man or a 406lb man?”

My clients have done the same thing. Once they decided to both take five and a half months a year off, they started making all their decisions in light of what they needed to do to begin to take five and a half months off per year, while still growing their revenue. Their intention changed from working really hard to working really effectively, distributing the workload, finding geniuses already in their business to take over things, and a long list of other actions designed to get them off the treadmill.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for. The biggest reason this is working for them is because they changed their intentions, and decided they could make more money in less time.

They got what they intended.

You Only Need One
By the way, they’re not special or unique, and neither are you. Every business owner can do this – every single one. As Henry Ford said, “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Intention. There may be 1,000 ways to keep you from doing this and only five ways that it might work for you. How many do you need? Just one, and the sold-out intention to make it happen.

What are your primary intentions? Are you intending to work hard and make money, or are you intending to get a life as a result of owning a business?

What’s the one way off the treadmill that will work for you? Stop focusing on the 1,000 ways to keep you from doing it and focus on the one way off.

Intend to get a life, then make every decision intending to make more money in less time. You’ll get what you intend, not what you hope for.

Then go public here and declare your intentions. I look forward to hearing how you’re doing it.

Clever Marketing 101 – Not Sustainable
People buy great marketing once. If the product isn’t great, they’re out.

There are a myriad of marketing firms out there showing you how to get someone to give you more than the three-second glance at a trade show or on your website and how to take them deeper and deeper through a series of bigger and bigger commitments until they finally buy something from you at the bottom of the website.

People tell me this is great marketing, but I believe that by itself, it’s terrible marketing and does more damage than good in the long run. It’s also the lazy man’s approach and because of that, not sustainable.

Recency & Frequency
The two main tenants of good marketing are “recency” and “frequency”. If you talked to me recently, but only once, I’m not likely to buy. If you talked to me often a year ago but not since, I’m not likely to buy. You must do both all the time.

This costs a lot of money if you’re doing it via traditional print, radio or TV advertising. One of my clients spends $2million a year in one mid-sized market alone just to stay in the recency/frequency game. If you’re going to use money to do marketing, you usually have to have a lot of it to make enough noise to drown out the other guy with only $250,000.

Then there is the clever website approach, that gets people to go deeper and deeper down the page and finally click on $27.77 (clever marketing says your price should always end in 7). What if people finally respond to your clever website or your $2 million in advertising? Neither of these are your best marketing – not even close.

Future Clients Come From…
Where do the overwhelming majority of your future customers come from? When I ask this question to live audiences, almost every person will say – “from existing clients and existing friends/relationships.” Then why are we investing so much time in cool logos, tortured websites that lead me down a clever spiral path to a commitment, and advertising to find people you’ve never met?

One of my clients has a company called “Jungle Quest”, a ropes and repelling environment for kids, that is franchising nationally now. In the early days he had $1,000/ mth in profit to reinvest in the company. His first instinct was to buy $1,000/mth in advertising. He decided instead that he would use the $1,000 each month to do something to make the customer experience more “Jungle-icious” as he describes it.

It was a brilliant move. He improved the look and feel of the environment, added new experiences, improved the clothing on the staff and trained them better, and instituted a customer satisfaction program to stay in touch (recency and frequency). Today virtually all of his future clients come from his existing clients because he has done such a good job delivering a better product. It was hard work, but with a sustainable result – a better product and better relationships with customers.

Better Marketing? Absolutely.
Most people would say he didn’t improve his marketing, only his product. But in fact he did both because the best marketing you can do is to make a better chair, deliver it with flair, and apply “recency and frequency” to staying in touch with your existing customers and friends. It’s lot less expensive and more effective than chasing people you’ve never met.

The problem is that it takes work. We have to constantly work at our craft and get better and better at it. And we have to regularly find a way to touch our existing clients, say hello, and let them know we care. All of that sounds too much like work. We’d rather put together a clever website or marketing campaign that does this for us.

People buy great marketing once. If your product isn’t more jungle-icious than the next one, they won’t be back. But if you work hard over a number of years to make your offering distinctive, unique and presented with great customer service, people will refer you to all their friends.

The Best Marketing of All
Make a better chair and say hello to people you already know. It’s the best marketing you can do.

Circumstances don’t make me who I am. How I respond to them does.

Gladwell disagrees. He says circumstances are largely to blame (or credit) for who I am.

Never has a book engendered such a reaction from me to make me review it. I don’t review books. I use them to change who I am, or discard them as interesting (entertaining, but not transformational) or not interesting. I loved Gladwell’s Tipping Point and use it regularly in my work and life.

But Outliers is not just “interesting”. For those who choose to embrace it, it could be a transformational compendium of victimology that gives excuse after excuse for not choosing to live a life of significance.

If it was by an obscure author it could be ignored. But because Gladwell has laid such a great foundational reputation with his other works, people have bought into this without critiquing it. Many people loved it and recommended it to me, which is how I read all my books. I was very disappointed by what I read. I hope you are, too.

Which 90/10 Rule Do You Live By?
My belief is that 90% of life is what you make happen and 10% is what happens to you. And you have two possible responses to the 10%: 1) Fascinating! How’d that happen? Let’s make lemonade! and 2) I’m a victim of my circumstances, background, legacy, great grandmother, the Duke of Wellington, Atilla the Hun or some outside dark force that rules over me.

Gladwell apparently believes 90% of life is what happens to you and 10% is what you make happen. And for the 90% that happens to you, he subscribes to ONLY response #2 – you’re a victim. Poor babies. You should lay down and die. Give up. It’s understandable. You had an ancestor 300 years ago that made a bad decision or was unlucky, or you were living in poverty, and you’re never going to live it down.

And if you’re successful, Gladwell says you also didn’t have nearly as much to do with it as you think. It’s luck, circumstance, legacy, the Duke of Wellington, Attila the Hun and a thousand other things outside you that nearly pushed you unwillingly over the edge of success. You nearly had no choice but to live the life of Riley.

I say CHOICE is 90% of the formula for success. Gladwell says CIRCUMSTANCE is…50%? 90%?. I say a difficult background makes you even more successful if you CHOOSE to respond to it well. You’ll be stronger than most. Gladwell says hardship makes it very unlikely you can succeed – it’s almost not your choice at all. In Gladwell’s world, hardship and a lousy background aren’t sources of fertile ground for building a unique and wonderfully powerfully story for you. There something to get over, if you can. Good luck with that.

Lies, Damnable Lies, and Statistics
Disraeli said there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damnable lies, and statistics.” Here are some of Gladwells:

1) He cites Roseto, PA as “proof” that where you are FROM has more to do with success (health, lower crime, suicide, etc.) than your choices. Then he ignores the research that shows the reason the town was so healthy was exactly because of their 1) choice to live in close knit relationships, 2) choice to be spiritual, 3) choice to live by fundamentally sound values, 4) choice to respect elders, etc. Even the town they came FROM in Italy and others from that town that didn’t CHOOSE to live like the Rosetans didn’t have the same health and crime. The Rosetan’s CHOICES made them who they were, not where they are from.

2) He cites Canadian Junior Hockey stats showing 40% of the 10 yr. old all-stars were born Jan-Mar, 30% April-June, and only 10% Oct.-Dec. The age cutoff is Jan 1 so those kids born early in the year are playing against younger kids and get chosen to go through to the all-stars, even though they’re not better, just older (therefore appear better when chosen as all-stars). He wants a separate league for the poor babies born June-Dec. Get over it.

I won the city batting championship three years in a row in Pony League w/ a left-handed batting average of .555 and an on-base % of .695. I could draw a walk as easy as getting a hit. As the youngest and smallest tenth grader at high school baseball tryouts I was cut without swinging a bat. The uninformed coach lined us up by height and cut the bottom five in the first five minutes of practice. He was looking for football players for the fall. I was easily the fastest center fielder and the best hitter there (and a prized left-hander), and when I filled out to 6’ 1"+ a few years later it turned out I might have been a pro prospect. Wah, wah, wah. Life is not fair. Michael Jordan was cut from ninth grade basketball. He CHOSE to not give up. I CHOSE to give up and do something else. It’s about choice.

Apparently pro hockey players agree. The 40% born in Jan-Mar in kid hockey is reduced to 31% in the pros, and the 10% Oct-Dec. is doubled to 20%, just five percentage points below “fair”. An awful lot of those poor babies who didn’t make the All Star teams first time around CHOSE to not give up. Life isn’t fair, nor should it be. We would lose all our drive to succeed. Gladwell didn’t show us the pro stats. Because they demonstrate that circumstances don’t make me who I am. How I respond, does. Choice.

3) To debunk the ridiculously over-worked role of talent, Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to succeed – that at the highest level, work is more important than talent. I couldn’t agree more, except that having correctly correlated success more with hard work (choice) than with talent, this debunks most of the rest of his victimology as well. I have a choice to succeed. Working my tail off is the biggest part of that, and that is a choice.

4) He also correctly debunks the role of “genius” by showing many smart people don’t make it. I couldn’t agree more, but the reason isn’t because of their background. It’s because of their choices. He actually gives the smartest man in the world a pass for giving up on getting published because his background obviously was too difficult to over come. Poor baby. It took me 19 years to finish college, but I’ve started and run seven businesses. I’m not smart, I’m just relentless. Choice.

Gladwell goes on to talk in the same terms about legacy, heritage, deep ties to people you never met in the old country a hundred years ago that allow you to live a life of significance or keep you from experiencing it. But he gives almost no time to the most important characteristics of success: personal vision, personal choice, and personal commitment to get there no matter what. Burn the bridges, sink the ships, shred the parachutes, I’m all in. This is nothing more than background noise in the book, which he only recognizes as an annoying fact but not as the source of success.

My best lesson from all of college came from one of the Women’s Studies Courses I took. The female professor asked the one other guy in the 200 person class to come up front, gave him a toy gun and told him to hold her up. At first it was comical, but she kept belittling him and instructing him until he held the gun to her head and screamed at her, “Give me your f-ing money or I’ll blow your f-ing head off!” She congratulated him for eventually becoming convincing, and ask him to sit down.

Then she asked us a stunningly simple question, “At what point did I become a victim?” Her answer – “I never was.” And she said, “And at what point would I have become a victim? Only when I gave him control of my mind or he took control of me physically.”

She went on to say that the problem with victimology is that it gives us a pass from taking charge of our lives, and allows us to blame our circumstances for forming who we are. I never forgot that lesson from 30 years ago. Those who read Gladwell’s book should use it as a filter as they read.

As I road on the back of a motorcycle through the bush for 8 hrs in the middle of the rainy night, then spent 10 hrs with the Chief, and 10 hrs back last night without sleep (four flats, a blown gear box), my African friends on that trip were incredibly resilient. There wasn’t a victim among them. Together we plan to build a first world country on the backs of these incredible people. If they read Gladwell’s book and embrace it, they don’t have a chance.

Circumstances don’t make me who I am. How I respond to them, does.

Don’t be a victim. Chose to live a life of significance. It’s 90% choice and 10% what happens to you (and you have a choice how to respond to that 10%).

Choice.

John McCormack, author of my favorite “motivational” book – Self-made in America, went to 265 banks trying to get a loan to open a hair salon in a mall in the 1970s – an unheard of proposition then. No bank was biting.

He called his wife after the 265th and told her he was going to open a Tex Mex restaurant because the banks were all offering him money for that. She told him go ahead, but reminded him that Walt Disney had gone to 302 banks before the 303rd gave him money for his ridiculous idea to open an amusement park in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

John decided he would keep trying until he went through 302 banks before opening a Tex Mex. The next day the 266th bank gave him the money. He now owns many locations and makes $200k+ a year in profit from each one.

In 1989, John wrote this in “Self-Made in America” about banks:

Bankers are by nature conservative bean-counters, and entrepreneurs are, by definition risk-taking bean-planters. I’ll make my point simply: can you point out a banker or a bookkeeper who has ever started anything on his or her own – other than trouble?"

Banks in this country are bureaucratically stacked against the entrepreneur or the original thinker, and our country’s economy is paying dearly for it. Bankers love to write checks to companies with track records, because they don’t do any work to do it, but as we can well document many of those “safe loans” made in the last decade have been nothing short of foolhardy. To this day, I worry more about my bank going broke than I do about myself going broke.

That’s a guy who, 23 years ago might as well have been talking about the banks of the last five years. Nothing has changed.

I am not a victim
So how did John McCormack respond to this well-known fact? He kept going. He was relentless. He didn’t let this keep him from reaching his dreams. John knew what I say all the time:

Circumstances don’t make me who I am. How I respond to them, does.

90% of life is what I make happen. 10% is what happens to me. Are you a victim of the banks, or a victor who will find the one bank who is having an entrepreneurial spasm and will work with you?

Relentless
What made McCormack keep going? In his own words:

It wasn’t brains, brawn or even our business plan that resulted in our ultimate success. It was persistence, pure and simple.

I call it being relentless, a form of conation. I’m not smart, I’m just relentless. You don’t have to be smart, just relentless.

Keep hunting. A good idea will ALWAYS get money if you need it, even if it takes you being relentless. And if your idea can be proved without big money, even better. Prove it first, then go get the money. Either way, relentless beats smart every day.

Just keep counting banks, you might end up with a better story than Disney or McCormack. If you get to the 304th bank before you get your loan, write a book about it!

Cal Ripken performed in a record 2,632 consecutive baseball games. But he didn’t just perform. He dissected the strike zone into a number of smaller zones and practiced hitting pitches in each micro-zone to figure out which ones he could hit and which ones he should just hope the ump called a ball instead. He practiced at levels most people don’t bother.

I chatted with Yo Yo Ma, the greatest cello player of our time, backstage a few years ago. I asked him in front of my daughter, an aspiring cello player, “How do you become a great cello player?” He replied without hesitation, “It’s not enough to practice. You have to learn to love to practice and to practice every day as if you were on stage at Carnegie Hall.” Yo Yo Ma loves to practice, not just perform.

Theo Bikel first played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof in 1967. He is now 87 years old and still works full time in many roles. He has played Tevye now over 2,000 times in 45 years.

In the 30th anniversary Broadway tour revival of Fiddler I was playing clarinet/sax in the pit orchestra when they came through Denver. For a week I listened to Bikel’s incredible rendition of Tevye (couldn’t see from the pit, only hear). By the fifth or sixth performance I could nearly repeat his rhythmic interpretation of each line, the rising, falling, the long pause here and there. He became incredibly predictable.

Every performance was the same, but the amazing part was that every performance was magical. Theo Bikel was not winging it and was not just performing. He had practiced this part and dissected it over and over again to discover the highest interpretation, then he did something few business owners (or actors) would ever do – he stuck with what worked and never varied from it.

Practice, then be consistent
I’ve never heard a more consistently repeated performance, or a better one. Theo Bikel had learned two things:

1) Practice, and lots of it, is the only way to become better. Performing is not how you become better.
2) Stick with what works. Don’t mess with success.

Learn to love to practice
Most business owners will never have a chance to stick with what works. They’ve never practiced enough to find out what truly works and what truly puts them on top of their game. They’re too busy winging it.

And even when they find something that works, most business owners will abandon it long before it has stopped working. Why? Because THEY are bored!

Learn to love consistency
They hate practicing and get bored doing the same great performance over and over. They are willing to sacrifice the success of their business so they can keep performing with variety and never practicing to find the best way to do something. Remember, your customer, like each theater goer watching Theo Bikel, is experiencing you for the first time. They aren’t bored and you shouldn’t be either.

Practice to find your groove
A great golfer practices until they find the swing groove that works the best all the time, and they never vary from it. You could look at shadow figures of some of them and know who it is by their swing (like Jim Furyk). They practiced like crazy to find it, and then do it the same every time.

I went from a 20 handicap to a 1.9 by practicing like crazy. While I was doing that I played (performed) with a lot of golfers who had never been on a driving range or taken a lesson. They thought it was a nutty idea to practice a lot, almost beneath them, and prided themselves in hacking around, never practicing, always trying a new club, a different swing.

They’re still 20 handicaps and hide their incompetence by poking fun at people who practice. It’s not manly – real men don’t practice. They laughingly say, “Practice is a sign of insecurity.” Too many business owners feel the same way.

Want to be successful? Reach your tipping point? Have the business outgrow your own capabilities and become something that makes money while you’re on vacation? It won’t happen by performing.

The way to Carnegie Hall
The tourist leaned out his car window and asked the cop, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice, practice, practice.”, was the answer the cop gave, as he waved they tourist through.

Repeatable, consistent performance is the key to a business outgrowing you and your own talents. And the only way to find what your business should do over time is to practice until you find it.

Variety is not the spice of business
Practice like crazy, learn the best way to do what you do, then do it that way every time. Variety is not the spice of life – it’s the road to mediocrity.

Silver bullet, anyone?
This blog post won’t likely get a lot of hits. There has to be a faster, easier silver bullet. The people who think that will still be 20 handicaps in their business 10 years from now, while those willing to practice hard will actually be enjoying themselves on the golf course while they’re business makes money without them.

When a teeter totter is perfectly balanced, nothing is happening. Both people are sitting there in mid-air staring at each other wondering if anything interesting is on the horizon, slowing realizing that what they are experiencing is not worth getting on the see saw for. Sound like fun?

Welcome to the life the Industrial Age wanted us to live. We were taught to find the “balance” of the three "Ss’ of the Industrial Age – safety, security and stability/predictability and live unremarkable, highly balanced lives.

Full Engagement, not Balance
Successful people don’t seek balance, they seek full engagement with whatever will make them successful. It’s not about balance, but about full engagement. People having the most fun on a teeter-totter are fully engaged and always out of balance. If you’re not fully engaged and are paralyzed in the pursuit of balance, expect to hit bottom hard.

Work Less Time, More Fully Engaged
I’m not advocating being a workaholic. Plenty of research shows that workaholics spend 12 hours a day at work but only invest 6-8 hours in actually getting something done. You can get almost as much done in half the time if you’re fully engaged. What I’m advocating is full engagement in whatever needs the highest and best use of your time right now. Balance would say take lots of breaks and stretch it over 12 hours. Workaholics live balanced lives that usually don’t lead to success.

Loehr & Schwartz wrote a book called The Power of Full Engagement. They had it right by recommending that we make sure we develop each major area of our life – mental, physical (exercise/diet), emotional, spiritual, and the productive output of work and play. And if we don’t, we will atrophy and be much less likely to build a successful business.

Get More Done in Less Time
Too many business owners go into business immediately looking for a “lifestyle business” – assuming that they can step right in working 3-4 days a week so they can be “balanced”. Success almost never comes that way.

When I started Crankset Group five years ago I worked 6 1/2 to seven days a week for almost a year. I exhibited the same kind of imbalance in starting five other businesses in the previous 20 years. Five years later I work 3 1/2 days a week and take the 4th week off each month. But I got there gradually over the five years, and it was the willingness to go nuts and be completely unbalanced on the front end that allows me to be unbalanced now in the direction of free time.

Momentum doesn’t come through balance. You burn a lot of fuel on take off. An airplane burns up to 50% of its fuel just getting to its cruise altitude.

Shoot for Next Year, Not Tomorrow
Full engagement is tied directly to wanting the best in the long term, not right now, and wanting it badly enough to go nuts, all in – abandoning anything that the Balanced Life folks would recommend. I didn’t get to 3 1/2 days of work and the last week of the month off by living a balanced life.

And I don’t live one now. Instead of celebrating Thanksgiving, I went to Kenya for a week to work with some business owners and encourage them to build a business that makes money while they’re on vacation. I flew for two days, had 2 1/2 days on the ground and flew back for two days.

I was totally out of balance the whole time. I switched to Kenyan time the morning of my flight, getting up VERY early. And on the plane there I didn’t eat breakfast food when served because it was dinner time in Kenya, slept during Kenyan time when it was daytime on the plane, etc. And I did the same thing on the way back.

Being completely out of balance while everyone else on the flights was comfortable allowed me to overcome 80% of the jet lag and hit the ground running both in Kenya and when I got back.

Rest With Full Engagement
I rarely sit around during that fourth week and seek “balance”. The fourth week of May I’ll be on a week long bike trip in Corsica, riding 60-100 miles a day for six straight days, drinking wine at night – completely out of balance. (Somebody else might lay on a beach the whole time – totally unbalanced.) Go off the grid while you do it.

Stop seeking balance. Find something to throw yourself at and do it with everything you have. Then take a break from that and throw yourself at something else just as hard (playing with your kids, another business, writing a book, etc.)

How to Live a Life That Matters
Live a committed, fully engaged, unbalanced life. As Margaret Thatcher, who lived an unbalanced life, said, “One’s life should matter.” If you live a balanced one, yours won’t.

I love my teeter-totter life. If you don’t have one, don’t expect to be successful.

Get a teeter totter life and start having more fun!

People aren’t successful because they have a good attitude. They have a good attitude because they have something much deeper figured out. Attitude is a RESULT of something much bigger. If we don’t have the bigger thing, ginning up a great attitude is like lipstick on a pig.

Emotionalism is Not a Good Attitude
People with great attitudes that aren’t backed by the bigger thing are usually pretty obvious. They’re convinced that attitude is everything, so they rely on emotionalism and “everything is GREAT!” “live is wonderful” statements on the outside while they’re dying on the inside. And they just hope that “fake it until you make it” will get them through. It won’t.

It impossible to have a good attitude by deciding to have a good attitude. It’s like squinting hard to make a wad of bills appear in front of you. At times I do have to “just decide” to have a good attitude, but I guarantee you I would have no motivation to make the decision if it wasn’t driven by something bigger.

The Fourth “S”
The Industrial Age taught us the “Three S’s” – Safety, Security and Stability. The problem with the three S’s is that they are at the bottom of Masloew’s hierarchy – they are just survival mechanisms. The Three S’s will not give us enough motivation to have a great attitude. The fourth S, the one the Industrial Age couldn’t afford for you to have – Significance – that is the driver of attitude.

Clarity on what you want out of your business and your life is what drives good attitude. If you know where you are going, what you want when you get there, and when you want to be there, it will have a transformational impact on your attitude.

The Big Why
In Crankset Group we talk a lot about “The Big Why.” The Big Why is that one big thing that gets you out of bed every morning that gives you the motivation to create a life of significance. If you have a Big Why, you will rarely have to work on getting your attitude straight, and when you do lose it, it will be much easier to get your good attitude back. It’s not about good attitude, but about having the motivation to have one.

Attitude is a Result, Not a Cause
Focus on Significance, not on attitude. Figure out what is really deeply important and run toward it with everything you’ve got. Use your business to get you there. You’re attitude will follow.

I built five businesses where I never got a life. In some cases I got a lot of money, in others very little, but in none did I get a life. Why? Simple. I only asked our businesses to produce money, so that’s exactly what they did.

When I started this sixth business, Crankset Group, five years ago, I decided (intended) to do it differently. I decided I would demand that my business produce both time and money for me, not just money. Gee what a surprise, I got both.

Three Jeers for the Industrial Age
The Industrial Age taught us to assume a number of stupid things related to this idea of time:

1) Money is the path to a great lifestyle. If I have money, I will automatically have a great life (time). Wrong. I know a woman who makes nearly $1 million a month who feels trapped by her business and is there at least six days a week. Money buys you stuff, but it doesn’t buy you time.

2) To make more money, you must spend more time at work – you have to trade hours for money. Wrong. Read my blog post, Time is the new money. The game every business owner should play is, “How do I make MORE money in LESS time?”

3) Make money now. Get time later. Wrong. See #2 above – get both at the same time. Retirement is a really bad concept because it taught us to wait until “tomorrow” to get time. It also taught us that money would get us time – see #1 above, and read my blog post Retirement is a Bankrupt Industrial Age Idea .

So after five failed attempts at doing it the Industrial Age way (get money, time will naturally follow), we decided to do it differently and demand that our business give us both time and money at the same time.

What happened?

Money
We started in 2007 and grew revenues every year. We grew 122% from Dec. 2009 to Dec. 2010, and 57% from Dec. 2010 to Dec. 2011, and expect to grow another 50% in 2012, which is harder to do the bigger you get.

Time
We worked our tushes off to begin with. In 2007 I probably worked 6+ days a week, but ALWAYS with the mindset that I was front loading it to get a lot more time off later. In 2008 I probably got 2/3rds of my Saturdays off and took a couple very short weeks off. In 2009, I got most Saturdays, a few 3-day weekends and two weeks of real vacation. In 2010, I took eight to 10 three-day weekends, and a couple weeks of vacation.

In 2011 we broke through on the time front. I took a day a week (Fridays), a week a month (the 4th week of every month), and a month a year (half Feb, half March) off. How did the business do? We grew revenues by 57%.

Bonus
I intended to get a day week, a week a month and a month a year, but I also ended up with half days two Mondays a month. So I regularly have a three to three and a half day week, with the 4th week off. All this while expecting to grow at least 50% in 2012. I expect the people working with us to take more time off in 2012, too.

Is what I did special? Am I lucky, unique or uber-talented? No. I’m not any smarter or any different than I was in the first five businesses where I never got a life.

Make New Rules
The difference was simply that I made new rules (He who makes the rules wins), and required that my business play by my business, not the other way around.

You get what you intend not what you hope for.

Not smart. Relentless.
It’s about chasing something you decide is important enough to finally catch. I decided time was important enough to catch. It turns out relentless is much more important than smart.

I’m not smart. I’m just relentless.

Be relentless about demanding that your business produce both time and money for you. You probably already did a spreadsheet on how to increase your revenue. That’s only half the objective. Get a spreadsheet this year for how you plan to reduce your work time – and be relentless about making it happen.

We do it every year. “I hereby resolve”… blah, blah, blah. A kept resolution is harder to find than a moose in Miami.

97% of people who decide to lose weight actually weigh more 12 months later. All other New Years “resolutions” have just about as much resolve behind them. Let’s change that.

How to actually change something.

1) Don’t “get motivated”. Don’t make resolutions at the end of a weekend motivational seminar.* Most of this stuff is emotion-based and has no lasting power. You’re either committed or you aren’t. I don’t get motivated to brush my teeth. I either do it or I don’t.

2) Run toward something, not away from something. People who want to lose weight rarely lose any. “I want to stop being fat.” That’s running away from being fat.

People who want to live a healthy long life are much more likely to not be fat. “I want to be able to…” That is running toward something.

The gravitational pull of what you are running away from will always suck you back in. Likewise, the gravitational pull of something you are running toward will release you from the pull behind you. You will get where you are going because you are actually going TO something, not AWAY from something. See my post “Get a Second Planet”:

3) Make decisions through the new lens. See yourself and/or your business the way you want it to be when you get there, not where it is, and make decisions AS IF YOU WERE ALREADY THERE.

In the book Shift by Peter Arnell, he tells how he went from being 406 lbs to a maintenance weight of 150 lbs. As soon as he decided to lose the weight, he began to see himself from that moment on as a 150lb. man, and EVERY DECISION HE MADE was as a 150lb. man. He even went out that week and fired some of his clients who he felt were the clients of a 406lb. man.

Don’t “hope” to get there. Peter didn’t wait until he was 150lbs. to begin to make decisions like a 150lb. man. That would be “hoping” to get there, and running away from being fat. The minute he made the decision he was already 150lbs. on the inside.

Be there already inside, and just bring the rest of your external world into alignment with the way you already view the world from inside. Sound like woo-woo crap? It’s not – it’s hard core success strategy, and it’s how every highly successful business person becomes so. They see something they want to make happen, they believe in their core that it is doable, and then they set about making every decision as if it has already happened.

The above three steps are all about intentionality vs. hope. Intention is the key because:

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

New Year’s Resolutions are almost always too full of “hope”, which is emotion-based and needs a special day to get itself motivated to do anything. Real decisions are usually full of intention and don’t need a special day or audience to be walked out into the open.

BUT – I will say that whatever decision you make, on whatever day you make it, you should indeed declare it to the world and ask everyone around you to support you, not in getting there, but in already being there (please don’t feed me donuts if I’ve declared I’m 150lbs., and don’t entice me with 2 weeks in Cabo the day after I start my new business.)

Don’t get there. Be there. Then bring the outside world into alignment with that clear intention. Hoping, wishing, dreaming, and believing don’t add up to doing.

Go ahead. Make a decision ANY day of the year (including New Year’s Day). But much more importantly, see yourself, your business, and the world around you through the new lens, and make every decision going forward as if you were already there.

Where do you want to be in 2012? Tell the world here, be there inside today, and then let’s go do it on the outside the next 364 days.

What We Were Taught
- Go away for 2-3 days in January to plan the year.
- Plan everything in as much detail as you can; growth strategies, budget, purchases, hires, leases, etc., etc.
- Follow the plan – don’t deviate – people who deviate won’t be successful.
- Wait until next January to do it again.
- Put it on a shelf with your “shelf-help” books – it’s only real value is to help your shelf look good.

If strategic planning was important for the new year, you would do it in December, not in January. And we wouldn’t wait 12 months to do it again. If you let your “strategy” degrade to the point that you only have one day of “strategy” left when you get back to it next January, it’s not a strategy, just an exercise you go through.

And following it faithfully is just a dumb idea. During one of my short stints at trying to be an employee I wrote the CEO an email in October requesting 10 new workstations and 20 employees (double-shifts) to handle growth. The next day he wrote back and said he had checked the annual plan I submitted in January, and that I had not requested those capital expenditures in the “plan”. Request denied.

They went bankrupt three years later, slavishly following their silly annual plans and rearranging the deck chairs in the business all the way down.

It’s Counter-Intuitive
Giant Corporation, Inc. taught us that we should try to capture everything in an annual plan – the more detail we go into, the more likely we are to be successful. I did enough of those to know it’s nonsense (and surveyed a few thousand business owners who say the same thing).

Only sweat the big stuff – the 12-3-1 Plan
All you need to capture is the four-to-ten big things that you need to do this coming year. That’s it. Write them down. I guarantee you that if you capture the very few, very important things you need to accomplish this year, you are MUCH more likely to actually get them done than if you attempt to capture EVERYTHING that needs to be done this year.

Once you have these, develop what we call a 12-3-1 Strategic Plan. 12-months, 3-months and 1-month, a third of a page for each. You don’t need anything more than this.

12-Month Objectives
Put your four-to-ten 12-month Objectives for next year on the top 1/3 of a page (spreadsheet, word doc, doesn’t matter), That’s typewritten in an 11 pt. font, with lots of spacing. Don’t cheat. The more you capture, the less you will do. Simple beats complex every time.

3-Month Action Plan
Take each one of these 4-10 Objectives and decide what you have to do in the next quarter to get them done in a year. Put them on the middle third of the page – keep it short!!

Don’t wait until next November to get started. That’s why both diets and business plans don’t work. Tomorrow never comes. Cut the elephant into smaller bites and get a sense of urgency.

1-Month Action Plan
Take each quarterly action plan/objective and divide it once again into what you need to do in January to accomplish the first quarter’s objectives. These take up the bottom third of your page. Don’t cheat – if you can’t fit it comfortably on one page, you have too much detail.

Don’t wait until March. Annual and quarterly objectives can be daunting, but picking away month-by-month will make them doable.

Strategic Only!
Don’t put anything in your 12-3-1 Plan that helps you make money this month; just things that will help you build a business that creates more time and money next year.

“Buy a copier”, “Replace retiring employee”, “Sign contract w/ xxx, Inc.” – none of these belong on your plan.

“Move to new location”, “Hire/train someone to replace a piece of me”, “Increase revenues by xx%”, “Go from 60 hrs/wk to 30hrs/wk while increasing profits” – these are great annual planning objectives.

Monday
Every Monday morning look at the bottom 1/3 of the page and decide what you need to do that week to accomplish that month’s action plan. Block the time that week to get it done. If you do this every week, you will knock out the monthly action plan. If you knock out each month, you will accomplish the quarterly objective, and if you do that four quarters in a row, you will have had a great year.

Details? We don’t need no stinkin’ details!
If you keep it simple, you will only have to work out real details in a real world each week/month. If you try to capture all the details for the year when you put together the plan, you will be solving ivory tower problems – most of which will never happen. And you will miss half the problems you will actually face. So don’t solve problems/details until they are real. They are never real in January when you did your planning (see above request for 10 workstations).

Quarterly 12-3-1 Plan
This is the big key. Don’t do an annual plan anymore. Do a quarterly one. Every quarter your 12-month plan will have deteriorated to only 9 months. April 1, push it back out to 12 months on the top 1/3 of the page, then use that to re-populate the 3-month (middle third) and the 1-month (bottom third), and then get after it again each Monday.

Simple beats complex every time. If you capture everything, you’ll do nothing. If you capture the few big things, you might actually do some of them.

You can buy our Strategic Plan template along with our Lifetime Goals and Process Mapping templates and detailed instructions for each on our book site – Making Money Is Killing Your Business .

Or just grab a sheet of paper and get it done.

By the way, it shouldn’t take you more than 2-4 hours to do it, because you get to tweak it every week, every month, and every quarter.

Relax. Just get moving on the big stuff and the rest of it will unfold as you move.

Have a great year! (one week at a time)

It’s counter-intuitive, but you’ll fix more problems by focusing on solving where you’re going, not on what you’re experiencing.

The best way to stay stuck is to work really hard on the problems in your business and invest a lot of time and energy in how hard those problems are.

Re-describe or re-write your future.
Instead of focusing on the problems you’re experiencing, get a clear picture of where you are going and when you want to be there. Three years out, 12 months out, 3 months out, the end of this month. Do it backwards like that (start with the three-year end in mind) and focus on re-describing the future without the problems you’re experiencing today.

I use our 2pg. Strategic Plan process to do this. Having a clear picture of where you want to be 12 months, three months, and one month from now focuses you on WHERE YOU ARE GOING, instead of on WHERE YOU HAVE BEEN.

Working on Problems is Working on Your Past
The best way to become an alcoholic is to focus all your time and energy on not being like that person in your life who was an alcoholic. All your focus is on the very thing you don’t want to happen, which makes it much more likely to happen.

Why do some business owners seem to have problems all the time? Too often it’s because they are focused on problems instead of on getting somewhere successful.

Get a Second Planet!
If there were only one planet in the universe and you used a powerful rocket to get 10 million light years away from it and ran out of fuel, what would happen? You would get sucked back in – it’s the only center of gravity in your universe.

But if there was just one other planet in the universe, 20 million light years away, and your rocket got you 10 million light years and one inch away from the planet behind you, what would happen? You would have all the momentum you need to get to the next planet.

When we try to move away from things, they eventually suck us back in. When we have somewhere big we need to get to, we are much more likely to be successful.

Stop focusing on your problems. They keep you tied to your past. Instead, focus all your time and energy on where you want your business to be in three years, 12 months, 3 months and next month, and focus all of your “solving” skills on that, not on your present problems.

We’ll All Be Killed
In one day last week we unexpectedly lost all our office and meeting space, and our weekly Business Leaders Insight lunch site. We were homeless as a business.

We only had two weeks to replace it all, including Christmas and New Years. Instead of focusing on this “problem”, we focused on what situation would best help us get where we’re going, and assumed right away that the change would be better for us and our clients.

Within four business days Krista Valentine, our Chief Results Officer had found new office and meeting space that is a big upgrade from what we had and a weekly lunch place for our BLI lunches that everyone is gaga over – it’s better than any we’ve had in the five years we’ve been doing this weekly event, and for less money than people have paid in a few years.

This isn’t surprising. First, Krista rocks. Second, we weren’t focused on our problem [Problem – we don’t have a place to call home or to hold our biggest weekly public event anymore]. Instead we were focused on re-writing our future; creating a new narrative for what we were doing going forward [Future – what a great opportunity to upgrade both to better match our brand!].

We have places we want to be three years from now, 12 months from now, three months from now. And because of that, we were focused on creating success this month that helps us build that future success.

Focusing on problems is a focus on your past, even if they are in the present. Focus instead on what your future looks like without them, then build that future. You’ll be surprised how many “problems” become opportunities.

Every day we are faced with opportunities cleverly disguised as obstacles. Life and business is 10% what happens to us and 90% what we make happen.

Redescribe your future (next week/month/year) and run toward it with everything you have. Run toward something, not away from something. You’re much more likely to get there.

People who passionately love what they do are supposed to be the most successful and the happiest. It makes sense, except I have trouble finding the happy and successful ones.

The are plenty of people who do what they love. I think most business owners start their business with this statement: "Wouldn’t it be great if I could just make money doing…[fill in the blank]. Violin makers, doctors, plumbers, dancers, designers, lawyers – there are people in just about every vocation that are doing it because they couldn’t see themselves doing anything else.

But more often than not, these passionate people are less likely to be successful or happy in their chosen careers than their more utilitarian counterparts in the same vocation. Why?

Endless Love
People who love what they do have the most serious issues with control, lack of vision, and other big picture issues. When we love what we do so much, we’re pretty sure:

- there is no one else who can do it better
- it will be too hard to train someone else to do it
- my customers need ME
- I find my self-worth in being needed (co-dependent)
- I tried employees and they suck
- I don’t have the money to get anyone else involved
- Once I have enough money, I’ll hire someone
- I can’t seem to make enough money to hire someone
- etc., etc., blah, blah, blah.

Excuses, Reasons and Priorities
Mrs. Fields found someone else who could make cookies. Charles Schwab found somebody else who could trade stocks. A dog walking company went from $0.00 to $10 million a year in just two years without the founder ever walking a dog.

People who love what they do tend to be the main producer, if not the sole producer in their business. If you are that necessary to production, you will be on the treadmill the rest of your life. The producer-owner doesn’t really get to go on vacation, even if they physically leave for a week or two – the business follows them.

The producer-owner has the weight of the world on their shoulders. It’s all up to them. And they can’t think of a way to get off this treadmill.

There really aren’t any reasons not to get off the treadmill. There aren’t even excuses. As my mother used to say, “Chuck, there aren’t any excuses, there aren’t even reasons, there are just priorities.”

If you can’t think of a way to get off the treadmill, it’s because it’s not important enough for you to get off. I don’t intend to be mean here, just truthful. The fact is that no matter what profession or vocation you have taken up, I could find you someone who has gotten off the treadmill and is no longer the main producer, doing exactly what you are doing.

A Thousand Ways Not to Leave Your Love
If you think about it, there are 1,000 ways to not get off the treadmill. You won’t even have to look hard to find them. And there may only be a half dozen that will actually get you off the treadmill. You only need one. If you focus on the 1,000, you’ll be buried in ways to not get a life. But if getting off the treadmill is a real priority, you will figure it out.

By the way, you don’t have to fall out of love with what you do. In fact, if you build a business that makes money when you are not around (produces revenue without you), you can do the one thing in that business that you love anytime of the day or night that you want to do it. Ironically, the people who have the most freedom to do what they love are those who were willing to get others to it for them first.

Do you think it’s impossible for you to get off the treadmill? Are you one of the thousands of business owners I’ve met over the years who have a “unique” or “special” circumstance that makes them the one exception who can’t get off the treadmill?

I’m not smart. I’m just relentless.
I take every Friday off and the last week of every month. I get to choose what to do on those days. While building my first five businesses I didn’t get this kind of freedom or anything like it. Then I made it a priority. Gee, what a surprise, I get Fridays and the fourth week off now.

As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

What’s your priority? You don’t have to tell anyone. It will just show up in what you do. If it’s a priority to get off the treadmill, you’ll do that. If it’s not, stop whining and pretending that it is.

“Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Yoda