The secret is….they have no power unless you give it to them.

Most of the “boogeymen” that bedevil us in our businesses….in our lives….are powerless except for the power we hand them. We agree to be governed by them. We drop to our knees on our own.

Consider the “indispensable” employee holding employer, co-workers, office hostage. Time and time and time again, I hear of the existence of such a mythical, powerful creature from my coaching group members and clients. Time and time again, after extended periods of suffering, when finally emboldened to slay this demon, or the demon abruptly exits on its own, the myth is exposed.

The employee was far from indispensable. In fact, the removal of the creature instantly improved every measurable aspect of the business. It could have been sooner rather than later if only the entrepreneur had seen the creature for what it really was. Consider the troublesome, unreasonable, impossible to satisfy client holding the vendor hostage…..the “rules” of an industry, the way things “must” be done, the prices that “can’t” be raised, the business that is “different”.

Look more courageously at whatever fire-breathing, seemingly all-powerful creature stands between you and the way you want things to be. Its power exists only so long as you acknowledge it as powerful.

One of the objects I have, as a psychological trigger, is a rock with sword in it, symbol from the King Arthur legend, which I got via the Disney book and movie ‘The Sword And The Stone.’ If you are unfamiliar, go to bookstore or amazon, buy the kids’ book or Disney movie and read or watch. It is a lesson in truth about power.

On a more adult, directly instructional level, re-read ‘The New Psycho-Cybernetics’, then in succession, ‘Thick Face, Black Heart’ and ‘Power’ (the old book by Michael Korda).

In the interim, think about what creatures are bedeviling you, that you are infusing with power. . Spit in the eye of the thing bullying you. It’ll shrink instantly. Cower and slink away.

If we were serious about independence from foreign oil, we would immediately shut down NASA entirely – we have no need to go to Mars – and divert some of that talent and all that money into accelerated research and production of alternative fuels. (Brazil is fueling cars right now with homemade ethanol from sugar cane. A lot of their gas stations have ethanol pumps.)

If we were serious about solving illegal immigration, we’d immediately bring all the troops home from Germany and station them along the Mexican border, bring in the Army Corps of Engineers and build the wall. (Then, and only then, we’d set up a system for earned amnesty for the illegals already here.)

If we were serious about tax reform, we’d already have junked the income tax and switched to a national sales tax. Nothing else makes any sense. Only the income tax protects all criminals and the underground economy from taxation, facilitates lobbyists’ shenanigans and politicians’ theft.

If we were serious about health care reform, we’d get the employer out of the equation, and we would require individuals to buy it and prove they have it, just like we do with automobile insurance and mortgage loan insurance.

We are not serious about any of these things. The politicians merely give them lip service.

The public merely foams at the mouth. But the public re-elects more than 70% of all incumbents instead of throwing them all out until somebody does treat these things seriously. By this simple act, the public reveals itself.

Well, political rant aside, here are provocative questions: what are you just foaming at the mouth about, in your business or your life, but really not doing anything about?

And, what are your employees or others around you only giving lip service to, believing (correctly) that you are only foaming at the mouth?

I often wind up with things creeping into my life that I realize I’m not happy about. As soon as I realize this, I go to work doing something about them.

I often get myself into situations in my business that seemed like good ideas at the time but prove otherwise. As soon as I recognize their truth, I go to work extricating myself.

In short, I step square into shit a lot. But I never just sit there smelling it and howling at the moon.

The insane pleasures…

Of being profoundly superior to all the morons and mere mortals surrounding you. Yes, it is immensely satisfying to know so much that they do not know. To watch the highly educated MBA’s and lawyers on ‘The Apprentice’ who couldn’t run a lemonade stand in the real world. To look at big, dumb corporations and revel in their self-destruction.

Of firing a client or customer. As hard as they are to get, you might think there’d be no pleasure in this. And usually, there isn’t. But being able to, there’s enormous pleasure in that.

Of taking a Wednesday or a week off. Or enjoying coffee on your backyard deck while all your neighbors are climbing into cars and crawling into a bumper to bumper commute. Or having neighbors wonder about you – what is he anyway?

Of alchemy. Making money materialize out of thin air. Conceiving some offer or promotion or ad or mailing from scratch, bringing it to life, and watching money pour in. I wonder, what is more satisfying than that? I know for fact that Gene Simmons gets more satisfaction from filling the arena, the ticket sales, the merchandise sales than he does from performing, just as I did from speaking. Hell, anybody can play rock music. Few can make millions. The making of anything from scratch is uniquely satisfying.

I used to try and imagine what Rich DeVos thought as he drove over to the giant, sprawling, multi-million dollar Amway complex linked to millions of distributors, just down the road from the abandoned, leased gas station he’d started bottling soap in. When I see 500, 600, 700 people at a SuperConference, when you see customers streaming into your store’s event, or your book or gadget or bottle of goop on a store shelf, your commercial on TV, your ad in a magazine – you’ve got to FEEL something special, because you’re doing something comparatively few have the guts to do. Most everybody wants to. Few do. Haven’t got the guts.

Of resiliency. Oddly, successful entrepreneurs relish their war stories of disaster and recovery even more than their outright successes. Maybe not so oddly. Unlike anyone else, the entrepreneur is totally in control of his own redemption. There’s pleasure in that.

Of wealth. Well, of course. To quote, I’ve been poor, I’ve been rich, rich is better. It isn’t perfect. You don’t have $500 problems anymore; you have $50,000 and $500,000 problems. Still. It’s better.

That moment of abject panic. Like looking up at a clock reading 1:20, and suddenly thinking: was that teleseminar at 2:00 or omigod, 1:00? (It was 2)

The hour of crisis. Like having all four of your websites crash, actually moved to somebody else’s sites, all your traffic re-routed – with $50,000.00 of print ads out there. The resolution – it was accident, fixed in under 3 hours.

The disappointment. Like the loss of a client, account, customer for whom you bent over backwards, made huge gobs of money for, have glowing testimonials from. Or the long trusted employee caught sabotaging your sales or outright stealing. Or the ad you labored endlessly over, that you think is brilliant, that tanks.

The loneliness. Of having no one who can understand either your stresses or your successes. Or that very, very difficult decision to which there is only one sane answer albeit one certain to be unpopular and misunderstood. (Nobody really gets what this is all about unless they live it. In an issue of INC., there’s an article by a woman who worked for INC. for years, wrote about entrepreneurs, has a business degree, etc. who admits discovering – when her husband launched a business – that everything she thought she knew was wrong; that the real entrepreneurial experience was completely different from what she’d perceived as an observer and reporter. Yep.)

The hardest task. Managing yourself. The temptation to procrastinate, to goof off, to sleep in, to avoid whatever unpleasant work is staring at you from the corner of the room. The need for self-discipline and self-motivation.

The work. The typical entrepreneur does the work of ten salaried employees. If he doesn’t, he’s going to be in trouble. (It is why you damned well do deserve high pay and wealth and perks and luxuries far greater than those of 9-5 employees.)

The secret no one can ever know – that you’re just guessing.

Most of last week, I covered jealousy, envy, the cures for both and most importantly the quick and easy ways to fame and fortune. But now it is time to back up a minute and discover where you are right now and see if you are even heading in the right direction.

How are you doing? Are you on pace, ahead or behind schedule with your every goal and objective?

Do you know?

A lot of people do NOT know, and that’s too bad. There’s a line in the Kenny Rogers song, advice from a lifelong gambler: “you never count your money when you’re sitting at the table.” The advice came from a guy who died broke in a boxcar, riding the rails.

By all means, count. Every day. Every hour. Every week. In every way that you can.

I am ASTOUNDED at the otherwise smart entrepreneurs I have sat with in consulting days who aren’t counting. I recall one with two men running a company with an in-house sales force. They knew the macro numbers: sales up 40%. All salespeople beating quota. But they knew none of the micro numbers – and when they go home and investigate them, they are going to discover the increase is largely deception; recurring monthly billings being converted to discounted prepays.

The cross-selling of other products isn’t occurring because it’s not being measured. Another past VIP Member in the manufacturing business wasn’t job costing. Immediately after discussing that at a meeting, she uncovered a severe flaw in the way customers were being charged.

Look, frankly, I never found this any fun, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve chosen not to build, own and run a business. But if you are going to do it, it is incumbent to do it right. By knowing what the hell’s going on.

I am also ASTOUNDED at otherwise smart entrepreneurs playing blind archery everyday; not measuring their gains toward targets, on timetables.

This isn’t Amtrak here, subsidized by the government. This is your life. You can’t get somewhere on time unless you know where you’re going and have a timetable for getting there.

I have a client who says he wants to sell his business for 10-million dollars in the next few years . I asked: what does it have to look like – in detail – by then in order to achieve that goal?

He couldn’t tell me. And odds are, he won’t sell that business in that time frame for 10-mill either.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

In my last post, I discussed the Disney Effect and your business culture. Let’s continue on this topic and why it is so important to your success.

Why was this topic so important?

Because ‘customer loyalty’ is long ago dead. As it was known. Brand loyalty for example. If your Dad was a Ford man, by gum, he stayed a Ford man. Local restaurant patronage. I remember going to the same restaurant with my parents every week for years. Missed, they’d call to see if you were ill. Well, those days are gone.

But there are companies who do form a real bond with their customers. Disney is one. One to admire, envy, study.

The strongest bond is behavioral and attitudinal transformation. If your business and your relationship with and influence on your customers leads to them feeling differently (better) about themselves, thinking differently (more optimistically or creatively) about themselves and their world, behaving differently (more successfully), something greater than old-fashioned loyalty or allegiance forms. I don’t know that anybody has defined it well or assigned a useful terminology to it. But it occurs.

Can some ‘ordinary’ business — a clothing store, a dental practice, a bookstore, a home cleaning service – have such an influence? No. An ordinary business cannot.

But, as I discuss in my NO B.S. BUSINESS SUCCESS IN THE NEW ECONOMY book, it is the job of the entrepreneur to turn the ordinary business into the extraordinary business.

The next strongest bond is relationship. Where the customer genuinely feels – power word: feels – a real, non-superficial, personal connection, friendship, relationship. That something more than transactions is involved.

The next strongest bond is common culture. The proprietary language, the secret handshake, the school colors, the shared understanding, agreed upon ideas and philosophy. Being part of something, accepted by a group, being an ‘insider’. Think about how Hefner launched and developed Playboy around a philosophy, a viewpoint.

Maybe ironically, Disney and Playboy have much in common — evidenced by the fact that their customers eagerly wear and display their logos, collect their symbols. I think this may be the toughest marketing strategy or collection of strategies to wrap the mind around, to figure out, to find ways to apply. But what a breakthrough it can provide! What wealth it can create!

Successful people have become, by necessity, great students of money and finance. There used to be a time where you didn’t have to be a great student of money management, unless you were way up there in the income brackets, because there weren’t a lot of money options available to you in the first place.

Pretty much everybody used a savings account if they used anything and that is about it. Well today you walk into your local savings and loan and they’ve got a menu that is more complex than the airline fair schedules to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B.’ You got all sorts of options of what to do with your money don’t you? Just in selection of checking accounts you’ve got more options than you can possibly deal with.

Making money is such an important part of our total approach to success we have to become great students of finance. Not only do we have to become great students of money but of money management and investment strategies. And I believe that it’s important to be more advanced as a student of that than you are even prepared to use at this moment.

I think that’s another way to apply the principle of creating a vacuum. I began to study the stock market and penny stocks and mutual funds and all that several years before I was prepared to spend any money on it. I got the knowledge even before I needed it and I think that’s important. I think you need to be creating the ability and the money to use it will follow.
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Anyone can create a business, but few create businesses which generate millions of dollars. I’m not talking about a business that generates $1 million in annual revenue; I’m talking about creating a business that generates $1 million—cash—to you, each year.

It takes four things to build a business to provide you with $1 million a year in spendable, personal income. It just so happens, it also takes four things to drive a car. It will help me teach you by explaining these four things in the context of driving a car.

THE GAS PEDAL

The speed in your business is determined by the number of new customers you are adding every day, every week, every month, and every year. Your new customer acquisition is the “gas pedal” that determines the speed with which your business accelerates its growth. How adept you are at putting new customers into your business will determine your growth rate. Similar to driving a car: the accelerator pedal determines how fast your car goes. While there are a lot of other factors determining whether or not you get to your destination, the gas pedal provides the speed for getting there. You must have a system for identifying potential clients and converting them into customers. Otherwise, it’s like going down the highway at 10 mph. You’re going to get there, but not very quickly. If you invest in building a customer acquisition system for your business, you will have the opportunity to quickly build a million-dollar business.
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