As business owners, we sometimes reach that difficult part where we ask ourselves, “What’s the point of all of this?” We may think that it is easier to give up than to continue. We feel like we’re fighting a lost cause. If you are in the middle of this dilemma, then you must understand how you have the capability to turn it all around. This is the third part of the fourth-part series on getting real with yourself, bringing down the reasons why you have to fight through it all. Focusing on the difference between price and prize, we go deep into our goals (prize) and the steps (price) we take to reach them.
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Get Real: Get The Prize
This is a four-part series. This is episode number three of a series called Get Real, Why Fight? Why Not Just Get a Job? Why be a business owner? Why be a high-level executive with stock options, which means you’re a business owner? Why be a leader with a lot of people counting on you when it is difficult? What’s the point? Ask yourself the question, “Do I need to grow my business?” If you can grow your business, you don’t need to go. If you can’t seem to grow either a product, a division of your company’s not growing, relationships in your company aren’t growing or overall net revenues are not growing, I can assure you will find the answers at DigitalFootprint.net.
The concept of digital footprint says that for every company about to start, for every company in existence, there is already a digital footprint online of something that has already succeeded before you. If you know where to look for it, those digital footprints leave physical footprints like footprints in the sand that you can step right into and make growing your company so much easier. You just have to know where to look. Digital Footprint is about opening up the doors both online and offline to find those digital footprints very quickly.
This is episode 267 and it’s called Do You Understand the Price Versus the Prize? What’s your prize? Why do you do what you do? What are you doing? What’s the goal? Do you have any clue about the price you’re going to have to pay to achieve that goal? Some of you think you know a couple of the prizes. I might open your eyes to a couple other prizes. This is coming from 25 years in business, 100 employees, owned countless companies, consulted 3,100 companies, some great and some not so great companies, learned a lot from the companies that were not so great, and managing 900 money-making websites seen by 115 million people a week. There’s a price to be paid.
Growing your company can be so much easier if you just know where to look. Click To Tweet
Kerri and I have a business that’s 25 years old. There are a hundred people helping us and we’re managing 900 businesses for other people. We get 50% of the revenue on all these businesses. How in the world did we do that? There was a price to be paid, and it was quite severe. I want to share with you what I believe are the four prices that every business owner who wants to kick butt and grow quickly must pay. The first price you’re going to have to pay is you have to know why you’re going to be willing to take the bullets.
I don’t mean this like Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, the flowery introspection of why you’re doing this. I’ve done some of those podcasts. That’s important. I mean to the core in 30 seconds, why do you want to be a business owner? Get real, put it on paper, and stare it in the face. No, not in sport, not in business, not in relationships. You will never see extreme victory. An Olympic gold medal, Inc. 5000 company, major notable success, you will never see victory without extreme price that had to be paid. You must know, see, and state your why. It is what it is.
Number one is it’s a price you have to pay. It takes time for you to stop your life and get into the why. Once you know why you’re doing it, you then have to tell the world. You have to state it. You have to make a vision statement, a mission statement. You’ve got to know why the heck you’re doing it. If you, entrepreneurs, are reading to this, if you think you’re going to rub-a-dub your way to massive success without a vision statement or a mission statement and telling others why you’re doing it, you are mistaken. It is going to catch up to you at some point. You’re going to eventually do it. You might as well do it now. You can do that exercise in under an hour. Pay the price, get it done.
You will never see victory without the extreme price that has to be paid. Click To Tweet
Number two, to be a high-level, hard-charging, hill-climbing entrepreneur, you have to be willing to lose family and friends. It’s not optional. Kerri and I got to be very careful when I say this. I have not seen a high school or college friend in over a decade, not one, maybe for fifteen years. Kerri never sees a high school friend. She very seldom gets together with some of her college gals and she still lives in the same town as most of these folks. It’s just what it is. When you’re building a business, your business is going to force new relationships. There’s only so much time in the day. The mind can only absorb so much. It only has so much ATP. We have a finite amount of ATP every 24 hours. You’ve got to sleep to replenish. The body and the mind can only absorb so many high-level relationships. When you go into business and you want to succeed at a great level, you have to elevate phenomenal relationships so they can suck you up to their level. That’s how it works.
Read the book, Think and Grow Rich. You have to be willing to let go of relationships with friends and even some family, especially the negative nannies, negative ninnies, and the negative nellies. You’ve got to let them go, cut them off. If they’re negative, they weren’t your friends anyway. You’re going to gain new friends. My best friends now, my great friends whom I can call at 2:00 AM, are all people I met through our business. Number two, you’re going to have to be willing to absorb emotional pain. It’s not optional. I don’t know one person who has achieved greatness who didn’t at least two times in their life have an absolute lack of money. They weren’t just broke, they couldn’t wait to be broke. In 1998, I couldn’t wait to be broke.
I was so far in debt. My accounts were so under zero. They were so negative, so in the red. I couldn’t wait to get to zero. I couldn’t wait to be broke. If you’re going to be a hard-charger, the odds of you doing it methodically, slowly, and perfectly in borrowing money from others and always maintaining a growing savings account in self-directed IRA. I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen many people who, after 30, 40 years, have something successful who didn’t grow it slowly. I’m not saying that can’t be done. I’m talking about the people who want to rip off the cover and kick serious butt now. I don’t know how you can do it without the emotional pain of going all in and giving everything you’ve got financially. That’s emotional pain number one.
Emotional pain number two is a lack of loyalty. Male or female, if you’re going to kill it, the family and friends are not going to be that loyal. They’ll come around eventually. Once you’re successful, every family member, every friend, “I knew you’d do it. We knew it. We were bragging about you.” I don’t remember the loyalty when we asked you for a $1,000 when we were broke. Then you’re going to build a team, you’re going to get employees. Interestingly enough, it could because you don’t share your vision, you don’t share your mission statement or your why. You never drafted them into your team, they’re not going to be loyal. They’re going to go to the highest dollar. They’re going to get stolen from another company and quite frankly, that’s very painful because you think they’re your friends and it is what it is.
Probably the most painful and it’s similar but not the same is the lack of vision that other people have. This one’s tough. It took me fifteen to twenty years to realize that God planted a dream in my mind, not somebody else’s. God planted a dream in Kerri’s mind, not somebody else’s. It’s our dream. What’s awesome because we understand how to communicate now is each of our employees has their own God-given dream inside our company. I know some of their dreams are so big, they can’t stay here forever. They have to go leave us and go do something else. In the early years, it was so emotionally traumatizing when Kerri and I couldn’t get other people to see our vision. It was traumatic. I’m going to move on from there, but you better be willing to absorb an onslaught of emotional pain.
Number four, you better be willing to absorb physical pain. I’ll give you two examples. In this ten-day period, we’re in leading up to Digital Footprint. My wife’s baby is Digital Footprint. She loves it and loves what it’s all about. She loves seeing people come in. At the Digital Footprint, we had people from Australia, Columbia, Mexico, Canada, and Europe. They came in from everywhere and she loves it when
it’s all said and done. You can see this video at the bottom of DigitalFootprint.net in the little four-minute sizzle reel. She loves when the gal from Australia says, “I came from Australia. I was told this was going to be amazing and they undersold it. I came out with 700 ideas of how I can grow my business back in Australia.”
Building a business means forging new relationships. Click To Tweet
That is what fuels Kerri when she knows we put on an event that these people can go back into the world all over the world and institute these ideas immediately for the cost of zero, just hard work and blow up their businesses. She is so passionate. I don’t think she has slept more than three hours a night literally in the last seven days. I am not exaggerating. She has not gone to bed before midnight and her alarm is set at 3:15 AM. She went to bed after midnight. She’s amazing and you can physically see it. She’s a walking zombie but there’s only so much time and she is going to make sure that we blow the minds out of everybody who walks into that event. I was looking into the business and I spotted four weaknesses at the same time.
We did an internal SWOT, Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. I saw four weaknesses compounding. I thought I was doing a good job keeping it together and one by one we got three of the four weaknesses fixed. At that time I broke out in something called shingles. If you have never seen shingles or experienced shingles, it physically has to be the worst thing I’ve ever experienced. It was so painful. It’s like the nerves get pushed to the surface of your skin. My face broke out, my scalp broke, out and I happened to be in Pennsylvania. The guy started looking at me funny. Everybody’s like, “Ken, you don’t look right.”
My left eye started getting a little bit red. Finally, that night I went to the hospital and the gal immediately pumped me with something in a needle. She was like, “You have shingles. If we don’t catch those in the next two hours, you’re going to probably lose your left eye.” It was traumatic, and I had to absorb that physical pain. The physical shingles was a manifestation of the pressure that I was holding in trying to keep these for weaknesses together without passing negative to other people inside of our company. I was trying to fix it without bothering or interrupting other people.
Do you know your prize? Do you know your why? Why do you do it? Do you have any idea how high of a price you’re going to have to pay? If your prize and your why is huge, your prize is going to be huge. If your why is, “I need to make $80,000 this year,” or, “I need to make an extra $200,” and it’s monetary or anything like that, your price is not going to be very high at all. You can rub it up your way to any financial number. Money is a magnet to true value. If you have something of true value, you have a money magnet. If you have a good product at a great price, you have no problem getting money.
I’m talking about real game-changing life-changing business ideas. If you’re that type of entrepreneur, you better find out and be able to put in writing what your prize is so you can figure out and get mentally ready for what the price is. Greg Reid loves to share a little story from one of his mentors, Evander Holyfield. Evander Holyfield got his ear bitten off by Mike Tyson. The concept is Greg was interviewing Evander Holyfield for one of Greg’s books.
He said, “When you’re in the ring, especially with these guys like Mike Tyson, how do you take the pounding when you know going into the ring after three, four, five, ten rounds, you’re going to get physically beat, like beating on a piece of meat? Your face is going to be puffy, your lips are going to get cut open. You’re just going to ache all over for a week. How do you get into the ring knowing you are about to take the most physical punishment any human can receive? He goes, “It’s simple. I know going in that when he raises my arm and victory, I’m not going to feel anything, but the other guy isn’t going to get his arms raised in victory and he’s going to feel every bruise, every hit, every black eye, and every cut lip.”
Is that apropos to business? If you know going in what the prize is, you will not feel the price. My wife is a zombie physically but she still wakes up at 3:15 AM excited, jacked out of her mind because she knows why she’s doing it. She knew going in. Quite frankly, she was even excited to remove some of the family and friends she communicated with regularly because they were negative nellies. They were downers. She replaced them with incredible loving people whom we surround ourselves with. We were willing to take the emotional pain. We were totally willing and will always be willing if needed to have a lack of loyalty or lack of vision and others. We’re definitely willing to absorb physical pain because our prize is massive.
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