Sometimes, we ask ourselves why can others succeed, and we can’t? In this episode, Ken Courtright teaches us the possibility of doing things out of hunger, the hunger for success and growth. He talks about the concept of starvation as a key to bring an explosion to your division or team. Learn more from Ken as he discusses the roles of turnaround experts in team performance and talks about the Jack Welch introducing the business diet to the corporate world.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Why You CAN
The podcast that is simply about dropping nuggets here and there that many people don’t think about or they’re long lost growth techniques that because of technology, people are either blind to or don’t think they work anymore. I’m going to drop a couple right here and here we go. This is a podcast that is sponsored by our Digital Footprint Event. We’ve got a couple of incredible guest speakers like Jeff Hoffman and Dan Fleyshman. I know many people have paid many thousands of dollars to spend time with Jeff and Dan. Dan is a young man. He owns 27 companies, youngest person ever traded on Wall Street.
Jeff Hoffman, Cofounder of Priceline, and many other things. If you’ve ever been to an airport and you’ve checked in via a kiosk instead of a person or you swipe your card, pick your seat, and want to upgrade your seat, and it’s all done with a little kiosk, Jeff Hoffman is the person that created that kiosk among other things. Jeff and Dan are amazing. They’re going to be part of our panel. People that come to Digital Footprint can walk up to a microphone with a panel of these worldwide business owners and state your business challenge and get advice, mentorship and coaching. It’s amazing. Many of you know, we lowered the price from $2,000 to $5,000 this year. Ticket entry is $197. Don’t ask me why. We sell out every year at $2,000 but we have expanded the room and we’re going to try this. If you do not already have your ticket to Digital Footprint, which Forbes says is one of the top five Can’t-Miss Business Conferences in North America, you might want to get it at DigitalFootprint.net.
This is an awesome podcast. This episode, I’m calling it Why You Can. I’m going to rip through it. Have you ever noticed, especially as an entrepreneur, a go-getter, a driven person, that when you have had to pull something off, you did? You cram for a test, maybe aced it. You had to raise money to start a project. You had to sell something to pay your bills. Isn’t it funny that you can go back in your life and I know you can? If you’re reading this blog, you’re what’s called a Blue Vaser. You’re a Go-Getter. If you haven’t read those books, get them. I know that you know in your heart when it counts, you can get it done.
I want to explain one of the nuggets or one of the reasons why this happens and why do entrepreneurs and highly successful people time and time again pull things off? To a degree, although I believe in creation, I do believe in evolution and evolution has proved that the only time we can create a new brain cell is during a period of starvation. There is no energy. The brain runs on what’s called ATP, and when ATP is 100% depleted and there are no other calories to come in to generate energy to create ATP, the mind goes back into evolution times and says, “We’re starving. We better get smarter and figure out a way to find food.” You can thank Dr. Freeman on a PBS special where he explained that eloquently in about a half an hour. It’s pretty powerful.
Business diet is when employees become fat and lazy and begin relying on tools and other people. Click To TweetHere’s what’s cool about this, the human brain when it’s physically starving gets smarter. I’m here to tell you that all highly successful people and entrepreneurs, when they’re starving, when they have to get something done, they get smarter, sharper, their vision increases and their hearing increases. The radio station they’re tuned into for success gets fine-tuned in HD and crystal clear. I call this the business diet. I want to walk you through a couple of things and you follow along and tell me if you haven’t witnessed this as well. When a turn-around expert is brought into a company of 200 employees or more substantial sized operation, the first thing a turnaround expert does is evaluate. They don’t cut immediately. They don’t trim expenses, cut ad budgets and fire people. That’s not what they do. They evaluate. There is a phenomenon during a turnaround expert’s tenure. My brother-in-law is an incredible turnaround expert, and/or a merger and acquisition enterprise that’s brought in to merge two companies.
The phenomenon is when a turnaround expert comes in or there are a merger and acquisition, how is it that over 80% of the time, the 450 people all in line to achieve the same goal for that division is trimmed down to 300 people. They lose 1/3 of the physical bodies from 450 to 300. Why is it that 80% of the time, two years later, that division with many fewer people is producing far greater results? Why is that? This is known as the business diet. This isn’t new. This is an age-old concept. In the business sense, that division got fat, lazy, began relying on tools and other people.
That division of 450 knew they had an adequate headcount to do it, and if they didn’t get around to it, somebody else could pick it up. When the division gets to 300 people from 450, every person in there realizes, “I cannot rely on someone else to pick up my slack. I’m going to have to do what I know I have to do.” When that division gets trimmed down, the individuals subconsciously start stating to themselves, “I’m going to now have to do what I know I have to do.” What does this have to do with ATP? When you starve a division, you remove people and you purposely tell this division, “I’m sorry guys, there are no treats. There’s not going to be extra lunch breaks and extended hours. You’re not going to be able to not come in on Fridays.” We’re going to starve this division and you are going to magically see an explosion in production per person from less people and less resources.
To those reading this blog, do your homework and see if it isn’t an 80% result in a better, more productive fashion per division. Let’s take this another step further and talk about Jack Welch. Jack Welch from GE was the master of the business diet. He was the master of starving a division or a company to produce the results. Number one, for an expanded explanation of what I’m going to cover briefly, I urge and beg everybody to read episode one called S-Curves. For those of you that have not listened to it, you might want to hear it. If you’ve heard it, you might want to hear it again.
I did a piece of a book with Brian Tracy and it ended up getting into the National Bestselling Author Hall of Fame. Partly because I drafted off of Brian Tracy and everything he writes is an international bestseller. I do believe it’s my life’s greatest work. It took six months to write ten pages, and it is all about the S-Curve or the business diet in detail using a real-world case study of something that happened in 1968. It is by far my life’s best work, and it kick starts the first twelve podcasts. In an excellent way, it’s by far one of the top three most listened to podcasts of all time for good reasons. For an expanded explanation, check it out.
What does this mean when Jack Welch is known as the best business diet expert? Here’s the deal, when Jack Welch walked into GE, they had two divisions with a market cap of $4 billion. When he left them a number of years later, they had fourteen divisions and a market cap of $40 billion. What Jack did once a year, he looked at the organization and he said, “We need to pretend we’re out of money. We’re out of payroll. We can’t expand payroll. We have no budget for advertising. We need to know what else can this company make or create nights and weekends using the same resources, the same people, the same equipment.” He forced that division to think deeply in, “What else could we do?” What they would do, once they figured out what else they could do, they went out and bought another company already doing that.
They merged those companies. Trimmed staff usually on the company they merge, not the existing baseline, because that was already trimmed, and it exploded. GE was one of the greatest stocks you could buy in the fifteen years Jack Welch was at the helm. If you have never read a Jack Welch book, I highly urge you to go out and get it. It’s called The Welch Way. It’s awesome. Here’s my suggestion. Have you ever cut your divisions? Have you ever looked at your company and remove the worst performing employee or the worst division or 10% of a division?
Have you stripped all advertising budgets out for 30 days and forced yourself to go back to how you were when you were a younger, leaner, meaner entrepreneur with no money and you were forced to create and generate new ATP and new brain cells? Have you ever done the Brian Tracy move once a year where you say to yourself, “If I had to start all over, would I hire this person again, would I start this product line again?” Get brutally honest as we know from my mentor, Brad, back in the day, “The first step of all success is to stop lying to yourself.”
Why not finish this podcast and get hyper-real with yourself and do the Brian Tracy test again? Would I hire this person again? If it’s no, you might want to consider removing them. Would I start this product line again? If it’s no, you might want to consider removing that product line and trust yourself because when you’ve had to pull things off, you did. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re a leader of a division or a company. You’re a great salesperson. You are a leader or you wouldn’t be reading this blog. Trust yourself. You can create more ATP. You can grow new brain cells. You can shrink to expand and explode. I hope this helps. See you. Take care.
Important Links:
- DigitalFootprint.net
- Go-Getter
- S-Curves – previous episode
- The Welch Way
Leave a Reply