The more people who rally with you to the top, the more success you get. In today’s episode, Ken and Kerri Courtright talk about the beauty of accountability partners. Using Kerri’s constant aim to be fit through the years, Ken has emphasized why partners matter when you want to succeed. Here, he asks you to do a personal SWOT and highlights the strength of the exercise by using her wife’s physique and accountability as an example. With the right accountability partners, you will be more confident that your efforts won’t go down the drain.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Accountability
I am sitting here with a special guest, the beautiful Kerri Courtright. Kerri, say hello. We’re going to talk today about the power of accountability partners. First and foremost, this episode and all episodes leading up to our October event are sponsored by Digital Footprint. You can find that at DigitalFootprint.net. I wanted to say something pretty cool about the aspect of digital footprints. First of all, Digital Footprint is one of five conferences annually that Forbes recognizes as a Can’t-Miss, Must-Attend Business Growth Conference. Digital footprint, for a couple of years now, is one of them. We’re proud of that. I’m going to cover three of the seventeen nuggets from my book Rally: 19 Growth Strategies You’ve NEVER Heard Of. I promise you have not heard them on this podcast in the way I’m going to cover them in a book. There is tremendous detail, how to apply them, what to do, where to find the data and how to get the results.
We’re going to cover live with a little bit of a breakout session and a little interaction. If you want a taste of it months before the book comes out, you’ve got to get your tickets. We sell out every single year. It’s DigitalFootprint.net. My wife, Kerri, is an ex-professional athlete. She has taught cheer and dance for twenty plus years. She has taught hundreds of women how to exercise and how to tone your body properly. I would say simply put that my wife is ripped, her body looks still looks like a professional athlete. She wears the exact same size of clothes when I met her in 1988. Here’s the deal, Kerri was an NCA and UDA instructor. As many of you know, she was a Chicago Bulls cheerleader. She is an athlete, top to bottom, through and through. My question for Kerri is, after all these years, when you could teach fitness, why do you still drive 2 to 3 times a week to a personal trainer?
I’ll be honest. I prefer driving out to my trainer five days a week. Unfortunately, other requirements have come up that have taken my time. I willingly drive even in the wintertime. Here’s what happens, when I don’t go and see my trainer, sometimes I don’t work out. Sometimes, I’ll work out 50% of what I normally would do. When I drive to him, I am being held accountable to myself and to him for his time because he’s waiting as well as the amount of money that I’m paying. It’s now a commitment. The second part is, I see the results. When I go, I see what happens. I work out harder. I’d hit muscles that I don’t hit at home. It’s a whole different environment between being in a gym where everybody’s like-minded for the same benefit of each other versus when I’m at home and distracted. I would call it accountability and results. Those are the two main reasons why I continue to work out with someone else. Yes, I am qualified to do it on my own, but I do know there is a big difference.
That’s huge. Kerri made my two points of this podcast. The first and foremost is this, human nature says we are going to fail. We are humans. We fail, we fail forward, hopefully, but we’re going to fail constantly. Chet Holmes was an amazing man. He has since passed on, but Chet Holmes became famous by teaching people the principle of pig-headed discipline. The concept says, “It takes an extreme athlete or an extreme entrepreneur, especially a serial entrepreneur of juggling multiple companies. It takes an extreme amount of pig-headed discipline to launch the career or the business but it takes incredible discipline to hand those responsibilities of accountability over to other people to manage.” He says, “A lot of people make the mistake of thinking they’re pig-headed discipline is strong enough to carry them to the finish line.”
If you're not afraid to do something, it means your goals are way too small. Click To TweetI want to cover some things that I’ve learned in twenty-some years that might help everybody. I want to go to the year 2000. I was brought into MCI WorldCom. I was there for 91 days. Three weeks in, I noticed a pattern that this fast-growing publicly-traded company was doing with all of its sales reps nationwide. On my third Monday there, I was invited into a conference call, it was a 45-minute conference call, every rep, all managers, all branch managers, and the regional vice president, the 3rd in command of the sales division was on the call. Every single sales rep in front of every other sales rep of a five-state area had to state what they committed to last Monday, how many appointments they were going to run and how many deals they were going to close.
After that, they had to state how many deals they did run and how many deals they closed and they had to state next week’s commitment. When I heard these reps going through this, I was looking at every rep and I’m thinking, “They have to be so nervous. They have to be shaking in their boots with the RVP, which is their boss’s boss’s boss on the phone,” yet none of them were sweating it. They were used to it and they understood the concept of it. Quite frankly, they knew the value after being there for some time. My question to everybody reading is, how often do you write down what you know you need to do and have the guts in the beginning, being scared to death, to hand to somebody else what you know you need to do and say, “Please hold me accountable to this.”
If you’re not afraid to do it, it means your goals are way too small. I’d like everybody to get out a piece of paper and write SWOT going down your piece of paper. We’re going to do a personal SWOT, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of bringing on an accountability partner. Let’s look at the strength of this exercise. Number one, it reminds you that you’re still excited because you still have a goal. Number two, it reminds you as a weakness that you are a human and you have been failing up into this point and you’re going to continue to fail. Your weakness in bringing on an accountability partner is to expose yourself and say, “I am weak. I need you to hold me accountable.” Here’s the opportunity, this is the golden goose, not the golden egg, the opportunity of having an accountability partner.
The reason my wife in the middle of winter drives 40 minutes to a professional trainer and she pays handsomely every single training session to this professional trainer, he is the golden goose. The golden egg is that my wife’s body stays physically fit and healthy. She is the result. That’s the egg, the production of it. Without the accountability partner, my wife has to be the accountability partner and the doer and they’re two separate entities in the business. You have never and never will see a major publicly-traded company without a board of directors. They don’t exist. They never will. The board of directors does not set any agenda. They don’t do anything. They take the board of directors aka the accountability team takes the business plan written by the C-Suites.
All the executives, the CEO, the COO, take all of the plans written by the C-Suites and they hold them accountable. They don’t do anything outside of their big black book of referrals and references and financing partners, etc. They hold people accountable for what they say they’re going to do. The opportunity in the SWOT analysis of your accountability is, do you have the guts as a solopreneur, a small business owner, somebody with twenty or more employees or less, to take on a board of directors? A lot of times your board of directors is one person. It could be your mom, dad, sister, brother, and friend and say, “Here’s our business plan for this year. Can we meet once every 90 days for fifteen minutes so you can ask me if I’m still on track?”
Let’s go to the threat. This is Chet Holmes talking, not Ken Courtright. Chet Holmes ran multiple five-state companies. The threat is, do you think that you have the pig-headed discipline to write the plan and then hold yourself accountable to the plan? If you do, you’re stronger than 99.99999% of the people walking. What are we saying? Knowing what to do is one thing. Managing your accountability is a completely different animal. Business is much easier when you’re accountable to somebody else. Try this, here’s one little nugget to walk away from, write something down that you know you should do today and not tomorrow. Call somebody and tell them you’re going to do it by X date and watch what happens. Any last-minute thoughts, Kerri?
Accountability is the biggest, which is one reason why I like working with you.
Thank you. I love you.
I love you too.
You’re awesome. I hope this helps. See you on the trail. Take care.
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