EP364 The 3-Day Assault On Growth

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The 3-Day Assault On Growth

I’m calling this podcast The Three-Day Assault. The reason is I am starting my next three-day assault on Income Store. What does that mean? Sometimes once a year, sometimes twice a year, I play what’s called Capture the Flag. If you ever played that as a kid, another team hides a flag, another team has to protect that flag. At the same time, that other team that’s protecting the flag on the other side of the field, they’re assaulting your team to capture the flag on your side so you have to defend your flag. You have to capture that flag or you can’t win.

I view business very much like Capture the Flag. First of all, the flag is growth. It could be growth of a product, it could be growth of a division and it could be growth of a whole company. What do I know about playing the game Capture the Flag? In my notes, I’ve got the word RESISTANCE typed in all caps. Here’s what I know for a fact, I don’t see a clear path to the flag. I don’t even see the flag for that matter. I certainly am not going to rub-a-dub my way and walk up to and grab the flag. There is going to be extreme resistance.

When it comes to Capture the Flag and growing a company or a product or a division, where is the resistance going to come from? It could come from vendors. It could come from affiliate partners. It could come from employees. It could come from competition. It could come from what we’ll call acts of God or weather. It could come from Google Algorithms. Ask ESPN how they felt one day when Google did an algorithm change. It took 72% of the traffic away in one day and they never recovered. Friction or resistance could even maybe come from yourself in what’s called self-doubt.

To me, business is a game of psychology. It’s a game of chess. It’s a game of restraint. I remember the late Chet Holmes used to say very often business owners, entrepreneurs especially, have to have pig-headed discipline. This is my words, not his, “We need to make one decision and then manage the decision daily.” What do most people do? They make a decision, “We’re going to grow this thing.” Then they hit resistance. What do they do? They change their mind and make a new decision, “No. That’s not what we do.” I’m going to give you a little ten-step process that I do during a three-day assault. In this case, I’m doing a three-day assault. I’m growing the whole company, first mentally then I’m going to visualize it. Then I’m going to map it and then I’m going to get it to the right people. I’m going to get complete buy-in and I’m going to be the guy dancing on a hill.

If you have never seen Cameron Herold’s TED Talk, in which he shows the little video clip of a man dancing on a hill. I strongly urge you to go to YouTube, type in Cameron Herold, go to his channel and watch his first three videos. One or two of the first three of his videos on his YouTube channel. You’ve got to watch them, they’re short videos, but you’ve got to watch for the dancing man. You can even play one of his videos and literally scroll through the video quickly until you see a picture of a guy on a hill at a concert dancing by himself. Then rewind that piece to hearing Cameron Herold’s narration of the man dancing on a hill, how he relates it to how Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and all these incredible entrepreneurs were the one man dancing on a hill and then slowly, because they kept dancing, people joined them, when there was tremendous resistance in the beginning. If you have never seen that metaphor, I urge you to watch it because at least everybody I’ve shown that to has used that as a teaching tool in their company. It’s a pretty famous video. It’s been seen by 21 million people.

Step one, you’re going to create a large growth goal, not a small one. You’re not going to test this ten-step process. You’re going to go big or go home, as the plaque is right in front of me on my desk. Step two, you’re going to come up with five reasons, not methods, why you will hit the goal. I’ll give you an example. My three-day assault in our company is I’m going to map out how we’re going to double again in the next twelve months. I need to come up with five reasons why we’re going to hit the goal.

Number one, we’ve done it nine times, why can’t we do it again? That’s a good enough reason for me. Number two, I’ve got dials. On our marketing, on our websites, on our everything, on every product we have, I’ve got a physical dial. I could, in some cases, get more salespeople to make calls. We don’t do outbound calls but if I had salespeople, I could dial that in. If we did radio commercials, I could dial in more advertising. If we write articles in newspapers to get people’s attention, I could do more newspapers. My point is, of the methodologies we use to grow our websites and our business, I can turn the dial. Let’s get it dialed in to probably everybody on this podcast.

Probably most people listening to this podcast have a website that encompasses your company. There are dials that you can put on that website to get more clients and sell more items. You can do Google Pay-Per-Click. If you’ve never done it, you could turn on that dial. You could do Facebook Ads if you’ve never done them. You could turn on that dial. If you’ve done them, you could add a bigger budget. I know many people that have borrowed money from banks to do more Google Pay-Per-Click. We have dials on marketing but more apropos to everybody listening to this podcast. If you need more clients and you need to move more products, I hope you’ve heard my other prior podcast. You need to have three to ten dials at all times that you can turn the knob up when you need to increase sales.

Number three, reason not method, why we can double. We’re led by great people. If you have not seen our state of the union video, which is on IncomeStore.com/state-of-the-union. You will see clearly the type of people we’re led by. Number four, we have the team to handle it. Go to the state of the union video, you’ll see that our company has a massive team in place to handle growth. We go ahead of growth because we always understand that we’re currently managing two businesses at the same time. The business we’re in and the business we’re becoming. We always ramp up our management and our advisers around the team that we’re the company we’re becoming, not the company we are.

Number five. The reason we’re going to double again is that we will. I’ve made the decision. It’s not optional. As you’re going to see in step eight, you declare your goal publicly. I’m declaring my goal publicly. Step three, come up with five reasons you might not double. I’m not going to list my five for you because I don’t do this rule because it’s self-sabotage, but if you have never done it, I used to do this years ago. You’ve got to write things down like, “I might get in my own way.” I don’t even like writing that down but I might get in my own way. “My spouse might not let us double.” Whatever goofball reason you can come up with, put it on paper and then see if you can eliminate that.

Step four, recognize you do not need anybody’s opinion to win. You don’t need anybody’s approval to grow. Could you imagine Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, did these people get approval to go out and kick some serious fanny and grow massive companies? If they waited for approval, they would have never got off the ground because the opposition and resistance against these folks is unbelievable. The opposition against Elon Musk, for him to build his tubes under major cities to get people to and from one spot efficiently, the resistance is so overwhelming. There is a reason he’s taking Tesla private. Then what you do is you write and post in your office, this is the key to number four, “I don’t need anybody’s approval to grow X to Y level.”

I don’t need anybody’s approval to get Income Store to double again. I don’t need anybody’s improved approval to get this Amazon product to grow 300% in a year. Whatever your thing is, you’re going to write down and post in front of you, “I do not need anybody’s approval to do this.”

Step five, don’t get good, get done. Providence moves upon commitment. Don’t get good. Don’t try to read books, don’t try to study stuff. Don’t wait for a mentor. Don’t try to go to school and perfect something. Forget that. Just go and do it. Start. Keep reinventing. I’m going to read you a short paragraph from a book from 1926. “Isn’t it amazing that a man with definiteness of purpose goes through life and watches how the world steps aside and then comes beside him and helps him with his aims?” Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. Isn’t it amazing that a man or woman, with definiteness of purpose, a large goal goes through life and watches how the world steps aside and then comes beside and helps him or her with their aims, their goal? Set a huge goal, proclaim it to the world, publicly state it, and watch how people go, “I’d love to work with you for free. Could you help me out and give me some coaching here?” You will be blown away when you are convicted and you’ve made the commitment and your resolve is, “I’m going to hit it no matter what,” how the world comes to you to help you. That was written in 1926.

Step six, make one decision. Make the decision to grow. Put the number on paper. Just like in 2009, I literally ripped out of a magazine, Inc. 500, and put it on a wall. Have I ever hit it? If you shoot for the stars, you might hit the moon. Make a decision, post it, look at it, stare at it, state it publicly and get out of your own way and keep managing that decision to hit the goal daily. Don’t change the decision. Make the decision with a great frame of mind. When the phone’s not ringing and maybe on a weekend, think about it. Make a decision and then hit it.

Step seven, expect resistance and ignore it because you’ve already made the decision to go through the resistance and providence is moving in the background. Remember, providence moves upon commitment. Providence says when you make the decision, the world is going to move things for you. I’m telling you, the world is going to move things for you. They’re going to come beside you and help you with your aims. Providence moves upon commitment, providence does not move upon, “We’re probably going to do this,” or “I think I can do this.” Providence isn’t moving anything. You’ve got to make the decision and do it. Step eight, state your goal publicly. I don’t care how you do it. You got to tell it to the world. Somehow, someway, post on a website. Make a YouTube video that you may not know of anybody ever sees. Who cares? State it, providence hears it.

Step nine, spend the money. What would happen if you hit the goal? I want you to figuratively in your mind spend the fruits of the results of you hitting number one on Amazon or doing this, whatever it is? Step ten, this is called level three selling. It’s on previous podcasts. I covered this somewhere in the last twenty podcasts. I covered three levels of selling but here’s the deal. Step ten of the ten steps, you have to, in your mind, get other people to see you enjoying the fruits of you hitting that goal. If your goal is to get your product number one on Amazon, which would increase revenues ten-fold, how much money does that make you? How many new people can you hire? What type of car can you drive? How big of a yacht can you buy? You’ve got to play the game.

The whole world is psychology. Some of you know the backstory of why I picked the University of St. Francis and eventually met my wife. I had tickets to Brown University. I was going to Brown and Gordie Gillespie calls my house and says, “I’d love you to play for the University of St. Francis.” Turns out it’s only half hour from my house in Joliet, Illinois. It turns out Gordie Gillespie was the winningest coach in any division in any level. He was the USA Today Coach of the Century. This was an elite human being that my grandfather convinced me I needed to go play for and be mentored by and I did.

The key is the psychology of sport says how could Gordie Gillespie be in the Hall of Fame in three sports, be the winningest coach in sports, and he never played two of the three sports he coached? That doesn’t make any sense. Yes, it does. He understands the psychology of sports. He understands the psychology of winning. He knows how to get something out of somebody that they don’t even know they have to give. We were division three school. The only schools that would play us were one AA. Nobody would play us in our division. Some Division II schools would play but we destroyed people as a tiny little school with 11,000 total kids in our school and we’re cleaning house on other bigger schools. Why is that? Because everything is psychology. Please don’t take lightly these ten steps, write them down. This is the ten-step punch lists to growth. Play the game, give it a shot but please commit to it because if you do this, this will change your thinking of everything in business forever.

Important Links:

• Cameron Herold’s TED Talk
• Cameron Herold’s YouTube channel
• IncomeStore.com/state-of-the-union
• Think and Grow Rich