I had an interesting conversation with my wife the other day. She told me that when we met I was the only person she knew who didn’t follow football. She thought I was a snob. I could have said the same to her about the movies she watches. I, on the other hand, prefer high level motor racing like Formula 1 and MotoGP….not everyone’s cup of tea for sure. I am really not interested in what is ‘main stream’.

It reminded me of what path someone who builds a business or succeeds at anything has to follow. What does your head space look like to succeed?

There has been much written about the path less trodden and the need to go on a lonely journey. I believe this is true. You certainly have to walk against the current most of the time. It is harder. So what does it take really? A lot and that’s for sure. You have to be incredibly determined and persistant. You have to deny self. You have to push aside the things that give you the ‘instant gratification’. You have to have a “I will persist until” mentality.

It was probably a foregone conclusion that I would end up in business. My father would go on about “not following the crowd” and being yourself. The funny thing was he then advised us to get a trade and a government job. Well, I did the trade thing but realised the government job was not for me. I discovered that unless I could have the capacity to direct my own destiny, I wasn’t very happy. I would think this is something that plagues creative people the world over. I think my father probably squashed his artistic endeavours because of circumstances. Those circumstance were the Great Depression and it shaped his thinking and therefore life. While I can understand that, I cannot help but disagree because it was based on fear of what may happen again. He failed to see the way the world moved forward away from the Depression years towards abundance. Ironically, this thinking forced him to follow the crowd.

Friends of mine have a painting that depicts a column of people trudging along to a factory in the distance. One man in the crowd has a different expression, he is bright and looking at the green fields they are passing as if longing to break free and run. I often looked at this painting and recognised the same spirit in myself. Always looking to explore the boundaries, finding out what works and if it doesn’t, why not?

I think that what happens is this. You either supress your feelings for long enough to accept them or you fight them until you are more afraid of staying than you are of going. This applies to relationships, employment, business…everything I can think of.

The unreasonable man.

I love the George Bernard Shaw quote that goes “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man”

What are you being unreasonable about?

Henry Ford wanted to make the first single casting V8, his engineers told him it couldn’t be done. He persisted until he won

. Barnes Wallis had an idea to build a skipping bomb to blow up the German dams during WW2. They said he was mad, but he did it.

Captain Cook insisted the crew eat sauerkraut to avoid scurvy. The resistance was great, but he prevailed and they never had a problem with scurvy even though the average journey back then would lose many many crew to the disease.

These guys were unreasonable in their demands.

But what do others think?

You really should not go around worrying about what others think of you. What they think is what they think! There is not much you can do about it. And does it really matter what they think? Not much.

Being an individual takes something extra. A mental capacity that shuts out the criticism or ignores it completely. Of course we question ourselves at times. This is par for the course.

Read about those who persisted even if they failed. It takes a strong person to keep going against the tide. Being an individual doesn’t mean you will always win…you won’t. It means you will think for yourself, not just follow what others say or do. It means the satisfaction you get from doing something will be yours and yours alone. It means you will sometimes stand up and be counted as someone who is a free thinker. So go on, be an individual, the world depends on you!

A few years ago I shared a shed with a friend of mine who was starting to manufacture a product. At the time I was working four days a week for wages then a couple for myself, starting a decorative blacksmithing business. I knew little at the time about real business but I was willing to take on projects that were above what I knew. It was either sink or swim.

I swam hard.

My friend wanted all things in place before he unleashed himself on the world. The product had to be defined and refined, equipment had to be bought and serviced, the sign for the workshop had to be made etc etc. He didn’t want to market himself before Christmas because he wasn’t ready and in the new year when he was ready, he either had no money or it ‘wasn’t the right time’. The business went on for a bit but he ended up folding it before it had time to mature. This friend, whom I am still very good friends with, is one of the best craftsmen I have known. Great eye for detail, very particular. His product was a very good one, in fact I haven’t seen anything on the market since that is near the same. It was first class but I think he failed to grasp a basic truth.

There is never a ‘right time’.

I have witnessed this a few times over the last couple of decades with a different people. Someone has a great idea (or even a lousy one) and fails to act on by taking it to market or giving up when there is a little speed bump.

I guess one of the questions that comes up is “Should I do this, what if….blah blah blah”. Well guess what? The time will go by anyhow. Lets look at this logically.

Just say I was to looking at being a concreter for instance (it really doesn’t matter what it is the principle is the same) and I saw all these other guys already in the market. I could take one of two tacks. I could be despondent about how many opposition there are OR I could say “Given time I will be just as good concreter as them and have lots of work”. It really doesn’t matter which market there is, between now and five years time someone will enter that market as a newbie and be a leader in the field. I can pretty much guarantee that!

The fact is that the experts tell us to have everything planned out and in place but I can’t help but wonder if this is a total waste of our energy and time. Within reason of course. The reality is that you can only plan so much as you step forward into the unknown. Mark Twain once wrote that “Success is a combination of Ignorance, Confidence and Filthy Rich Friends”. I am not sure about he last one but the first two are absolutely correct. You must have confidence in yourself and if you really knew what was coming, you probably wouldn’t do it.

Abraham Lincoln pointed out that “the good thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time”.

Given that business is incremental, there is no harm in stepping out there. Do a bit of planning for sure but take the step. If we don’t take any action, it simply will not happen. A bit at a time, move forward, keeping the end in mind slowly plodding your way through it. I have no doubt at all that part of my success has been the fact that I take a step up whenever I can. Sometimes I had to take steps back but that was usually to get a better foothold and move forward in a different direction.

It has to be persistant and it has to be consistent to be of any real value to you, but the time will go by anyhow and you eventually will perfect your craft.

There absolutely is a balance between planning too much and planning too little. So where is it? Give yourself a ‘start date’. Plan as much as you can but then get going! You should be planning as you move forward anyhow and it won’t stop. The one thing about business that sometimes gets up my nose is that it’s relentless. You have to plan constantly into the future. You will also find that by giving yourself a ‘start date’ you will jam more things in…sort of a mini goal.

When I look back now, it was a shame my friend didn’t continue as I believe the product was right, the market would have liked it and by now he would have had a very good business if he had’ve kept plugging away. A few of my friends once told me they agreed between themselves that in a few years they would want to be in my shoes, but didn’t want to go through what I had to at the time. Maybe that is the difference. I persisted and wouldn’t accept that I had to have a ‘right time’.

It is common to hear of all the ways to be successful and what path one should take, but we don’t often hear about simplifying your life. People tend to add stuff to their lives and we have books or TV programs telling us how to organise or declutter.

But it goes further than that.

We live in an age where we don’t have to go out and tend the fields or spend an inordinate amount of time gathering just so we can live. We go to work instead, gathering money so we can just spend it on the essentials…plus some hopefully. This leaves us time to have hobbies and interests and ‘downtime’ or ‘family time’ or ‘time out’. Not that any of these are, in themselves, wrong.

We only have 168 hrs per week. Then we whinge that we aren’t successful or we don’t have time to pursue something.

Look at yourself!

Have you ever seriously looked at how you spend your time? I’m not talking about being such a tight arse with every second like you have to invoice someone for it or “Son, I’ve played ball with you for 37 minutes now, you have 8 to go”.

We actually spend a lot of our time on crap then complain we don’t have enough time. We have a very highly scheduled TV program to watch or we go shopping for hours to ‘spend some time’. We shouldn’t complain, because it’s our own fault!

What can you do without?

What if you took the things out of your life that really take up the space you need to grow into success? Like making a clearing for something new in your life.

When I first heard this, I looked at my life and realised I had some choices to make. I really love Formula One and would buy the magazines every fortnight to keep up. I would listen to Triple J radio religiously. I would read the Sunday newspaper. I spent a huge amount of time watching TV.

I decided to stop buying the magazines, stop listening to the radio, not buy the Sunday paper and have a few TV free nights. The change was amazing. I could focus my thoughts and energy on building my business and reading the books that would get my head into a space suitable for a business owner. It wasn’t much to sacrifice really.

I’ve known of people who don’t mow their lawns and have plastic furniture while they focus on the job at hand of building a big business. They didn’t need or want a mortgage to take their mind off what they had to do. Later on when they had reached a level they were satisfied with, they bought themselves the trappings because they could well and truly afford it.

This is not uncommon with successful people. They delay the gratification until later and don’t get caught up in the ‘we have to have it now’ syndrome of modern living.

Live a ‘bare’ life.

Minimise the clutter. Only spend the energy on stuff that will move you forward to your goal. Give yourself a day off every now and then to stop and smell the roses.

Live without.

Read things that uplift your spirit, watch things that you can learn from, always moving forward incrementally.

What gets measured, improves

One of the key factors to any business is its measurement. I talk to a lot of small business people and I have ceased to be amazed at how many don’t measure their progress. Quite often all they will know is how their turnover is going.

I doesn’t matter what field you are in, measuring results is key to understanding how things are running.

In motor racing, measuring even the tiniest amount can contribute to a winning performance. Recently I read an interesting article of an interview with Casey Stoner’s (2011 MotoGP World Champ) engineer. He states that Casey was able to start accelerating earlier in a corner than his team owner/lead rider in the 125cc class years ago. How did they know? They have telemetry that they are able to printout and check moment by moment. They were able to confirm that he was able to open up earlier and this may have only been a meter or two earlier, but what it equates to is a higher top speed down a straight due to effectively making the straight slightly longer for him. This is only fractions of seconds but it is the same sort of measurement.

Business has the same sort of process, it requires counting the various parameters to gain an overall view. There is a catch however.

Perspective

All measurement, indeed all thinking, depends on perspective. Let me explain.

My business relies on going out and quoting for our product to be fitted to the prospective clients home. So we measure the number of quotes to the number of sales, or conversion rate. How accurate is this? Consider that firstly not all the people we talk to want us to come out for a start, so we don’t count those. Then if we count month by month we could quite concievably count the same person twice, so we have to be careful. What I do is count everything that happens within the month, so quotes that came in during the month get measured as do the sales that happen from those quotes within the month. Then I also measure the sales that were generated from quotes given during previous months. After the month is finished I go back and add the sale if there is any that come in after the month. I keep all these separate so that I have fairly accurate figures.

I also measure the source of the lead. We gather leads from various sources and we know with a fair amount of predictability just what our conversion rate and average sale is from each source. If a source is requiring a huge amount of resource and not producing the leads, we keep an eye on it, change it, or even cut it out. This way you marketing can be accurately targeted.

What this amounts to is when I may be talking to my opposition or our main supplier (we are sort of a franchise), and they are claiming a high conversion rate, I can tell if they are bullshitting me. Or I can assume they are only counting some of the leads. We have a few lead sources that give us the bulk of our business.

It also gives me a year by year blow of how this plays out. I know, for instance, that August can be mostly quiet but come September it immediately picks up. October can also have a dip, November is usually very strong and it quietens down in early December just in time for Christmas.

I know that our average sale is fairly predictable for years and our average gross profit percentage stays pretty much stable unless we have a discounting war. Being mainly a manufacturer who quotes on jobs before they are costed makes this all the more important. We need to know if we are on track.

So measuring your results is a vital way to know how your business is performing. Just imagine if you took all the email addresses from customers that walk into your store every day. You would be able to not only know how many people walk though but also have a good data base. The other part of it is looking at trends, you would know if Friday was better than Monday, if the week after Easter died more than the week after the grand final.

Patience

What this all says is your business can become predictable. Even through hard times. Of course there are a lot more things that can affect it but they are often outside you sphere of influence and you will have to react to them. It can teach you the patience by just knowing everything will be okay. I often say “The tide goes out and the tide comes back in”. We know if we are able to hang around long enough, it’ll change in our favour.

I spent a short holiday in Thailand about six months after the tsunami of Boxing Day 2004 and I met a local on a beach just north of Patong who said to me “We take a lot from the sea, this time the sea took from us. It’s ok”. These things come and they go. It rebuilds. Be patient and determined.

It is not enough to succeed at something. If you want to be able to do it again, the process must be understood.

I have often seen people who ‘make it good’, then are unable to repeat what they just did. Take the music industry. As fickle as this industry is, there are some people and bands who seem to have a happy knack of being able to produce hit after hit. This is not luck. This is analysis of the situation and sticking to the formula that worked. A couple spring to mind. The Eagles were a band that hit on a formula at the right time and continued to produce music that worked for them until they broke up. They laboured hard at honing their skills and formed an alliance that saw some of the best mainstream music of their time. Bryan Adams, the Canadian singer songwriter is another one who has a written and been awarded for dozens of songs. His style became his trademark and he seemed to be able to serve up one hit after another. From another era, Radiohead have become the musician’s musicians because of their cutting edge alternative outlook, constantly changing but fielding songs that have also become very mainstream such as “Creep”. They continued to break new ground after they started selling albums on the net, not attached to any record company. Why is this? Why is it that some are able to do it yet others have one hit then disappear. The mainstream media will probably have you believe that this is all luck but I don’t think so.

Small business is exactly the same as this, some make a lot of money straight up but then falter or decide to go do something else. What happens next depends on whether they have learnt the lessons.

“Lessons will be repeated until learned”

I find that my life repeats a few things and, until I do sit up and take notice, the same things repeat. How do you get out of the cycle? The “Einstein Principle of Insanity”. ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result’. Lets put this another way. What are doing over and over, and expecting a different result from? I spent a couple of years asking this of myself. If I had tried one method ten times and I just kept blindly following it, it was insanity. Even things that others had apparently proven for themselves, I questioned it. I changed stuff and moved things and tried many different paths. This led me to the next principle.

“What gets measured, improves”

Count it. Then count it again. It amazes me how many businesses don’t measure everyday stuff. They guess at how many people walked into the shop, what their average sale is, what their conversion is, which parts of their business makes the money. A great part of success is analysing the numbers and finding the surprises. For a couple of years I went on the road and sold the product we were producing. I need to emphasise here that I am not a born salesperson, in fact I really dislike it but I sold about $1M of product in each of the 2 years I was out there. It doesn’t matter which sales book or school you go to, one of the fundamentals is “do a follow up”. Well, I hate the follow up!! Because it was my own business, I didn’t do it, but I still managed to do very well. The interesting thing was that when we employed a sales rep, he used to follow up everything and guess what? His conversion was less than mine!! I eventually convinced him that unless he stopped for a while and we really measured it, we wouldn’t know whether the follow up was effective or not. He did get better after a while but went back to following everything up. The other lesson I got from this was, “It ain’t necessarily so”.

I am a keen…some would say mad…follower of Formula 1 and MotoGP. I was reading an article the other day about how changes in technology changed the riding styles of the top riders. One of the summary points made by Mick Doohan was “If you want to win, you’ve got to do whatever the other guys aren’t doing”.

Analyse

It is vital to analyse the successes and the failures. You absolutely need to know why something worked or didn’t work. Make sure your method of gathering and recording the data is not flawed, it will give you a false reading. I once heard a guy say in a speech, “If you want to know whether you are going in the right direction or not, accelerate, you will get there quicker”. This probably isn’t bad advice and it stands for gathering data. For a few years we gathered our sales leads and conversions etc the normal way straight out of MYOB and recorded them on an excel spreadsheet. The problem was a nagging question in my mind for a long time that it wasn’t accurate due to ‘counting’ a lead twice if it was quoted in one month, then converted in another. I eventually developed a system that was much more accurate and I was able to recognise the fluctuations in the year easier…but I should have been on to it much sooner.

So if you can understand the process, you can repeat the process. Learn to be inquisitive about why things work or don’t. Why you made $180K sales in August but only $45K in September. Keep records of it. I cannot stress enough how much difference this makes to you business. Be patient, move yourself forward incrementally.