A Few Good Principles
10X Business Letter
August 1st, 2013
San Diego, Ca
Sunny 75 Degrees
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Dear 10X Business Builder,
It's a big world world out there.
Just 15 years ago before the internet had really taken off, our world, our opportunities for wealth creation were vastly different.
But today, we truly are a global economy.
I have a friend that is from Switzerland but he does most of his business in Hong Kong and Malaysia.
I have a family friend from London, UK that is a major stakeholder in a packaging company based in Azerbaijan.
I have a Brazilian friend that imports electronics from China and sells them in Brazil.
Most of this would not have been possible just 15 years ago — had it not been for the advent of the internet and access to the internet.
The reason I bring this up is to point out that opportunities to create and grow a business today are 100x more prevalent than just a few years ago. They literally are limitless.
If you have started a business and it's not at the level you want it to be, it's probably not because the "right opportunity" hasn't come, because they are everywhere. It's most likely because you haven't learned some fundamentals of business to know a good opportunity from a bad one and to make smarter decisions.
Ultimately the business that rises to the top in any industry is the one that makes the best decisions. (TWEET THIS)
Decisions like:
… What products to offer?
… Where to market them?
… What systems to put in place?
… Who to hire? Who to partner with?
… When to cut your loses and change directions?
All of these types of decisions effect the direction of your business longterm. The decisions that you are making today are going to decide where your business is headed 5 to 10 years from now.
When tasked with making the hard decisions of what to do, I find living and dying by a certain core principles makes my decisions easier.
In my personal life, I live by 3 rules:
1.) Work hard
2.) Do my best
3.) Do the right thing
In business it's not so cut and dry but here are a few of mine…
"A Few Good Principles"
Rule #1: "Without the sale there is no business". Your sales process IS the nervous system of the business. Without one, you're dead. Plain and simple. Before you work on customer service, before you hire more employees, you have to figure out how to "best" sell your product or service. I would prove my sales process even before I made business cards. (To this day, I still don't use business cards).
Measure Everything: One of my mentors Chet Holmes taught me a principle that I find most people don't abide by and that is, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." So if there isn't a way to measure performance, he doesn't spend a penny on that activity.
It seems obvious, but so many clients are spending money on advertising that they have no idea if it is working or not. They are paying for customer service training but they have not metrics in place to see if it is being effective.
The Power of 90 Days: This is one that I learned from Rockefeller. Rockefeller believed that your company should have a 15 – 20 year vision and then you should set up 90 day goals that move you towards that vision and forget about the rest of the time in the middle. It's amazing what you can accomplish in 90 days!
It's a fundamental that I have used with great success, not only in our business, but also in my health and fitness goals as well.
Always ask WIIFM?. Right now video marketing is all the rage, we sell a lot of video marketing content. A lot of people see this as the next hot opportunity, which it is, but there is a right way and a wrong way to use it.
If you don't understand this principle, you may be one of the people that create videos that shout, "look at me", or "me too" messages, but if you understand marketing you know that viewers want to know "what's in it for me?".
Your videos should be focusing on how you can enrich their lives, not on the 15 features your product has to offer.
In EVERY aspect of your business you need to be answering "What's in if for me?" (from the perspective of the client/prospect)
One degree is a whole new destination
These are just a few of the principles that Roberto and I believe and follow. Though this list is small and may seem inconsequential , it is the culmination of these small distinctions that lead you and your business to a whole new destiny.
What are some of the principles you live and die by to make better decisions?
Loving, Living, Giving Large,
Jeff Paro
Editor, The 10X Business Letter
PS – If you don't feel like re-creating the wheel and would like some help implementing these principles… we can help.
