An Entrepreneurial Journey

What do YOU do when things don’t go your way?
Categories: Efficience
Tags: Motivation, Nando Parrado
If you follow my blog you might remember my mentioning Nando Parrado several months ago following my trip to the EO Barcelona University. His story was one of the most inspirational stories of my life, and I really want to follow up on it a little more closely.

Nando’s story is about his experience surviving a plane crash and 72 days in the Andes Mountains before walking out with Roberto Canessa to save themselves and their rugby teammates. It’s difficult for me to convey to you how powerful his story is, but here are the highlights (I highly recommend reading his book or watching the movie):

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SWOT your Way to Focus and Flow!
Categories: Efficience
Tags: business, Business Decisions, Business Growth, Change, Decisions, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs Organization, EO, FLOW, Forum, MeetingHabits, Software, Steve D'Annunzio, SWOT
When you run a business, various opportunities often present themselves and persuade you to run off in different directions, pulling you away from your focus. This happens to me frequently, and I find it difficult to avoid being sucked down a path that sounds like the next great avenue for huge success.

Thankfully, my partners, EO Forum, or my team usually slap me back into reality. Taking a closer look at what you are doing can also help you discover if these opportunities are worthy or if the current focus is best.

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Proactive Vs. Reactive
Categories: Efficience
Tags: BHAG, Chet Holmes, Jim Collins, Productivity, The Ultimate Sales Machine
I’ve written a lot about execution and getting things done. A few years back we created a software program (FlockGPS) to help us execute on our strategic plan by knocking out quarterly goals on the way to reaching our longterm BHAG, or Bug Hairy Audacious Goal (as coined by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great).

Another aspect to execution is in the day to day – how to manage your time effectively and have productive days that add up to your longer term goals. We all struggle with getting tied up in so many things we must be reactive to, and not making time for those things where we must be proactive.

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Sometimes only a clown shoe fits….
Categories: Efficience
Tags: Entrepreneur, Motivation, The Purple Cow

When I was about 13 years old I had a neighbor named John Buckholtz. Mr. Buckholtz made clown shoes for a living, a family business that dated back to 1873. His grandfather was Raymond Griffin, the son of James R. Griffin, who originally founded Griffin Theatrical Shoe Co. By the time the business was handed down to Mr. Buckholtz, he was one of less than a handful of clown shoemakers in the world, and arguably the only one who still custom made them by hand.

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Designing Your Life at EO Barcelona
Categories: Efficience
Tags: BHAG, Entrepreneur, EO, Goals, Jim Collins, Nando Parrado, Personal Growth, Purpose
I’ve attended EO Universities for several years now, but this year was unlike any I’ve ever attended. I went for the first time to Barcelona, Spain. The theme of the University was “Design Your Life”. The idea was to focus on what you really want out of life, and what you’re doing to get there. It’s like choosing a personal BHAG – your very own Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

As entrepreneurs, we set goals all the time, but experience has taught me that we tend to view are business goals and life goals as one in the same; that by reaching our business goals we receive all we want out of life. Shouldn’t our businesses really be the means to our personal goals and the life legacies we want to create? This isn’t the case, in that, more often than not we let our businesses consume our lives and distract us from our families, spousal relationships, and our own personal paths.

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What Are Your Worth per Hour?
Categories: Efficience
Tags: Law of 1920, Productivity, Profitability
What are you worth per hour? What is your company worth per hour?

Are you doing the things in your work that are allowing you to bring the most value to your role, team and company?

There is a way to analyze this and you do it by using the law of 1920. I have done different forms of calculations to look at hourly worth before but Joe John Duran simplified this for me when he discussed this at EO Barcelona University. So here we go. If you assume that with vacations and holidays you have 48 work weeks a year and you multiply that by 40 hours a week you get 1920.

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The S Curve
Categories: Efficience
Tags: Business Growth, EO, Investing, Personal Growth, S Curve
On my trip to Canada for the EO Conference, Peter Thomas, who I introduced in the last blog, (founded Century 21 in Canada and took it to 9 billion in sales) spoke to us about the S Curve.

I spent many years in the investment world and back in the early nineties I went thought the C hartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program. We discussed the S curve in depth, which depicts the life cycle of a business. With the S tilted forward a little, you can see how a growing company starts out flat for a bit, then takes strong spurt upward and then levels off and starts to decline. This is the life cycle of most businesses, usually lasting 5 to 7 years. Hang on for a second if you think this may not be relevant to you.

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3 Keys to Business Greatness!
Categories: Efficience
Tags: 10xer, BHAG, business, Discipline, Empirical, Entrepreneur, Goals, Great by Choice, information revolution, Jim Collins, market growth, New Years, Paranoid, Peter Drucker, strategic planning, strategy
If you asked me the business authors out there who I think provide the most value, I would have to say Jim Collins and Peter Drucker. Both of these guys have provided huge insight to the business community on how to run a successful company. Like most businesses, we at Efficience are starting the year formulating strategies and goals to make forward progress toward our destination, and reading Collins’ and Drucker’s material has always been good preparation.

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ABUNDANCE – [uh-buhn-duh ns]: an extremely plentiful or over sufficient quantity or supply
Categories: Efficience
Tags: Abundance, Creativity, Prosperity, The Prosperity Paradigm, The Secret
My son (Tony) graduated from college back in May from the University of TN. I was toasting him, my niece (Danielle) and a bunch of graduate friends at his college graduation party when I shared some comments and personal perspective about looking at their life ahead. The toast went something like “there are great opportunities out there to grow and advance yourselves and I feel a lot of you have a head start because I see you have a mind set of ABUNDANCE! This allows the things in life you want to have to flow to you much more easily!”

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Choose to be Great with These 3 Behaviors!
Categories: Efficience
Tags: 10xer, Andy Grove, BHAG, Bill Gates, Business Decisions, Business Growth, Creativity, Discipline, Drive, Empirical, Entrepreneur, Great by Choice, Paranoid, strategic planning
In last week’s blog, I introduced the three core behaviors for business greatness as researched by Jim Collins in his new book “Great by Choice.” These behaviors include fanatical discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia.

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