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):

Nando is told there is extra space on the plane flying his rugby team to Argentina, so he offers a few spots to his mother and sister. The place crashed into the side of a mountain and the back half was lost. Nando woke from a concussion to find his mother was lost with the back half of the plane and his sister in critical condition (she died shortly after). The only food they had were a few packs of peanuts, rationed at something like one peanut a day. The temperature was so absurdly cold that they slept on each other and took turns breathing on one another to keep warm.

They assumed they would be rescued, and they’d only need to survive a few days. 10 days into it, however, they heard the radio broadcast that the search was called off. Not too long after, an avalanche came, burying the place, killing a few of the survivors, and injuring a few others. It took them days to dig out, and they were forced to survive on the bodies of the dead to make it through the worst part of winter.

As spring approached, they decided the only way to survive was to send someone out to find help. Nando and Roberto volunteered, thinking that they were on the far edge of the mountains and that they would find civilization just past the first ridge. In reality, the first mountain cap only revealed another, and after that, sheer ice. With mountain tops as far as they could see, they trudged onward for 10 days and 45 miles of frozen wilderness until they saw life – a farmer on a horse across the river, which ultimately led to the rescue of the remaining survivors.

The past few years the world has seen a lot of stress. We’ve seen multi-million dollar industries crumble and experienced a dangerous level of unemployment. Losing a job, getting a divorce, no customers are buying what you offer, everyone on your team hates each other, can feel like the world is coming down on you, but when you look at Nando’s experience, would you trade circumstances? Nando’s story puts life’s troubles into perspective…and reminds us that the only alternative is to keep moving forward, even if you don’t know exactly where you’re going.

Nando went on to run a successful business, but it wasn’t all cake and ice cream. He dealt with tough situations the same as the rest of us. In dealing with adversity, he says “Sometimes things do not go in the direction that I want them to go, but I keep moving on regardless. I look at the situation through the storm, always going forward one step at a time.”

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.

As my success coach Steve D’Annunzio asks:  Where have the most profitable clients come from over the past 3 months?  What is the common theme across those clients and what is it you are providing that makes the clients happy to pay you?  What is the common size of these clients?  What category are they generally from?  What are their locations?

If the answers point towards the companies paying me the most profit, why would I not want to go get more of the same?  Why would I not want to build on this synergy and find a way to get the most scalability possible by giving the clients what they love while also getting paid at the most profitable level?

Steve tells me that when those things happen, you are in “FLOW.”  When it’s right, you notice it in the areas of time, energy and currency because they will all be jamming together like a great jazz band or orchestra.

As we close in on the end of the year, many businesses are looking deeper at what they are doing and may be considering these same types of questions.  Another beneficial exercise that can help to open your awareness to all the options is the basic Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats or SWOT analysis.  We utilize this every quarter to challenge our business and ensure we are considering all possibilities and are not about to get eaten by something sitting around the corner waiting to pounce.  Remember the Software Monster.

We found that we spent too much time gathering data from all the participants for SWOT, leaving us little time to really dig into the data we had pulled out.  To fix this, we built a tool that has helped us ramp this up before we start our planning meeting and has given us much more time to go deeper.  This tool, called MeetingHabits, can now be utilized for free, and it may stay that way as we study how it benefits us.  We would also like hearing how it helps you if you would like to share your experiences.

As you work to focus more on bringing the most value to a core group of clients that will put you in the best FLOW, what are you doing to make sure your business is harmonizing the best tune?

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.

In Chet Holmes’ book “The Ultimate Sales Machine” he discusses time management secrets. The first chapter digs into an effective daily routine that will increase your productivity several times over. The first step is to make a list of the top 6 things you need to get done. Maybe you already make a list, I know I do, but the key here is to pull from your regular to do list and only focus on the top 6 things.

Next you take those 6 things and figure the amount of time each task will take. The total should not exceed 6.5 hours because you want to leave time for the “unscheduled stuff” – time to be reactive. The last step is to prioritize…putting the most important items at the top to be completed earlier in the day when you have the most time and energy. His process forces the majority of your day to be proactive, and less reactive, thus getting more done. I’m trying it right now and so far, so good!! How much of your day is spent being reactive, instead of proactive?

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.

Occasionally I would do yard work for Mr. Buckholtz for extra money. Over time he recognized my work ethic and desire to learn, so one day he offered to teach me how to make clown shoes. With my mother’s permission and a nervous enthusiasm, I accepted, unaware of what was in store for me.

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.

While there I attended programs on knowing your limits, and designing your personnel life plan. Verne Harnish introduced the personal one page plan, or the ME page. We discussed things like, “How important is money?” and “How much is enough?” Social entrepreneurs were a common topic, as well as finding strength in all the challenges of life and business.

A fellow entrepreneur, Nando Parrado, gave a testimonial on the Miracle in the Andes, his story of surviving 72 days when they knew no one was coming. Nando and one of his Rugby mates inspired us with strength and courage with their fight against the cold and mountains. They hiked over 40 miles of nasty terrain to find help and see the team they left behind get rescued. On a scale of 1 to 10, this story was a 15…and is to be continued in a later blog.

I began working on my own BHAG on this trip, and I made a commitment to create 3 very deep relationships that will help me grown and be a strong resource for me in good and bad times. Keith Farrazzi talks about this in his new book, who’s got your back. Working on personal goals has been eye opening for me and has allowed me to combine my thoughts about my life with the success of my business in a way that brings more meaning and satisfaction to all that I do!

Whether you are just starting out, or you’ve already achieved success in your business, have you thought about the major accomplishments you want above all else in your life? Look at it like this: If you were a big ship leaving behind a wake that rippled through all those you pass by, one day when you looked back at that wake, how do you want to have affected those you’ve passed? How do you want them to remember that wake?

The people (it is always mostly about the people) and the speakers in this beautiful city of Barcelona, caused me to stop and have some serious contemplation about my future.

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.

48 weeks X 40 hrs = 1920

Now divide your annual income by the 1920 to get your hourly value. Let’s use this example below:

$100,000 of annual income divided by 1920 = $52 per hour

With that said, if you are doing work that is worth less than $52 an hour, you are hurting your productivity and profitability! Do you fix the copier when it is broken, file a bunch of papers, or spend time with a bum computer? All these services can be valued and compared to your hourly worth.

This same exercise can be done to determine your Corporate Hourly Value: Corporate Annual Revenue / (1920 x team members) = Corporate Hourly Value

Example:

$1,000,000 / (1920 x 5 team members) = $104 per hour.

This is a great way to determine if you need to hire others to do the things that you should not be doing given your strengths (see Maximization blog). The more time you spend doing the things that you have a natural strength or core competency to do, the more energized you become as determined in Marcus Buckingham’s research on strengths.

Joe John says “Revenues are directly linked to the size, depth and breadth of your client relationship and profit margins are directly linked to the size and productivity of your staff”.

To sum this up the law of 1920 says that how and what your team works during the average work hour determines the success of the practice!

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 Chartered 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.

Peter demonstrated that if you add the S curves on top of each other (as shown below) and draw a line between them, it shows the steep declining cycle that happens over and over again in companies with a long history. What do these companies do to keep from going out of business during these declines? They have to make changes and inject something different, something new, something innovative, to start the cycle over again. If not…what happens?

 Peter talked about how we can use this analogy in life as well. This really got me thinking, and I have spent the past week pondering how many areas of our life this theory applies too. Think about relationships and marriage. How many do you see that are short lived, that only make one S curve cycle. How many go through multiple S curve cycles? Do the longer ones add something different, something new or innovative into them? 

Think about the S curve as it applies to our other interests in life…our workouts, our diet, our favorite sport or team and even our friends. I can only imagine how many more excited fans we’ll see this year for the TN Volunteers football program with the new, young, energetic coach Lane Kiffin at the helm. What is it in our workouts, our diet, or our relationships that we can add to keep them on an upward growth curve?

If you are a business, what are you doing if you are starting to round out the top of the S? Are you looking at new markets, new products, a strategic partner, a new leader, technological innovation, or going to the web? We all know that change happens around us and we also need to change with the times!

If you asked me the business authors out there who I think provide the most value, I would have to say Jim CollinsPeter DruckerIPS Millennium Fund i

In Great by Choice, Collins and Hansen set up an awareness of how three key areas acted as the common themes in the companies that have dealt with uncertainty, chaos, and luck as well as why some companies thrive despite all this. What they found was very interesting and contradicts common thinking about great companies. They discovered what they call 10Xers (companies that have been beating the marketing and comparison firms by at least 10 times in stock market performance) were not more visionary, more bold, more risk taking, more innovative, or more creative than the comparison companies.

They were more of 3 things:

1) More Disciplined

2) More Empirical

3) More Paranoid

This book is very eye opening! When we think of a company that has had great success, we usually assume it has done so with a new break through idea, a new patent, or by taking a big risk that is paying off. However, this was not the case. Of course, to a point, these companies were innovative and creative, but they became really great by finding what works through empirical evidence, testing that out, and then being super disciplined to get it done. They also worried excessively about what was out there that could change the game for them.

I will discuss each in more detail in next week’s blog. Happy New Year, and I wish you much success this year being worried about what is coming, gathering evidence that your ideas work, and implementing them with vigorous discipline.

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (also a movie) is a good example of recent intrigue into the laws of attraction…and it all begins with changing the way you think.

The Prosperity Paradigm, by Steve D’Annunzio. This book uses actions that “align with universal laws that naturally attract success as surely as gravity attracts objects to one another.” It helps one to learn how to open up to the mindset of abundance – well worth the read.

Maybe this will help open your mind to see that abundance is something we can all have.

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. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these, so we can have a better understanding of how to apply them in our own businesses.

In the core behavior of fanatical discipline, Collins discusses how these companies had a relentless approach in implementing their processes and strategy. Collins describes “relentless” as “consistency of action, consistency of values, consistency with long term goals, consistency with performance standards, consistency of method, and consistency over time.” He then adds, “For a 10Xer the only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult.” These 10Xer companies operated on a completely different level of discipline than the average or even the comparison companies. They were fanatics about it!

In regards to the core behavior of empirical creativity, Collins shows that 10Xers would try things in the marketplace, get feedback, make changes, and get more feedback. They relied on this practice to make bold moves with less risk. He says, “By empirical, we mean relying upon direct observations, conducting practical experiments, and / or engaging directly with evidence rather than relying upon opinion, whim, conventional wisdom, or untested ideas.” I really relate to Collins analogy of firing bullets instead of cannonballs. Fire the bullets and make adjustments to be sure you zero in on the target. When you have a lock on the target, then you fire your cannonball.

When observing the core behavior of productive paranoia, the 10Xers displayed a sense of constant worry in regards to what could cause their demise in good times as well as bad. They worried, like Gates, that the guy in the garage would come out with something that would sink them. Like me, you may remember Andy Grove of Intel, a 10X company, coming out of the cover of Fortune with the title Only the Paranoid Survive.” Collins says, “They (10Xers) believe that conditions will – absolutely, with 100 percent certainty – turn against them without warning, at some unpredictable point in time, at some highly inconvenient moment. And they’d better be prepared.”

I have discussed many times in these writings how Efficience is working toward its BHAG by creating many products in the marketplace and observing the evidence of what works. Those are our bullets, and when the empirical evidence comes in, we will fire a cannonball. I expected this to be a core behavior, but the other two behaviors of discipline and paranoia found in the 10Xers surprised me. We will be working hard to step up to our discipline and paranoia going forward. How will you use these behaviors to be great?