Magento CEO Explains How the Next Generation of eCommerce Is About Bringing the Store to You, Not Driving You into a Store

eCommerce is no longer about driving prospects into your funnel. Today you are engaging your customers where they already are and bringing the store to them.

Last month at Shoptalk, I had the pleasure of interviewing the CEO of Magento, Mark Lavelle. After establishing independence from eBay last year Magento rose to the number one commerce platform with 29.8% market share among the 30 most popular eCommerce platforms. It’s safe to say that Magento has its finger on the pulse of the eCommerce marketplace and it was a fascinating conversation with Mr. Lavelle. Here’s what he recommends to anyone looking to increase their eCommerce sales in 2016 and beyond.

Control the Customer Experience Despite How it All Evolves
“Today you need to own the front-end to differentiate yourself,” Mr. Lavelle said. “Your content and your commerce are coming together around an experience, whether you are a B2B or B2C company. Today’s eCommerce is more expert and knowledge driven. The digital experience engenders loyalty.”

And more and more frequently, these experiences are happening outside your traditional eCommerce channels. This is the idea of distributed commerce, which means your content is living outside of your website and even your commerce is becoming distributed through buy buttons and links on Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook and YouTube.

“Your job in digital commerce today is about removing friction and building a clean path to order,” Mr. Lavelle explained. “This requires fast response and a flexible digital platform to work from. Where are your customers spending their time? You need to get your CRM, your catalog and your inventory aligned so that as a marketer you can bring your store to your customers no matter what evolves over the next five years.”

Building Your Shopping Experiences Around Customer Engagements
The traditional way of shopping online has evolved and will continue to evolve at a rapid clip. No longer is it enough to focus on how you take your customers through a typical eCommerce funnel. Abandonment rates and check-outs are the basics that must already be mastered. Today the focus is on how you engage with customers, create an incredible experience and understand how they want to shop with you. Often this is outside your own web or mobile store funnel. Today the goal is to create the shopping experience around customer engagements–whenever and wherever that may be.

“The cycle used to be: (1) Get a customer to your webstore, (2) Get them onto a product detail page, (3) Get them into a shopping cart, (4) Get a transaction done, and (5) Send them an email to drive them back to your homepage to buy something else and get the cycle to continue,” Mr. Lavelle explained. “Now you may rather have your customer follow you on Instagram or Messenger than hitting them with an email because that’s where your customers are spending their time. Wherever your customers are spending time, you want to be there. You want to be spending upwards of 20% of your marketing time understanding where your customers are spending time–be that Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook, etc. — and how to engage with them all along the funnel. And it might not be that you’re selling them something. It might just be that you’re talking to them and showing them a context of what your brand experience is, or providing basic customer service. Your goal is to engage with them and be present wherever your customers are spending their time.”

Building Your Brand on Instagram
One of the companies Mr. Lavelle is impressed with is Carved. This is a company that has grown their business exponentially on Instagram. At the time of this article, they have over 27,200 followers and a simple link to www.carved.com/kerby driving the bulk of their eCommerce business.

A few years ago marketers were looking for ways to leverage Instagram to build their brands. Today you can run your entire eCommerce business on any of these social media platforms provided that you have the back-end support you need.

“Today, companies can post an image on Instagram and get thousands of likes and collect comments” Mr. Lavelle said. “They can then convert this to a sale by giving these prospects a link back to your shopping experience featuring the same image. This enables you to close out custom orders directly from the Instagram experience.”

Selling Healthy Snacks via Subscription to College Kids
Or perhaps you’ve heard of Graze? This company started in the UK selling healthy snacks to college kids. “Graze took the time to ask the important questions such as ‘What do you want to see in a snack?’ and ‘What would you like to see next?'” Mr. Lavelle explained. “The result is that they created demand for specific snacks which ended up in retail stores such as 7-11. What they ended up doing was creating demand for new products via a subscription serve into physical retail stores. So while Graze started out as a subscription snack company, they ended up building demand for and launching new products into physical retail.”

This all started with a social idea of getting people to buy snacks from a subscription model and ended up with what is really a traditional retail business.

Real-Time Mobile Shopping at the Frankfurt Airport
“We did this project in the Frankfurt airport with AOE, one of our systems integrators out of Germany,” Mr. Lavelle explained. “Frankfurt airport has over 300 retailers and is one of the largest airports in Europe. They have millions of people flying through this airport every day. They push the app to you while you’re on your phone and you can buy anything from any of these hundreds of retailers. They will then package what you bought and have it waiting for you at your gate. If your gate changes, they will move your purchased items to your new gate.”

This is a massive order management challenge that was accomplished with Magento Order Management software. The flying public in Germany is looking to have a positive experience while in the airport. The point being that you’re no longer driving people into your store, but rather looking for new and interesting ways to engage customers well before they walk into your store.

“Because mobile smartphones are so ubiquitous, anyone who aggregates buyers–from farmers markets to Time Square–now needs to be considered as an opportunity to engage customers with a retail experience that can be just as powerful as being on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest,” Mr. Lavelle said. “All these new things are possible because the software today is very flexible, mobile devices, Internet connectivity are ubiquitous, and you can connect with customers in ways you never previously thought possible.”

Content & Commerce Coming Together Around Experiences
The bottom line from Magento CEO, Mark Lavelle, is that everywhere you look, content and commerce are coming together around experiences. Where it used to be about driving prospects into your eCommerce funnel, today you are engaging prospects where they already are (online and in real life). Today it’s becoming less and less about your shopping cart experience (as this is now table stakes) and it’s more expertise and knowledge driven. Your company engenders loyalty through being relevant in the places where your customers hang out. This isn’t always a “buy now” message, but rather coming up with experiences that keep you relevant.

In this way, you get your brands to express the passion of what you’re doing. Those shared passions lead to highly engaged customers who are much more willing to buy from you when the need arises. Staying engaged and creating experiences online and in real life is where eCommerce has migrated. Today it’s not just about driving people into your store. Today it’s about bringing the store to your customers. That’s the power of distributed commerce.

For more on this topic, see how Under Armour is leveraging distributed commerce to fuel their growth.

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3 Exponentially Better Alternatives to Banner Advertisi

With the average click-through rate at a historic low of 0.06 percent, banner ads are failing to deliver results 99.94 percent of the time. Here are 3 viable alternatives with proven results.

Having started my career in 1994 building some of the very first commercial websites, I have more than 22 years of digital marketing game footage to draw upon. I even placed MasterCard’s very first banner ad on Yahoo in early 1995. At that time, we were delivering click through rates north of 10% on a consistent basis.

My how times have changed. What astounds me, however, is just how ineffective banner ads are and yet how prolific they still remain. As the CEO of Trepoint, a digital marketing agency, I am often asked what we think of banner ads. My answer is simple, we don’t recommend them nor do we take on banner advertising business. Betweengrowing ad blocking technologies, massive ad fraud, and banner ad blindness, is it any wonder why the average click through rate is hovering at 0.06%? But because 63% of all digital media is bought programmatically, it’s understandable why banner ads continue to flourish despite all the evidence that they are ineffective. So what are the alternatives?

Alternative #1: Influencer Marketing
In case you missed it, earlier this month I reported on a groundbreaking Nielsen Catalina Solutions study which highlighted the incredible impact of Influencer Marketing had on WhiteWave Foods. In short the results of the study showed thatInfluencer Marketing delivered 11 times ROI over all other forms of Digital Media. The study further provided a direct attribution between Influencer Marketing and in-store sales lift. Specifically, for every 1,000 impressions delivered through Influencer Marketing, WhiteWave Foods received $285 of incremental in-store sales.

So what is Influencer Marketing and why is it delivering substantially higher ROI? Simply put, Influencer Marketing is about sponsoring and supporting the people who your customers look to as subject matter experts. Whereas digital marketers like me used to hire celebrity spokespeople, today your customers trust well-known bloggers and social media pundits who may only have tens to hundreds of thousands of followers (instead of the millions we used to focus on).

If you’re looking to learn more about Influencer Marketing, I recently did a keynote speech about it and have posted my presentation online. I’m a big believer in this methodology because it requires that the content come directly from the influencers you engage which, by definition, dramatically reduces the two largest expense areas in effective digital marketing: content creation and distribution.

Alternative #2: Native Advertising
Originally, I was NOT a huge fan of Native Adverting. The early pioneers of Native Advertising were not diligent about disclosing the advertising nature of native and there was a lot of unnecessary consumer confusion. While it’s still not perfect, the recent federal mandates along with industry self-policing have helped clean up its act and now we’re seeing a substantial rise of Native Advertising.

Like Influencer Marketing, Native Advertising is exponentially more effective than banner ads with 3rd party studies an overall 88.6 percent increase in brand awarenessamong those exposed to the campaign. As savvy digital marketers look for viable alternatives to banner ads, more and more of them are turning to Native Advertising. Moreover, programmatic native adverting networks such as Instinctive, are even exploring entirely new business models such as charging for time spent with your content rather than industry standard metrics of “impressions” which typically only require a partial view (i.e. 60%) of a banner ad for one second.

Changes in the way you measure the levels of engagement with your content will ultimately lead to better targeting and even better ROI from your Native Advertising investments, which are arguably already substantially more valuable than traditional banner ads.

Alternative #3: Give It Up For Free
Before anyone will buy from you, they must first know, like and trust you. How do you get someone who’s never used your product or service to do that? The answer is to give your ideal customers something of value before you ever ask for the sale. What you are giving up for free will, of course, be different for every industry, but the core idea is the same. By giving something of value that no one else is willing to offer, you will stand out in a world cluttered with “me to” offers.

By giving it up for free, you are being disruptive to the status quo. In fact, it should even feel a bit uncomfortable and scary because you are taking a leap of faith that when your ideal customer receives this value from you that they will want more and, having had a great experience for free, they will pay you for your product or services.

This model can be seen in every industry and is usually the start of a massively high-growth company. Netflix, for example, continues to give you 30 days free of their streaming video service before they every ask you to pay. This model ultimately brought down the powerhouse that was Blockbuster. Google’s Android operating system completely disrupted the mobile phone industry and knocked out several major players who had previously dominated the space (think Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericson, etc.) Successful restaurants give entire meals away for free, Zappos was the first to give away free shipping BOTH ways, Wix gives website design away for free, and the list goes on.

While every industry may have a slightly different variation on the theme, the act of giving it up for free tends to be a disruptive business model that forces the larger players to respond (or ignore at their own peril).

Stop Your Banner Advertising Addiction
Regardless of which one you choose, the only bad choice is sticking to what’s no longer working just because it’s what you’re comfortable with doing. Go to BAA (Banner Advertising Anonymous) if you have to in order to free your marketing dollars for something that actually works.

You’ve known for quite some time now that the banner advertising model is broken. It’s simply irresponsible as a digital marketer to stick with a broken model when there are substantially better and more viable options out there. If you need a “sponsor” to help you with your banner advertising addiction, you can find one on our Facebook group. Together, we can kick this addiction and build a better digital marketing future for everyone–especially your ideal customers.

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At 24, This Recent College Grad Became the CEO of Her Father’s Company and Hasn’t Looked Back Since

The inspiring story of Amanda Holmes illustrates that there are plenty of Millennials who are ready, willing and able to take the reins of established companies.

My favorite sales book is Chet Holmes The Ultimate Sales Machine. Anyone familiar with this masterpiece probably also knows that Chet Holmes died at an early age of 55. What many people don’t know, however, is that his daughter Amanda Holmes, became the CEO of her father’s company, Chet Holmes International a year and a half after his death.

Here’s why this is an incredible story. Think about this for a moment. You’re 24 years old having been graduated from USC just 2 years earlier with a music degree (and a promising performing arts career) and you are faced with an incredible decision to “stay the course” with your original career path, or pivot and become the CEO of your father’s incredibly successful multi-million dollar enterprise with more than a 100 employees–most of whom are older than you and have been with the company for several more years than you.

Stepping-Up And Building The Future
So I asked Amanda Holmes how she felt about this incredible situation. To which she replied, “It was daunting at first. Who was I to come into this company and attempt to fill my father’s incredibly large shoes? So I just went to meetings and listened. I did a whole lot of listening for several months. Then I started asking questions. People would tell me to keep asking questions because my questions were really good. And so I did. Eventually it became clear that I was, in fact, best suited to be the CEO of my father’s company as I had spent so much time with him and understood his vision and how I could play an important part in that future.”

And it is at this point that I want you to think back to when you were in your early twenties and ask yourself if you were that in tune with how to come into an established company, listen deeply, ask great questions and decide how to build the future of an already successful company. I’m sure it helps to have an incredible mentor like Chet Holmes in your life, but as we know great advice only gets you so far. You have to be willing to take massive action on great advice in order to reap any actual benefits. This is what gets me excited and why I believe Amanda Holmes represents a mastery that is not typically associated with the Millennial generation.

Breaking Down Stereotypes
Last week while I was in LA, I attended an event hosted by METal, which is “an exclusive gathering of and for dynamic entrepreneurs and change-makers in the media, entertainment and technology space.” This was my first event and the founder, Ken Rutkowski, was not at this event. Instead there was a guest MC who showed an Official Comedy clip called Millennials in the Workplace Training Video. It’s a spoof training video about “…a new type of worker has entered the workforce. They are called Millennials and they’re terrible. Today I’m going to teach you about this new breed of worker so that you can avoid misunderstandings in which you feel the need to fire them immediately.”

What struck me about this video is that I’d heard that story before about my generation, Gen-X. It seems that every older generation feels that the up and coming generation is entitled and without the work ethic that got their generation to their desired rung on the corporate ladder. In my previous article, Growing and Thriving in the Age of Mediocrity, I surface a scary statistic that “workplace incivility is costing U.S. companies $300 billion a year and that 1 in 4 Americans have quit their jobs because of incivility at work.” A lot of this incivility comes from office stereotypes such as the ones called out in the Millennials in the Workplace Training Video.

Millennials Empowered
One reason why Amanda Holmes’ story is such an incredible inspiration is that it highlights such a contrast to the millennial generation stereotype. As Baby Boomers retire and it becomes painfully obvious that there aren’t enough experienced Gen-Xers to replace them, it’s people like Amanda Holmes that illustrate that there are plenty of Millennials who have mastered business at a young age and are ready, willing and able to take the reins of established companies and help them grow and thrive. Amanda Holmes has a unique perspective on this:

“There is a lot of talk about how large the Baby Boomer generation is, but few people talk about how Millennials are actually bigger than the Baby Boomer generation. There has been plenty of complaints from the Baby Boomer generation that Millennials cannot be hired because they’re lazy and disrespectful. But I see there are a lot more similarities than differences between these generations. It turns out that Millennials and Baby Boomers have the same values including family, friendship, and respect. It’s just different how each generation expresses these values. Baby boomers show respect with titles like saying, “Sir” or “Ma’am.” Whereas Millennials show their respect by giving honest feedback and speaking their thoughts. Same values, just a different approach to honoring these values. Since there are so many Baby Boomers in the workforce, Millennials will have to start taking over companies at an earlier age to account for the massive number of Baby Boomers going into retirement.”

And Amanda Holmes should know as she’s done just that. I feel very fortunate to have met Amanda Holmes and look forward to learning from her as she flexes her business muscle and takes Chet Holmes International to new heights.

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Innovation Is Not Enough. Consider an Alternative Disruption Path

While most startups are looking to disrupt an established big business or even an entire industry, Michael Docherty’s book ‘Collective Disruption’ provides a surprising and viable alternative.

Michael Docherty defines Collective Disruption as “harnessing the power of two seemingly disparate groups and aligning the best of both worlds at each stage of the value creation process.”

Those two “seemingly disparate groups” are (1) startups and (2) large corporations. The brilliant insight that Mr. Docherty shares is that both groups need each other. It’s not news to many that corporations are looking to startups like never before for new innovations. But he’s promoting the idea of early-stage partnering to co-create new businesses. Startups bring a level of risk-taking and entrepreneurial sprit that is lacking in most large corporations, while those same large corporations have the resources, experience and operational proficiency that most startups lack.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Docherty and I encourage you to watch our lively discussion about this topic.

Innovation is Not Enough
“Gone are the days when incremental core business innovation was enough to drive business growth,” says Docherty. “Core business innovation is now what it takes to simply stay in the game.” The whole concept of “New and Improved” is expected and is what it takes just to stay in business today. If you don’t make these small innovative changes, you are likely to go out of business. Simply put, incremental innovation helps you survive, not thrive.

“Consumers want to buy the new, exciting stuff,” Docherty explains. “Who wants the slightly new iteration on an old product you’ve known and loved when you can have the fascinating, mind-blowing newness of the latest gadget or software?”

With every industry experiencing an exponential rate of change, incremental innovation helps you stay in the game, but it won’t help you grow in any meaningful way. That’s why a new approach is needed; one that combines the power of large corporations with the scrappy nature of startups.

No Shortage of Great Ideas
“The world has no shortage of great ideas,” says Docherty. “What’s often lacking is the ability or the will to act on them.” In his book, he talks about the idea oftransformative innovation. This is the kind of innovation that doesn’t build off an existing product, but rather transforms through seeing the future differently (seerelated article on Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One.)

If your business has a problem following through on transformative innovation, Mr. Docherty believes that chances are “you are identifying needs to support today’s business, but are missing the major shifts with your customers.”

His recommended solution is that, “big businesses need to partner with entrepreneurs in new ways. The game has changed, so the players must change with it.” This requires a new kind of collaboration, which is less about strict (legal-binding) joint-ventures and non-exclusive agreements, but rather a focused collaboration between big and small companies to execute against great ideas.

Give Up the Illusion of Control
What’s stopped large corporations with working with startups in the past? The primary issue as Mr. Docherty sees it is the illusion of control. Large enterprises typically want to control ventures and partnerships with startups. But a large corporation’s need for control is often the very thing that destroys the entrepreneurial spirit that startups bring to the partnership.

Instead, he recommends that enterprises need to build networks of entrepreneurs. He outlines how to build these innovation networks using 5 steps:

  1. Set clear goals
  2. Identify key players
  3. Informally launch
  4. Formalize and Expand the Network
  5. Experiment and Evolve

Trust is build through action steps, instead of a “command and control” mentality. By taking a leap of faith that both parties will mutually benefit, Docherty sees collaboration in ways that allow collective disruption to occur.

A Model for Collective Disruption
“Collective disruption is about applying many of the concepts of collaboration to the strategy of new business creation,” Docherty explains. “It’s about building and nurturing a network of entrepreneurs, technology startups, and other creative minds and working in concert with your internal resources in a networked approach to rapidly envision, incubate, and commercialize a pipeline of new business opportunities.”

Docherty identifies the collective disruption framework in four iterative phases:

  1. Discover
  2. Define
  3. Incubate
  4. Integrate

When both startups and large enterprises play to their strengths, individuals are tapped for their specialties and transformative innovation can occur. The alternative distribution path is about startups and large corporations working together to co-create transformative new business opportunities. Mr. Docherty brings real experience to this book, having been a corporate executive, entrepreneur, venture investor and now CEO of Venture2, a consulting and venturing firm.

If you’re looking for a detailed roadmap on how to co-create transformative innovation, I highly recommend reading Collective Disruption. Michael Docherty delivers a well-documented path to success from which both startups and large corporations can benefit.

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62 Actionable Ideas for Getting More Clients From 13 Top Marketing and Sales Leaders

Talk is cheap and great ideas without action are useless. Instead, here are 62 actions you can take today from 13 brilliant sales and marketing thought leaders.

If you missed one of the best eight-hour-marathon, virtual events of 2016, Amanda Holmes and her team at Chet Holmes International have summarized the key takeaways. Thirteen of the top marketing and sales masters reveal their secrets–from Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com, sharing his thoughts on reaching 4X more prospects to Tom Ziglar of Zig Ziglar on living a motivated life. You’re going to want to bookmark this page and come back often.

But don’t just read and absorb this content–make an action plan to implement this sage advice. As CHI teaches, “It isn’t about doing 4,000 things. It’s about doing one or two things 4,000 times.” So pick one or two initiatives and, with pigheaded discipline and determination, follow through on them until they become habitual. Intellectual curiosity does nothing to help your business grow. Taking massive action on great advice does. So put yourself in a frame of mind ready to drink from the proverbial fire hose of sales and marketing wisdom. Enjoy!

Ken Krogue, president of InsideSales.com–Reaching 4x More Prospects

  1. Most companies average 1.5 phone calls to a lead before they give up. Standard procedure should be at least six to nine.
  2. Teach your reps to ask specifically for direct dial numbers from prospects (make sure your web forms do as well). You will reach prospects much more efficiently.
  3. Forbid your salespeople to ask prospects about the weather: Mandate they find three less generic rapport-building topics (it takes two minutes to do a Google-Facebook-LinkedIn search).
  4. Teach your sales reps to use “reverse customer referrals.” Search the LinkedIn connections of prospects to find anyone they’re connected with whom your company has already done business with. Now your reps can mention that common relationship to the prospect–you have instant social proof.
  5. Have your sales reps read these articles and turn their LinkedIn Profiles into little lead-generation machines: “Epic List of LinkedIn Profile Tips.”

Chad Kirby, Infusionsoft–Seven Things You Forgot to Automate That Can Double Your Sales

  1. Know exactly who your customers are. Get specific: Write down descriptions of basic characteristics; pains, problems, and challenges; benefits they seek; why they buy from you; the most common objections; who is not your target customer.
  2. Once you know these traits, check whether your marketing messages appeal directly to these specific prospects. If you don’t have educational marketing collateral, build it to attract these ideal prospects to opt in to your lead system (e.g., create a free white paper: “Five Ways You’re [pain point of your target audience], and the Two Things You Can Do to [benefit of working with your company]”).
  3. Look at the places where your leads might be falling through the gaps and create a lead-capture process for each of these potentially missed interactions:
    1. Web traffic that leaves your site
    2. Walk-ins who walk out
    3. Telephone callers who hang up
    4. Networking contacts who leave
    5. Tradeshow visitors who walk by
  4. Look at what you’re doing to nurture your prospects (educating them, training them, building trust with them), and see if you can’t procedurize those processes.
    1. Make templates for those follow-up emails (and automate them in a CRM like Infusionsoft)
    2. Stop wasting the time of a live person by answering the same customer questions over and over. Create a PDF with the answers to the most common questions your prospects ask. Automate the system so that enquiring or new customers automatically receive this PDF.
  5. If you can’t guarantee that you’re asking for a referral with every sale you make, you must automate this process. (It can be as simple as an email that says, “Is there anybody you would recommend our services to?” along with a contact form to fill out.)

Amanda Holmes, Chet Holmes International, with Shane Hurley–The One Strategy That Increased Appointment Setting 5.5X and Sales Conversions by 38 Percent

  1. If your company is self-focused, you’re wasting 90 percent of your time, money, and energy. Stop with the me, me, me, me, me: “I want your business”; “I want to sell my product”; “My product is great!”
  2. Get the attention of the 90 percent of prospects that weren’t thinking about your product or service by talking to them about what’s interesting to them. For example: “Hey! This is a problem that you are facing, or this is something that you’ve been looking for. I can give you some information that will help you with that.”
  3. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal prospect. What keeps the prospect up at night? (It may have nothing to do with your product or service, but can you grab the prospect’s attention by giving a solution to the problem or highlighting it?)
  4. Market data is way more motivational than product data. Example: Did you know that 75 percent of employees have stolen from their employers, and half of them steal repeatedly? (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). This market data creates a much more compelling reason to speak to Shane at Redfynn about protecting your assets than simply touting the features of his products and services.
  5. Create a presentation that educates your prospects about these pains. The presentation should also provide great solutions to those pains (hint: one, but not all, of these solutions is your product or service).
  6. Once this presentation is created, it becomes the ultimate vehicle for creating trust and rapport with your prospects before even pitching them on your product or service. Done well, such a presentation (CHI calls it a “core story”) establishes you as an expert and authority while simultaneously resetting buying criteria in your favor.

Keith Cunningham–Don’t Get Big, Get Rich: How to Avoid Dumb Tax

  1. Stop tolerating “below the line” culture in your company. You get what you tolerate:
    1. Backstabbing
    2. Smack talking
    3. Gossip
    4. Etc.
  2. Studies have shown that if a company is $10 million or less, there is a 90 percent chance that nobody on the executive team is consistently looking at the numbers! If you do not already, you must start paying attention to your metrics:
    1. The accounting: balance sheets, income statements, etc.
    2. KPIs: How does my profit compare with my revenue? How does my profit compare with my operating cash flow? Etc.
  3. Make sure you’re looking at the trends in these numbers over time. It is fundamental to running a successful business–trends over time tell you where you’re succeeding and where you need work. Without an eye on the trends, you’re just shooting in the dark.
  4. Stop making the same mistakes. Start keeping a log of lessons learned. Every time you make a mistake (or something goes better than expected), pull out the log and make a note of the lesson.
  5. Anytime you’re thinking about trying something new with your business, ask yourself these three questions:
    1. What’s the upside?
    2. What’s the downside? (What could go wrong? What if I’m wrong? And how would that play out?)
    3. Can I live with the downside?

Brendon Burchard–How to Get Millions to See Your Marketing Messages

  1. Content is the new currency. If you aren’t already, you need to start creating great free content for your audience. (Your only other option is to pay for every click.)
    1. You don’t need to create something every single day.
    2. Try creating one significant thing a week.
  2. Make sure when you’re creating content, you “particle-ize” it–that is, convert it to the proper format and disseminate it to all your media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.). You shouldn’t waste your time creating unique content for each platform.
  3. Implement “circular viralocity” in your social media efforts. This means make sure all your platforms link back and forth to one another. This interconnectedness causes all your platforms to grow much more rapidly.
  4. If you are not using retargeting in your business, you need to start; it isn’t optional anymore. You are blowing through leads and money if you don’t have a strategic retargeting campaign running.
  5. Keep in mind that at the end of your life, you will probably reflect back and ask yourself these questions:
    1. Did I live?
    2. Did I love?
    3. Did I matter?
    4. Live each day with so much intention that when you get to the end of your life, you are happy with the answers to those questions.

Clay Collins–How Leadpages Went From Zero to 40,000 Clients in 2.8 Years

  1. Instead of going out and hiring salespeople, consider hiring content creators to own different marketing channels (e.g., someone just to operate your YouTube channel and someone just for your blog).
  2. Put your content creators on a quota like you would a salesperson. Define how much revenue you want generated from that blog or that YouTube channel.
  3. Make sure to turn literally every single piece of content that you create into a lead-generation opportunity.
  4. Measure the results of your content creators. Most companies underinvest in content, because they have no idea how to tell what the ROI is on that content.
  5. Here’s where many companies fall flat: They fail to realize the value of creating unlimited budgets for things.
    1. If you have a machine that for every $1 you put in, $1.50 comes out, you should hire people to just feed dollars into the machine all day long.
    2. The key to doing this is measurement. You can’t even think about finding these “machines” in your company unless you’re measuring the results of what you’re doing.

Stacey Hylen, Chet Holmes International–Best Buyer Strategy: The Fastest, Least Expensive Way to Double Your Sales

  1. Compared with all potential buyers, there is always a much smaller number of ideal buyers. So ideal buyers are cheaper to market to and yet bring much greater reward. These ideal buyers are called “best buyers.” In some cases, this smallergroup of best buyers account for the majority of a company’s revenue. In spite of this, most companies market the same way to everyone. It’s time to create a special initiative to specifically attract these best buyers.
  2. Determine who your best buyers are. Are you already working with some of these best buyers? They can act as a good example of what similar buyers will look like: What kind of businesses are they? What industry are they in? What size are they? Etc.
  3. Once you’ve determined what your best buyers look like, you should create a list of specific targets. (Don’t be afraid to put some of the big scary names on that list.)
  4. Now build a plan for how you’re going to market directly to these targeted buyers every month without fail. For instance, you might send them a cheap (extremely cheap–otherwise it may be construed as a bribe) but creative gift (such as a key chain) with a letter every month. Follow every letter with a call. Every month.
  5. Now you go after that list with pigheaded discipline and determination (#phd) until they are all your clients. You never stop.

Tim Paige, Leadpages–The Perfect Sales Funnel

  1. If you don’t already have one, make sure you create a simple and free one-page PDF for your prospects to download from your website. This easy-to-make lead magnet will often outperform more complicated offerings.
  2. Use “content upgrades” to increase opt-in rates on all your free content (a content upgrade is something that enhances the value of that content, but in order to receive the upgrade, visitors must supply an email address).
  3. If you have a lot of free content online, look at your analytics and determine your five top performing pieces of content. Start by creating content upgrades for those pieces.
  4. Go through your website(s) and replace all imbedded opt-in forms with pop-up opt-in forms so that you force visitors to make a decision. Read this twice: 100 percent of visitors who do not make a decision whether to opt in on your website will not opt in on your site.
  5. Consider creating an automated email lesson or video lesson series so that people who opt in to your web forms start receiving something of value from you immediately.

Gene McNaughton, Chet Holmes International–Secrets to Hiring Sales Superstars (Do this one wrong and it’ll cost you on average $60,000)

  1. The very first step to finding superstar salespeople is to make a commitment that you’re only going to hire superstars.
  2. Write sales job ads so that a “hungry” person will feel like that ad is speaking to him or her. No: “Sales representative wanted.” Yes: “Our top performers make X.” (Look at what your top performer is making. If your top performer is making $80,000, $100,000, $200,000, put that in the headline.)
  3. Quantify what it costs you to take people through your hiring process. You will likely be shocked at how much you’re really spending as a result of not getting the right person.
  4. Your ad should challenge those who read it (“Superstars only. Must have a burning desire to succeed,” etc.). A good ad will weed undesirables out.
  5. Try putting this in your job ad: “If you feel like you’re a superstar, call us and leave us a voicemail that’s two minutes or less and tell us why you’re a superstar. If we contact you, then that means you’ve made it to the next round.”
    1. Half of these voicemails will be terrible: Boom, you’ve eliminated half of your candidates.
    2. At the end of an interview for a sales position, reject all candidates regardless of how they did. Those who continue to sell themselves are worth a second interview. Remember, how they sell themselves in the interview is how they’ll sell your product or service. Somebody who folds after the first no will not be a star salesperson.

Guruji Sri Sri Poonamji, Divine Bliss International–How to Do the Same Work in Half the Time With Less Stress

  1. “Be aware that stress and even depression are a result of attaching yourself to an illusion or a dream.”
  2. “Failure happens when you are limiting yourself to the somebody else you want to become. When you simply are yourself, there is no failure.”
  3. Upgrade your intellect; start working through your super conscience (the 97 percent of your brain that you’re holding out on and not using currently).

Ari Sherbill, PowToon.com–Six Genius Video Hacks That Generate Leads on Demand

  1. We live during a crisis of attention. The average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes (1988) to eight seconds (today). Your audience operates in three learning modes (visual, auditory, and kinetic). Your best chance at capturing this fleeting attention is to appeal to all three simultaneously.
  2. Consider animated visuals for your marketing. Animation abstracts the meaning of what you’re communicating and can thereby enhance the entertainment and attentional value.
  3. You can use a simple video creation software like PowToon to create video templates for your salespeople to personalize and send to each prospect (with that person’s name and specific pains to be solved). The novelty of a personalized video is such that people must watch it. It’s great for follow-up strategies.
  4. Can you use a simple animated video to liven up your Thank You page (or any of your webpages)? Remember, 55 percent of visitors to your website only stay for 15 seconds, on average. By simply adding a video, that jumps up to two minutes!

Ryan Deiss, Digital Marketer–Three Proven Email Marketing Campaigns You Can “Swipe and Deploy” in Your Own Business

  1. Using a flash sale campaign (no more than once a month and preferably once every two months) is a great way to create a buying frenzy from your email list.
  2. Can you create a targeted reminder (Are you still/Have you yet) email campaign? Here is an example:
    1. Prospect opts in and downloads a PDF: “Six Easy Steps to a Six Pack.”
    2. Every month you can now send an email with a little copy and the subject line, “Do You Have That Six Pack Yet?” Chances are, he or she doesn’t. You can proceed to offer the person your assistance in the email and repeat this every month.
  3. A great way to increase the engagement of your email list is to send out a faux quiz or survey.

Tom Ziglar of Zig Ziglar–How to Close More Prospects, Increase Productivity, and Stay Motivated

  1. For setting a goal,
    1. Write down everything you want to be, do, or have.
    2. For each thing you wrote down, ask this question: Why?
    3. If you can’t answer the “why?” it’s not your goal or dream.
    4. Check and make sure you haven’t confused your “what” with your “why.”
  2. Are you specific about your goals? If you’re not, it’s time to put a lot of furniture in that goal (e.g., if your goal is to buy a house, what does it look like? Where is it located? What color is it? What’s in the house?).
  3. Once you have this goal, now you want to get really deep into the benefits of that goal. The longer the list of benefits is, the more likely you’ll stick to the goal.
  4. Take stock of your bad habits: The fastest way to success is to replace bad habits with good habits. Every week, pick a small bad habit and replace it with a good habit. Do this for 52 weeks and you’ll have the best year you’ve ever had.
  5. A great way to motivate employees is to find out what their dreams are and then help them attain those dreams. Tie those dreams in to their success in your business.

If you found these action ideas useful, I encourage you to check out the full recording of the day. Chet Holmes International has made it available here. While I can attest that this list provides an overview of many of the concepts covered, the full sessions take you a great deal deeper into these powerful concepts, strategies, and tactics. And again, remember, insights without action are useless. It’s what you do with this information that will grow your business.

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3 Things You Can Learn from Tony Robbins Million Dollar Guarantee

If you are looking for world-class business insights you can immediately apply, consider the most powerful money back guarantee: $1 Million Dollars of Value or your money back.

Let’s talk about risk for a minute. If you had the courage to start a company or join a small business or start-up, then you have the entrepreneurial spirit. Every business has risk and every deal you choose to move forward on has inherent risk. That’s why smart businesses offer some sort of money back guarantee. Let’s face it, if one of your customers was unhappy with your product or service, they will ask for their money back anyway. And, if their complaint was legitimate, you’ll most likely do it. So why hide it? To stay in business, you must deliver 10 times the value that your customers are paying, or you risk having them come back and question your value.

What If You Offered 100 Times The Value Of Your Product or Your Money Back?

Would you even consider 100 times the value or your money back? Think about that for a minute. As a business owner or key contributor to your company, is that something you’d support? The vast majority of businesses owners I know would give an emphatic “NFW” (i.e. No Way) response.

So check this out. If you want to attend Tony Robbin’s Business Mastery event, the cost to you would be $10,000 (unless you first attended a UPW and bought it there for a discount). And right on your application form you will see Tony Robbin’s guarantee:

“If after attending the first full day of Business Mastery, you do not feel you have received $1 million worth of value to create exponential growth in your business, turn in your manual and materials and we will send you a full refund for the event.”

Personally, I prefer seeing the 90 second video with Tony Robbins declaring this guarantee to his audience, and then asking at the end of the 5 days how many people got not $1 million, but at least $5 million in value. Watch how the audience responds:

3 Applications to Your Business

There are three important lessons to be learned from all of this. You can take massive action today and immediately change your outcomes.

  1. Put Your Money Back Guarantee Up Front – If you take nothing else away from what Tony Robbins has done here, I urge you to consider putting your guarantee up front. Think about your best customer coming to you and asking for their money back. If the problem was real and you were unable to fix it, you would, in fact, give them their money back, wouldn’t you? Construct the terms and conditions any way you’d like, but by mitigating the risk of working with you, your business is going to grow in ways that it probably hasn’t in quite some time.
  2. Determine How You Can Add As Much as 100 Times the Value – Stop and quantify the value you’re delivering for the money you’re charging. If it’s “about right”, then you’re at risk of being disrupted by a competitor. If you can quantify 10 times the value, then you’re probably doing well and growing. However, if you want to experience geometric growth, then spend some time thinking about how you can deliver as much as 100 times the value or more. If you can quantify how you can consistently deliver $1 million dollars of value for every $10 thousand dollars your clients spend with you, then you have a winning formula that will sustain your growth for the foreseeable future. Your job, once you have mapped this out, is to make sure every possible prospect who could use your services knows about the value you deliver and how you guarantee their satisfaction and/or outcome.
  3. Decide How You Will Add A Minimum of $5 Million in Growth to Your Business – When you do the two items above successfully, you’re already on your way to growing your business by $5 million dollars. But we’ve only scratched the surface here. How long have you spent with this article? A few minutes? Imagine if you were to immerse yourself in your business for 60 hours with other like-minded individuals who are just as motivated to geometrically grow their business? All the while being guided by the top tier experts in their field. If you have a better plan than attending Business Mastery, please share it with me. Either way, decide right now what you’re willing to invest to get the outcomes you deserve. By takin g massive action now, you will end up where you want to be not just in the next 12 months, but over the course of your career – which I’m guessing is many, many more years to come.

Having attended Business Mastery twice myself, I can attest to the value. Ask me at the end of 2017 if I was able to realize the $5 million in incremental revenue I expect to see. If not, I can tell you that it’s on me and my team at Trepoint. Having the breakthroughs at Business Mastery are only as powerful as the massive actions you take coming out of this immersive experience. It’s about the 2 millimeter shifts, not the wholesale changes you make in your business. Taking massive action trumps having great ideas every day of the week.

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Why 96 Percent of Businesses Fail Within 10 Years

While there may be many contributing factors, there is only one reason businesses fail. Here’s what you can do to prevent your business from closing its doors.

I can remember the first time I heard that 96% of businesses fail in ten years. I was shocked and upset. How can this be? Most people are smart and if they have taken the risk to go out on their own and start their own company, they are willing to take calculated risks. Small businesses are part of the American Dream — it’s how entrepreneurs control their own destiny and make the world a better place.

But what’s happening if only 4 out of 100 businesses survive past the 10 year mark? If your company is a decade or more old, then congratulations, you’re one of the 4%! If your business is less than 10 years old, then I would like to share one of the most important lessons I learned from Keith Cunningham (otherwise known as “Rich Dad” from Robert Kiyosaki’s book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”) at the Tony Robbins Business Mastery event. It could be the defining difference between going out of business or accomplishing the very goals you set out to achieve.

Profit is a Theory. Cash is a Fact.
Why do most businesses fail? Because they can’t pay their bills. Most entrepreneurs either are (or start out as) financially illiterate. Unless you are into financial services or accounting, most entrepreneurs don’t go into business because they love numbers. Most entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to make the world better in some way and built a company around that idea. So what do they do? They hire accountants and controllers to manage their books.

The way Profit & Loss and Income Statements are constructed, most CEOs are trained to focus on the profits or EBITA of their businesses. After all, it’s what you are taxed on and how your business is evaluated. But profits are simply a snapshot in time. They are a theory because a number of factors determine if you can actually pull the cash out of the business.

This is where the “Cash is a Fact” comes into play. Why do most businesses fail? Because they can’t pay their bills. When you run out of cash, it’s game over. None of your vendors / creditors care in the least how much profit you’re showing on your books if you can’t pay your bills. Companies don’t go out of business because they lack profits on their financial documents, they go out of business because they don’t manage their cash and can’t pay their bills.

You Are Financing Your Clients (And Your Vendors)
Ever notice why massive companies tend not to pay faster than 45 to as much as 120 days? They are using their size and position in the industry to set their cash management terms. Unfortunately for many small and medium sized businesses, entrepreneurs end up financing their clients who are ten times their size.

The problem gets worse because in order to attract the vendors you need to deliver your product and you usually end up paying fast (as in less than 30 days). It makes logical sense as your ability to pay quickly puts your requests at the top of most of the vendors you have engaged. The problem comes when you get squeezed between attempting to be a good corporate citizen to your vendors, and being raked over the coals by your slow paying clients.

Controlling Your Cash Can Also Help Increase Your Profits!
If you’re not tightly managing your cash, then you will eventually be blindsided one day. Conversely, tighter cash controls will actually improve your profits. How? By having higher visibility around your expenses when you are focused on managing your cash. For example, did you know that by cutting your expenses by 10% you can increase your bottom line profit by as much as 50%? This is because as businesses grow, most entrepreneurs are focused on the big picture such as top-line revenue growth and their expenses begin to grow. Many of these expenses can easily be cut as they are not critical to servicing your clients or growing your business.

If you want to cut your expenses by as much as 10% in the next 90 days, sign every check. This is how most entrepreneurs started in the first place. Once you hire your financial support team, you stop being so diligent about the expenses of the business. Consider this a “check up.” You don’t have to do it all the time, just pick a quarter in which you see every penny moving through your company. Right away, you’ll see expenses that are either too high or simply not needed in your business. Cutting these costs will drop money to your bottom line and increase the amount of cash you can keep.

Taking Control of Your Business and Financial Future
If you’re tracking with me thus far, you are probably asking yourself how else you can you ensure your long-term financial health. In Keith Cunningham’s view, the number one problem CEO’s have is that they are not clear on what they are looking at when they read the financial documents that are prepared for them (usually by their accountant or CFO). After many years consulting on this problem, Keith created a tool called The CFO Scoreboard. The premise being that if you have a better idea of what you should be looking at, you are likely to manage the most important areas of your business.

I have been using this tool for the last couple of months and I highly recommend it. At its most basic level, it’s a financial dashboard that pulls important information from your financial documents and illustrates key issues in simple graphs and color coded positive (green) and negative (red) impacts on your business. The tools automates the red flags that show up when your financial data seems out of whack. In essence, it gives you a very clear picture of what’s working and not working in your business financially.

That alone would be worth it, but what you’ll really appreciate is the “What If” tab that allows you to project out and see in real-time what small 1 to 3% changes in your operations will do for your bottom line. Without seeing these impacts illustrated, it’s really difficult to internalize just how much of an impact a 3% change in your costs of goods sold has on your bottom line. By playing with the built-in financial models, you quickly discover just where you need to focus in order to take control of your business and financial future. I highly recommend setting up a demo of The CFO Scoreboard and seeing it for yourself. You’ll never look at your financial statements the same way again.

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Billionaires Master the Rule of 168: Life’s Great Equalizer

The Rule of 168 is one that cannot be broken and anyone who masters it will live a life of joy and utter fulfillment. Those who ignore it do so at their own peril.

One of the many reasons I love my coach, Chad Cooper, is because he often comes up with a blinding glimpse of the obvious–something that was right there in front of me all the time. Once you are aware of the rule of 168, then you will immediately see why it is life’s great equalizer.

The rule of 168.

One hundred sixty-eight is the total number of hours each and every one of us gets in any given week. No more. No less. What separates the ultra successful from the mildly so is what each does with this number of hours. The ultra wealthy and incredibly successful all live extraordinary lives. How is it that Sir Richard Branson can own multiple companies and still find time to become an expert kite surfer, while many of us stress out because we can’t seem to strike a balance between our careers and the many other facets of our life?

Time is the great equalizer of life.

Here is the beauty of the rule: It doesn’t matter how rich or successful you are–everyone gets only 168 hours each week. Period. You can’t buy more time, but you can sell your available hours to someone else. This is what the wealthy refer to asleverage. You probably already use leverage in your life. Do you have someone who cuts your grass or cleans your house? Or perhaps you have invested in a virtual assistant. Then you know the power of leverage. The question is, are you properly using the leverage available to you or are you being controlled by the leverage others have on your life?

Or, as Chad Cooper likes to ask, “Are you an extra in someone else’s movie script, or are you the lead author of your own blockbuster?”

The happiest, most successful people not only understand the power of leverage, but they also understand that time is the most precious commodity. Therefore, they do not squander it. They take the time to plan their weeks rather than allowing others to plan their week for them.

Stop allowing a to-do list control your life.

Most people use the worst possible planning methodology: the to-do list. By creating an overwhelming list of things you should do, not prioritizing them, and then attempting to cross them off, other people are free to add their items to your list. Your sense of being overwhelmed grows as you struggle to cross items off your list faster than they are put on, but the net effect is that the list is rarely completed. Instead, the list becomes a source of pain, stress, and something to avoid at all costs. This leads to procrastination and accomplishing even less than when you had no list at all.

Planning your extraordinary life.

Instead, take time to divvy up your 168 hours between the distinct roles you have made for yourself. When you subtract out seven nights of sleep, you’re left with between 112 to 126 hours (depending on whether you sleep six or eight hours per night). From there, you need to decide how to maximize the outcomes you want in your life given the remaining hours you have to work with.

Do you want to be an amazing spouse parent? How many hours in the week do you need in order to reach that outcome? If you’re finding that you’re working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, then you’re clocking 84 hours of work time and you’re left with only 42 hours. Add the two to four hours of TV most people watch ever day (28 hours) and it’s no wonder a lot of people are stressed out.

Taking control of your calendar.

Before you can design an extraordinary life for yourself, you first need to understand where all your time is going. Some of the most successful people, such as Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, started tracking their time with a log of every 15 minutes from the time they got up to the time they went to bed. This helped them see where their time was being devoted and what changes can (and should) be made to prioritized the most important items.

Resources available to you.

There are also really amazing tools available to you, including Tony Robbins’s RPM Life Planner. You can download the free version of his workbook and get the high-level version of his breakthrough thinking immediately. I highly recommend his 10-day audio book program, as it will help you change your outlook on how you manage your time. After all, it’s usually your psychology and lack of purpose that encourages you to procrastinate rather than dive with both feet into the things you know you want to accomplish.

There are also several books available on the subject and one that will be coming out later this year by Chad Cooper. I can’t talk about that one much right now, but when we get closer to the launch date, you can bet I will be sharing some of the incredible insights he has included in his book. After all, if you like the rule of 168, remember that it came from Cooper and there is a whole lot more where that came from.

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Tony Robbins on Acing the Age-Old Question ‘What Does Your Company Do?’

What business are you in? No, I mean what business are you really in? In other words, what core benefit do you deliver to your prospective client beyond the category or industry in which you’ve built your career? Here’s how to pivot to a much more powerful response.

One of the most powerful lessons Tony Robbins teaches at Business Mastery is to know where you really are and create an effective business map to where you want to go. Sounds simple enough, but most companies struggle to clearly articulate the business value of what they do for their customers.

Take my marketing firm, Trepoint, for example. If someone asked me, “So, what business are you in?” the short answer might be, “Digital marketing.” But that does nothing to inspire the person I’m talking to and make him or her want to hire me. In fact, all it really does is allow the person I’m speaking with to quickly file my business into a known category and switch to a different topic (thereby losing an opportunity to explore possible ways of working together).

What Business Are You Really In?
Tony Robbins asked his more than 1,500 attendees, “What business are you really in?” Meaning, what core benefit do you deliver to your client beyond the category or industry in which you’ve built your career? For Trepoint, we came up with, “We create breakthrough marketing and innovation that is as powerful as the clients we serve.” That really resonated to my core. The result was that it unleashed my passion and was much more interesting to whomever I was speaking with. What business is Tony Robbins in? “I get you to be the man or woman you were meant to be,” he said. “That’s what the F I do for a living.”

Many Incredible Examples
Scott Harrison, one of Tony Robbin’s top speakers, told the audience, “This is a wonderful time for you to review what your neighbor has written and, if you like it, steal it.” Agreed. While you are certainly encouraged to come up with your own unique answer, it really does help to get some diverse examples of breakthroughs in several different industries.

With that in mind, I will use the balance of this article to highlight eight industry examples that I thought were much more powerful than their original industry-specific response. I’ve also encouraged my fellow Business Mastery Gladiators to use the comment section of this article to include their own, as it just wasn’t practical to capture all 1,500 in this article.

  1. Are you in the real estate business? No, you’re actually in the business of helping families achieve the American dream. Or, better yet, you’re in the business of creating wealth through home ownership. Much better description from Century 21 Allstars’ Mirna Martinez.
  2. How about the video production business? You’re actually in the business of helping companies express and market themselves through turnkey video production services. Or, better yet, you’re in the business of making it easier for all companies to embrace and market themselves through digital media, saysVSP Worldwide Productions.
  3. Perhaps you’re a lawyer. Actually, you’re a professional problem solver. Or better yet, you’re providing peace of mind and a good night’s sleep during people’s most turbulent times. Wow. Love that one, from KER Legal Group.
  4. Are you competing in the fast casual food service business? Perhaps you are you in the business of fueling the world with energy, health, and vitality to help reduce the sickness and suffering in the world. Or you’re in the business of changing people’s lives through proper nutrition and lifestyle choices. Watch out, Chipotle! Johnny’s Garden is coming for you.
  5. Have a hardware store? To compete with Home Depot, you need to be in the business of helping your clients love and care for their home by providing world-class products, knowledge, and passion. Crown Ace Hardware is putting much needed services back into the hardware-store business.
  6. How about the insurance business? The value is really keeping people and their valuables safe and making sure they are financially secure when things do go wrong. Or, better yet, you’re in the business of creating an environment in which people have total security on what matters most to them, thereby allowing them peace of mind and to focus on living life to the fullest. It helps when your business’s name is iCare.
  7. Do you write children’s books? Well, you could be in the business of enlightening kids so that they can wake up from the paralyzing fear of death, while using book profits to improve the quality of life of those kids endangered by poverty and violence in America. Powerful stuff, Joseph Diaz-Oldenburg!
  8. And finally, what if you run a children’s camp? Perhaps you are really in the business of empowering kids to become their best self through inner confidence, self awareness, contribution, and success. Or perhaps you’re in the business of creating opportunities for kids to create the life they want. Now that’s a camp I want to send my kids to. Sign me up, Camp Lonehollow.

What Business Do You Need to Be In?
The last question in this exercise is future looking. Regardless of how awesomely you articulated your current state, technology, and innovation are moving so rapidly, you need to continuously look to the future to determine the business you are becoming. So, while Trepoint currently creates breakthrough marketing and innovation that is as powerful as the clients we serve, we also need to be working on our future business: Transhuman Revenue Reengineering for Web 5.0. But explaining that is for a future article.

The point is simply that you need to always be working on two businesses: the one you’re currently in and the one you are becoming. That way, you’ll never find yourself in the company of Blockbuster, Kodak, and Borders–none of whom changed fast enough to stay relevant and compete with the likes of Netflix, Apple, and Amazon.

So the next time someone asks, “What does your company do?” make sure you give that person a compelling answer that is client-benefit based to truly ace this question.

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Tony Robbins Shares 5 Words That Change Everything

In your business, relationships, or family life, pain is inevitable, but suffering is not. It turns out as few as five words can change everything from turning around a company to saving a life.

This week, I have been completely blown away (once again!) by Tony Robbins at hisDate With Destiny experience. By his own account, this event is his personal favorite, and three days into it I can see why. Tonight, I witnessed 12 people (out of over 2,500) stand up and self identify as suicidal. The first man was what any entrepreneur would consider “successful” when measuring from a business metric. But just like Robin Williams, who had economic and career success beyond what most people even dream of, this man was ready to end his life. “Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure,” says Tony Robbins.

I have never witnessed anything more powerful in my life. From the incredible courage to stand up in front of thousands and admit that you are ready to end your life to the complete and utter transformation that resulted in thousands of people, myself included, crying tears of joy right along with this man who chose to end his own suffering, not through suicide, but through love and gratitude.

“I love you. Thank you.”
After going through a process of clearly understanding his own value systems (i.e., what gave him pleasure and what caused him pain), this man was transformed by five words repeated over and over again: “I love you. Thank you.” This was a shortened version of an ancient Hawaiian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness known as Ho’oponopono. The original is, “I’m sorry. I love you. Please forgive me. Thank you.”

While it would be an oversimplification to say that these five words alone ended this man’s suffering and turned around his suicidal thoughts, they were the very words that ultimately led to the breakthrough he had. I was compelled to share this profound experience because far too many of my fellow entrepreneurs suffer needlessly. While pain is inevitable, suffering is not. And if the approach Tony Robbins shared can help a dozen people who were suicidal, I am certain that it can help the millions of entrepreneurs who struggle to grow and/or turn around their companies. But more importantly, by choosing to end suffering, this approach will also lead to fulfillment, which is the ultimate success.

The Three Ways We Suffer in Business
“When you get in your head, you’re dead,” says Tony Robbins. In business, it’s our story of limiting belief that causes us and our businesses to suffer. This story usually comes in one of three flavors: 1) Loss, 2) Less, or 3) Never.

The story often begins with a significant loss. This could be a major client, for example, who decides to take her business elsewhere. In business, we win and we lose, but it’s the meaning we give the event that causes positive or negative feelings about it. Feelings of failure and rejection are normal, but when we begin to obsess about ourselves, we move from the pain of the loss to the suffering around it. A question such as, “Why did this happen to me?” can be healthy if the purpose is to make the company better. But if this leads to a process of self-doubt, judgment, and continued negative feelings, it stops being about improvement and begins to chip away at your generally positive outlook.

Getting less of something can also cause additional suffering. When you expect one revenue target and end up with something less, this can trigger the same negative feelings. While it’s fantastic to hold yourself and your company to a high standard, it’s important to understand when that standard has become an unrealistic ideal that you can never meet. While a standard is something you grow towards, an ideal tends to be a vision of perfection that is not realistic. When you are less than the ideal you’ve set for yourself or your company, you will feel like a failure and needlessly suffer.

“Loss” and “Less” usually lead to the third feeling that “The business will never be ______ enough,” and this begins the downward cycle we’d prefer to stamp out.

The Three Ways to End Suffering
The good news is that it’s relatively easy to destroy your story of limiting belief. You can:

Appreciate and Enjoy
Learn and Grow
Love, Give, and Be Grateful

This is why the Ho’oponopono is so powerful. The statements, “I’m sorry. I love you. Please forgive me. Thank you,” lead to all three ways to end suffering. The core idea being a belief that everything happens for a reason, and that even the most terrible events usually offer an opportunity. Rather than focusing on our own suffering, we have an opportunity to learn from what just happened and grow because of it. The love, gratitude, and appreciation all reinforce the positive feelings we want to maintain, even when faced with incredibly difficult challenges.

The next time you feel yourself getting stressed out or frustrated with a co-worker, take a deep breath and say “I love you. Thank you.” You don’t even have to say it out loud or to the other person, as long as you mean it when you say it. Know that the frustration you’re feeling is usually an opportunity to learn and grow. That’s why you’re thanking the very person you are frustrated with.

Date With Destiny and Business Mastery
I am in no way doing justice to the first 40 hours of the Date With Destiny experience I’ve just had. But when I experience something incredible, I want to share it with as many people as I can. If you’re struggling with your business or sense of purpose in life, then I strongly urge you to check out Tony Robbins’s Date with Destiny (for personal growth) and Business Mastery (for corporate growth).

Maybe when The Beatles wrote, “Love is all you need,” they were right in its application to business as well.

 

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