FedEx and UPS are profitable; the Postal Service is awash in red ink. AmTrak loses about a billion dollars a year. FannieMae and FreddieMac are so beyond bankrupt it’s unfair to call them zombie institutions. Dead yes, walking no. As a matter of fact, every business the government has attempted operating or micro-managing has gone broke, is broke, or – in the case of Social Security – is on an inevitable march to being broke. Yet we actually debate over whether or not government should run different businesses or industries. We might as well be discussing having hamsters drive snow plows in winter storms.
There are things that just do not work. No matter who tries them or their intentions. In the direct sales world, as an example, analysis-based selection of winners and only recruiting/hiring winners based on psychological profiles is a failed concept. The only thing that actually, consistently works in direct-selling is sorting out winners from losers via their behavior. No one can truly tell you if Bob can or will sell here until we give Bob the opportunity to sell here. (Corporate sales is different. Selection assessment tools can be useful.)
In this way, success is not a mystery. It’s finding out what doesn’t work and then not doing it, and finding out what does work and doing more of it. Not much of a seminar, but there it is. So, here’s a cool idea: Identify the 10 things that work best for you and your business – absolutely, positively, without question or ambiguity, factually, profitably. Do more of them. Stop doing everything else. You know the cliché: INSANITY is doing the same things in the same way and hoping for different results. So, stop the foolishness.
And here’s a more advanced app, as a bonus: Look for ways to repeat what works exactly as it works. On a private coaching call, one of my clients told me he had generated 10,000 leads, converted 8{cd266c1509fca34f59dc93da7daf12a6ee52c6401aabb2126e757d9de7c223fc} to buyers of his main product, and made about $2 million net doing it. He has umpteen steps in his very follow-up sequence trying to sell that product. But he still has 800 buyers and 9,200 non-buyers. He has 11 other products. I said, “Pick one of the 11 and
repeat the whole successful process again.” This had not occurred to him. SANITY is doing the same thing exactly the same way to get the same desirable results.
So, here’s something that surprises many – how stubbornly close to their knitting many Renegade Millionaires stick. They get a formula, a modus operandi that works, and then they doggedly work it, and are reluctant to suffer distractions or deviation from it. Most entrepreneurs sitting atop big enterprises they built from scratch are narrow in method. Repeaters of what works.
I’m not opposed to innovation, testing, even controlled risk at all, but I am opposed to neglect of the proven.
