Last week one of the great entrepreneurs of the world died.
Dietrich Mateschitz, the multi-billionaire founder of Red Bull.
But there is a powerful lesson he can still teach you.
Because the same technique Dietrich used to grow his company you too can use to grow your business.
You see Dietrich did not invent Red Bull.
He was in Thailand and saw there was an energy drink called Krathing Daeng, which was very popular with workers and truck drivers, to keep them awake. (At that time, such high-caffeine drinks did not exist in the western world)
He reached out to the Thai businessman who owned the company, and they agreed to create a version of that drink for the western market. (Krathing Daeng translated into English is ‘Red Bull’).
Fifteen years later he was a billionaire.
So if you are wondering how to grow your business, try using the same method Dietrich Mateschitz did.
Look at what other countries are doing in your industry.
Then see if you can adapt their ideas so they work for you.
It’s never been easier to do this.
All you have to do is Google companies in your space in different countries, visit their websites, and see what they are selling- and how they are doing it.
When I coach entrepreneurs, this is one of 21 methods I use to massively increase their income.
After all, if it worked for the founder of Red Bull, it can work for you.
If you want to excel at a high level in business, it is so important to get your mind in great shape.
With the right mental state, you can achieve enormous things. But if your mind is weak, confused or lacking in confidence, it is really hard to reach your business goals.
Or frankly even your personal goals.
I just did a deep interview where I outline some of the most cutting-edge mind techniques to think like a champion.
Techniques currently being used by elite athletes and U.S special forces to get their minds super strong.
I guarantee that if you listen to this you will gain some brilliant tools to help you perform at a high level.
Can you believe it? We are already in the last quarter of the year!
Before you know it, the year will be over. Done. Finished.
How’s this year looking? Are you kicking big financial goals? Are you achieving what you set out to do?
If you feel like you’re behind on your aspirations, it’s not too late. But you must dramatically adjust your behaviour.
I coach entrepreneurs all over the world on how to increase their income, and I assure you, if you do the 3 steps below, you can make this 4th quarter of the year your most finically successful.
1. Follow up on all old leads. Make a list of every person you talked to this year about working with you, who hasn’t hired you yet. And call every single one of them.
Concurrently, email them at least twice about working with you.
You would be amazed how much money is sitting in that list of old leads. Go get it!
2. Spend 2 hours a day reaching out to potential customers. Look them up on Google or Linked In, make a contact list and introduce yourself.
Tell them 3 reasons why they should work with you. Be warm but assertive.
Money follows connections- the more people who know your company exists the more money you will make, simple as that. Yet so many business owners do almost no cold outreach.
Go find clients, every single day you work this quarter. Don’t just do an occasional call or email, but work on it 2 solid hours a day.
Whatever you are usually doing is unlikely to be as important as finding potential customers.
3. Bring massive Desire and Urgency to your work. Do everything faster. Demand speed from everyone – your staff, your suppliers, yourself. Stop being so relaxed and ramp up your desire and your urgency.
Get out of your normal speed of working. Do you think Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is moving slowly?
The opposite: his day is planned in 5-minute blocks.
Money loves speed.
Start creating that speed and your financial results will dramatically increase.
With only 3 months left in the year, there really is no time to waste.
Follow these three steps every single day and you’ll finish this year delighted with your monetary results.
People think building a highly successful business is hard.
Actually, it’s really simple.
As long as you have a good product or service to offer, you only need to avoid making two mistakes.
Mistake 1: Not reaching out to enough potential buyers.
I have coached hundreds of entrepreneurs, and it’s truly amazing how many of them spend most of their day handling their current business and spend hardly any time introducing themselves to new potential clients.
How can you expect to grow your company if hardly any potential customers even know you exist?
Surely Mission One is to get your company known. All else is useless unless you can get that job done.
Only when you have a large enough pool of potential customers that know what you offer, can you ever hope to convert some of them into actual customers.
Mistake 2: Not staying in touch with those people.
When I started my first company I made this classic mistake. I reached out to plenty of potential clients, but then I didn’t stay in contact.
Oh sure, I’d ring them once or twice a year to see how they going, but that’s not nearly enough to stay in their minds. And get them to buy your services.
You have to be communicating with them many times a year to keep your company at the forefront of their thoughts. (The art, of course, is to do it in a way that makes you valued, rather than reviled).
These two simple mistakes are made by at least 80% of business owners, to varying degrees.
Get these two things right and most of your business growth dreams will be realized.
Get them wrong and even if you have a great product, your growth will be slow, a fraction of what it could have been.
When I coach entrepreneurs I focus on two primary things to make them more money.
Better marketing.
Greater productivity.
Let’s talk about number two for a minute.
Most business owners are performing at well under 50% of the level they should be. They waste enormous amounts of time, almost every day.
But if you get superb at productivity, you can make a phenomenal difference in how much wealth you create for yourself.
To help you do that here’s a productivity technique I recently invented- and it’s really helping me get things done.
I call it 20/20 Vision.
It’s a little extreme, but here’s how it works.
Firstly, you try to do every task in 20 minutes. Yes I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out.
It will truly amaze you how many tasks that would normally take an hour or more can actually be done in 20 minutes when you really push yourself.
And if you can’t complete the job in 20 minutes, at least you’ve made fast progress. Instead of it sitting on your To Do list for weeks, you at least move it forward.
This quick progress gives you an enormous amount of momentum and massively boosts your confidence and self-esteem.
The second part of the method is all-around Vision.
In my experience as a coach to business owners, many of us get caught up in doing endless jobs in our company and often forget our overall vision or big picture aims.
What are we actually trying to create? Who are we trying to become? If all you do is work on the next thing, you will get pulled down by your never-ending To Do List and could be in danger of not achieving your dreams.
With the 20/20 Vision technique, we take a different approach. You think about your life Vision numerous times during the day.
This does several valuable things:
It keeps you motivated- we stay inspired by our beautiful vision of our future.
It makes you focus much more on what is truly important your “to do’s” actually are. You do less of the urgent and more of the important. Less of the minutiae and more of the impactful activities.
So there you have it, the 20/20 Vision productivity technique.
It speeds up your rate of achievement, increases your morale and confidence (because you are making fast progress in many areas) and keeps you focused on your true work and life vision, rather than getting caught up in the trivial.
Professor John Kotter of Harvard University wanted to know what makes some CEOs more successful. So he and his team studied the fastest growing U.S companies over a ten-year period, then examined how their chief executives behaved differently.
Was there one thing that separated the great CEOs from the ordinary ones?
There sure was.
Kotter discovered that the CEOs who got the best results in America had a very different mental attitude from the other business leaders.
They had what he calls “A Sense Of Urgency.”
Professor Kotter found that only when you have a spirit of urgency can you push your way through the admin and red tape. Only by acting with urgency can you get others to deliver on time. Only by being truly urgent in your dealings can you achieve significant things in a year.
The more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Urgency is the one thing that drives business projects forward quickly.
If you’re not urgent, people sense it and relax and move slowly. Things take ages to bear fruit. Mediocrity abounds.
The big question you may be asking of course is, are you performing with enough urgency?
Are you demanding enough? Of others, or indeed yourself?
Urgency is not an easy character trait to develop. The world doesn’t particularly like urgent people. They can seem rude. Pushy. Unreasonable. Yet being that way is often the only way to get stuff of consequence done.
As George Bernard Shaw so aptly put it, ” The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
There are several different types of urgency we should focus on if we want to achieve great things.
1. Urgency with strategic planning.
I know so many business owners who frequently procrastinate about choosing a company strategy. As a result of their strategic cowardice and complacency, they often get left behind in their industry.
(What have you been thinking about for too long? How about making a decision in the next 60 minutes on it?)
2. Urgency with other people.
Who owes you a report, product or idea? Why haven’t they sent it to you already? Do they really need that much time, or are they taking advantage of your leniency?
When you ask for a result with genuine urgency you usually move straight to the front of the other person’s line of important tasks. That’s where you deserve to be, must be, to get things done quickly.
3. Urgency in your own mind.
When I am coaching my business clients, I am always pushing them to cultivate great urgency in the way that they think. We need to see ourselves as highly time-sensitive, fast-achieving people. Only when we view ourselves this way are we likely to muster the energy and drive to make things happen at warp speed.
As the great American psychologist, William James, so often reminded us, we become what we consistently think about. If every day we have a self-image as somebody who has a real spirit of urgency, then soon we are likely to become that type of person.
So in conclusion, if you are not happy with the speed at which you are achieving in business, don’t just look at tactics, like sales, marketing, systems and the like. Spend at least as much time focusing on the one mindset that makes all the other stuff happen.
A real, deep, all-encompassing, powerful sense of urgency.
There’s a wonderful method for quickly increasing the profits of your company.
Invented around 40 years ago, it is still one of the most effective ways to take your company to a higher level.
It’s called the Theory Of Constraints and it was invented by an Israeli management expert named Eli Goldratt. It’s really simple. And really powerful.
Eli believed that every single company in the world has one main thing that is slowing its growth. He called it the ‘bottle neck’ that limits the company.
His way of breaking that bottleneck is as follows:
Locate the Constraint. What’s the one thing that most limits the growth of your company? Work that out and you are halfway there.
Make eliminating that bottleneck the primary role of the company. Focus as many people and resources as you can on this issue until you fix it.
Look for the next Constraint. In Goldratt’s experience, there is always a Constraint. It doesn’t matter if you are one of the fastest growing companies in the world, you are always being limited by something.
Your constant mission is to identify that limitation and then put massive effort into eliminating it.
In my experience as a coach to entrepreneurs and business leaders all over the world, I have found this technique to be a stunningly effective way to improve any company.
We so often get caught up handling the latest emergency or opportunity and forget to look deeper at fundamental elements that are slowing our company’s growth.
When you base your entire company around the Theory Of Constraints, you are always working on what you should be working on, and fast revenue growth is your almost constant companion.
What is your company’s main Constraint at the moment?
Attack it with all the resources you can, and watch how quickly your company’s revenue soars.
All those things you once tried to grow your business that didn’t work?
Maybe some of them do.
Maybe the only reason you didn’t get results from them is you simply didn’t do them enough.
Think cold calling doesn’t work? Perhaps that’s because you only did it a few times and got discouraged.
Have you sent out some direct mail to potential clients and got no response? Maybe that’s because you didn’t send enough of them. Or enough variations.
Tried to create a few joint ventures or partnerships and had no luck? It could be because you only asked 2 or 3 people. When you should have asked 10.
Go back and look at your past marketing attempts.
And ask yourself, “Did I give up too soon?”
Then pick the one that seems to have the most potential. And this time give it a real go.
Dedicate one full month to really making it work.
You will be surprised how often a previously rejected business growth method can actually bring you a fortune.
When I coach entrepreneurs, I give them many tactics to grow their companies fast:
How to bring in a lot more leads.
How to convert more of those leads into clients.
How to maximize the revenue of each of those clients, etc.
These techniques work very well, but I have discovered a remarkable thing.
Some entrepreneurs still grow their companies much faster than others!
Why?
I think there are several reasons, but one that really stands out is that all the really successful business owners have one key difference in how they think.
They have what I call an Attack Mentality.
They don’t just come into work and start on their To-Do List.
They attack in every way.
They are constantly being daring in both their thoughts about their business and their actions.
Firstly they are very proactive. They don’t just wait for revenue to come in.
They ask people for money a lot more-getting more No’s than most business owners, but a lot more Yeses as well.
I am a great believer in the following maxim:
Asking Is Winning.
Just ask more and you’ll get more.
Money. And Opportunities. And adventures.
Secondly, they don’t buy into society’s beliefs about the economy being down. Or their industry not being as good as it used to be. Or their staff is no good, etc.
They just arrive each morning and attack – aggressively solving problems and looking for immediate actions that grow revenue.
Even if the stock market has collapsed. Even if they don’t feel like working that day. Even if their industry’s margins have declined.
Truly, if we all focused daily on developing our Attack Mentality, we would get phenomenal business results.
Give it a try this week.
The Attack Mentality is summed up nicely in one of my favourite quotes, from an 1844 book, ‘The Luck Of Barry Lyndon’, by Willaim Thackeray.
“Let the man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim. Attacking is his only secret. Dare, and the world always yields. Or, if it beat you sometimes, dare again, and it will succumb.’
