Dan Floros Chairman Of The Board | Global Business Thought Leader

Almost always I start my maiden conversations with business executives, be they one-to-one or at the group level, as follows. "What is the purpose of your business?" or, "Why did you start your business in the first place?" Almost always the response revolves around producing money. I answer that one should perhaps enter the money printing profession down at the national Mint if they are interested in making (printing) money. Producing a profit is, of course, a given necessity to maintaining a viable, sustainable business however, there is a far greater purpose that matters in this discipline we call business. So here is the overarching philosophy on a bumper sticker:

The purpose of business is to take a lead and transform it into an exponential number of referrals.

Marketing In Action

The first stage is that of procuring a lead. Someone who genuinely has an interest in utilizing the products you bring to the marketplace. There is a never-ending number of ways you can generate a lead, from traditional marketing all the way through to the modern digital medium. When it comes to advertising, the combinations and permutations are infinite, and you the smart business leader has a powerful marketing matrix that delivers target prospect to your doorstep.

Seamless Sales

The profession of selling is one of the most important drivers in every successful business (those in the top 5% of their market segment). As is the case with marketing, the way you approach sales in your organization can be, and unfortunately for most companies, a deal-breaker. Creating a lead is the catalyst for unleashing a clear set of predetermined steps and activities that inevitably lead to a sale. One can have the best office furniture, and well-manicured front desk assistants, whilst making the loudest noise in the crowd. All good. But until you can close the deal by getting your prospect's signature at the bottom of an agreement, and do this consistently, you have nothing but thin air and fixed overheads that soon enough swamp the enterprise. So, in a professional sales framework, the second step to exponential referrals is a given.

Operational Potency

Everyone that buys from you does so with the motive of solving a primary, underlying need. All humans tend to move away from their fears and/or propagate toward their aspirations and dreams. The most successful organizations take their customers by the hand and in turn transform them into clients because they meet these needs better than anybody else in the market. Their aligned business model is tailored to deliver on the promises that were made by the marketing and sales teams upstream. For many companies, this may seem more than adequate. Well, almost.

Superior Service

There is a small subset of businesses that understand and embrace the power of building emotional bonds. This group of people goes the extra mile by creating memorable experiences for their client base. They know that it doesn't take much to reinforce a very high level of care across the board. Taking it one step further, the most successful businesses "wow" their clients as well as their people. Only then can the internal human asset impart a culture of superior service to their valuable clients.

Growth Becomes Effortless

Imagine how profitable your business would be if you had retained every individual (B2C) or company (B2B) that ever transacted with you? Think about this for a moment. Now think about what this would look like if your clients had referred on average 2 new leads to your organization. The numbers soon enough become immeasurable. The important thing to remember here is that, a philosophy of conducting your business in a manner that potentially delivers an exponential number of referrals matters. Why? Because soon enough it will matter. It matters for the time that you will compress as you move across your life, it matters for the number of people that you will influence, be they your internal team or external market, it matters because your presence and purpose are paramount during your brief journey through eternity.

The Primary Philosophy

Date May 20, 2022

Almost always I start my maiden conversations with business executives, be they one-to-one or at the group level, as follows. "What is...

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When Sir David Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2002, the team had almost no record of success: British cycling had only won a single gold medal in its 76-year history. Only one. Then Sir David took hold of the reigns. Forward six years at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, his squad won seven out of 10 gold medals available in track cycling, and they matched the achievement at the London Olympics four years later. Sir David now leads Britain’s first-ever professional cycling team, which has won three of the last four Tour de France events. Sir Dave, a former professional cycler who holds an MBA, applied a theory of marginal gains to cycling — he gambled that if the team broke down everything they could think of that goes into competing on a bike, and then improved each element by 1%, they would achieve a significant aggregated increase in performance. Kaizen As an MBA, Brailsford embraced the Japanese process of constant improvement technique (Kaizen). His vision was large, yet his daily focus was small, not big, adopting a philosophy of continuous improvement through the aggregation of marginal gains. His mantra "Forget about perfection; focus on progression, and compound the improvements". By experimenting in a wind tunnel, he searched for small improvements to aerodynamics. By analysing the mechanic's area in the team truck, he discovered that dust was accumulating on the floor, undermining bike maintenance. So he painted the floor white, in order to spot any impurities. Quoting him - "We were precise about food preparation. We brought our own mattresses and pillows so our athletes could sleep in the same posture every night. We searched for small improvements everywhere and found countless opportunities. Taken together, we felt they gave us a competitive advantage." Sir David and his team had three pillars to this one-percenters approach, called “the podium principles.” The first one was strategy. The second was human performance, not around cycling, but more about behavioural psychology and how to create an environment for optimum performance. The third principle was continuous improvement. Quantum Returns It has been often said that "the devil is in the details." This is especially the case with leading a business from the front. The most successful leaders understand the latent leverage found in making very small, consistent improvements over time. Progressive people look well into the future, and in the process, they have full clarity on the key focal areas that deliver exponential returns. They have a blueprint that takes care of the major drivers, and just like the British Cycling Team, remain committed to lifting standards across the board. Surely but slowly, they tighten and streamline on a daily basis. As an example, let us assume you identify a dozen areas in your business that you can easily improve over the next 52 weeks. In my work with all my clients, I call this the 12/52 Method. The approach here is to improve each one of these key areas by a minimum of 1% per week. We track and repeat these standards for a year across weekly units that are directly related to profit improvements.. The result? Profit increases of at least 67% per year. Almost all of the time, increases surpass this level. Re-engineering Life Small improvements in the way you invest your time have a profound effect on your life. Nowhere is the "1 Percenters Theory" more relevant or more important. Always ask yourself, 'how can I best invest my increments of time?' or "what is the best use of my time right now?". The adjustments do not have to be major as sometimes we have so much to do and take care of that it becomes difficult to cut large sections of time out. A great way to gain leverage is to save time in small chunks. Fifteen minutes here better invested, delegating small repeatable tasks, or even better eliminating them altogether can make a massive difference down the track. The key is to continuously refine, ever raising your standards. Quietly. Consistently. Sooner or later you will arrive and surpass what you ever thought possible, and then some. Success in business and life is not loud. It is not quick. It is knowing what you wish to bring into reality in combination with a gentle expansion towards it across small increments of time and space. One per cent here. One per cent there, consistently.

The One Percenters

Date September 1, 2021

When Sir David Brailsford became head of British Cycling in 2002, the team had almost no record of success: British cycling had...

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Can you remember when there was no such thing as Federal Express? Forty years ago it was a baby-sized company—a few planes and not many customers. But FedEx soon thrived, and in doing so it proved a point: Overnight delivery is worth a premium. It helps people get things done a lot quicker, which is another way of saying more competitively. Because time really is worth money. Pretty soon a host of bigger companies, even the U.S. Postal Service itself, jumped into the trend FedEx had started, bringing to bear huge commitments of their considerable resources. And yet FedEx has remained dominant. It’s even become a verb: People will say, “I’ll FedEx this package to you,” even if they’re actually using another courier. I’m a big believer in the notion that consumers, given choices, will naturally eradicate every single source of waste or inefficiency in business: everything from the high cost of telephone service (as in Internet phones) to segments of entire professions. If it’s a middleman/woman, they’re gone —unless they are adding a lot of value to their clients throughout the day. Delay is simply one of the many unnecessary expenses that consumers are now rejecting. Delay is something that you can really do something about on a practical basis, and right away - and as a consequence of eradicating it your company becomes highly desirable in the marketplace. Following are seven ways to get started—immediately.

1. Refuse To Wait For Things Choose to deal only with companies or clients who respond immediately to what you want or what agree to deliver. Know that delay of any kind is wasteful or, at the very least, expensive. Delay slows down your creative process, so be unwilling to tolerate it. Don’t get upset if something doesn’t arrive when it should. Simply work with someone else next time. To put it another way, a quick response adds value—which makes you more attractive. And, believe me, there are plenty of people who value immediate response as much as you do. So choose which group you wish to join—the Immediate Response Club or the Delay Club. It matters. 2. Transform Your Business Into A Responsive Enterprise When you respond immediately to inquiries or questions from clients or prospective customers, their trust expands greatly, without your having to do anything else. People fear delay. They are reassured by immediate responses. That dynamic alone will make you a lot more attractive to yourself and to others because delay sometimes signals a shortage of integrity. Not always, but often enough to make people wary about whether you’ll really come through. The payoff is that you and your client will find yourselves getting more done in less time. So, while eliminating delay is a great thing in and of itself, it’s often just the beginning of what’s possible. 3. Learn Quickly And Integrate Changes Computers and the Internet are among the most important changes of our era. In the future, the companies that stay ahead will do so by generating an abundant stream of new technology and ideas. In a similar way, people who respond quickly (versus people who think slowly) will thrive. How quickly do you both assimilate new ideas and implement whatever changes are called for as a result of what you learned? For most people, there is a lag. In some cases it runs into a day or so; in others, it’s a lifetime. New information, truths, or new ways of doing things have to filter into our heads and through our systems. If they are delayed on the way, they’ll probably get either diluted or completely lost before we can benefit from them. “Turning on a dime” is one way to describe the preferred mode, and the place to start is to understand how long your “delay/integration process” takes. Then seek to shorten it by 90 percent. True, you’ll make some mistakes by responding too quickly to false signals. But it’s better to master the signals in your body and in life than to play it safe and miss out on the real opportunities that business and life present. 4. Respond Before Delay Is Possible If you really understood how costly delays are to you, your people, and to your business, you’d quickly make changes to eliminate them. It’s more than just avoiding delays; it’s about being a scout—sensing what’s around the next bend, even before the competition knows there’s a bend coming, and making immediate changes to take advantage of what’s ahead. This way of thinking leads to an extreme competitive advantage, having been practiced by leaders who have become household names such as Jobs, Musk, and Gates just to name a few. 5. Filter What Matters Should you respond to everything that comes to you? Could you really do this? Probably not. But you can filter what comes at you so that you do have time to respond immediately to whatever really matters. One way I filter out stuff is by maintaining just a few key and mutually supportive friendships and relationships. Managing and supporting several relationships consumes bandwidth. For me, having a few friendships and relationships of terrific quality proves that less equals more. Another way to filter is to let an assistant, whether local or virtual (quick shout out to Cathy M), handle your incoming E-mail and even regular mail. Just instruct your assistant on what matters to you, yet give him or her freedom to include whatever else might interest you. Another way to filter is to know what your vision is. When you’re clear on this and on your personal values, your clarity will automatically filter out unwanted stuff. You’ll be attracting the appropriate information, along with people who have a similar vision. Joy is an excellent filter as well. If something is not going to bring you joy, it shouldn’t get into your life. 6. Build Capacity Before You Need To If you’re successful or plan to be, it only makes sense that the demands on your time will increase. Think of a computer. One that’s okay for an elementary school student to do homework assignments on will probably be too limited in speed and memory to handle a small business’s inventory, shipping, customer base, projections, etc. In other words, its CPU (central processing unit) will be underpowered relative to what’s needed. And if that small business really grew, the computer would soon be a bottleneck—until it was replaced by perhaps several computers linked in a network or by a giant mainframe. Given that success is bound to happen, the only responsible thing to do is to consciously scale up your support system and personal capacities in order to handle the oncoming demands. Most people are in the mode of scrambling to keep up. Instead, always operate at a 50 percent reserve factor. Scrambling to keep up with opportunities puts you behind the curve. Being ready for opportunities takes you to the next level, where you will once again scale up your support system and personal capacities. Be responsible—develop a personal system that generates quick responses. 7. Find Out Why You Delay Learning slowly, deferring decisions, or playing wait and see can sometimes be the very best approach! Occasionally, the best decision is going to be no decision at all. This is sometimes known as “good timing.” However, if you find yourself always putting things off, or delaying in any manner, ask yourself why. Take the time to count the cost in lost opportunities, lost business relationships, increases in stress, and most importantly the loss in time that is never to return. When you respond in your business, the benefits are multiple and far-reaching, to say the least. So, compress time and thrive.

DAN FLOROS

The Chairman Of The Board

The World’s Preeminent Authority On Total Business Mastery

Total Business Mastery

Articles That Matter

The Primary Philosophy

The One Percenters

Compress Time – Eliminate Delay