Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”
In not so elegant terms – if what you are doing now isn’t getting you where you want to be, then doing more of it is not going to solve your problems. So it’s time to start looking for ideas.
Like my client realised – they needed the right help.
He realised that he has choices to make in order to get what he wants.
You do too.
You can work harder and do more – labouring for what will be in effect minimum wage. That is when a sales person makes 5 extra calls a day. Relying on quantity. It’s the same problem my client talked about in the last email.
That may get you bigger but it may not make you more profitable. If you put enough meat through the grinder you’ll get there. But there is a massive price to pay if you do.
The problem with this is it often leaves you tired and burnt out, frustrated and disappointed. Solutions like this are lazy and to me are just plundering capital in the hope of a short term gain.
If you could already do more you would do more. We are all hard working people, we aren’t lazy. That is why I am against blindly doing more. If we could do more we would.
The goal is to live off of the interest, not be perpetually eating the capital.
What is most telling especially if you’ve ever paid attention to ‘business gurus’ is they all talk about doing more. More leads, more customers, more sales.
There is an old maxim in sales, to sell them ‘what they want.’
The unfortunate truth is that sometimes what you ‘ask for’ is not what you actually need.
More often than not it is because the gurus aren’t really in the education business, they are in the ‘profits for them’ business and rightfully so. So they sell what is easiest to sell, not necessarily what you need.
And to be honest there aren’t any guru businesses in Australia that would sell for very much money (There are 5 criteria to sell these business for a lot of money and NONE of them meet all 5).
The financial reason we are in business is actually kind of simple. It’s to amass enough money so that we can sit on the beach and drink margaritas. And that is why profitability is important. It’s the profits that we put in our pocket that allow us to amass that money so that we can go and live our lives how we want.
Stay tuned for part 3 where we will talk about how we can work to build the assets to operate in a smarter way – doing more with what you’ve got or possibly even less.