ENTREPRENEUR TO MILLIONAIRE MYTHS #6 – YOU’RE RECEIVING AND FOLLOWING GREAT ADVICE – NOT REALLY! AND, IT MIGHT BE DAMAGING YOUR BUSINESS

Share with anyone about a challenge you’re having in your business or life, and virtually everyone will have an answer, solution, or idea on how to fix it.  As humans, we love to help. 

However, I am going to share a recent personal life crisis and how the “advice given” was almost 99% of the time flawed, stale, or would do more damage than good.  Why is most advice bad and shouldn’t be followed? And oppositely, what is the one time you should listen and follow guidance? 

I’ve been in CEO Peer-to-Peer groups for almost twenty years as both a member and a financial sponsor.  Every month, week, or meeting, there are business leaders – from CEOs to entrepreneurs – struggling with challenges and frustrations.  And what is so interesting is “everyone in the room has a solution or an idea.” That’s because no one wants to be seen as unknowledgeable and also because everyone “wants to help.” However, in most cases, good intent and perfect results rarely follow – can you say “government”? 

PERSONAL LIFE EXAMPLE…

On Wednesday morning, March 17th, I attended a breakfast meeting, and during the event, my lower left leg started to hurt on the side of the ankle area.  I thought “no big deal” as being human and having leg pain from time to time is an “old” normal – not a new normal. However, four days later, I’m in the ER for eight hours on morphine drips and Dilaudid (hydromorphone hydrochloride, similar to oxycodone), which is an extremely powerful pain reliever. I couldn’t feel my face, but my leg still felt like it needed to be amputated as the shooting pain and tingling were so horrific that my toes had gone numb. 

Over the next few weeks, anyone AND everyone I shared my life-stopping dilemma with offered advice as I discovered almost every American suffers from some form of leg, neck, or back pain. Every friend, associate, and listener knew the “greatest chiropractor,” the best back doctor, or had an acupuncturist referral. In addition, everyone else had a proven solution and personally tested recommendations of stretching exercises, heating to cooling, inversion machines, EMS/EPS, YouTube videos, potions and pills, etc.  

Even some friends told me what medicines to tell my doctor to put me on as they had worked for them.  And a few had suggested the pain could work itself out, so just give it time. How much time do you give something when you can’t sleep, you can’t stand, you can’t sit, and you can go into level 9 pain in a matter of minutes when you get up?  Really? 

I followed the advice – tried the pills, then off to the chiropractor. I call chiropractors “cereal doctors” because their approach is heavy on the Snap, Crackle, and Pop.  Next, the acupuncturists – what a prick – I mean the needles and electric stimulation.  Next on the list were the inversion tables, the stretching exercises, and additional potions and pills.  

Finally, after a couple of weeks of treatment torture, I got to the point where I just couldn’t handle no sleep and eye-watering pain, even with strong meds.  The breaking point was going to CVS pharmacy to pick up more pain medicine, and the line was so long, I grabbed a chair and drug it along to each COVID safe-space sticker on the floor to sit on while waiting.  Once it was my turn at the counter, I couldn’t stand up to get my prescription, so I sat in the chair.  

Why didn’t I just go to my regular doctor, you ask?  Because I’m hard-headed and didn’t want to waste the time and didn’t want to spend the money. Plus, it was several weeks for an appointment.  As busy businesspeople, we also always have excuses. I was convinced, with the support of my new surrogate doctor friends, that any day one of those dozens of solutions would help me get better.  Wrong the pain worsened. 

Finally, at my doctor’s office, she asked the one question that I only heard from one of my fifty friends and associates who offered advice ask me, “Have you had an MRI”?  

She followed with, “I don’t recommend you do or try anything else other than a pain shot until we can find what is really causing the pain. We need a holistic view of what is going on.”

What does this story (and yes, I will tell you the amazing results later) have to do with you and your business?  For close to 25 years, I’ve been identifying and solving highly complex sales, revenue, and growth problems in companies from start-ups to billions of dollars all over the world. 

Pain (or performance problems) in a company, usually in the sales function or revenue performance area, is what triggers a call to us. When we ask, “What have you tried or implemented to solve the problem?”, the answer always follows the same pattern. The leader says, “First, we tried to fix it ourselves –  spend more money, do more training, hire more managers.”  See the pattern – “more”?  

Next, they say, “We brought in ‘experts,’ like marketing, SEO, or social media firms.” Do you know what happened?  Every one of those firms suggested more marketing, more SEO, more social media. Same pattern, “more from more,” and similar but okay, or the same results. 

REMEMBER THIS – WHEN SOMEONE IS SELLING HAMMERS, EVERY PROBLEM YOU HAVE LOOKS LIKE A NAIL. 

Long story short.  My neurologist and my doctor identified the cause of my pain using the MRI information where a CT scan and dozens of X-rays couldn’t.  The root cause of my life-interrupting agony was a ruptured disc in the L4-L5 region, with the soft center of the disc outside of the spinal column and pinching a nerve root. 

We tried one more intervention, the long needle lumbar epidural steroid injection because surgery was the last thing I ever wanted.  Amazingly, the fifteen-minute procedure eliminated all the pain. But only for six hours.  

About a week later and 12 weeks into the first pain day, I hobbled into the Medical City Plano Hospital, unable to stand for registration.  After seven hours in the hospital and two hours of spinal surgery (are you ready for this?),  I walked out of the hospital PAIN-FREE!  After four more days on pain medicine due to the deep incision in my back, I was totally pain-free and no longer taking any pain medicine.  To go from crippled to walking in a few hours is a miracle. I thank all the people who prayed for me because I was spending my days in bed worthless, bored, and in agony. 

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE

Key lesson. The pain in my leg was not caused by anything in my leg; it was caused by a spinal disc problem, far away from my leg in my body.  And that is quite common – 

Symptoms and cause can be far apart but still connected.

Back to your business…  Usually, 99% of all sales, growth, performance, people, and other horrific pain problems have a root cause that is usually nowhere near where the pain is being experienced.  This means, no matter what intervention you try in that area, you will never solve the real root cause. Even worse, you will waste time, money, and maybe like me, make the problem worse.  For example, many operational issues are actual marketing mistakes. And many marketing failures are operational misunderstandings. 

ACTION AND URGENCY

Want to optimize your company’s performance? Then get an MRI of your business.  Find the root cause to link the symptoms to the real root cause.  Don’t hire a company that has a “bench of people or offerings,” as that is what they will tell you and sell you.  Get an MRI – a holistic 360-degree view of your organization to identify what and where you can work to achieve optimization.  And don’t be delusional; most companies operate at less than 50% of their potential of sales, revenue, and profit production – because they become “pain tolerant”. 

For example, most sales growth problems and salespeople performance problems are not in the sales area.  The root cause of poor performance many times are cracks in the business model, stale strategy, weak messaging, toxic enterprise culture, and bad managers disguised as leaders.  Until you know what is broken in those areas and can fix the root cause, your sales or other pains will always exist and be sub-optimized. 

Ask us about how we go about delivering a revealing business MRI.  It’s a combination of holistic assessment, strategic audit, and comparative superior practice analysis of your whole enterprise, function, or department.  It’s amazing how in just a few hours, several million- to multi-million-dollar root-cause problems can be identified, and some even solved.  But only if you know how and where to look. Unlike the human body that only goes through an MRI when there is a crisis, a healthy business should go through one every one to two years, but never longer than that.  In just the last week, what a new client had been working on for 14 years, we helped them solve in less than three hours.  What is that time worth?  Millions and more? 

Contact us now for your Revenue Growth® MRI. The fee structure is based on size of your firm and in most cases one-tenth of what a large firm would charge.  In many cases we have more experience and expertise performing thousands of business MRIs. 

BOOK INFORMATION

Is Your Business Growing or Creating Wealth?

       “A must-read book.” —Mark Cuban

Amazon: https://amzn.to/2WJSNYw

Kindle Edition – https://amzn.to/2Kw9cgW

Bulk Sales 25+ for 40% off www.porchlightbooks.com

AUTHOR BACKGROUND

Kent Billingsley is the founder and president of the Revenue Growth® Company, LLC (TRGC). He is a published author, international keynote speaker, and business transformation expert. He has become America’s Revenue Growth® Architect by helping thousands of entrepreneurs and CEOs (representing over a million employees) generate several billion in new sales, as well as tens of billions in new revenue and profits for large corporations. He has personally designed, built, transformed, and turbocharged several thousand organizations in 36 countries. Over the last 20 years, his proprietary content and trademarked programs have helped thousands of entrepreneurs and employees become millionaires and multimillionaires by “creating wealth” inside their companies. He can be reached at [email protected].