“Making Money is Killing Your Business” is named Business Book of the Year

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Making an impact.

NFIB, the leading small business association with 500,000 businesses, has named my book, Making Money is Killing Your Business, the number one business book of 2010.

The National Federation of Independent Businesses, or NFIB, rated it #1 because they thought it has the most potential for real impact in the lives of the readers.

Readers are indeed finding their lives and businesses transformed by the principles and practical in this book.

“Never in my life have I read a book so full of transformational content that actually got me creating a better business for myself.” – Julia Gentry, TheUltimateE.com

“Every small business owner will benefit from this easy yet profound read. I was ready to throw in the towel on our six-year-old real estate business, but after reading Chuck’s book we have increased our gross revenue by 27% and doubled our net profit.” – Sandy Corrigan, The Corrigan Group

Making Money is built on profoundly simple ideas that have been around forever and ignored as being too simple to work. I’ve learned the hard way that the profound things are always simple and will revolutionize any business willing to give up complexity for effectiveness.

Making Money helps business owners move from a focus on trying to make money to building a business that does it for them while they’re on vacation. It debunks the idea that small business is a 30 year grind, and introduces the concept of building a business in just three to five years that runs itself.

Making Money also replaces the traditional concept of retirement with using your business to quickly build your Ideal Lifestyle, moving you and your business from survival through success to significance.

The principles and tools in this book grew out of years of hacking it up in the trenches and learning what really works. It’s been a privilege to start and build a number of businesses before helping others do it. I don’t see myself as a business coach, advisor, consultant, etc., but as a guy who built a number of businesses and now helps others avoid the mistakes I’ve made.

My company, The Crankset Group has an off the grid approach that has been adopted by thousands of business owners. We’re growing internationally now with 3to5 Clubs (our committed communities for 24 business owners each) starting in throughout the states and in Europe, with an objective of having 3to5 Clubs in every major city in the world.

It’s also been a privilege to have articles and mentions in the last year in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur Magazine, CNNMoney.com, NYTimes.com, other magazines and small business blogs throughout the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand.

I firmly believe Making Money is Killing Your Business inspires a new way of thinking that will transform how you approach your business and your future. I’m getting regular feedback from people we’ve never met who confirm it.

I’d love to hear how it’s impacting your business.

Wouldn’t it be great if…

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Random Hope is a lousy business strategy.

Chapter Six in my next book, Bad Plans Carried Out Violently, is about Conation, the most important business word you’ve never heard. Its antonym is just as obscure and just as critical for you to know – velleity.

Our whole community of business owners use this phrase all the time:

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

Nothing could describe the above better than two of the 1,000 most obscure words in the English language – conation and velleity (vel-lee-ity).

Conation is “Committed Movement in a Purposeful Direction”. The dictionary says its the desire plus the volition at the same time. I know I want to do it because I already am. I don’t need to desire it and get all motivated. I just do it because I want it.

Velleity is the desire with no intention of ever doing anything about it. It’s the exact opposite of conation. Wouldn’t it be nice if things worked out better next year? Wouldn’t it be nice if I only worked half as much as I do now? Would it be nice if… that’s velleity.

What’s the difference between a visionary and a dreamer? A visionary is already doing it (conation) and a dreamer is talking about how nice it would if… (velleity).

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.
CONATION < – – – – – – – – – > VELLEITY

Conate.

Business is Full of Beaver Dams

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Struggle is Good. Embrace The Dams.

Traditional business plan thinking tells you that if you plan well enough, you’ll avoid all the “problems”. But usually it’s those “problems” that lead you to the best plan.

I’m not saying don’t plan, but I am saying don’t do very much of it in a vacuum, and don’t expect that it will keep you from hitting beaver dams on your way down the stream.

In fact, it’s the beaver dams that are much more likely to lead you to the things that will produce time and money for you than any amount of planning you do.

The average business goes through five to 15 iterations of lame products or services before they land on the thing that puts them on cruise control. And the only good way to find that groove is to go through all those bad attempts, not by planning.

One of Hewlett Packard’s first products in the late 1930’s was an automated bowling lane aisle violator. That lame product led them to a harmonic tuner, and after that beaver dam they decided to do an automated toilet flusher. Traditional business planners would have applied all of their collective “wisdom” to kindly putting HP out of its misery. But it’s those dumb products, and an unwavering commitment to finding good ones, that led HP to make such great contributions to modern technology.

Bill Hewlett understood that it wasn’t about how good their plan was, but how committed they were to the bad plan they had. Business is full of beaver dams and it’s those beaver dams that will cause us to turn right or left and find the best way downhill. Don’t create a highly detailed plan and slavishly follow it – you might miss the beaver dams that could take you to the promised land.

Instead figure out what your end goal is as a company (Hewlett said that for them it was “to make a contribution to society”), then be fundamentally committed to getting there. And use the beaver dams of business to help you figure it out.

We’re taught to avoid struggle of any kind, which is a really bad idea. Struggle helps us run a four minute mile, write a symphony, build a road and learn our ABCs. People who expend all their energy planning to avoid struggle miss all the opportunities to grow personally or build a great business.

Don’t go looking for beaver dams but don’t avoid them when you run into them. Embrace them, learn from them, figure out whether you have to go left, right, over, under or through them and use them to get to your ocean.

Expend all your energy avoiding them and you’ll hate them because they stood in the way of your great plan. Learn from them and they’ll be fond memories in the rear view mirror that pushed you in the right direction.

Embrace the beaver dams. Struggle is good if you use it to get where you want to go. It’s your choice.

The Industrial Age is Dead – Time is the New Money

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The Industrial Age is Dead – Time is the New Money

As a business owner, you’re likely carrying a lot of baggage from the Industrial age (1800-ish to 1965-ish) that won’t fully go away for decades to come. He who makes the rules wins. You need to stop running your business on Industrial Age rules.

The Industrial Age brought us two incredibly bad ideas that led to many other bad ideas:

  1. Retirement
  2. Separation of work and play

A few weeks ago we said retirement is a bankrupt industrial age idea . Here we’re saying separation of work and play is a bad idea.

Time vs. Money
A young web designer friend of mine just one year out of college was given a huge pay raise by an ad agency, from $48,000 to $69,000. The company saw him as indispensable and didn’t want him going anywhere. A few months later, as winter approached, he quit. They wanted him there 8am-5pm and in the winter the only time to ride a bike was in the afternoon.

He would have worked in the evening, and that would have had no impact on the company, but they were stuck in the Industrial Age that valued money over time, and couldn’t see it. They were giving him the same tired “I’ll trade you money for your hours” deal that was dominant in the Industrial Age. He now runs his own very successful company and goes for a run or bike ride in the middle of the day any time he wants.

The Old (and Returning) Normal
For thousands of years people lived where they worked (over the storefront, on the farm) and played where they worked. Community was built around work and small markets. The kids ran and played, learned and worked there, the grandparents helped out – everyone was involved.

And there wasn’t much separation of work and play in the process. We look back and have a dreary and incorrect view of what life before “jobs” was like. What we miss is that above all else, we had community, something we’re only now beginning to recapture.

Humans as Extensions of Machines
It’s easy to see how this happened. During the Industrial Age, machines needed humans to become extensions of them in order to serve the machines properly. The machines needed people to be there all the time to run them, so we created humans in the image of machines. That “condition” was spread across all vocations, and “jobs” that separated work and play become the norm, even where there were no machines.

The Silent Generation – the worst label ever given
And it all worked in response to the needs of the machine, not the person. As the companies that owned the machines became huge, the pervasive need was to serve the corporation, and we were told to shut up, sit down, live invisibly, be loyal, don’t make waves and go out quietly. The generation which lived at the pinnacle of the Industrial Age, who are now in their late 70’s and early 80’s, have been labeled by marketers and sociologists as “The Silent Generation.” Can you think of a more condemning label? But it accurately reflects the damage the Industrial Age has done to us as a culture.

Time is The New Money
The Industrial Age taught us to value money above time. Giant Corporation, Inc. wanted you to focus on making money, not on having time to do anything with it. They needed all your time to run the machines. In the 21st Century we will understand that riches may equal money, but wealth equals freedom – the ability to choose what to do with my time. We will understand that money does not give us freedom, only time can do that.

Do you have time (wealth) or just money (riches)? Stop focusing on making money (see my book, Making Money Is Killing Your Business on the same subject), and intend to be wealthy instead. You’ll actually make more money and have a lot more fun in life, too.

Your Competition, Isn’t.

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Scarcity thinking will keep you poor.

I’ve sold millions in big contracts and small and never once thought about “competition.” It’s NEVER a factor. I don’t think I have any. I don’t believe you do, either. If you think you do, you’re probably not thinking straight.

Big business loves to teach us to do “SWOT” analyses” where the “T” is for “Threats”, those evil competitors who are going to swoop in and steal our clients any day. The only threats you should ever be worried about come from within your own company and your own head.

The problem is bad thinking and bad strategies on your part. Here’s some examples:

You either live in a world of abundance or a world of scarcity, and whichever one you choose affects everything you do.

This isn’t woo-woo crap. This is hard-core success thinking. If you live in a zero sum world then there’s only so much to go around, and you better get yours before the next guy gets his. If you live in a world of abundance you figure out how to help other people be successful so that you can be, too. I do a weekly lunch with 50-60 business owners and regularly have “competition” there who “steal” potential clients. I’m glad they find clients there. I do, too. Everyone says it’s the best weekly lunch environment they’ve ever been around, because it’s based on living in a world of abundance.

People who focus on trying to figure out what makes their competition successful don’t have enough good ideas of their own.

We don’t have time to figure out what others are doing – we’re too busy trying to breathe life into our own ideas. Focus on getting better, not on your competition.

Focus on your client’s needs, not your competition’s products.

I expend a lot of energy figuring out what my clients need (which isn’t necessarily what they always want right away). If you do that, you won’t have time to focus on what other providers are doing.

You’re a terrible guesser, anyway.

I’ve seen companies dissect the products, services or marketing of other companies, then mimic it, only to find out they were mimicking the worst part of what the others were doing. The mimic thought it was what made them successful, and so did they. They’re thanking the mimic for helping them see it clearly while the mimic goes out of business.

The two last words of a dying company are “Me, Too.”

The best way to ensure you are irrelevant is to mimic other people’s successes rather than creating your own. That strategy is fundamental to a world of scarcity, but worse yet it shows a complete lack of originality, passion, cause, mission, or joy in what you do. And it means you’re only in it for the money. And people who try to make money make a lot less than people who birth something the world can use.

If someone “beats” you, they simply have something the customer needs that you don’t.

Rejoice for the customer. If you also have things other customers will want, you’ll attract those relationships and the other guy won’t. When you try to be all things to all men you become nothing to anyone (a wandering generality vs. a meaningful specific – Ziz Ziegler).

If you have something meaningful to offer, you will get customers. If you don’t you won’t. Blaming “competitors” for “losing” contracts is nonsense. Just get better in a few things and go deeper, not wider. If you’re not losing a lot of opportunities, you’re too wide and likely are delivering on the edge of mediocrity. Not a great long term strategy.

The bottom line

Get the idea of competition out of your head and focus on being the best at whatever great idea you’ve birthed. And while you’re at it, try to figure out how to make the other guy successful, too. You’ll make a lot more money and have a lot more fun.