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What Do You Want to Be Known For?

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An empowering vision.

What are you building with your business? Do you know? If not, it’s never too late to get this answer. Stop for a moment and get it, because every decision will fall from this one if you have it answered. People who try to make money rarely make very much of it. People who answer this question understand it is where significance begins.

We sometimes confuse what is good for us with what works for big business. We see Giant Corporation, Incorporated focused on return on investment (ROI) to it’s shareholders and think that we should do that. They are a lousy example of what you want to be known for. They have a legal responsibility to focus on making money, we don’t. And I can tell you that people who focus on something bigger than making money always make more of it.

What do you want to be known for?

And it’s even true with a very few Giant Corp. companies. As Raj Sisodia found in his book Firms of Endearment , 28 of the Fortune 500 have declared to their shareholders that they are about something bigger than making money – they want to be know for something else. You would think that might distract them from making money, but you would be wrong.

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collin’s identified 11 companies that beat the S&P 500 profit standard by at least 300%. Raj’s 28 Giant Corporations that focused instead on something bigger than making money do 1,072% better than the average S&P 500 company.

This relationship between focusing on something bigger than making money and actually making a lot is even more clear with small businesses. Why?

Making money is not an empowering vision.

People make money for two reasons:

1) Survival – survival is a very strong instinct. It is not surprising that most people make just enough money to pay their bills. And the only way that they can motivate themselves to make more is to constantly increase their lifestyle so they can ensure there is always more money going out than coming in. Staying in this Cycle of Poverty, even when you’re making millions, is a great way to ensure you will always be motivated only by survival.

I have a former client who lives that way. His house is beautiful and his cars are gorgeous, and he doesn’t sleep at night. He is in survival mode all the time. He bought the 80’s lie “He who dies with the most toys wins”, and is a hostage to his business and his lifestyle.

2)Significance – An empowering vision – People who see money as a means to an end that is bigger than the toys it can buy are much more likely to make a lot more of it.

You should have as the objective of your work to move from SURVIVAL right through SUCCESS (the imposter of toys) to SIGNIFICANCE.

What do you want to be known for?

I address this in Making Money Is Killing Your Business. Answer that question and you’re likely to get up tomorrow a lot more motivated regardless of the economic climate. And you’re likely to be a lot more successful because you have committed movement in a purposeful direction.

Get out of my way. I have somewhere I have to be.

It’s a lot more motivating than, “I made 6% more this year.”

What do you want to be known for?

“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.

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.

Everything You Need to Know About Business, I Learned in Nairobi.

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The Cycle of Poverty is a Mindset, not a Condition.

We drove out of the airport at 9pm into the deep Kenyan night, so much blacker this near the equator. The driver did 5-20mph because anything more would have broken the suspension on the Land Rover. To the left of the airport entrance bonfires blazed 50 feet into air as tires were burned away for the metal chords in them. It was my first encounter of the close kind with the Cycle of Poverty.

After 10 days living on the poor side of Nairobi and spending every day in the slums working with business owners, I was numb from the experience of so much poverty, so many people, and such great attitudes in the midst of this unending uphill climb.

It wasn’t until I was home and the numbness had worn off that I finally realized the Cycle of Poverty isn’t a physical condition, but a mindset; that it is everywhere, and that most rich Americans suffer from it even more than my new friends in Nairobi, Kenya.

My new friends in Nairobi don’t plan for tomorrow because they’re too busy surviving today. So they make just enough money to get through the month, then they go out and do it again – an endless cycle of just trying to make ends meet. They can’t plan for tomorrow because they are truly in basic survival mode.

In the rich west we have exactly the same problem – except we choose it and they don’t. We regularly PUT OURSELVES in survival mode by simply filling our day with things that will make us money today, with no regard for tomorrow.

We’re so busy making money today just to make ends meet that we don’t have time to plan to build a business that will make money when we’re not around. And we’ve done it so long that we actually think there is some outside force that is making us live this way – I don’t have any choice but to focus solely on paying this month’s bills. Really?

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

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had more time to smell the roses or help someone else be successful? Wouldn’t it be great if we had money to help fix some problems in the world around us? But we don’t have either time or money, not because we can’t get it, but because we don’t actually intend to. We intend to work hard and make some money, and so we get what we intend – HARD work and SOME money – just enough to keep us on the treadmill – The Cycle of Poverty.

A sad irony – there is no question that the average indebtedness of the American business owner is exponentially higher than the business owner in the slums of Kibera in Nairobi. The Cycle of Poverty has had a bigger effect on us than on them, except that we choose to live this way and they don’t. We got exactly what we intended, a treadmill.

Reflecting again this week on my experience in Kenya, I see more and more everyday the title of my book is confirmed – Making Money Is Killing Your Business. It really should have been titled “Making Money Is Killing Your Future”, but I wanted business owners to see that it was written to help them get off the treadmill and get out of their self-imposed Cycle of Poverty.

Change your intention, decide that your Lifetime Goals and Ideal Lifestyle are the reason you are in business and intend to build a Mature Business in support of those Lifetime Goals. Anybody can do it; we just need to intend to do so.

I would love to hear below how you are working your way out of the Cycle of Poverty. Let’s do it together!

Is Industrial Age Thinking Crippling Your Business?

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Retirement is a bankrupt Industrial Age idea.

The Industrial Age of 1780-1960-ish was the greatest advance in physical lifestyle benefits in history, and likely the worst thing that ever happened to our real lifestyle.

As a business owner, your view of business has been radically tainted by this very short period of time in history, and the sooner you stop using it as a reference for your business, the better off you and your business will be.

The Industrial Age gave us a lot of bad legacies, and a couple of the worst are:

  1. Retirement
  2. Separation of Work and Play

We’ll deal with Work and Play in a later post.

Retirement. What a dumb idea. In 1889, Bismarck invented it to give German laborer’s hope that there was a carrot at the end of the stick. He set retirement at age 70 when the average life expectancy was 42.5, and for those who made it to 20, they could hope to live all the way to 60. In 1913 the U.S. institutionalized it at age 65, three years after the average age of death in the U.S. Hmmm… great – thanks.

This was actually only the natural evolution of an Age that asked us to give the best 8-12 hours of our day, the best six days of our week, and the best 40 years of our lives to do something that was many times not fulfilling and did not allow you to think, be creative, or express your humanity. But if you worked hard, you could enjoy what’s left of your day, your week, and your life – AFTER we got the best of what you had to offer.

The Industrial Age worker bought it hook line and sinker, and as a result we have a whole nation of people who dream about “retirement”, which implies at least two things:

  1. Work is not fulfilling – it’s just a means to a future end a long way off.
  2. Significance and fulfillment is something you get AFTER you’ve worked really hard for decades.

Fortunately the alphabet generation (Gen X and Y) don’t have the baggage of having grown up in the Industrial Age, and are leading a peaceful revolt against the whole idea. They expect work to be fulfilling, meaningful, significant, and enjoyable RIGHT NOW. Not when they retire. It’s mystifying to their parents because it looks like they’re not willing to “settle down and get a job”. (pssst – Mom/Dad – they never will).

We need to learn how to stop waiting on decades of toil to eventually get us to something meaningful. I would suggest that you replace “Retirement” with “Ideal Lifestyle”. Retirement happens at 65-ish, but your Ideal Lifestyle is in your own hands to create any time you want. And as a business owner, I believe you can get there in 3to5Years from the printing of your business card.

If you’ve been in business for 20 years and aren’t at your Ideal Lifestyle, you might want to look at the model in your head for what your intending to get out of all this. Likely you just took your employee mindset with you from the Industrial Age and that giant corporation you used to work for, and repeated that same system that will (maybe) allow you to retire someday

He who makes the rules wins. Stop accepting the rules handed down to you by the Industrial Age and USE YOUR BUSINESS TO GET TO YOUR IDEAL LIFESTYLE – now. Life shouldn’t be meaningful tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes.

Take a look at my book at and other posts here to see how to get off this treadmill. You’ll enjoy life a lot more if you do.

Why I wrote “Making Money Is Killing Your Business”

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I built five businesses from the ground up. Each time in the process I found myself as a hostage of my business, never knowing how it would work out, how I would get off the treadmill, or most importantly, a firm date for when I could look forward to enjoying my business. It all seemed to be up to chance, and that the best I could do was work harder and increase my “chances”.

Along the way I learned two valuable principles that transformed me and my businesses, and helped me build a business I could enjoy for decades:

  1. You get what you intend, not what you hope for… and…
  2. He who makes the rules wins.

Throughout a number of my businesses I intended to work extremely hard and make money, and I got exactly what I intended – hard work and some money. While growing those same businesses I “hoped” they would result in a great lifestyle and worked even harder to increase my chances. But we get what we intend, not what we hope for.

I learned that unless I very intentionally designed my work around building a great lifestyle, that all I was going to get was hard work and maybe some money. I decided I was going to turn the whole thing on its head, stop working for my business and make my business start working for me.

It dawned on me that “He who makes the rules wins”, and that I had been allowing my businesses to make the rules by just “hoping” they would give me a great lifestyle. I added “use my business to create a great lifestyle” to my intentionality, having grown into the belief now that business should not just give us money, but it should give us three things – money, time, and the opportunity for significance, or meaning.

This led me to develop simple tools that would keep me on track to create that lifestyle:

  1. The Big Why – those with a great vision for what to do are more likely to be successful.
  2. A Business Maturity Date – to give me a very clear, measure of the time, money, and significance I now intended for my business to bring me, and a specific date for when I intended to be there – Friday, February 18, 2001, at 10am.
  3. A simple 2-page Strategic Plan – to help me stay above the daily Tyranny of the Urgent so I could focus on the things that would build a business that makes money while I’m on vacation.
  4. Process Mapping – to get me off the treadmill, allow me to train others to do what I do, and create repeatable and consistent experiences for my clients.
  5. Outside Eyes – I have others I meet with regularly who are helping me keep on track. I’m too subjective about my own business to make the kind of progress I regularly should.

February 18, 2011, we’ll be on our way to New Zealand celebrating the maturity of our business, and we fully intend for it to make money while we’re on vacation. Why don’t most businesses get here? Simple, the owner is doing what I used to do – intending to work hard and make money, and “hoping” it will all work out in a great lifestyle. We get what we intend, not what we hope for, And when I realized I could no longer let my businesses make the rules, I was on the road to freedom.

What are you doing to build a business that makes money while you’re on vacation?

UPDATE: The book is now out and available.

Your Freedom Number is the Only Number That Matters.

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Your business has the same issues as those I visited in Kenya. In the final analysis, there’s only one number in business that really matters, you’re Freedom Number. While I was in Kenya, I had seminars and workshops with everyone from large international businesses to egg vendors in the slums. I wanted to impress on them the importance of net profit, the money that is “left over” after you pay all your expenses including your income.

I wanted them to know that it’s the only number that matters in the long run (others might be more important in the short run), so I asked an egg vendor:

“Would you like to get to a point where you could choose what to do with your time and your money?” She lit up.

I said, “Wealth is simply the ability to choose what to do with my time. We need to figure out how to become wealthy, not rich (riches=money).” She agreed and recognized instantly that having more money, if it didn’t create a better lifestyle for her, would not solve anything.

Sound familiar? We struggle with the same issue, the decimal point is just in a different place. The key is Net Profit. If you have Net Profit, now you have the freedom to choose what to do with it – the seed money for Wealth. To drive this home I asked the Kenya business owners to switch out the term “Net Profit” with “Your Freedom Number”, and to report it to each other every month, along with how the were going to reinvest it to create more wealth. They got very excited about the idea and there was a lot of buzz about their “Freedom Numbers”. I also challenged them to have a long term Freedom Number – the accumulated Net Profits over time that would truly create Wealth – the ability to choose what to do with their time.

One of the big “ahas” from being with business owners in Kenya was that the Cycle of Poverty is identical here with seemingly successful business owners – we haven’t really broken out of the mental Cycle of Poverty. The decimal point is in a different place, but we’re mortgaged and leveraged to the hilt and Net Profit is something we use to go to the movies, not reinvest in our business. After all, how could $50 left over at the end of the month have any impact anyway? I might as well just use it to enjoy the moment.

The egg vendor had the same question. She figured she might have 200 shillings ($2.64) of Freedom Money at the end of a month. We did the math. If she reinvested it and bought 20 extra eggs the next month, and kept reinvesting her increasing Net Profit for 18 months, her personal income would go from 4800 shillings a month to 30,000 shillings a month, with 10,000 more shillings to still reinvest in her business! $2.64 is a great Freedom Number if you see it that way.

What is your Freedom Number (Net Profit) this month? What are you doing to create more of it? Are you reinvesting it to build Wealth or using it for short term comfort?

Net Profit is the most important number in your business – it’s your only Freedom Number. Focus on it and you’ll make more money in less time.

He who makes the rules wins.

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Make Your Own Business Rules.

As I was writing my new book “Making Money is Killing Your Business” and getting feedback on it, a lot of people told me that some of the principles in this book are things they’ve never heard before. I’ve frequently heard, “I’ve never been given permission to think that way.” Allow me to set the record straight. I’ve never had an original thought in my life and I’m pretty sure no one else has either.

Picasso said “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” There is nothing new under the sun and when I hear people claiming they have an amazing new way of doing something that no one else has ever thought of, it usually turns out it was all just marketing.

One of the big re-discoveries of old truths for me was that a business is supposed to throw off three things for us, time, money and significance. But for some reason we only expect it to give us one: money. And because we focus on just making money, our business never gives back time or helps us have a significant impact in the world around us. We’re too busy making money to get to the important stuff.

As a result everything is backwards. We build a business and take whatever lifestyle that business happens to throw off for us, which at best usually involves having money, but rarely a lot of time, and almost never significance. This isn’t surprising because “he who makes the rules wins,” and we too often let our business and the business world around us make the rules for us. Making Money was written to help us take hold of our business and re-make the rules in our favor so that our business finally becomes our servant to do our bidding, not the other way around.

On Monday, I’m able to head to London, Belfast, and Nairobi Kenya largely because I’ve been committed to making my business live by my rules. I have to rein it in every day of every week, but simply being committed to do so has made all the difference. Working for free with business owners in Kenya is a great reward for having made the rules in my business. I’m looking forward to a lot more time, money, and significance to come as I force my business to live by my rule: Live well by doing good.

Are you making the rules or reacting to your business? He who makes the rules wins.

Buy my book for a small business owner in Kenya. I’ll take it to them.

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February 7-20 I will accompany The 1010 Project to Kenya to explore ways to break the cycle of poverty by developing sustainable business models. Brian Rants, the Director of The 1010 Project asked me to work with them to think big and go beyond the typical craft-making and handwork solutions. We’ll be looking for ways to fund real businesses that work for the local economy – it’s an exciting and daunting opportunity.

We’ll be working in the Kibera slum with a population density of 1,250 people per acre. We lived on one acre in Farmington, CT for years, backed up against 75 acres of state forest. Kibera will be a different world. We’ll also meet with some nationally connected business leaders to involve them in the solution.

The size of the problem is overwhelming. Our solution will be simple – change everything; one person and one small business at a time.

What can you do?

Three things:

  1. Sign up for The 1010 Project Newsletter here – and keep updated about our trip and what we plan to do to.
  2. Make a donation to help fund the trip by clicking here. I will be funding my own travel costs; your donations will go to fund the in-country costs of the trip and the travel costs for Brian Rants, The 1010 Project Director, and to support the in-country permanent presence of The 1010 Project headed up by Keith Ives.
  3. Buy a copy of Making Money is Killing Your Business that we can take with us to Kenya and donate to a small business owner. I wrote this book as a comprehensive reference book for starting and running a small business, and I believe the principles work in any culture. It is normally $28.95, but if you want to buy one specifically to send on our trip, we’ll take it with us (it will be shipped in advance), and the cost will be only $15. This will pay for the printing, handling, shipping and for having your name placed in the book (address info will not be provided).

To buy a book to send with us to Kenya and present in your name, go to our pre-order site and click on the Book for Kenya button. We’ll present the book on your behalf to a small business owner in Kenya. We’ll only be able to take 150 books, so please order your Book for Kenya right away.

Making Money is not an Empowering Vision

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To build a business that provides you the lifestyle you want, you need a vision that motivates you. And guess what? Making money is not an empowering vision. I know plenty of people who’ve tried it including me.

My friend Eddie Drescher has a client who told him, “After $150,000, it didn’t make me any happier to be making $500,000.” Some people push the numbers up or down, but you get the point—money never makes life more meaningful.

What we do with it can.

I made healthy six-figure incomes for years before I started The Crankset Group. One day a few years ago, while in one of those jobs, Diane, my much better half, came to me and said, “I don’t know how you keep going, because I can’t take this job any more and I’m not even the one doing it.” She was responding to the listlessness, the lack of power and meaning that comes from just making money.

She helped me identify that I hadn’t made any connection between the money I was making and what I could do with it to build a life of success and significance for myself, let alone for anyone else. It was as if making money was an objective that lived on its own and had no way of influencing what went on in the rest of my life beyond buying shiny objects.

But I knew intuitively that there is a deep connection between my work, the fruit of that labor, and how I could use that work to create a life of success and significance. It was the turning point that led to starting The Crankset Group. I make a great living now, too, but with better reasons than just making dough. I get out of bed easier and with more purpose.

A successful business owner eventually figures this out. Making money is not an empowering vision; neither is being trapped as an employee of yourself something you can call a lifestyle. Either way, if you want to be successful you’re going to need to figure out how to build a business that makes money while you’re on vacation, while you’re also trying to make money.

The successful business owners make sure they make money today, but they make sure they are building their future at the same time. And building your future almost never makes you money today:

  1. deciding what your business looks like 3 years from now
  2. putting together a simple 2pg Strategic Plan to get there
  3. Process Mapping your business so somebody else can do it for you
  4. hiring the right people and training them, etc.

None of these things make you money today. All they do is help you build a business you can enjoy for decades. If you’re focused on making money, you won’t get there. If you’re focused on building a business that makes money while you’re on vacation, you’ve got a much more empowering vision.

Are you working to make money or to build a business you can use to create significance for yourself and the community around you?