What matters most in making your business successful? (It might not be what you expect)

If a genie popped out of a bottle and granted you instant “best-in-your-industry” status in just one of four categories, which would you choose?:

• best management
• best margins
• best marketing
• best product

While all these contribute to your business success, only one factor matters most.

PRODUCT?
It’s often assumed that the highest-quality and best product wins. Not true.

What’s the No. 1 restaurant in the world? McDonald’s. What’s the No. 1 wine? Franzia (the stuff that comes in a box!).

MANAGEMENT?
The next assumption is that management makes the competitive difference. Countless “dream teams” have failed miserably (think Enron, the movie Oceans 12 and the 2004 Olympic basketball team, comprising nothing but NBA stars, ending up third, losing to Lithuania. Ouch.).

MARGINS?
Certainly your accountant and CFO would wish for the highest margins. Tell’em margins don’t matter at all if the product never sells.

Ultimately, like  it or not, the one thing that matters most in determining whether your business succeeds or fails miserably is read more »

Millennials, also known as Gen Y-ers (80 million, born between 1980 and 1995), were raised by overly doting parents who coddled their self-esteem like fragile Fabergé eggs. They played in little leagues where the score wasn’t kept and where everyone was a winner and everyone got a trophy for just showing up.

Having hired, worked with and trained many, I had concluded that millennials were simply lazy, undisciplined, unmotivated, over-entitled and disengaged, with the attention span of goldfish.

Then I joined the Board of Directors of an organization called Invisible Children, founded by and made up entirely of millennials. I was quickly humbled to the fact that it is not that they are unmotivated, inattentive or disengaged—they were just unmotivated, inattentive and disengaged in working for ME!

The three leaders behind Invisible Children and their mostly volunteer army of incredibly motivated, hard-working and passionately engaged millennials have pulled off achievements in the last half dozen years that even SUCCESS hasn’t in the last 116 years. They have organized marches on Washington, simultaneous overnight rallies of millions of people in over 100 cities worldwide and pulled off wild stunts to get themselves on the Oprah show (which they did three times! video1, video2). They even wrote a bill that they personally pushed through the Senate and Congress all the way to the Oval Office and stood there while the President of the United States signed it. You cannot tell me this is an unmotivated, lazy and unfocused generation anymore. Go here to help support this group.

Having seen the talent, passion and capabilities of the millennials up-close, I now believe they pose one of the greatest strategic opportunities for companies today… if read more »

Now I don’t like this fact. I would philosophically argue against this fact. But it is a fact… and the evidence is all around us.

Who makes the best-tasting hamburger in the world? Doubtful you’d anoint McDonald’s with that title, but they outsell everyone else by many billions of dollars.

What is the best wine in the world? Certainly Franzia (which comes in a box!) wouldn’t be your first or 100th guess, but it is the best selling.

What is the highest-quality bottled water? If you tested it, it certainly wouldn’t be Aquafina (owned by PepsiCo), Dasani (owned by Coca-Cola) or Poland Spring (owned by Nestle Waters), but those are the number 1, 2 and 3 best selling.

Nine times out of 10 it is not the best or highest-quality clothing line, automobile, restaurant, CPA firm, real estate agent, lawyer, furniture manufacturer, refrigerator, etc. that sells the most or becomes the biggest—it is the ones who market themselves the best.

This is the business axiom that I witness all around me every day:
The ultimate success of a product or service is 10% the quality of the product and 90% the quality of the marketing.

Now while I don’t necessarily LIKE that fact, as I believe the success of a product or service should be what’s most important and it should stand ENTIRELY on the value it delivers, that is just not how it works in reality.

Even if you are simply an individual in a sales organization this is true. It is not necessarily the best, the highest quality, highest class, most refined people that make it to the top… it is the ones who market themselves, network themselves, position themselves with credibility amongst their peers and demonstrate their growing and developing selves to the circle around them that end up at the top of the sales organization.

Now, let me also add this: If your product or service is bad… or even if you are bad, unethical or without integrity, no amount of marketing will make you or your product or service successful—especially in this day and age of Yelp, Twitter, Facebook and Google. You and your product or service reputation will die a certain and expedient viral death.

Here is a not so funny (literally) great example of this: read more »

John Lennon is my real estate agent in South Beach, Miami. Seriously, that is his real name.

John sells exclusively on a single street called South Pointe Drive, located in an exclusive area called SoFi (South of Fifth). His sales territory consists of six über-luxury high-rises along the cruise ship waterway and Miami Beach front.

In the past 15 years, John has sold more than $3 billion in real estate on this street (do the math on 3 percent commission—that’s almost as much as the other John Lennon made!).

John took Georgia and me to lunch a couple days ago to give us an update on our property and the market. I took the opportunity to try and pry out the secret to his extraordinary success.

I found it! And now I will pass it along to you too… read more »

I wrote an article for Jeffrey Gitomer’s ezine recently in promotion of his SUCCESS Challenge on the SUCCESS Blog. It’s an article I think you will benefit from too.

I got into real estate when I was only 20 years old. I remember entering an office of 44 veteran agents who all had experienced track records and thick Rolodexes of past clients. One of them even called me a “naive snot-nosed kid” at one meeting.

That did it. I got pissed, and then I got even.

In 90 days I was outselling the entire office combined—with more listings and more escrow closings!

How did I do it?   read more »