You know, it’s interesting to me that most of the lessons that I learned in school had nothing to do with my becoming successful and wealthy. In school we learn how to become an accountant, how to become a nurse, how to become a banker, how to become an engineer. But there’s no class that teaches you how to become wealthy.
No matter what industry you look at, no matter what career you look at, there are people earning millions doing it and there are people earning nothing. The difference isn’t education. The key is your outlook and your activities. Are you doing wealth-building activities or crazy-building activities? You know what I mean? Are you doing the stuff that is going make you wealthy or are you doing the stuff that’s going to make you crazy and postpone success?
I call it $500-an-hour work versus $20-an-hour work. $500-an-hour work to me is only four things: getting new customers, selling more to the customers that you have, hiring and managing sales people, and buying out your competition. That’s it! Everything else—sourcing vendors, delivering quotes, dropping off samples, doing the accounting, the billing, writing checks, talking to bankers—it will all drive you crazy. It will make you exhausted and leave you with no time and no energy to go out and focus on business development, which will make you wealthy. Your first challenge is to keep track of how much $500-an-hour work are you doing—wealth building—versus $20-an-hour work that is just wasting your time and postponing success.
Now, let’s drill down hard. Selling stinks. There are plenty of seminars and webinars that you can go to and hear about how to make cold calling fun. Hey, good luck with that. Let’s face the facts: Calling on a stranger, trying to get them to know you, like you, trust you and maybe buy something from you… stinks! It stinks because you’re going to hear some rejection. When we were kids, what was the one word we hated hearing the most? We hated hearing “no,” right? Our parents said no, our teachers said no, our coaches said no, people we wanted to go out on dates with said no. I hated that word! And so now, we as business people confuse the rejection and the pain of “no” from our youth with the fact no means “No, I’m happy with who I’m buying from,” or “No, I don’t want to go to work for you,” or “No, I don’t want to sell my company to you.” It’s not personal, it’s just business. And yet, even the most successful people struggle to stay focused on the wealth-building activities because they’re a little harder than the wasting-time activities and the postponing success that’s behind your desk.
So here’s my challenge to you. It is a million dollar secret. It is how I created a nearly $500 million company and it’s what I still do. I keep track of how much time I spend on $500-an-hour work, versus how much stuff that I do that’s $20-an-hour work. So keep track of it. Every day. We have a success system at Proforma, but you can create your own. Keep track of how much time you spend on wealth-building activities, how much time you spend on everything else and what those things are. Keep track of what you need to delegate. Get everything else out of your way to go get wealthier.
I know if I asked most owners or sales rep in this industry, “How much time did you spend last week—forget last year, forget last month—just last week how much time did you spend on wealth-building activities?” most people couldn’t tell me. And that’s not a good place to be in because if you don’t know what you’re doing to waste your time and postpone success, then you don’t know how to fix it. You know, I’ve met distributors—thousands of distributors in this industry—who do $250,000 a year and wonder, “What could you do for me?” And I think “I just met somebody that’s not really been in this industry 20 years, they’ve been in this industry one year, 20 times, because they’ve learned nothing.” Don’t be somebody that learns nothing.
Learn how you spend your day. We call that plan, execute and evaluate. Most people plan. You probably have a to-do list. I call that a “do-do” list because to-do lists do not keep track of what’s $500-an-hour work versus $20-an-hour work. Most people do most of what’s on their lists. You may do stuff that wasn’t on the to-do list and then write it down and check it off, because that feels really good, right? That’s not enough. You have to plan, you have to execute and you have to evaluate: “How did I spend my time?” Only when we evaluate do we learn and improve, so let me encourage you to understand the difference between wealth-building activities and everything else. Start measuring it and monitoring it so that you can continually focus more on those things that will make you wealthy, those things that will make you a millionaire.
