Competition? That's the enemy isn't it?

Why would you sell or worse, give the competition your ideas? It doesn't seem to make sense at all and yet it's a very solid business strategy—and especially for small business.

In this episode, you'll find three solid reasons why competition can change your life for the better.

Right click here and ‘save as' to listen to this episode.

You are read the transcript on the website too:
#155: Why Selling Strategies to Competition Is a Smart Idea

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Approximately every month we take our nieces, Marsha and Keira for dinner, but Keira always does something very curious.

Since the girls were little, my wife Renuka and I have taken them to dinner

After dinner we head to the mall, where they buy themselves an ice-cream. The first thing Keira does when she gets her ice-cream is offer me the first bite. “Not too big a bite”, she'll always say. But yes, I do get the first bite, before she continues to devour the rest of the ice-cream. In doing so, Keira is sharing what's rightfully hers to keep. She doesn't need to have a chunk of her ice-cream bitten off, no matter how small.

Like Keira, our business is our ice-cream

We don't need to share our secrets with someone else, do we? Yet, the smaller your company, the bigger the upside in sharing the secrets and knowledge you've gained over the years. Big companies can thrive on muscle power alone and sell solely to their customers. A smaller business, on the other hand, needs to learn to share; to teach the competition what they already know.

I know, I know, this strategy sounds really odd. However, there are very solid reasons why you should wade right into the unlikely world of “teaching your competitors”.

Let's find out why and cover three main points.

1: Clients Come And Go, Competition Remains Longer
2: You're always ahead of the competition (even when you tell them what you know)
3: Why selling your information to competition makes the market more viable

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Part 1: Clients Come And Go, Competition Remains Longer

Imagine you dominated 90% of your market. Would you be happy?

About 20 years ago, I heard of a lumber company that was hugely successful. So successful, in fact, that the competition was reduced to just 10% of the share of market, while this lumber-company gobbled up the rest. Ideally they should have rested on their laurels.

A 90% stake signifies a healthy bottom line and lots of champagne, but they were restless. Their restlessness arose from their unusual plight. Being a lumber-based company, they could only operate profitably in a certain geographical area. If they tried to sell outside that area, they would run into increased transportation costs and other additional taxes, which made it unprofitable to go outside their boundaries. In short, they were “trapped” and could never expand or grow their business.

What would you do in such a situation?

Marketer, Jay Abraham, came up with a solution. He suggested the lumber company sell their secrets. As you can imagine, such a suggestion meets with instant pushback. The lumber company was the market leader because they had a system to treat the trees.

I don't remember the story very well, but it went a bit like this: If they overdid the treatment, the lumber would be “overcooked”. If they were too cautious, the wood would be “raw” and unfit for any use. Every year, companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of precious lumber, because they hadn't perfected this system of treating the lumber just right.

And now the company was being asked to sell its secrets

You'd recoil if you were asked to do the same, wouldn't you? Like some crazy grandmother defending her precious recipes, you'd refuse to give away your secrets. What if the competition learned all of the methods and put you out of business? Why should you sell something that has taken you so much pain to acquire? Giving away, or selling your secrets to the competition seems like the most dimwitted thing to do.

Selling to competition may seem foolish, but competition is an exceedingly powerful source of revenue and longevity.

My friend Julia used to own several bed stores. Over the years she learned how to run the stores very effectively. So effective was she that she'd make 200-300% higher profits over other stores. What's interesting about a bed store is that the goods aren't terribly unique. If you look at a brand like Sealy or Sleepyhead, you're likely to find the same beds in practically every bed store.

Yes, her profits were higher than other stores, but there's a limit to how much stock can be held in a store

Unless Julia were to lease a new space, get the franchise rights, hire new staff etc., there seemed to be no way to increase her profits with clients. However, there was a spectacular, if slightly hidden opportunity to sell the secrets to the competition.

Clients come and go. You buy a bed, and you're not exactly rushing out to buy another one tomorrow, are you? So clients buy the product and leave, but what does competition do? They stick around. If Julia were to sell her secrets to the competition, they'd stick around for as long as they were getting results. The “result” might mean greater profits, more time off, less staff turnover, or less chaotic management systems.

Which is what the lumber company did as well

They realised their geographical boundary was going to inhibit their growth, so they started having seminars. At first, the seminars were modestly priced at $5000 per head. Then in barely a year or so, the very same seminars shot up to $25,000 per person. Would you find the price of the seminar prohibitive? Lumber companies lost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

Badly treated wood was taken as the “cost of doing business”. Once this lumber company showed them their methods, the other lumber companies were in a position to make a small fortune by not consigning the wood to waste. And it wasn't just the lumber companies in that district, or city, or even country. Lumber companies around the world wanted to pay for that information so that they could reduce waste to the bare minimum. The competition would stick around as long as it was finding the information profitable.

Every bookstore on the planet is an example of this concept of selling to the competition

When confronted with the fact that you may need to sell your secrets, the idea may seem unpalatable, but look at the bookstore in your city. Those videos, the books, the magazines—they're all filled with secrets that are being given away.

Grandma kept her secrets and she's highly revered in her own family, but Grandma's only clients are her immediate family. The clients of the books, videos and magazines are the entire world. And you know as well as I do how the systems start chugging along once you buy a book.

You rarely buy one book and never buy another one again

When a business owner gives you their “secrets” and you get value from the information, you want to go back for more. However, as we've experienced in the past, we rarely restrict ourselves to just books. We buy into a lot more.

The lumber company continued to make steady profits from their sale of lumber to their customers, but it's the competition that needed more information on a regular basis. They were not only able to give information in the form of treating lumber, but on many other topics that the competition needed to succeed as well.

However, the most important bit of all is the longevity of the competition

Customers tend to come and go. Whether you're selling a bed, lumber or consulting, a customer will show up, take what they need and leave. And truly speaking, so will a competitor. However, in many cases the competition will come back to get even more information.

They'll consult with you, buy your courses, attend your workshops, and want to get as much as possible from you. If you're already ahead of the competition, they will keep coming back. No matter whether you have a brick and mortar business or something online, the principle remains exactly the same.

Customers come and go.
Competition stays around a lot longer.

The lumber company was seemingly trapped

Yet, it's that very trap that transformed their business. Instead of dealing solely with clients, they moved to competition and operated in a completely different universe. However, a red flag does pop up, doesn't it?

What if the competition takes your stuff and makes it their own? Is it possible to muscle in, on your market? What if you don't recover from your weapons being used against you? Let's find out in this second section on why you're always ahead of your competition, even when you're teaching them everything you know.

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2: You're always ahead of the competition (even when you tell them what you know)

Let's say you started walking down the road, six months ago

Somewhere along the way you learned a lot about the road, the pit stops, the method of walking, rehydration methods, etc. Now you're teaching your competition who's coming down that same road. If both of you were to keep walking, you'd still be many “months” ahead of the competition. Even though they've bought all the videos, read all your books and followed your plan in extreme detail, they're still going to be many months behind, even with you giving away all the tips that will help them move faster ahead.

However, if you're still feeling a bit paranoid about the competition, there are two factors that will keep you ahead.

The first factor is that time marches on.

Let's say you've figured out how to make social media ads get a great return on investment. By the time you teach your competition everything you know, time is ticking away. Things change all the time. What worked for Facebook yesterday, may be different today.

The same would apply for any business. Every so-called “success case study” is only a record of the past, and whatever you teach is likely to have changed anywhere from a tiny fraction to quite a lot. Even if you're teaching in an area that's not changing everyday—let's say watercolours, for instance—there's still some change in tools or equipment.

Something in your technique, material or sequence will change all the time, often without your knowledge. And the competition can't keep up.

The second point is one of mistakes

We all have been lost at some point or the other—even with a GPS. Why is this so? A map is a map is a map, right? We're not supposed to get lost when we're given precise instructions. However, human error, and often, human creativity comes into play. Even when it seems you're following the map with a great deal of precision, there's always some possibility that it will be interpreted in an incorrect manner. Your competition is going to have to work out those mistakes and fix them.

It's easy to believe that selling information to competition is risky

What if the competition takes your ideas and uses it as their own? The reality is different. No matter how generous and detailed you are with your ideas and systems, you will always be ahead of the competition. When we did the Protégé sessions back in 2006-2008, most of the “customers” were really our competition.

For most of our courses we get clients to fill in a form before, or right after they join. In this questionnaire, many of them revealed the primary reason why they wanted to be part of the course. As you've already guessed, they didn't want to reinvent the wheel. They wanted to use the system that we already had in place.

If you stay stagnant, the competition will catch up

They'll show up, they may overtake you and you're likely to be left in their dust. Yet we know that few of us intend to remain stagnant. As we learn and implement, invent and re-invent, we move ahead always maintaining enough of a lead. Plus, a lot of what we do depends on our strategy.

Staying ahead is a weird concept, because we're not running parallel races with our competition. In reality we're chapping and changing our strategies all the time and any comparison with the competition is odd, at best.

You can't really compare one restaurant with another. You can't throw one author in the same bull ring as another. Comparison itself is a super-weird activity to contemplate. Anyway, if the competition really wanted to copy your work, there are ways and means of doing so.

Instead, selling your work to competition is a much saner idea

It earns you revenue, builds up your authority and no matter how much you give away or sell, there's still an astounding amount of information that remains to be explained. If anything, selling the system is a far superior way to grow a business, as it draws in both customers and competition on a much bigger scale.

But here's one of the biggest reasons why you need to sell to your competition: it is called “expanding the market“. Most of us think of competition as a bad thing, but it's quite the opposite. It makes the market more viable. Let's find out how.

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3: Why selling your information makes the market more viable

In 2014, Tesla Motors did something very revolutionary. They gave away the patents to their electric car.

What are we to make of news like that? Is Tesla just being generous?

Or does it have an ulterior motive? We know electric cars are a tiny fragment of the market. Despite being superior in almost every way to the petrol-driven car, they're still to make big inroads. But as an article on Forbes Magazine pointed out, Tesla's real competition is not another company.

Instead it's the archaic petrol engines that are being manufactured in the millions around the globe, every single day. By giving away the patents, the competition doesn't have to figure things out. More importantly, they don't have to get into yet another patent lawsuit that would slow them down. Even when the other car manufacturers start to work on Tesla's patents, Tesla should be well down the road.

James Part is the co-founder and CEO of Fitbit, a wireless fitness tracker.

When Fitbit entered the market, they had bigger, gruntier competitors like Nike and Jawbone with the potential to crush an upstart like Fitbit. But here's what Park says. “You need some critical mass to legitimize what you're doing.” And Ben Yoskowitz, an angel investor told Inc. Magazine: “If nobody is competing in your space, there's a very good chance the market you're going into is too small.

Any reasonably good idea has 10,000 people working on it right now. You may not even know they exist because they're as small as you.”

But what's all of this got to do with you? After all Fitbit didn't give away or sell its information, did it?

We grow up in an us vs. them environment. Which means that many, if not most of us, believe that competition isn't a good thing. We also believe that too much competition causes a saturation in the marketplace.

Both these beliefs have some truth in them, but it really depends on your point of view. When you teach competition to do something that you already know, you're not only earning an income, but you're doing your own bit to broaden the market.

My friend, and super-graphic designer, John McWade was literally the first one on the planet to use desktop publishing software

McWade ran into some of the earliest Mac computers back in the 80's. He had a job as an art director of a magazine called Reno when he was given a little piece of software by Jeremy Jake. Jake was the chief engineer of a tiny Seattle startup called All This and was writing a software called PageMaker. Today we use the fancy InDesign software for desktop publishing but the heart of Adobe desktop publishing goes all the way back to PageMaker.

But who was using PageMaker?

Literally no one on the planet, except the engineers and John. Which is when John started up Before and After Magazine. And he showed people how to use PageMaker, and to create amazing graphic design. You could safely say that John McWade single handedly expanded the market and created competition.

Today there are tens of thousands of books, videos and courses on InDesign. Selling the secret of how to create great graphic design has given McWade a good life and a huge fan following. In turn, the expansion of the market has been good for almost everyone. However, this advice of expanding the market doesn't just apply when you're starting up. It also applies when you're entering a reasonably mature marketplace.

Which is why no matter where you look, whether it's books, cosmetics, shoes, consulting or training, there's new stuff appearing on the horizon almost endlessly. Which brings us to a very crucial point.

Your competition is going to sell to your competition

If you decide to keep your secrets all to yourself, that's your prerogative. However, your competition isn't exactly going to keep mum. If you have some great knowledge in selling real estate, and you decide not to tell or sell, another real estate agent will write a book, do seminars and give their version, anyway.

If you're outstanding at creating apps, so are a thousand others who will happily put their information out for sale. The market will exist with or without you, so you might as well get your skin in the game because there really is hardly any downside and a ton of benefit, instead.

Selling to your competition may at first seem like a bad idea, but it rarely is.

No one is saying you need to ignore your customers. Your customers are extremely important, but so is the competition. Go out and find the competition. They're good for business.

Next Step: Read or listen to: The Unlikely Bestseller (And Why It Sold 2 Million Copies)

 

Take time off? Doesn't everyone want that?

So how are you supposed to achieve that force of business?

How do you get to downtime? And what about the passion projects you've been putting off for so long?

In this episode we wrestle with the remaining two forces of business and start on a journey that's been put aside for much too long.

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Read the article online: Passion Projects: How They Can Completely Change Your Business

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Fourth Force of Business—Passion Projects
Part 2: Fifth Force of Business—The Power of Down Time

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The fourth force: Passion Projects

In 2010, I got this dazzling idea to do a series of stock cartoons.

As you probably know, I'm a professional cartoonist, and my fascination for Photoshop has lasted for well over 20 years. It seemed like a very good idea to create a unique set of cartoons that clients could use for their blogs, e-books, webinars or presentations. Then, seven years sneaked up, and now it's 2017. The cartoons aren't done.

Passion projects are what feed your soul

A passion project is something that you really want to complete, not necessarily because of revenue or fame. It's just something that you have to do because no one else will do it. The longer you put it off, the more you feel something chipping away at your soul.

I've wanted to write a book on talent; I've wanted to write about real education online with “Teacher vs. Preacher”, there's a website that I started out in 2015, and it's been on ice ever since. So much of what's important to me, to you just seems to circle the airport and never really lands.

However, at least at first, passion projects don't necessarily feed your tummy

If you were to decide to spend time embarking on a photography project on the side, or writing the novel you've always planned to write, there's almost no guarantee that any of it will bring in revenue or clients. It's possible that you may hit paydirt or hit a wall—at least when it comes to any sort of riches or fame. Even so, now and then it's important to feed your soul.

Take for instance, Marcus Stout from Golden Moon Tea

Back in 2011, Stout decided to trash 4 out of 5 of his best-selling teas. As if that were not enough, his company had to re-create 75 of his tea blends? What was the reason for all of this upheaval? It was a passion project that Stout wanted had wanted to put into place for a long time.

Around 2011, he changed the way he was personally eating and found he wasn't keen on drinking a lot of his own tea. “Most people don't realise it,” he says, “but a lot of tea has chemicals, even if they say it's natural.” Since he was keen on getting rid of all chemicals and every last toxin, he decided to scrap his best-selling tea.

It wasn't easy to take on a passion project of this nature

Stout did his homework. He didn't merely jump into changing the teas without seeing if a market existed. Even so, it was an incredibly difficult decision to make as some of the teas had been superstars all the way back from 1995. Some of his clients ask for those teas even today, and he won't stock them or sell them because they don't meet his standards.

A passion project can be a small undertaking or a complete change in the way you conduct your business

No matter how we look at it, it's a plane that's been circling the airport, and you need to get that plane to land. At Psychotactics, this meant walking away from doing courses in the second half of 2017 and early 2018.

The Article Writing Course and other live courses (that means courses that are conducted by me online) won't show up until mid-2018. In doing so, we walk away from well over $100k-$150k of profit. Will the passion projects replace that income? It's impossible to tell. When we walked away from the Protégé Program back in 2009, we also walked away from $150k a year, with no idea how to replace that income.

Whether you're dealing with smaller revenues or substantial revenues, the fear and the excitement are remarkably similar

However, a passion project needs to be done. It can't be postponed forever. All those dreams of what you and I will do when we retire, can't wait for retirement. They might be pushed onto the back burner for a while, but at some point, we all have to do what is important to us, even if we aren't sure it will have a payback.

Getting to New Zealand was a bit of a passion project for us

When we left India, we didn't know what to expect in New Zealand. We'd never been to Auckland and knew next to no one. We were also leaving a very settled and decently luxurious life back in Mumbai. The people we'd met along the way told us that it rains a lot in Auckland and it's really quiet. That to us was our beacon of light. We love the rain and the quiet, and it became our not-so-little passion project.

Making space for “landing those planes” is necessary.

It may not happen right away, but it needs to happen because it's good for the soul. What we've found as well, is that in the long run it's been reasonably profitable. Every time we've walked away from one thing to put our energy into another, we've found it's helped not just our mind, but our business as well.

A business needs so many things and has so many forces pulling at you in all directions

Learning by doing
Learning by learning
Revenue generation/client retention
Passion projects

There's still one thing that we all desperately need, and it's called downtime. It's such a simple concept that it almost requires no explanation, but let's give it a shot, shall we? Let's examine the fifth force of business and why it's incredibly crucial to your business and sanity.

The fifth force: Downtime

In the early days of the watercolour course, I gave everyone a break for a month.

When they came back, almost every participant was painting a lot better than the month before. Did they practice during the break? Did they access other material? Some did, but it didn't explain how almost everyone was better—even the ones who hadn't picked up a brush at all. The only common element between every one of the participants was a factor of downtime.

Business requires downtime

Without downtime there's a lot of do, do, do and not enough time for the brain to process what's happening. Time away from work is almost as crucial as work time itself. Which is why we plan the year differently from most people I know.

Instead of listing out all the things we need to do and projects we need to complete, we first put in the blocks of downtime. Then we put in the work in between that downtime. It enables us to recharge in a way that's not possible when at work.

Yet most of us don't have the luxury of downtime

When we started mentoring my niece, Marsha, for instance, it was a bit like starting up a new business. There was no time to waste. To get her up to speed, I'd tutor her on the way from the classroom to the car. Then in the car, we'd talk a bit and do spellings and practice multiplication tables.

We worked through the week, and for a couple of hours on the weekend. The school holidays were intensive for her, but also for us, and we often put in 6-8 hour days for five-six weeks on end. When you're right at the starting point, everything is an uphill journey. However, over time, Marsha has zoomed to the top tier of the class. Now she still works as hard as she possibly can, but she also has big chunky breaks during the day, week and in the year.

In business, it's not unusual to have no downtime

The mortgage and bills are starting to grow in untidy piles on your desk, and those payments need to be made. But in time, almost all of us have the ability to take time off. It almost seems like a silly thing to do, to take time off when the business has just started to pick up. And yet, it's what we all need to do. Downtime calms you down, relaxes you, and it helps you come back refreshed.

It's a force of business like the other forces

If anything, like the students on the watercolour course, it helps you come back stronger than ever before. Plan your downtime. Start small. Take a few days off, before embarking on longer breaks. But ignore the breaks at your peril. A tired brain is not quite as good as a rested one. And certainly not as creative.

Which brings us to the end of this journey where we explored five forces that pull us in different directions. It's a tug of war. Get used to it. With a little work and strategy, you'll be on the winning side.

 

Next Step: Have a look at—Why Anti-Fragility Breeds Success (And How Nature Focuses On It)

No one thinks running a small business is easy

But even so, there are forces that pull you in all directions.

These five forces almost seem to tear at us as we go through our daily work. It's not just a question of coping with the forces. We have to somehow make them part of our lives. Let's find out how.

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Read Online: How To Cope With The Five Forces of Business: Part 1

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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: What are the five forces of business?
Part 2: Why it is a question of management?
Part 3: What sucks up the most time in business?

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In December 2015, I attended a workshop in Nashville, Tennessee.

The workshop itself was very tedious. There were endless slides, countless examples of TV commercials and no breaks. However, there were these long lunch breaks that spanned almost an hour and a half. With little else to do after lunch, I’d wander around the lobby looking at the signs posted on the walls. The signs were quotes from prominent American politicians.

One of them was attributed to US President, John F. Kennedy.
It simply said:“If not us, who. If not now, when?”

No one seems to know if John F. Kennedy said it or not. And yet, for me at that moment, the quote was relevant. I’d wanted to get certain things done. I’d wanted to write some specific books on talent; books on teaching etc. And this sign seemed to slap me in the face. If it wasn’t for me, who would do it? If not now, when would it get done?

And yet here we are all these months later, and the battle rages on

Many other projects got done, but some remain almost permanently on the to-do list. How could I, I wondered, make things happen? It was time to take stock. I soon realised that business—at least my business—had five permanently competing forces. To achieve what I wanted, I couldn’t only focus on one and leave the others sulking in the corner.

This wasn’t a question of focus, it was a question of management

For me to feel a profound sense of achievement with every passing year, I knew I had to deal not with just one or two, but with all five forces of business. So what are these five forces of business? The first two involve learning.

The third includes revenue and client retention. The fourth was critical, but often neglected “passion projects” and finally there was downtime. All five of these forces jostled for space, and every one of them was incredibly important.

Let’s take a look at all five of them by listing them out, to begin with.

1) Learning by doing
2) Learning by learning
3) Revenue generation/client retention
4) Passion projects
5) Downtime

The first force of business: Learning by doing

Stop for a moment and think of something that kills 842,000 people a year.
That’s a whopping 2,300 people per day. You didn’t think of water, did you?

Water isn’t supposed to kill. It’s meant to give life. And yet it runs around day after day, year after year like a mutant Jack the Ripper. No one, it seems, is interested enough to stop this killer. No one, except Dean Kamen.

“We could empty half of all the beds in all the hospitals in the world by just giving people clean water”, says Kamen.

And Kamen is the one person who’s uniquely placed to take up this challenge. In Manchester, New Hampshire, where he lives and works, he’s known for the invention of the Segway, Ibot Transporter – a six-wheeled robotic “mobility system” that can climb stairs, traverse sandy and rocky terrain, and raise its user to eye-level with a standing person. Kamen has over 440 patents to his name, but it’s clean water that got his attention.

Which is why he set about creating the “Stirling engine”.

The “Stirling Engine” is so amazing, it can generate clean, drinkable water even from water contaminated with mud, even bacteria-filled human faeces. For most people, creating products of such grand simplicity would be an insurmountable barrier, but Kamen’s team at his firm, DEKA, soon came up with a working machine. A machine that only needed the power of a hair dryer. And if necessary, it could even work on fuel sources such as cow dung.

The product was ready; the challenge was met. It was then that Kamen ran into his first major hurdle

For fifteen years Kamen struggled to get his “Stirling Machines” mass-produced and distributed around the world. And yet all he met with was polite smiles and closed doors. The World Bank, the UN, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and many other governmental agencies, and NGO’s—they all realised the problem but couldn’t help.

Too many of these organisations were not set up to help mass manufacture or distribute Kamen’s machine to the poorest parts of the world, where they are most needed.

This is our first challenge in business: We need to learn by doing

At Psychotactics I’ve conducted the Article Writing Course since 2006. It’s called the toughest writing course in the world, and for a good reason. For three months clients have to slog to get to the finish line and be able to write an article in between 60-90 minutes. For me, the workload is magnified several times over.

Every day, I have to look at 25 assignments and lots of questions relating to the assignment. The course itself generates no fewer than 600 articles, all of which have to be read and evaluated. It’s not just the toughest course for the clients; it’s also a mind-bending course for me as the trainer.

So why do it?

The course isn’t cheap at $3000 or more, but it’s not the revenue that’s the biggest driver. It’s easy enough to create one, even two products that would generate a far greater profit, without all the associated hard work. The answer is in the “doing”.

By teaching that course time after time, for the past ten years, you learn things that you couldn’t know or experience by just writing a home study course. Every course brings up brand new challenges all of which have to be tackled.

It’s the problems that create enormous spikes in learning. The secrets of teaching and learning are revealed frustratingly slowly, as I push myself yet into another iteration of the course. Without doing, I’d have no learning, no way to overcome the barriers.

Kamen’s 15-year learning journey to deliver clean water ended in an interesting place too

While the UN or NGOs don’t head out into the tiny villages, there’s one organisation that has found penetration in the smallest pockets. No matter where you go on the planet, you can get yourself a bottle of Coca-Cola. In exchange for a redesign of their age-old dispensing machines, Kamen teamed up with Coke to take the Stirling machines to the far edges of the planet. That’s not as if to say there weren’t more challenges in getting the device to work. Nonetheless, all of these issues can only be overcome by doing.

It’s the reason why you need to blog.
It’s the reason why some of us create podcasts.
It’s the reason why we keep doing stuff even when at times it’s plainly disheartening to go on.

It’s in the doing that we learn the lessons

The reason why so many people fail is because you have to persist for a while before the oceans part and you can walk through to the other side. It’s not like Dean Kamen isn’t well-connected. He’s directly in touch with prominent organisations, US presidents and well-known figures. Even so, it’s taken him a solid 15 years to find any traction. Many of us, swayed by the “double your results tomorrow” bandwagon feel like we’re losers when things don’t happen overnight.

At Psychotactics we’ve had to learn by doing

We’ve held workshops in New Zealand, in the US, in Amsterdam, in the UK. Every workshop is a super-challenge. Why not sit back and just conduct an online course instead? Why not just do the simplest thing possible?

The answer is in doing. You learn most when you push your boundaries. All of this earth-shaking work takes energy and time. A single workshop takes a month of preparation, a month of travel and a month of re-entry time. It's all learning by doing. You can’t make big leaps in your work, and you can’t stand out in the way you’d want to, by taking tiny steps all the time.

It’s these big steps that also cause the greatest chaos

If you were on the Article Writing Course in 2016, it would have been just a course. But if you were part of the alumni doing the course, you might have been slightly horrified. The entire course had changed. Assignments that were usually in Week 11 showed up in Week 4. Whole systems that were used in earlier courses were just dropped and replaced by quite another system. Was the new system tested? Of course not.

It's what learning by doing is often about. When you make significant changes, there’s no way to know how something will work right away. You’re supposed to improvise, and it pushes you to the limit.

Learning by doing easily sucks up the most time in a business

Dean Kamen is a multimillionaire. He flies to work by helicopter every day and has earned enough fame and money never to have to work again. He took on the challenge of proving that clean water could indeed reach the poorest. The only way he could achieve all of this activity was by putting himself on the sword and keeping at it. It’s the core of what drives the business: doing stuff even when the odds are against you.

It’s where you learn the most.

But that’s only one form of learning. There’s also the relatively less strenuous form of learning that can suck up a lot of time. And that’s learning by learning.

Why is Australia hot?
Why is Antarctica cold?

The greatest change in my life in the past 3 ½ years has been my niece, Marsha’s, questions. Renuka and I mentor her, but once she’s done with Renuka’s part of the syllabus, I take over. We sit on the floor near the sofa, chomping cheese, carrots and almonds. And Marsha has questions, lots of questions. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about clouds, countries and their capitals, geology, biology and history.

I learned the Antarctica and Australia were once connected

That they had the same endless forests of Glossopteris. And that with the drifting of continents, Australia moved north. This created space for the Southern Ocean. As Australia floated away, the ocean currents had no landmass barriers. They started spinning around the continent of Australia at an increasingly rapid speed. So quickly did it spin, that the mild climate of Antarctica started to freeze over around 17 million years ago.

Second Force: This is learning by learning and is the second force of business

It’s the one thing that we don’t always have time for. It’s easier to keep doing what we’re doing instead of learning a new skill. Having to dig into the freezing over of Antarctica or how some software program works, can suck up a lot of time. Then there are all those books that we buy that need to be read; all those podcasts that have to be heard; all those courses that have to be looked into.

This year, in particular, I dropped the ball on reading

I benchmark my learning based on where I am with my New Yorker magazine and National Geographic reading. Usually, a New Yorker won’t last more than a few days, and the same goes for National Geographic.

It means I am reading at optimum pace and learning not only through magazines but also have time to read books—a lot of books. Instead, this year, I’ve been behind on New Yorker almost all year. I’ve still got to go through at least four months worth of National Geographic. Somehow it seems, I’ve not allocated enough time for this activity as I did in previous years. I got so tied up with the doing, with the courses, etc. that the learning dropped precipitously.

One of the core forces of business involves learning by learning

To be exceedingly smart at what you do, the learning needs to consist of reading, audio (even if you’re not a big fan), video and learning programs. All of this learning is mind boggling and can be exhausting at times. It's one of the most vital forces of business.

It’s what keeps you on top of things in a way that Facebook or listening to yet another debate about the political madness can never do for you. There is, of course, the downside for this type of learning. I see people who read book after book but never do anything. They always hope to do something, plan to do it, even, but never do. They spend a lot of time in learning from books, audio and video but never doing.

To progress, you need both forms of learning to move together in progression

No matter what the barriers, you need to keep doing. Failure will come, and failure will go, and you’ll learn from it and move ahead. It’s also important to keep your focus on the learning through books, audio and video. I know I slipped in the books department. I am aware that audio has never been a problem, but audio books are not the same as reading a book.

The forces of business pull in all directions. While we’re learning by doing and by learning, we still have to earn a living and keep clients coming back.

Third Force: Revenue generation/client retention

When I just started out Psychotactics, I first heard the definition of the word, “client”.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, the definition of client was: one who comes under your care, protection and guidance. For a lot of people this definition rings true. They want their customers to be like their child. They want to care, protect and guide. And yet, you can do too much.

Back in 2006, I started a year long training called the Protégé Course

It covered a lot of disciplines from copywriting, PR, information products etc. And that class alone was generating about $150,000 a year. But by 2008, I’d stopped that course. There were two reasons. The first reason was I felt I was covering too much material in a single year.

Going through the Protégé course was like having to learn five languages a year. But the secondary reason for stopping the course was simply that I wasn’t able to pay as much attention to the rest of the clients.

You’ve seen this in a classroom

A teacher has her favourite students and they get most of the attention and the others are left behind a bit. In a business, focusing a lot on some clients and not on the others is a bad idea. You have to work on the care, protect and guide as many clients as possible. And do it to the best of your ability. It’s only when we worked this out that we realised we could do just fine with a fewer number of clients.

Psychotactics gets about 90% of its revenue from about 500 clients

But it’s always a big balancing act. You have to have time to help clients through their issues, but no matter what you do, there’s always the brutal fact that some of them will leave. When I started 5000bc, I thought that clients would stay forever.

And many stayed for as long as 10 years, which is longer than forever on the Internet. But eventually clients will leave. You’re then faced with a nice big black hole if you haven’t been working on getting new clients.

And this bugged me a lot

Most people are happier getting new clients and then leaving them to their own devices. I’m happier not having to worry about new clients and would be exhilarated if everyone stuck around forever. However, that’s not how things work. Which is why your third big force in your business is dual-fold. It’s to keep clients and to get new clients at the same time.

We’ve tried a lot of stuff along the way

We gave YouTube a shot, started podcasts, then stopped it. And restarted again. We’ve never done much, if any, SEO. No advertising or publicity. But what’s worked for us has been a steady stream of clients from search engines, from a bit of guest blogging and finally, just creating products that no one else wants to create.

In the end, a few activities have made the biggest difference. I know the 80/20 group of people may pop up here, but it’s not been 80/20 at all. It’s just been that we’ve been more comfortable in some areas e.g. podcasting or e-mail, and persisted. Over the years, that persistence and subtle changes in strategy have worked for us.

But this third force of business takes a lot of time

To care, protect and guide your clients takes up a ton of time. And then, in your “free time” you’ve got to go out and get new clients. We’ve been in the business of marketing since 2000. I thought it would get easier over time. It doesn’t. You have to allocate a good amount of time to just keep client and get clients as well. Your strategy is going to depend on what you do.

I do have one quick tip about this point of getting new clients, though

Once you find what you do, do a lot of it. If you decide to write books on Amazon, write lots of books. If you decide to do guitar videos, do a ton of them. And this is because once clients find you and like you, they binge on your work. If they don’t find a lot of your work, they go elsewhere. Which is why you have to decide what you want to do and go for it. There’s no right or wrong strategy.

When we started our podcasts (or rather restarted it) back in 2014, we had no idea if it would work

But we got going all the same. For a good two years, the download figures stayed more or less the same. We got almost no e-mail from clients. Our reviews on iTunes barely made it past 100 reviews. Still, the sales of products kept going up steadily, month after month. And then for some unknown reason the downloads increased by 20%, then up to 25%. Having all these podcasts; all this information; it’s helped us do both things simultaneously. Get and keep the clients.

This getting and keeping—it’s a force of business. You have to allocate time for it as well. And it can distract you and me away from something we actually love. That something is our “passion projects”.

Let’s find out why in Part 2: Why The Five Forces of Business Can be Tamed

Articles can be mundane or enthralling. But what makes an article stand out? The short answer is enthusiasm. Yet, it's not easy to know how to create enthusiasm in an article, is it? In this podcast, we learn how to step through the three phases that makes your article pack a rollicking amount of enthusiasm.

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Read the article online: 
#152: How To Write Enthusiastically and Avoid The Dull Article
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In this episode Sean talks about

Part 1: Why you need to outline and how to keep it fresh
Part 2: Why you need to feel very strongly about the issue RIGHT NOW.
Part 3: Why you need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.

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What is the definition of sales?

There's are probably a lot of definitions, but back in the year 2003 or so, Canadian-born American motivational public speaker and author, Brian Tracy came to New Zealand. I loved Brian's work and got to know him personally. One of the things I really liked was his definition of sales. “Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another”.

A transfer of enthusiasm.

Wow! I always thought of sales as something grimy

Something you were forced to do to get your product or service in front of a client. With this definition, Brian changed the way I looked at sales. What he couldn't have known is that he didn't just change my perception of sales, but of communication itself. If selling could be enhanced through enthusiasm, then so could writing. Instead of just putting words on paper, an article could come alive with enthusiasm.

There's just one problem, isn't there?

How do you write enthusiastically? Are there stages or steps to follow? Not surprisingly, the stages aren't something you're unfamiliar with. The steps to enthusiastic writing are seemingly so obvious that it's easy to miss them.

Writing can get really grimy without the power of enthusiasm. It's time to find out what makes your words sing, isn't it? Let's take a look at the three steps you're going to need to put that zing in your words.

1: You need an outline. And the outline needs to be fresh.
2: You need to feel very strongly about the issue RIGHT NOW.
3: You need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.

1: How to write enthusiastically: The “fresh” outline

The week my mother in law came to stay with us, I had to throw out all my spices.

Most people think that cooking is the act of getting ingredients together in a pot or vessel. But we also know that ingredients matter. The fresher the ingredients, the tastier the food. What we seem to forget are the spices. Like many others, I bought bottles of spices and they sat in the pantry for weeks, even months on end. My mother in law was appalled at the lack of freshness. She got me to bin the entire lot and start with a fresh lot.

An outline is a lot like stale spices

Whether you're outlining a big project, like a book, or a relatively smaller project, like an article, you're still dealing with the factor of freshness. If the outline is a week old, it's already getting relatively stale. If it's older, you're likely to be struggling to find out what you outlined in the first instance.

The reason I outline is because it saves me time

I'm not exactly the kind of person that loves to outline. The reason why I do so is because I know it gives me structure and it saves me an enormous amount of time. Even so, there's the curse called “excessive outlining”.

In my desire to create a truckload of content, I'll head to the cafe and outline five or ten articles. If I get down to writing those articles within a week or two, maybe even three, I'd be fine. But as you can tell, it's practically impossible to write so many articles in such a short time span.

Which means that the outline starts to get stale

I get newer ideas along the way, and add to the mountain of outlines and the longer I wait, the more the earlier outlines seem to fade into oblivion. I will look at the outlines; I know they're important, but they're not fresh anymore.

Like those spices in my kitchen cabinet, I can throw them in the dish, but they won't enhance the dish at all. Which is why you need to get an idea, outline it, and then get started with your writing.

If you need to re-outline the material along the way, that's perfectly fine, but the outline must be relatively fresh at all times. The longer you wait, the more you have to battle with what you were really thinking about. And battle takes up a lot of energy, which means that you're less likely to write with any sort of enthusiasm.

Consider that outlines don't vary too much

An outline for an article will tend to have a pretty straightforward construction.

First Fifty Words (Opening of article)
What?
Why?
How?
Other questions
Objections
Examples
End of article

So if you had an article on “How to buy earphones”

First Fifty Words
What to look for?
Why is it important?
How to avoid the noise in earphone marketing
What else to consider when buying earphones
Objections
Examples
End of article

That article outline isn't going to change a lot six months or even six years from now, is it?

You can still write a great article or create a chapter in a book about it.  It makes no sense to say that six years from now you will shy away from writing the article. But this is where the weirdness kicks in.

Intellectually you know you can write the article, but when it comes down to writing it, the fact that you wrote the outline a while ago will prevent you from getting too far ahead. You'll somehow want to write another article—any article—and avoid the one that's stale.

When you're going through so much avoidance it's hard to be enthusiastic

Fresh outlines are like fresh spices.
You shouldn't wait too long.
You need to outline and write as quickly as possible.

I will outline on one day and by the next day or two, I'm writing

But why not write on the day itself? You could, of course, but more often than not it's better to keep a bit of space between the outline and the material you're about to write.

Why? Because the outline allows your brain to let the thoughts percolate. A day later your article is likely to be far superior because you've been thinking about the contents as the hours tick by. An outline, a fresh outline, is crucial to get that enthusiasm in your writing, but it's not enough.

The second most important factor is feeling strongly about the issue right now.

2: Feeling Strongly About The Issue Right Now

My friend Cher taught me an important lesson on the day of my father in law's funeral.

When someone close to you dies, most people are uncomfortable around you. They know you're grieving and they feel your pain. It's at this point that almost everyone makes the same statement.

They say something like: “If you need anything, please let me know”. Cher did something entirely different. She baked a whole bunch of muffins, brought them over, stayed for a short while and then left.

I feel strongly about that issue right now

I feel that so many people tend to use words, not actions. That if we were all like Cher, we wouldn't be asking “what can we do?” Instead, we'd be doing something for our friends, our relatives or even that stranger that we may never meet again.

When you feel strongly about an issue, you need to write about it as quickly as you can. Right at the top of my agenda is to write an article about how we need to:

1) Not ask what we should do, but do something instead.
2) Not wait to tell someone how they changed our lives, but be specific about how they did it.
3) Avoid grumbles and demonstrate persistence, instead

We feel strongly about issues all the time

We may have just run into a problem and the issue is top of mind. Or we may have been the recipient of a great wave of generosity. But you don't always need to be prodded by happy and sad moments.

You could have just heard a podcast and that could have ignited a fire within you. Or in the case of this article, a client may ask you a question that you feel needs to be answered in detail.

There are lots of things that rev up the engines of your brain and the more strongly you feel about these issues right now, the more likely you are to write with a greater amount of enthusiasm.

Yet, doesn't this “feeling” lead directly to the outlining process?

Yes it does. The feeling comes right before the outline. Once you feel the surge, you then get down to outline. However, in many cases, a surge may break the rule of outlining.

Take for instance, when you see something on Facebook or in a forum. There's a discussion going and you need to get an important point across. In such a scenario, outlining may slow down the process and the moment of passion passes.

Instead you need to capture the enthusiasm while it's still fresh. What you tend to write in that moment may be remarkably more lucid than anything that's outlined and planned.

Writing while the “iron is hot” is not an excuse to avoid the outlining process

Outlining is smart because it saves time. Writing an answer quickly is just a way of getting your thoughts out quickly and keeping that fire alive. It's a shoddy excuse if you just want to avoid outlining.

Yet it does feed the flames of your outline. I tend to write quickly, if needed, but then I will create an outline and fit the information into that outline. Later, probably the day after, I will write the article or the chapter in the book.

Enthusiasm doesn't come easily

Yet it does strike from time to time and if you don't go through the process of writing down your thoughts and fashioning them, your writing won't necessarily be dull.

A lot of writing is done by sitting down and just working your way through a project. Yet, that sparkle that comes from frustration, desperation or inspiration comes and goes in quick bursts. Learning to capture those shiny bits in your article is what a great writer does.

All of this outlining and striking when the iron is hot is about structure. It's about discipline. Yet, enthusiasm often shows up when you least expect it. It's at this point that we need to learn to trust the diversion. Let's find out how deviating from the script is a good idea to create a high level of enthusiasm.

3: You need to be able to deviate from your script a bit and make it messy.

When does a concept become a coconut?

When you run into your computer's auto-correct, that's when. Like the other day when I was writing an answer in the forum in 5000bc. I fully intended to use the word “concept”, but as you do, my fingers went on their own journey. And as I typed something that was clearly garbled, the auto-correct suggested “coconut” as a replacement. This is the messiness, the unexpected factor that leads to enthusiasm.

It's not unlike the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

In the book, “Messy”, author, Tim Harford talks about how Martin Luther King Jr valued preparation. By the age of five he was learning Bible passages by heart. By fourteen his dedication to detailed research, outlining and re-outlining was paying off as he won a prize in a public speaking contest.

This attention to sticking to a script paid off time and time again when he started preaching, then later as he snapped up an oratory prize in college, and finally helped him get his job as a minister.

Every sermon started out on yellow lined paper as an idea on Tuesday, would be researched and re-drafted many times during the week, before he delivered it on Sunday. He lavished well over 15 hours a week learning every sermon by heart, just so that he never had to refer to his notes.

Yet the one speech that was the most memorable of all wasn't rehearsed

It was an improvisation. Even though he went through his prepared text for most of the speech, as he came to the end, he started to improvise.

At that moment, Mahalia Jackson shouted: “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” And then he was off, giving one of the most memorable speeches, that seemed to take a life of its own.

In the world of scriptwriting it's known that scripts take a life of their own

Often writers are astounded to find that the character in the script dictating the series of events. Just like “autocorrect” on your computer, the character decides what to do next.

This concept of the character taking over sounds really odd, until you speak to writers who express how the words on the page seem to come alive in a way that is hard to imagine.

To create enthusiasm in your writing, you need to follow trust the diversion

The outline is crucial, there's not a shred of doubt about that fact. The outline lets you stay within the parameters, but an outline can also be the launching pad for enthusiasm of a monumental scale. Suddenly the words are flowing out of you in a way you can't imagine.

The result is something you're not anticipating, and yet it's extremely pleasing when you get to the finish point. Make no mistake: the results are random when you're first starting out. Martin Luther King Jr. was no average speaker.

Writers, singers, jazz players, sports people—they're not rank amateurs. They've got a bit of practice under their belt and it's only at that point that the improvisation kicks in.

Which isn't to say you should wait until you're a great writer, just to improvise

No one is a great writer. Everyone is still learning their craft and the best way to get started down this path of improvisation is to simply go down the road when you hear “improv” calling you. The enthusiasm you feel for the subject matter will present itself in a way that you don't or can't expect.

Even in the very early stages, you should break free and let the text take over. Unburdened by typos and grammatical errors. Unfettered by whether what you're writing makes sense or not. Writing in a way that a cartoonist doodles, without a care in the world.

I had to learn these lessons of breaking free as well

Take for instance the script of the podcast. When I first started doing the podcast back in late 2014, I'd have a very rough outline, but no script. I'd stick to the points but all of the thoughts had to be improvised as I went along.

By mid-2015, I not only outlined the podcast in great detail, but started reading it off the computer screen and then off a teleprompter on my iPhone called Promptsmart. I thought I was doing a great job until someone suggested I could do better. That comment via e-mail got me thinking about what I'd learned about the diversion; about how letting go was a smart strategy.

And so that's what I did. I still have the outline. I still script and follow the script, but from time to time in the podcast, I'll let the diversion take over. This diversion perks me up when I'm bumping down the side road, but also gives a ton of energy when I get back on track with the script.

It's odd, this advice—even contrary.

And yet we know it to be true. To get enthusiasm you have to doodle, do some fair work, then go back to doodling again. It's what makes for great work, and brings immense power to your words.

Next Step: Find out—Why You Need to Have “Tension and Release” To Create Drama in Article Writing.

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How do you find a good coach?

We've all done courses that have been a waste of time, money and energy. Yet, finding a great coach isn't easy, is it? There doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance how good (or bad) a coach will be.

Or is there? There are a few benchmarks that make the difference between average and special coaches. And strangely, your first point of due diligence is located right on the sales page in the testimonial section.

In this episode Sean talks about

Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials
Factor 2: Why you need to focus on the next play
Factor 3: The Rollercoaster Design Training System

Read it online: Unusual Methods to Find Outstanding Coaches

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I wanted 200 gm of coffee. The Russian behind the counter was only willing to sell me 50 gm.

My idea of a great coffee, was instant coffee, Nescafé to be precise. At which point I was introduced to New Zealand's amazing coffee culture. To improve my coffee taste buds, I first  moved to a slightly fancier brand; a Dutch barista-style coffee called Moccona.

It consisted of coffee granules in a reasonably sized jar. However, that wasn't enough. My journey to becoming a coffee-snob involved buying a pack of pre-roasted coffee called Gravity. Shortly after, I ran into the Russian.

The Russian ran a boutique roasting company not far from my house

When I needed coffee, I'd go over and order about 200 gm (about 7 ounces). Until the day he decided not to sell me that quantity. He was only willing to sell me 50 grams (about 2 ounces). “You live close by,” he said. “What's the point of buying coffee and letting it oxidise for the whole week? When you're out of coffee, you come back and take the next 50 gm.”

A good coach is like my Russian coffee “dealer”.

Good coaches know that you can't consume massive amounts at one go, and so they slow you down so that you get a far deeper, richer experience. Over the years, I've had the luxury of having good coaches. Coaches that take speed up your progress. And there are also the bad coaches, who in their own way, teach you what good coaching is all about.

In this series, we'll take a look at how you pick a good coach that moves you forward on the journey from a “Nescafé” to a delicious “brew of excellent coffee”.

In this series, we'll cover three factors that will help you spot good coaches.

Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials
Factor 2: Focus on the next play
Factor 3: Rollercoaster design

Factor 1: Look for the “End Point” in the testimonials

If the sky is filled with cirrus clouds, what will the next 24 hours bring?

Cirrus clouds are those feather-like clouds you see high up in the sky.

In fact they're so high up at 20,000 feet that they're composed exclusively of ice-crystals. But here's an interesting fact: if you see a sky filled with cirrus clouds, you'll get rain and cooler, if not cold weather within the following 24 hours.

What's fascinating about this fact is that almost all of us have seen those fairy-like cirrus clouds, because they can cover up to 30% of the Earth's atmosphere at a time. Even so, we've missed the obvious—that rain and cold soon follows.

Missing the obvious is something we tend to do a lot when trying to find the right coach—or even the right course to attend—online or offline. And that obvious fact is in the most obvious place of all, in the testimonials. Almost every coach or coaching system will have testimonials, and it's through scanning the testimonials that you're likely to find a lot of incredibly valuable information.

But what does a mere testimonial reveal?

Here are just some of the things you should look out for in the testimonials. Let's say you joined a class to learn to make sushi. When you finish the class, what would you expect to be able to do? Silly question, isn't it? Almost all of us would “want to make sushi”.

That's why we joined the class, and that would be the end point, wouldn't it? Which means that as you scanned through the testimonials, you should see row upon row of words talking about how the attendees were able to make flawless sushi. In fact, we'd be a little concerned if we didn't see testimonials with a clear end result.

Yet when we sign up for courses, we don't bother to check the fine print of the testimonials

Let's say the course makes some bombastic claim like how you can treble your client list in 60 days. Now we know what to look for in the testimonials, don't we? The testimonials should talk about how everyone (yes, everyone) saw a 300% jump in client growth.

Instead, you rarely see any talk about 300% growth. Most of the testimonials seem to talk about the amazing quality of the videos, about the stunning modules in the course or how the person conducting the course is a great teacher. Almost none of the clients talk about the fact that their list numbers have gone up 300% or more. And if such a testimonial does sneak in, it's probably just one of the many testimonials that seem to say little or nothing.

The reality is that every client should reach a clear “End Point”

If you're about to sign up with a coach, your goal is not vague, is it? Which is why if you run into a coaching program, whether it be offline or online, ask to see the testimonials or reviews. Peer carefully through them and you'll find the first clue to locating a coach that's focused on results instead of just another barrage of information and blah-blah.

But that's just one of the points to look for, in a good coach. The second is “the focus on the next play”. What's the next play all about?

Factor 2: Focusing on the “next play”

Think of a GPS for a moment and you'll get an idea of how a coach tends to work.

A GPS knows your starting point, and knows where you need to go. Yet, at all times, the GPS is tracking where you are. It's focused on your current situation and the the traffic that's building up or easing around you.

Good coaches are like walking-talking GPSs themselves

They are focused on the next turn, not something that is going to come down the road. They have that end point in mind, but right now the only thing that matters is the next left or right turn; the next play.

One of my earliest coaches in New Zealand was Doug Hitchcock

Doug was a coach who focused on the next play. He got me to do my goal setting and I wrote down half a million goals. Doug was the one who pulled me back and got me to get the tiny bit done, then the next and the next. “Keep to just three goals”, he'd say and then he'd get me to work on the first one.

This concept of focusing on the next play is what I use today almost 17 years later. When I write an article, it's not about the article, it's about the stages of the article. First the idea, then the outline, bit by bit, play by play. When I look at projects that I haven't finished, it's because I didn't pay attention to Doug—and every brilliant coach's simple advice—focus on the next play.

When looking for a coach look for someone who has a GPS-like functionality

And to be like a GPS, that coach can't have too many clients. If you're considering a course where you can't see the number of likely participants, you're probably signing up for just another dose of information. A good coach is likely to have a fixed number of clients, not an endless number.

You can't watch the next play of a client if you have 500, 200 or even 50 clients. That's just too much activity for a coach to handle and it's almost certain that many clients will simply slip through the net and not do as well as they hoped to do so.

There's a difference between a rally and true coaching

You wouldn't send your kid to a class with 200 other students—let alone 50 students. So why sign up for a coaching program like that yourself? If your goal is to hide among the other students, then it's a good strategy. However, if you want to dramatically move forward, find yourself a coach who can help you focus on your very next move.

In my early twenties, a good friend of mine taught me to do the dance called the “jive”

I wanted desperately to go out and dance well. My parents are great dancers, but that wasn't helping me at all on the dance floor.

So great was my desperation that I joined a dance class, but I was just one of many at the class. Many sessions and months later I was no better than before. I have come to realise that the same story plays itself out for the all the classes where I failed. Whether it’s photography classes, the Spanish class, watercolours—pretty much every class where I hadn't learned skills was simply because I didn’t do my due diligence.

In every situation, I was crammed in with others and the only goal of the coach was to get to the “End Point”. In every situation, the end point wasn't a clearly defined scenario, but merely a point where the class term ended.

It's not like no attention was given to us at all, but it's impossible for a trainer to do what Doug Hitchcock did. Or to get the same level of support that Phelps got from Bob Bowman.

Like a GPS, every turn is just as important as the final destination. And good coaches, pay close attention to these points. Even so, a great coach has one more trick up his or her sleeve. It's the system of “rollercoaster design”.

Factor 3: Rollercoaster Design of Training

My first tour of New York was done at a screaming pace.

I was with my friend, Mark Levy, Author of “Accidental Genius”. Mark is a great guy, but he also wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything in New York. We set out early that morning from New Jersey and went through New York at breakneck speed.

I guess I remember the day so very clearly even though it was back in 2004 because it was all go-go-go. A frenzied tour through a city, with no stops, is sometimes the way to go when you want to see all the sights and have little time. However, when you're looking for a coach, one of the main factors to watch for is what can be called the “roller coaster” learning design.

So what is the roller coaster design?

Even if you've never been on a roller coaster, you know somewhat how it operates. It sets off gingerly, then takes you up slowly and then throws you into a few screaming loops. What's important in roller coaster design is that there's a time to scream and a time to get your breath back. A coach should have “rollercoaster” modules in place when designing a training regime as well.

Almost any skill acquisition will have really tough sections

Which is why a coach must draw out the sequence of the course in advance. The coach or trainer must intersperse tough tasks throughout the training, but always go back to the easy wins. That way the person being coached doesn't feel like they're on the scream machine all the time.

Too much screaming is terrible for learning, but then so is too easy learning. If there isn't a scream session, the roller coaster is not much of a roller coaster. And while not one of us wants to battle it out through a course, there are going to be tougher sections in any sort of training. Sections the coach needs to figure out well in advance.

But it's not enough to have the roller coaster alone

The training system needs to have some sort of breathing space as well. Let's say you're learning to write articles. The course may start out nice and easy but then run into some difficult concept. Concepts that may need more time, understanding and practice.

Is there any leeway in the system or does the coach just barrel through? Is there room for an additional amount of practice? Can the coach take the participants on a detour for a while before getting back to the syllabus again?

Most training rarely has any breathing space. Instead, it's just like the NY tour. The coach takes the clients at breakneck speed across from one point to another.

And this need for getting mindlessly to the other point has real ramifications

You find that people drop out at a high rate simply because they can't cope with the intensity. However, the impact has far greater implications than just dropping out of a course or training. If you drop out of enough Spanish classes, for example, you tend to get the erroneous idea that you were never meant to learn Spanish.

Which is when the “give up” sign flashes madly in your rearview mirror. Granted, just putting in the roller coaster design isn't going to solve every problem. Clients can still go off track for many reasons, but having breathing space in terms of “easy assignments” as well as just “breathing space” to catch up, is critical.

Which brings us to a crucial juncture about how to do our investigations about coaches

It's easy enough to look at the testimonials for any coach. Almost every website will tend to have a string of testimonials that allow you to do your own due diligence. A quick look through the testimonials will clearly tell you whether there's an end point in place.

But how do you find out about whether the coach has a next play or some sort of roller coaster design in place? Unfortunately, there's only one way to tell, and that way is to call or email some of the people who you see in the list of testimonials.

The best way would be to e-mail them first, then get on the call and ask questions about how the course is conducted. Remember that what works for them won't necessarily work for you. If they became rich, famous or acquired skill, it doesn't mean you'll be bestowed with the same shower of goodness.

Which is why you should stick to the questions that involve the structure of the training. The structure is what shows you whether this is just a random run of endless information from start to finish, or instead, a well-thought out, well-executed course.

Finding a coach isn't easy.

Finding a great coach is a lot harder. However, in a rush to grow our business or improve our skill, it's easy to avoid doing the appropriate amount of due diligence. Or we may simply not know what to look for in a good coach. Many elements mark a good coach, but the easiest way of all is to get to the website and look for the testimonials. Then once you're there, read between the lines and the story of the coach will reveal itself to you.

One more thing: don't be afraid to bail out

I once went for a community college photography class. No, I didn't do any due diligence. I figured it was just $200 or so for the tuition and I failed to do my homework. In the first session itself, the trainer went off on a tangent. He talked endlessly about his family, and we learned almost nothing about photography. I didn't go back again. My brother in law also signed up for the course with me.

There wasn't any way to get a refund, so he continued to go for the rest of the sessions

As it turned out, they were all a waste of time. Trainers tend to show their colours very early. Sloppy coaches are sloppy right from the very start.

It's a good idea to bail out very quickly and to spend the time doing something else. Even with all the due diligence, you can make an error of judgment. However, once you've figured out your mistake, get out there quickly and use the time to learn something more constructive instead.

Next Step: Have a look at—Good to Great: How To Take Your Small Business To Greatness