THE 12 STRATEGIC PILLARS OF STRATEGY

These are what I believe are twelve of the strategy pillars you must incorporate into your
business philosophy from today forward.

CONTINUALLY IDENTIFYING AND DISCOVERING

HIDDEN ASSETS IN YOUR BUSINESS

Every business has hidden assets, overlooked opportunities, underperforming activities,
undervalued relationships, untapped resources and intellectual capital. And until you
commit, to monitor, to examine, to mine those on a continuous basis, you’ll never
maximize your performance income or profit.

MINING WINDFALLS OUT OF YOUR BUSINESS

EACH AND EVERY MONTH

It is very important psychologically to produce short-term wins. It’s important to get
them to validate that the course you’re on is correct. They don’t have to be big victories,
although they tend to create, in combination, extraordinarily substantial results when the
exponential impact applies. But you have to be committed that every month you want a
windfall. It could be a market windfall, a strategy windfall or a sales windfall. But you
have to be committed to that as an objective and a goal that you must fulfill every month.

ENGINEERING SUCCESSES INTO EVERY ACTION YOU TAKE

OR DECISION YOU MAKE

Most people are reactive, and not pragmatic. They’re not logical. They’re not strategic.
They’re reactively tactical, and it’s the worst thing in the world. You have to learn to take
a deep breath and reflect, and be much more systematic and much more global in the way
you look at all the integration of what’s going on in your world.
MULTIPLE PROFIT SOURCES
You must build your business on a foundation of Multiple Profit Sources instead of
depending on one single revenue source. Why grow incrementally or linear if you can
grow geometrically and exponentially with the same time, effort and capital.
Let geometry work for you. Geometry is not 2 + 2. It’s 2 x 2 x 2. It’s basically bringing
three different factors, or more, together. You have to bring continuous processes to
work for you¾a foundation of multiple profit sources.
USP
Being different, distinctive, special, unique, and advantageous in the eyes of your clients
is basic to your success. The concept of “Unique Selling Proposition” no longer is merely
having an advantage over your competitors. Today you have to be seen as the only viable
solution, strategy or opportunity for the problem or desire that your marketplace is trying
to address. And you have to be much more refined in it, because there are too many
choices. Needs today may be singular, but means to fill them are so vast it’s scary.

CREATING REAL VALUE FOR YOUR CLIENTS

Creating real value based for your clients means creating value based on what your
clients define value to be for them. And value for employees for maximum loyalty,
results, and sustaining relationship.

MAXIMIZE PERSONAL LEVERAGE

You must focus on getting the maximum personal leverage from every action,
investment, time or energy commitment you ever make. This is a simple concept, but you
probably don’t have this approach indelibly embedded in your mind, and you don’t
adhere to it. Just by bringing this thinking to bear is going to dramatically improve your
results.

NETWORKING, MASTERMINDING, BRAIN STORMING

You must start networking, masterminding, brainstorming with like-minded, successdriven
people from outside your industry who can share perspectives, real life
experiences and recommendations with you. If you look at all the great achievers, they
have brain trusts. They have kitchen cabinets. They have mastermind alliances. They
hvae advisory boards galore. If you’re a lonely entrepreneur out there trying to knock it
alone, and you’re not getting perspective from other people, you’re making it very hard
for yourself.

BE AN IDEA GENERATOR

Turning yourself into an idea generator and recognized innovator within your industry or
market will propell you from the middle of the pack to the leaader in your market.

GROWTH THINKING

Making growth thinking a natural part of your everyday business philosophy sounds
simple, but few actually do it. You can’t just give lip service and say, “Yeah, we want to
grow.” Everything you do must be driven through the screen, the filter and the lens of
dedication to growth thinking. Always ask yourself “Is this going to facilitate, is this
going to contribute, and is this going to bring about our growth or not?”

RISK REVERSAL

You will gain more clients and keep more clients by reversing the risk for both you and
your clients in everything you do so the downside is almost zero and the upside potential
nearly infinite.

TESTING

When you use safe, small tests you’ll eliminate the dangerous risks and costly misteps.
You’ll be inspired and spiritually animated to enthusiastically, continually test,
experiment, try. What you don’t want to ever do is go down looking at the third strike,
using a baseball analogy. You want to swing for it, but you don’t want to swing for it like
Casey at the bat. Getting a lot of singles and never striking out will win the game more
predictably than anything else you can do.

MINDSET FACTORS

There are mindset factors that I believe are very important for you to reflect on. You have
to be able to set and achieve your own lofty goals. And you have to be able to recognize
the process to achieve them. Many people have goals, but very few people reverse
engineer the systematic sequence of simple actions necessary to get them to that outcome.
You have to develop a process to effectively overcome obstacles. Struggling with
challenges is a waste. Overcoming them, resolving them, circumventing them is a
mindset that you must to install.

POSTIVE ATTITUDE

Lost the negative attitude. You can’t let your glass ceiling thwart you. You have to have
the right attitude. You can’t think in negative terms. It’s simple, it’s axiomatic, Logic
101. When you get the passion and the vision for what’s possible, when you get the
system, the policy and the procedures, and you see how predictably, how pragmatically,
how sequentially and how quickly you can do it, your whole mindset is going to change.
You have to realize and believe that this will work, but there are going to be challenges.
The truth of the matter is, adversity is opportunity. And when you believe that with every
filament of your being, you’re going to maximize and optimize everything you do.

PERSISTENCE

You have to be committed to persistence. Persistence is like the military. They hope that
their frontal attack works, but they’re not going to leave the war and put up the white flag
if they’re confronted with resistance. They’re going to go from the side, from above,
from underneath. They’re going to go by day, by night. They’re going to send unmanned
missiles. And they’re going to do everything, because they want to win the war. Sure, it
would be great if they could do it in one death-fell swoop. But they’re prepared to do
whatever it takes to be victorious. If you are not prepared to do that, you may not be
victorious.

ETHICS

Throughout all of this, you have to distinguish yourself and operate at the highest level of
ethics, of integrity, of veracity. If you lower yourself to the level of a lot of the people in
the world today, you won’t be distinctive. You won’t be preeminent. You won’t stand
out. If you operate at this high level, you will win over people and they will stay with you
when you have the right systems and strategy in place.

VISION AND PROCESS

The vision you paint will enable you to see exactly the sequence of events, to exponential
growth and success. Having a vision is very difficult if you don’t have the process to get
there. Just holding this big vision out there and believing it, is wonderful. But if you see
each step of the way, and when you take one, you knock that off, and you’re getting
closer. It’s like I know that I want to go there, but I can count off and say, “It’s 23 steps.”
And starting, you say, “OK, one, two¾now it’s only 21 steps. Three, four¾now it’s
only 19 steps. Five, six¾now it’s only 17 steps.” And it’s closer and closer.

REINVESTING

You have to be willing to take, not dangerous risks, but make calculated investments in
your future. And one of the biggest disappointments—and it almost makes me
cry¾when I look at businesses that won’t reinvest a portion of their increased revenue.
They’ll get a windfall that I would help them stimulate of two, three, $400,000, and
instead of taking 50% of that and putting it into new people, or more marketing, or more
selling systems, or buying more leads, or more starts in clients¾they’ll just put it in their
pocket and walk away. They don’t reinvest, so they don’t realize exponential growth.
Parlaying your successes by investing strategically and systematically in the future is
critical to your success.

BEING FEARLESS

The sky won’t fall. The world’s not going to collapse. You won’t go broke or look stupid.
Quite the opposite is the case once you adapt this philosophy. Really, doom and failure
only go to those who stay stuck in the status quo. You have to be resigned and resolved to
learn from the mistakes of others. It’ll save you millions. It’ll save you years. It’ll save
you emotional hardship. And it will catapult and propel you so many levels and rungs
higher so fast, if you’re committed to do it.

DAILY MOTIVATION

You really do have to review and revisit this belief system every day. I don’t care how
great your mind and your memory is, you retain about 3% of the boring things you learn.
If it’s more exciting and more diverse, you retain about 7%. The first thing in process
training is reviewing on a continuous basis what your vision is, what your goal is, what
you’re going after, what your system is. Because if you don’t, you’ll forget it.

YOUR NEW SUCCESS

How you handle your newfound success as you build it is very critical. And it’s a very
different change from the way you may have managed mediocrity or a plateau that you’re
on today.

GIVING BACK

You have to give back to others, just the way; hopefully, people are giving back to you.

SUCCESSION

And finally, what I call “succession.” It’s an idea that’s really powerful. It’s the process
of getting other massively successful individuals to pass on their best-kept success
secrets, strategies and philosophies to you so you can, again, shorten the timeline to
greater success and wealth.

IN SUMMARY…

Great marketers are made, not born. It requires discipline, a precise system, and a
highly strategic plan to really develop your personal marketing genius. It also requires a
very different mindset than the one all your competitors use. If you want to grow your
business like a weed, gain a decisive competitive advantage, attract new customers in
droves, and double and redouble your profits --- then you need to open your mind to
one overriding “big” idea:
It’s a fact: My marketing methods can work true performance miracles for your business.
But you will never reap their rich rewards, unless you develop a systematic process to
harness, harvest and strategically implement them. But most people don’t know how to
implement a strategic marketing system. Will you?
Hopefully this short-course primer goes a long way to helping that happen.