Take a minute and think for yourself what the most common self help lessons are… We’ve all heard them both in real life and parody by now. You’ve probably come up with something like:

1. Think positively
2. Tell yourself how good you are and that you have self worth
3. Create a positive self image by reciting “Affirmations”
4. Make use of the Law of Attraction – “Thoughts become things” – This one can be true if you full understand it’s meaning as you can read in my blog here. It has it’s place, but that place isn’t all alone as your guiding principle for success.
5. blah, blah, blah

Does that sound pretty close? We’ve all heard that stuff to some extent and obviously I’m going to now tell you that’s mostly wrong and half-true at best.

Do you think Kobe Bryant or Lebron James getup every morning or sit down before every game and tell themselves:

• “Gosh darnit, I’m a great basketball player”
• “My J is like butta” (i.e. I have a great jump shot)
• “I have mad handles” (i.e. My ball-handling skills are awesome)

Do you think Sidney Crosby or Alexander Ovechkin do the same thing every morning or before hitting the ice? What about Warren Buffet? Does he sit down every morning and tell himself he’s the greatest investor in the world?

Of course not (though they may visualize taking a game winning shot, or negotiating a billion dollar deal but we’ll get back to visualization in a different blog). That’s ridiculous. Why don’t they do that? Because they already know it to be true. They know this in both their conscious and sub-conscious mind. In other words – they know logically and instinctively they’re great at their given profession because they’ve already proven to themselves (and the rest of the world) that they are.

Ok, but maybe they’re great because ever since they were little they told themselves they were. Of course we’ve heard of the professional athlete who predicted as a 10 year old he’d be in the NFL. But then again which 10 year old doesn’t think they’ll be a professional athlete? Sorry, that’s not enough. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore. Think that helped his self-esteem? So did he sit around for the next year telling himself he was a great basketball player? Of course not, he went out and practiced until he actually was a great basketball player. And he kept practicing, and kept working hard until he was arguably the greatest athlete to ever pick up a basketball. Even the self help genius, Stuart Smalley, didn’t quite understand why Michael didn’t need affirmations.

Are you starting to see the failed logic of the self help “guru’s”? They tell you to tell yourself that you’re great before you ever are. Sorry to break it to them, but your mind knows the difference between truth and fiction. Even worse yet, as a general rule, your mind will reject the fiction and you’ll be no better off.

So what are you REALLY supposed to do to become successful? (And why should you listen to me about this?)

1. You can NOT be anything you put your mind to. Sorry, your mom is flat out wrong. Think about it for a second, there are only a mere fraction of human beings every physically or intellectually capable of becoming Olympians. I say intellectually because you can be the greatest physical specimen the world has ever seen, but without discipline you’ll never be world class. We all can’t be Einstein’s. Doesn’t matter how good you are at high school physics or how long you study, it’s just not possible. If you need more proof than simple appeals to logic, read, First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham. With very exhaustive research, he demonstrates why your mom’s words of encouragement are not at all realistic. Instead he points out that by a combination of nature and nurture we are predisposed to be good at something. Figuring out what that is, is obviously the trick.
2. Visualizing vague potential future scenarios doesn’t work. In the book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip Heath references a UCLA study that had 3 groups of students try to resolve problems in their lives. The first group (the control group) was given some basic instructions on how to deal with problems by thinking about the problems and coming up with ideas to resolve them. They were then given a list of benefits for fixing the problem such as reduced stress. The second group was instructed to visualize the problem and all of the steps that lead up to the problem in an effort to find the solution. The third group was told to picture the problem being resolved. In other words visualize the future of how the problem will be resolved and what that will look and feel like. If you’ve heard the self help preachers, as I have, then you instantly “knew” the third group did best. Sorry, wrong answer. By almost every measurable dimension the group that visualized the steps leading to the problem, NOT the group who visualized the possible future solution or how that solution would make them feel, did better. Sorry, self help guru’s. You’re wrong. (Honestly, that came as a shock to me too. But when you consider the science and a bit of common-sense, its easy to see that they’re obviously wrong.)
3. Lying to yourself is just plain silly. Noah St. John points this fact out in his book, The Secret Code of Success. He suggests that if you tell yourself every morning that “I’m rich” and you aren’t, your mind knows the difference and you won’t just become rich. Instead he claims that your mind prefers to look for solutions to problems. In other words, if, instead, you ask your brain, “Why am I so rich?” every morning, your brain will instinctively try to find the solution to that problem. He has plenty of anecdotal evidence though no real scientific studies to back up his assertion. In my book, that makes a LOT more sense to me than lying to yourself.
4. Confidence comes with experience. Two weeks ago I went on my first off-road mountain bike ride in about 5 years. Our trail was one of the top 50 ranked trails in the US called “The Alien” in Aztec, NM. The trail was a complete blast to ride, but I must admit there were some hairy parts. It’s mostly single-track and you spend a lot of time looking into canyons, riding between large boulders, and trying not to lose your traction on desert sand. Lizards regularly run across the trail. My guide was a friend who has quite literally ridden the trail about 50 times. He even completed a race on the trail less than 2 weeks before. He also just happened to be a national BMX champion in his youth. He has half a room filled with biking trophies. In the particularly scary parts of the trail, of which there were really only 2, he warned me ahead of time. He could ride the trail with his eyes closed (actually he does often ride it at night) but he knew I was on a new bike on a new trail doing something I hadn’t done regularly for a decade. I was a bit nervous. He was not. He had mastered the trail. I was just glad I hadn’t wrecked. He had immense proficiency due to years of riding in general and in particular on this precise trail. I had neither. No matter how much time I spent that morning, or even for the last 10 years, telling myself I was a great mountain biker I wasn’t going to do as well as him. On the other hand, I promise you, he didn’t expend one ounce of mental energy “affirming” for himself that he was a great rider that day. Confidence comes with practice and experience and not with mental repetition (visualization is something entirely different).

So why do all of the “guru’s” get it wrong? I can offer a few guesses:

1. They are naturally positive, confident, and good at things that bring success such as public speaking, learning, negotiating and leading people. Or they have some of those qualities and taught themselves the others. Since much of it is natural, they can’t ever figure out why other people aren’t that way and so just guess that if everyone else repeated to themselves daily what these guru’s already know to be true about themselves, they’ll improve themselves. Seems like a somewhat logical guess. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.
2. They don’t really dig deeper. By that I mean they don’t read and research the books and studies that attempt to explain the human mind and soul and so never get a full picture of what they themselves are probably doing naturally.

So how do you get it right? Let me sum this up in one simple quote:

“The difference between where you are and where you want to be is knowledge.”

In other words, if you aren’t wealthy, popular, successful or a star athlete but want to be, you need to learn what people who are the those things are doing. You need to know what they know. You need to know how they came to know it. You need their knowledge and eventually experience and skill. Once you have that, you will have the confidence you need without tricking your own mind. Obviously this also assumes that you have the ability (either mental or physical) and temperament to do all the things they were capable of doing.

The simplest explanation I’ve heard for this is Do x Be = Have. Read my blog explaining that formula.

That’s pretty much it. Sounds a bit too simple doesn’t it? No memorization, no daily recitations, no lists of positive self qualities. Though it is simple, if that sounds easy to you, you misunderstood what I said. If you want to be as wealthy as Bill Gates, you have to know and do all of the things that Bill Gates knows and does (and be lucky enough to have the timing and potential that he does). That’s not easy. If you want to simply be a millionaire, find a few who you’d like to emulate and learn everything they know and do. Unfortunately, this is a lot MORE work than the self help guru’s would lead you to believe. Fortunately, this will actually work. How do I know? I’m working through it with my businesses every day. You don’t have to believe me. Let me know how those daily affirmations work out, though.

To your success, Bryan

P.S. This, I am aware, goes against some of the ideas of great authors such as Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill, and Tony Robbins and obviously that means some people may passionately disagree. However, I have 2 quick counters to that disagreement. Firstly, I see this as an improvement not a replacement of those great minds. We’ve learned more about human psychology and are able to more effectively apply it now then they were. Secondly, that’s what blogs are for. If you disagree, comment and let me know.

In the last 2 weeks, my number 1 competitor has been doing more marketing than in the previous 9 months. Ironically, I don’t own a Television, don’t subscribe to the local paper, don’t listen to local radio, haven’t received anything in the mail from his company and none of our prospects have asked about that competitor. So how do I know he’s doing marketing in my area? Google Adwords told me so. As a matter of fact, Google Adwords can be used to track local industry trends, competition, market interest and even key terms (i.e. the words people on the street are using to describe your business or product offering). And the best part is, it can cost you little to no money and you don’t even need a great website to gather this information.

Widen your gaze to see all the benefits of Google Adwords

Here’s the concept. In previous blogs I’ve talked about the free tool at Wordtracker.com to help you determine which keywords are most popular on the internet. The problem with this tool for small businesses is that it’s a global tool. Meaning that it’s tracking keywords all over the world not just in your territory and so what might be a popular phrase or keyword around the world might not be in your area. More importantly, just because, on a global basis, your competition’s franchise is real popular, that doesn’t mean they are in your area. Or how about if your competition is a local restaurant that won’t even register on the tool at Wordtracker.com because only people (i.e. your potential customers) in your local area search for that business name?

Let’s look at a few examples. Keep in mind that this blog assumes you know how to set up a Google Adwords account, create a campaign for a targeted geographic area, and buy negative, broad-match, phrase-match, and term-match keywords. If all of that is foreign to you, check out my blog on Online Ads. Also review some of Google’s resources.

1. Local Industry Trends – Everyone has competition. And sometimes your direct and indirect competition might not be who you think. For instance, if you own an upscale restaurant who is your competition? You might say your direct competition would be the other upscale restaurants in town, however you would be missing out on a large part of your competition. Call it “indirect”, but any place where someone might spend discretionary income would be competing with you. After all people don’t go to your restaurant because they’re hungry. They can cook for themselves or eat fast food. They go to an upscale restaurant for a social experience. If you’re an accountant, you might consider other accountants in town as your direct competition however accounting software and people who do their own taxes are also your competition. For the water treatment industry, everyone else who sells water softeners and drinking water systems would be your competition however all the soap companies who sell people on the idea that more soaps and lotions are all they need to solve their problems are also competition. You get the point. With Google Adwords, in addition to buying your competitors’ business name as a keyword, you also need to buy all of the keywords that describe your indirect competition. You’ll catch the trends as to what’s popular in your area almost immediately and then be able to use that information in your marketing to better TALK directly to your prospects in the words they are using.
2. Competition – As I mentioned above, my top competitor just started marketing (through a direct sales telemarketing approach that’s very hard to track) in my area in the last month. How do I know this? I bought the keywords for his business name for the geographic territory that I serve about 10 months ago and in the last month more people searched for his business name than the other 9 months combined. The logic is quite simple. People are only going to search for things they’ve heard of so, one way or another, they’ve heard of his business and are doing some background checks via Google.
3. Market Interest – As you can tell, all 4 of these benefits are tightly related and so this one just builds on the last 2. Quite simply, if you’re tracking your direct and indirect competition as described in steps 1 and 2, you can gauge total market interest by simply monitoring the fluctuation in the number of searches for each term. If more people are searching for “Tax Software” than last month or last year, you better have a page on your website that directly addresses why your accounting firm is better and more cost-effective than off-the-shelf software.
4. Key Terms – The internet is an unparalleled testing ground for marketers. You can test creative, copy, calls to action, offers, coupons and just about anything else that can potentially improve your marketing. Now, with the help of Google Adwords, you can track common phrases. Last week my ad agency sent me creative on a newspaper insert we are working on. This ad agency works with dozens of franchises similar to mine around the US and part of the wording on the ad included the term “Water Analysis”. I’d been buying that keyword phrase along with a common synonym, “Water Test”, for months so I logged into my Google Adwords account to see, in my area, which was more popular. Turns out people search for “Water Test” or “Water Testing” 11 times more often than “Water Analysis”. Analysis just isn’t a word people use. So we updated the marketing to reflect the phrase that is already on prospects’ minds. The goal being that, as they’re sorting through their newspaper, they’ll be more likely to notice the term “Water Test” as they’ve already given that phrase a position in their mind. Make sense?

Now that you’re tracking all of this information, what do you do with it? You respond to their problems and let people know why your solution is the best to solve their problems. In marketing we can break up any individual marketing creative into 3 basic pieces:

1. The Target Audience – This is the MOST important piece. You can be running a buy 1 get 1 free deal on Harley’s but if you’re doing so in People or Home and Garden magazine your marketing isn’t going to perform as well as if you put it in American Motorcyclist.
2. The Copy – This is what you say and how you say it. Whether it’s written words or video or an audio recording.
3. The Offer – or Call to Action. This is what you use to try to make the prospect “Act Now.”

With the Google Adwords system I describe above, we can improve each item to maximize our conversion rate.

1. Target Audience – We are only marketing to people who search for the keywords related to your business or competition. It doesn’t get much better then that.
2. Copy – With information on local industry trends, competition, and key terms, your website can directly talk to your prospects in their own words. More importantly, you can create individual mini-sites to address each competitor or trend that might be taking business away from you. Again, you can specifically target and respond to the EXACT problem that you can solve for the prospect.
3. Offer – The possibilities are, of course, endless. If you can pinpoint your competition and why people are choosing them over you, you can easily structure a risk-free offer to get them to choose you. For the restaurant you can describe how the quality of food, waitstaff, atmosphere etc. far exceeds anything else in town. With testimonials and specific examples of the painstaking processes you use to hire chefs and maintain the utmost food quality. Put yourself head-to-head with your competition and show how you’re better. Now that you know exactly who your direct and indirect competition are, you can really get into the minds of your prospects.

This is a huge topic to cover in a blog. The ways you can leverage the information Google Adwords can provide for you are nearly endless. It’s a marketer’s dream-come-true. The best (or worst part if you sell Google Adwords services) is that it’s not complicated, would take a few hours to setup, and maybe an hour or 2 per month to maintain to garner all of the important information you can use.

Granted, as easy as it is to track, I’ve never heard another Google Adwords guru describe this power for small businesses. They all focus on online businesses so if you’re looking for more ideas on small business marketing in today’s  marketplace be sure to follow my Facebook Fan Page or sign-up for my email list in the upper right.

To your Google Adwords marketing success, Bryan

P.S. If you don’t even have a website you can still use everything I described. Just place your bids so low that your ad will show up on page 4 and never be read. If you’re looking to bring a new product to market or start a new business, this is a great way to determine current market interest.

To make my point, I’m gonna start with a lesson I’ve learned as a Mechanical Engineer studying, designing, building, and racing cars in college.

This past week I was brushing up on vehicle dynamics by thumbing through an engineering text I received at the OptimumG training put on by Claude Rouelle. The first story the book told went like this. The top 9 drivers in qualifying at a recent Nascar event (Virginia 500 2002) were separated by .1 second (.5%). The top 15 drivers in qualifying at a recent F1 race (Austria 2002) were separated by .8 seconds (less than .8%). Business works the same way, you don’t have to be 2 or 3 times better than your competition to get more business. You literally only have to do a few small things better and people will choose you. This is what’s meant by the “law of the slight edge.”

Me autocrossing my 2006 G35 at BeaveRun in 2007.

So how do you obtain that “slight edge” in racing? An engineer has 2 ways to address a problem. A driver goes out for a 6 lap test drive and says a car has a lot of understeer. The engineer adds 2 degrees to the front spoiler and sends the driver out for another 6 laps. Now it understeers less but still understeers. He adds 2 more degrees to the front and the driver heads out for another 6 test laps. Now it oversteers so the engineer subtracts 1 degree from the front spoiler and again out for another 6 laps. Finally the engineer adds another half degree and after 6 more laps the driver confirms that the handling is neutral. That took a LOT of time, money, rented track time, and energy. A total of 30 laps to accurately setup and test the car to come up with 3.5 degrees added to the front spoiler. This is how most business owners tackle problems.

A better way to improve the car is for the engineer to listen to the driver indicate understeer, evaluate the data (because he knows the correct data to review AND how to interpret it) to determine the cars Aero balance is at 36.9%. Then he compares that data to when the car was setup perfectly on a similar track and determines that an aero balance of 38.3% is needed. He makes a single adjustment to the front to add 3.6 degrees and the car is perfectly neutral the first time. A total of 12 laps and he knows the car is setup well. This is how business owners should tackle problems.

Now before you start saying, in the real world of business and dealing with people things are never that perfect. In reality, in racing it’s never that perfect either. Drivers are good, but they aren’t that good. They also aren’t generally very consistent and, in reality, they aren’t “sensitive” enough to feel slight variations. Moreover, weather, cross-winds, other drivers on the track, and a thousand other items can make choosing a “perfect” setup challenging. Which is why we’re never looking for perfect. We don’t need to be perfect. We just need to have a slight advantage over the competition.

That’s why the Team Leader for our race team used to point out to us when we were getting TOO wrapped up in the perfect simulations or calculations that “We’re engineers not scientists.” In other words, we live and work in the real world where your gut instinct and experience will ALWAYS be a factor in making decisions because you’ll never be able to test every single variable. On the other hand, scientists setup controlled environments so that they can test and control each variable.

As a business owner, your job is like that of the engineers relying on science, data, driver-input AND experience to make the best decisions. And that is why business consultants and coaches don’t work! Let me explain.

For that engineer to make the best decision for his racecar, a few things have to be present:

1. Experience
2. Data on his car
3. Comparable Data for that car running on other tracks
4. Ongoing support and testing because each track is different and even the same tracks can vary

The same is true of someone who wants to help you improve your business.

1. They need experience in running, owning, AND analyzing a business. Business coaches and consultants can both reasonably have this prerequisite.
2. They need data about the business. In other words, when a car is setup with hundreds of sensors to acquire data, they need to not only have access to that data, but they also need to know how to look at the relevant data and discard the irrelevant information. If the consultant or coach could reasonably have this skill however, there are plenty out there who are looking at the “wrong” numbers or skipping over some of the most important data. Quite often, they over-complicate it. For instance, in the example above, the engineer could have considered tires, anti-roll bars, springs, aerodynamics and even driver error in getting the car setup correctly. Experience told him exactly which data to review, however.
3. For comparable data, your coach or consultant needs experience AND data working with similar businesses. Think about it for a second. What conversion rate is reasonable for your business? If you have an accounting office is your conversion rate going to be the same as a woman’s clothing store? Probably not. When you have comparable data, you can now better determine which areas present the greatest area of improvement so that your time is always being invested on the projects that will give you the best ROI. This is where the rubber of the 80/20 rule meets the road. Just because you know there are 20% of things you can do to give you 80% of the results, doesn’t mean you know WHICH 20%. Industry specific consultants and coaches may have this data and experience, however most consultants and coaches are trying to be everything to everyone so look out for this.
4. Finally, the variables on the racetrack and in your business are ALWAYS changing. It’s not enough to be given a plan of action by your consultant and then be asked to implement it as he walks out the door (as is normally the case). It’s also not enough for your coach to call you every week or month and tweak your plan for real-world circumstances. To be truly effective, that coach needs to be constantly comparing your business to other similar businesses and providing you with input. Along the way both of you will develop the experience needed to make better gut choices when everything can’t be calculated and moreover, you’ll better understand how other similar businesses are tackling the same problems you are. No business owner, coach, or consultant will have all the answers so continually reviewing problems and solutions from a group of similar businesses can help everyone involved more quickly achieve excellent results (i.e. more profits with less time input).

As you know by now, I don’t write about problems in business without offering a solution. The solution is the Small Business Engineer leading a team of small business owners in the same industry. Just like the engineer at the racetrack, the Small Business Engineer will continually work with the driver (i.e. owner) to gather real-world feedback. He’ll help you determine exactly which data (i.e. reports) to be watching and help interpret the changes. He’ll provide data from similar racetracks (i.e. other businesses in your industry) to help you get up to speed more quickly and determine which 20% you should always be focusing on.

Whether for a business or a racecar, the engineer’s job is to help improve the problem as quickly, effectively and cheaply as possible. Once that’s done, your business can now have the slight edge it needs to blow away your competition.

If you’re interested in learning more about working with the Small Business Engineer, comment or email (bryan@ethicalbusinessbuilder.com) me.

To your business-engineering success, Bryan

P.S. For more information on what numbers to watch in your business, check out my 5 part series on how to fix your business fast.