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In this 2nd article of this series, I want to share another little known secret to business success…

Tool #2- Sacrifice
What is sacrifice?
According to Wikipedia, the word “sacrifice” comes from a Middle English verb meaning “To make Sacred”.
I like the implication in that meaning because right from the outset, entrepreneurial achievement requires that the entrepreneur “make sacred” whatever resources (time, money, attention) are needed, and allocate them almost exclusively to the goal of business success. This is personal sacrifice.

Sacrifice is about spiritual, mental and even physical discipline. It’s about the ability to stick to the “most important” choice among many “good” choices. Despite the temptation to do otherwise.
Sacrifice is about giving up one or more “good things”, in order to get the best thing.

In the context of business strategy, sacrifice is what enables strategic focus or business focus. In helping my clients construct an effective strategic marketing plan, I’ve found that I sometimes have to help them resolve an emotional resistance to making hard choices.

About 2 months ago, I wrote the Precious Pearl Productivity post to illustrate why it’s so important to sacrifice the “merely important” for the “most important“.

Sacrifice is the act of giving up something for something more valuable. This could apply to so many decisions or actions. For instance,

• Sacrificing sleep every morning to write blog articles daily.
• Sacrificing the income you could have obtained from people outside your target market niche.
• Sacrificing short-term profit to ensure a greater payoff down the road.

So practice giving up something small, and then gradually progress to making bigger and bigger sacrifices.
If you can make sacrifice a mental habit, you’ll better able to stick to your resolutions and more likely to implement your business plans.

See 3 Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 1

See 3 Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 3

I think it’s a bias of the American business culture to pursue opportunities or approach challenges with a techno-centric orientation – with machines or software, or some other “technology”.

In the modern America, we’re unlikely to start with a people-centric approach until we exhaust other alternatives…even in our war against terrorism, we’ve seen this approach result in billions wasted purchasing security equipment instead of getting into the cultural “soil” in which the enemies are sprouting up like weeds…but that’s a topic for another forum.

Today, I want to share 3 not-so-obvious business success tools that are more “habits” than things. Whether you’re seeking online business success, or some other form of personal or entrepreneurial success, these tools are certain to apply to you.

Tool #1 – Strategy
Strategy is a word that’s been bandied around, almost recklessly, by business executives and authors since we successfully stole it from the military world.
It comes from the classical Greek word, “Strategos” meaning “general” or “commander”. Strategy has to do with the “big picture” plan of action that connects where you are and what you’ve got to where you want to be (and what you want to have/achieve there).

In a military context, it has to do with the planning, integration and linking of tactics to achieve the overall victory. In a business context, it’s not so much about how you engage your customers and competitors (those are tactics), but the bigger picture road map of preparing for, planning and designing the terms of engagement so that every “how” is more advantageous and effective.

Being Strategic Vs. Strategy
When talk of strategy comes up, most business owners think of “having the right strategy” but I’ve got news for you:

There are thousands of business success stories where entrepreneurs built successful six, seven and even eight figure businesses without so much as a business plan or even a specific marketing plan. You might be surprised to hear this coming from a business growth strategist and marketing consultant, but it’s the honest-to-goodness truth!

So what gives?

Many of these business owners were actually “strategic without strategy”. Being strategic is an orientation, a set of “habits of approach” that defines how a person deals with opportunities and challenges. This habit is one that applies, not just to individuals, but to organizations. Your organization can learn to “be strategic” as a cultural trait.

Being strategic means habitually planning before doing. It means habitually doing those things first that are closer related to the desired “big picture” outcome. For some business owners who have experienced success, being strategic is an established life habit.

Being Strategic: 4 Reasons why this Business Success Tool Comes First

1. Failure Lessons and The Success Cycle
Being strategic allows you to learn lessons faster when you fail and give you a better ability to extract success from failure more often. Many aspiring entrepreneurs spend hours and hours studying and benchmarking success when they should be benchmarking “turnarounds” (or Failure lessons).

This systemic undersampling of failure lessons (See See Stanford University study on Bias against failure lessons) results in a more unrealistic handling of future threats and is a direct result of one of the most damaging myths of modern management – The ease of achieving business success through vicarious learning and external benchmarking.

2. Being strategic encourages founders, managers and employees to be optimizers
Strategic business owners and managers are more likely to be business optimizers than “home-run hitters”. The legend of the home-run hitter in business is simply untrue when you examine the majority of business success stories. Instead success most often comes to those who master the very boring business of gradual improvement through strategy, integration of tools, monitoring, testing & tweaking and continuous trials.

3. Being strategic makes every tactic, tool and campaign more valuable
Another powerful benefit of being strategic as an orientation is captured in the following quote by Chet Holmes,

… I agree!

Imagine 2 entrepreneurs who both decide to create a website for their business. After 3 years, one entrepreneur has a business that’s slowly growing and doing just fine.

The second entrepreneur, on the other hand, has grown so fast and so far that she’s had to create a new strategic marketing plan that will completely change her business model and organizational structure…just to keep pace with the accelerated growth!

Going back to interview them, you find that the first entrepreneur decided to create a website and simply paid a few hundred bucks to have one built. It contained a “Home” page, an “About Us” page and a few brief blurbs about what he offered.

The second entrepreneur first consulted her strategic marketing plan and analyzed where her web site marketing strategy would fit into it. She defined her ideal targets as her direct customers and her distributors and continually communicated a unique selling proposition.

She made sure to incorporate free strategies like YouTube marketing, free video syndication and search engine optimized press releases. Of course, she made sure hers was NOT one of the 84% of websites that are not listed by the search engines.

Surprisingly, over the next 3 years, she spent just a few hundred dollars more annually than our first entrepreneur. But she connected with hundreds of thousands more prospects, clients and partners. And gained so much new business that she’s contemplating selling off a digital profit center for a 6 figure payday.

To summarize, it’s more important to be a strategic thinker and implementer than it is to latch on to any particular strategy. It is important to think strategically about what you invest in to market or to grow your business. Applying strategic thinking to your business, your time and your life will no doubt accelerate the pace of your business success.

In part 2, I share a truly overlooked business success tool that may forever change how you approach both your company and maybe even your life.

Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 2

Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 3