The Business2
Process has 5 steps to it. I'll introduce the steps now and then
go into more detail later in The Tour:
Step 1:
Diagnostics
The first
step in the Business2 Process is to do a thorough assessment
of the present state of your business -- the problems, strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, untapped resources and untapped assets
-- to isolate the precise restriction and acceleration points
that must be removed or stimulated for maximized results.
Step 2:
Development of Strategies and Tactics
Once your
restriction points and acceleration points have been identified,
strategies and tactics must be designed to release the
restrictions and increase your acceleration speed.
From our experience,
many business owners have never defined the difference between
a tactic and a strategy, so let's be sure we're clear. A tactic
is participating in a trade show, using direct mail to generate
leads or sales, a website, an in-person sales call, etc.
A strategy
is the intelligent plan through which your tactics are aligned
and tweaked to work together, and optimized to maximize your efficiency
and effectiveness.
Step 3:
Execution of Strategies and Tactics
Once the optimal
strategies and tactics have been defined, they must be executed
in the best possible ways and at the best possible times for optimal
results.
Step 4:
Ongoing Monitoring Of Results And Gathering Feedback From The
Marketplace
Once we begin
executing the strategies and tactics, we must monitor the results
being produced and gather feedback from the marketplace so we
can adjust and tweak the strategies and tactics for maximum effectiveness.
Adjustment
and tweaking may mean stimulation of additional acceleration points,
removal of additional restriction points, or tweaking and refining
existing strategies or tactics.
Step 5:
Navigating The Passage Through New Growth Stages
After taking
the first 4 steps, business owners consistently see strong surges
in sales, profits, business value, personal income and wealth.
However, as you might expect, you can't do a diagnostic once,
develop strategies and tactics once, monitor results once, tweak
things for optimal operation once, and then have them work forever
at peak efficiency.
You and I
know the real world doesn't work that way!
The Business2
Process requires a long-term commitment and vision. You've got
to repeat the first 4 steps of The Business2 Process
as you move through new growth stages, as you encounter new opportunities
and challenges, as your competitive environment changes, as new
restriction and acceleration points materialize, etc.
For example,
the challenges and opportunities facing a business doing $250,000
in annual sales are very different from those facing a business
doing $2 million. The same goes for the differences between a
$5 million and a $10 million business, a $15 million and $30 million
business, and so on.
Who's
Driving The Bus?
Many consultants
and experts can say their processes follow the same basic 5 steps
I just outlined - taking a snapshot of your business, analyzing
it, making recommendations, and helping to execute new strategies
and tactics.
To understand
what truly makes the Business2 Process and organization so unique
and powerful, you must ask and answer 3 questions:
- What's
the snapshot being taken of?
- Who's taking
the snapshot?
- Who's going
to be analyzing, recommending and helping you execute?
Let's take
a quick look at the answers to these critical questions.
What's
the snapshot being taken of?
When you apply
Business2 Process, you take a snapshot of what we call
"The 4 Power Centers Of Your Business":
- Sales
- Marketing
- Management
- Finance
For purposes
of discussion, we'll define these 4 Power Centers as follows:
Sales:
The process of closing sales and collecting money in exchange
for products and services when a person is present.
Marketing:
The process of generating high quality leads, building brand
awareness, and closing sales and collecting money for products
and services when a person is not present.
Management:
The process of establishing a clear vision, mission and purpose
for the business, and making sure everyone is focused, trained
and empowered to manifest it.
Finance:
The ability to forecast, manage and invest the financial assets
and cash flow of the company.
Note:
Each of the 4 Power Centers has numerous sub-categories within
it which we'll discuss later in The Tour.
There's absolutely
no way to create -- and sustain -- exponential growth in your
business if you don't take an integrated approach that optimizes
all 4 Power Centers -- and keeps them optimized.
In our experience,
we've never seen a business that's fully optimized in all
4 areas -- no matter how successful or profitable it is. In our
experience, most
businesses are "lopsided" when it comes to the 4 Power
Centers - strong in some, weak in others.
The net result
of that "lopsidedness" is that restriction points get
created, acceleration points get ignored, and huge amounts of
money are squandered or left on the table that could be scooped
up, multiplied, and put in your bank account!
Certainly
sales and marketing lead to the fastest and most explosive growth,
but when it comes to "the big picture" -- making, keeping
and socking away millions (which we'll talk more about in minute)
-- all four Power Centers must be generating power at maximum
capacity.
From my experience,
few experts, consultants or organizations have the ability to
help you integrate, optimize and keep optimized all 4 of Power
Centers. That's why I got so excited when I heard about what the
Business2 founders and organization were all about.
Who's taking
the snapshot -- and who will be analyzing, recommending and helping
to execute?
To receive
maximized value from the Business2 Process, you want
the "photographer" to be someone skilled in the optimization
of all 4 Power Centers -- someone who sees into things
and doesn't just look at things.
In the case
of the Business2 Process and organization, the photographers
are multimillionaire super entrepreneurs John Assaraf, Bob Scheinfeld
and Murray Smith. If you compare the creation of the Business2
Process to putting together a jigsaw puzzle, you'll see that by
working independently for more than 25 years, John, Bob and Murray
each collected and became masterful with specific puzzle pieces.
Each puzzle
piece was e-x-t-r-e-m-e-l-y powerful on its own (as you'll see
in a minute), but when John, Bob and Murray combined their pieces
and visions and added a "dream team" of additional advisors
they're using themselves (including me), the Business2
Process was born.
To
illustrate what I mean by this, let me tell you the amazing stories
of "The Street Kid," "The Rich Kid," and "The
Whiz Kid":
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The
Street Kid
At
the age of 21, after spending years on the streets as
a gang member and flirting too many times with going to
jail (and even dying), John Assaraf straightened himself
out and eventually met two very unique entrepreneurs who
became his mentors.
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As a team,
those two entrepreneurs quietly built a 19 country empire of
RE/MAX real estate franchises from scratch to $15+ billion a
year in sales. They saw the raw talent, hunger and potential
in John's eyes, and believed he could become their "Ultimate
Protégé."
In a unique
experiment to see if their methods and mind-set could be "cloned,"
and their monster success replicated, they partnered with John
and taught him their "Blueprint" for rapidly building
companies.
The results
surprised even them as John went on to massive success of his
own, including rapidly building RE/MAX
of Indiana from scratch to $4+ billion a year in sales.
After RE/MAX,
among other successful ventures you'll be hearing about, John
next applied the same "Success Cloning Blueprint"
to Internet start-up, Bamboo.com.
Within its
first year, Bamboo's revenues quickly reached $25 million, and
the company completed one of the fastest NASDAQ IPO's in history.
A case study of how John achieved such extraordinary results
follows later in The Tour.
Unlike so
many "dot-bombs" that rose quickly, then crashed and
burned, Bamboo later merged with another Internet powerhouse
named Ipix and is still operating profitably today.
John became
a founding member of the Business2 team because of
his passion for growing businesses, and his desire to help other
entrepreneurs as he'd once been helped by his early mentors.
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The
Rich Kid
Bob
Scheinfeld is the grandson of Aaron
Scheinfeld, who founded Manpower Inc., the world's
largest temporary help service.
To
build Manpower into a colossus (it's now an 11-Billion
Dollar, global, publicly held Fortune
500 company), and actually invent the entire industry
Manpower still dominates and leads today, Aaron had to
marshall an amazing array of resources, people, capital
and systems.
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He had to
overcome enormous skepticism and resistance, embrace unorthodox
measures, and of course, do it all without so many of the tools
we routinely use today: no FAX machines, no Internet, no cell
phones.
He had to
convince skeptical heads of foreign governments to even permit
the launch of this type of strange, unheard of business in their
countries, then convince the businesses there to utilize a service
that required a total change in fundamental thinking about the
employer-employee relationship.
When Bob
was just 12, Aaron began teaching him his little known business
and wealth building secrets which Bob went on to apply to build
his own business empire and start living what he calls "The
Ultimate Lifestyle."
Bob then
supplemented what he learned from his grandfather by mentoring
with the top direct marketing experts in the world, eventually
becoming one of the most successful and most sought after direct
marketing experts in that field himself.
For example,
Bob played a key role in growing a computer store franchise
company called Connecting Point of America from $90 million
to $350 million in sales in just 3 1/2 years.. He also designed
a marketing model and system that has been used for 10+ years
to pack the room at Tony Robbins multi-media seminars.
Finally,
most recently, among other monster success stories, Bob helped
grow Blue Ocean Software from $1 million to $44 million in less
than four years, resulting in the company being named three
times to the Inc. Magazine
Inc. 500 list.
That tremendous
growth, accompanied by outrageous profitability (50%+ margins),
led to Blue Ocean being acquired by software giant Intuit for
$177
million. A case study of exactly how such extraordinary
results were produced follows later in The Tour.
Bob became
a founding member of the Business2 team because of
his passion for building businesses, and his desire to share
the business building insights and skills he acquired from his
grandfather and by applying his knowledge and skills with clients
and in the "laboratory" of his own companies.
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The
Whiz Kid
For
more than 25 years, Murray Smith has been applying his
unique vision, strategic thinking and decision making
skills to help business owners take quantum leaps in brand
awareness, sales, profits and business value.
As
a kid, Murray was told he had a learning disability.
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That knowledge
drove him to succeed and achieve from a very young age. In order
to hide his disability, he had to learn how to speak with authority
and he realized that could only happen if he knew everything
there was to know about the subjects he "spoke" on,
one of which was business.
As it turned
out, what Murray and others perceived as a learning disability
was really the presence of unusual creative and analytical abilities
that allowed him to absorb and process information in slightly
different ways from what's called "normal." In reality,
Murray actually had a unique gift, not a disability.
Murray ultimately
left high school and worked for two telecommunications firms
before starting his first business in 1979 which he sold 2 years
later for $1.2 million.
Through
intense study, trial and error, and the proverbial "school
of hard knocks," Murray honed his unique gift and refined
his ability to look at businesses to quickly pinpoint:
- Their
potential for success or failure
- What
was needed to take quantum leaps forward in achievement
- How to
communicate and execute the strategies necessary to take those
leaps
Murray went
on to build extremely successful businesses in the private and
public sectors, do corporate turnaround work, and launch start-ups
in the hospitality, retail, media, consumer products, technology,
training, energy, e-commerce, software, and entertainment industries.
Among other
achievements, most recently, Murray took over as CEO of Indian
Motorcycle, pulled the company out of bankruptcy, and built
it into the 2nd largest motorcycle company in the world with
sales exceeding $200 million and a market value of $500 million.
A case study of exactly how he did that follows later in The
Tour.
The Indian
Motorcycle success story was one of the most talked about business
achievements in recent history. It was featured on CBS, NBC,
CNN, Forbes, in 140 newspapers, on 120 radio stations, in 30
magazines and over 2,000 Internet news sites in 7 countries.
All that attention from the media later earned Murray the nickname
"The Whiz Kid."
Murray became
a founding member of the Business2 team because of
his passion for sharing and expressing his unique gift, and
for the thrill of "victory" he feels when a business
breaks out of the pack, fully realizes its potential, and starts
growing exponentially.
At this point,
you might be interested to read five case studies that illustrate
exactly how John, Bob and Murray applied all five steps of the
Business2 Process to create extraordinary results.
Please continue on to Part 3 of The Tour to study those case studies.
Take
me to Part 3, please.
I want to read those case studies.
