01 Squash Lessons for Marketing Interview Bonuses/MEx/SquashLessons.pdfDr Marc Dussault is a veteran...
Transcript of 01 Squash Lessons for Marketing Interview Bonuses/MEx/SquashLessons.pdfDr Marc Dussault is a veteran...
Squash Lessons for Marketing Lachlan’s Business Breakfast Radio Interview on 2RDJ
14 December 2006
- Transcript -
This is the transcript of a live radio interview that took place at 2RDJ’s studio in Sydney on Thursday 14 December 2006. Although it has been edited, the raw, interactive elements of the discussion have been purposefully kept – we hope you’ll enjoy reading the transcript as the listeners enjoyed their commute into work that morning! Dr Marc Dussault is a veteran of Jay Abraham’s strategies with more than a decade’s experience in dozens of industries across three continents. His passion for business is closely followed by his love of the game of squash. This transcript is dedicated to Marc’s squash partner, Simon Gogolin – 2005 World Masters Gold Medallist Champion, 2006 World Masters Silver Medallist, 2005 and 2006 Australian and NSW Masters Champion all in the 45-49 age category.
LACHLAN: Good morning, you’re listening to Lachan’s Business Breakfast on 2RDJ.
My guest in the studio this morning is Dr Marc Dussault. Good morning
Marc.
MARC: Good morning.
LACHLAN: It’s been a while.
MARC: Yes it has. Last time we spoke we were with Jay Abraham back in August.
LACHLAN: That’s right, that’s right. Four months ago. Wow. It doesn’t seem like four
months ago –
LAUGHING AND UNCLEAR TALKING
LACHLAN: It’s been such a busy time, it’s been a very busy time.
MARC: Yes, it’s been a pretty good year, actually.
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LACHLAN: Yeah, we’ve had a very good year from a financial point of view, it’s been
quite busy. My business has done pretty well. How have you been?
MARC: We’ve done quite well, in fact. the whole Australian economy I think is
doing well on the back of the commodities boom, and the entrepreneurial
spirit that’s taking place, and, yeah. It’s been a good cycle.
LACHLAN: Yeah, no worries. And so you’re going to give us some lessons from
squash.
MARC: Actually, it’s a sports metaphor, it’s called squash lessons for marketing
your business.
LACHLAN: Right, okay.
MARC: And the reason I use a sports metaphor is just like in sales, you have a
scoreboard, and the scoreboard just never lies, and it’s a very harsh critic.
LACHLAN: Yes.
MARC: But I use the sports metaphor because there are a lot of concepts in
marketing and business strategy that are a little bit ambiguous for some
people, and intangible. But when you put it into a sports metaphor, it’s
actually quite an easy thing to comprehend, and it’s actually a little bit of
fun, you know, you can laugh about it, because everybody has fun playing
sports. I’m a competitive squash player. I’ve been playing since I, I got to
Australia about six years ago.
LACHLAN: Right.
MARC: And so I enjoy the sport, and I just give some metaphors that people can
have some fun with, and just – just put it in their minds what they ‘re doing
on a daily basis, because when we play sport, we know what we’re doing.
In business it’s a little bit harder to see ourselves actually playing the game
of business.
LACHLAN: Yeah. Well, in sport there’s defined rules and there’s defined goals to
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score the appropriate points and things like that. In business things can be
– those lines can blur a bit, unless we put some things in place to make it
work.
MARC: Absolutely.
LACHLAN: Okay. Well, that sounds like we’re going to be in for a fun morning.
MARC: Yes.
LACHLAN: I haven’t played squash for a long time, and once you stop they reckon you
should never start again –
LAUGHING
MARC: It is one of the most injurious sports in the world. It’s also one of the best
sports for fitness. But yes, it’s a sport that doesn’t leave a lot of room for
compromise.
LACHLAN: No, no, no, it doesn’t, the brick walls and glass walls don’t –
LAUGHING
MARC: It can be expensive with the racquets if you keep hitting the walls!
LACHLAN: Yeah, well, and also doctor’s bills.
MARC: Yes.
LACHLAN: We won’t go there, though!
LAUGHING
MARC: Well, some people shouldn’t be playing squash, and in business it’s the
same thing. You have to pick your sport, you have to pick your industry,
you have to pick the business you’re going to be in, and decide at which
level of the game that you’re going to play. So yes, we’ll have fun this
morning.
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LACHLAN: Yeah, it sounds good. Okay. All we have to do is put on track, get
ourselves organised, then we’ll come back.
BREAK
LACHLAN: Marc’s just told me his little journey in this morning, and mine was just as
bad, trying to come – I dropped my wife out at Merrylands and came down
the M4, this morning it was the worst I’ve seen it so far this year.
MARC: Yeah, I was coming in from the city on Parramatta Road and the first ten,
fifteen minutes there was nobody on the roads in either direction, and
within fifteen minutes it’s chockablock on the other side, and that’s early,
six thirty in the morning, and there were people getting to the city, it’s
unbelievable.
LACHLAN: If you want to go anywhere you get up earlier and earlier and earlier, it’s
just, just wild stuff.
MARC: So for those listening in the car, thanks for listening!
LAUGHING
LACHLAN: Yeah, we’ve got a captive audience.
LAUGHING
MARC: Enjoy the ride in, hope we make it more enjoyable, that’s the point, that’s
why we got up so early this morning, to make it a little bit more pleasurable
for a few more people.
LACHLAN: Okay, so you’re going to serve, now, are you?
MARC: Yes, absolutely, I’ll serve the ball!
LAUGHING AND UNCLEAR TALKING
MARC: The funny thing about the squash analogy is, you know, when we think
about business, a lot of people just show up on the court, figuratively
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speaking, and they just bash the ball around. And they just figure if they
can bash the ball around better than the next guy they’re going to win the
game. And the reality –
LACHLAN: No tactics.
MARC: - the reality is you have to have a strategy, and you have to have tactics.
Now, if you’re playing someone that’s not as good as you are, you’re
probably going to win. But the chances are he’s just going to lose faster
than you’re going to win. There’s a difference between winning a game
and having someone else lose the game. In business it’s getting more and
more competitive, and people realise that if they can’t actually control their
game, they’re really not in the game at all. That’s why you see a lot of
angst in small business. I’ve been involved with small business for about
twenty years, and with the Jay Abraham strategies, we basically cater to
small to medium sized businesses. People are feeling more and more
threatened because the players on the court are basically getting better
and better. But you have to come to the game with a strategy.
LACHLAN: Yes. And to beat the opposition.
MARC: And to beat the opposition. Now, I don’t actually believe that business is a
zero sum gain, because I actually believe in unlimited wealth from the point
of view that just like for example oil, and yes we know that the oil price is
going up, but if we just go back twenty years, the actual fuel efficiency of
cars has gone up four times, so the cars are four times more efficient. That
means basically that the oil reserves, at least from the point of view of car
[oil] consumption, has actually gone up four times. So as a technology
increases–
LACHLAN: The only problem is that we’ve had an increase in population, so ????
MARC: Yes, no, no, I understand, but the fact that –
LACHLAN: But the efficiency of the automobile has increased four times, yeah.
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MARC: That’s right. So – and in sports, you have to beat the opponent. But in
business, all you really have to do is you have to win your game. And the
game is won in your head. But you have to have strategies, and you have
to know what game it is that you’re playing.
LACHLAN: Exactly.
MARC: But I guess if I look at the sports metaphor just as a basic starting point,
most people don’t realise that they’re actually playing a game. They don’t
realise the rules that they’re playing to, they don’t realise that people are
keeping score, and in some cases don’t even know that the metrics that
they should be keeping to actually determine whether they’re winning or
losing, how fast they’re winning or how fast they’re losing.
LACHLAN: Exactly.
MARC: And when, when you’re playing a game, you know what the scoreboard’s
going to say, and you actually know that you’re going to play, you know,
best of, best of five, so the first three to win, gets this award, and then it’s
the next competition.
LACHLAN: Exactly.
MARC: But, yeah, it’s an interesting way to look at business.
LACHLAN: Yeah, no, it’s a very good one. Because, like you say, most people have
no idea. They would not know even on an annual basis, whether they’re in
front or behind. It’s only when they – the accountant’s gone through the
shoe box and gone through all the receipts and invoices and stuff and said
“What do you think you’re doing?”
MARC: Exactly. It’s shocking. I ask people – and, you know, when I speak in front
of, you know, hundreds of people, and I ask them just by a show of hands,
how many people have metrics for their company? Basically a score card.
You know, less than ten percent of the room put their hand up.
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LACHLAN: Exactly. I could imagine that.
MARC: And you can’t win the game of business if you’re not keeping score. And
it’s not a question of being better than the next guy, it’s really being the
best that you can be at the game that you want to play. And the fun thing
is as a business you actually make your own rules, and if you change the
rules to your advantage, well, guess what, you can win.
UNCLEAR TALKING
LACHLAN: I play golf. It’s a very unforgiving game, but you’re playing against yourself,
you know, you’re playing with a bunch of guys and that’s all fun, but really
the person you’re trying to beat is you.
MARC: That’s right.
LACHLAN: So, yeah, it’s a very horrible hook.
MARC: Yes, the hook and the slice…
TALKING OVER EACH OTHER
MARC: Absolutely. And it’s funny, if we keep to the, to the metaphor of golf, one of
the things in golf is if you ever realise, those of you who have played golf,
is that the minute that there’s a water trap, what do they keep looking at?
The water.
LACHLAN: As people do, yeah.
MARC: Yes. But the reality is that if you don’t actually – if you don’t see it, if you
actually remove it from your mind, you can actually hit the ball straight, but
the chances are it becomes a magnet, because you get what you focus on.
LACHLAN: Yeah, well, exactly. There’s a hole up at, up on the Central Coast that’s
ninety meters. And right in front of the tee’s a little creek. You will not
believe how many balls go plonk, you know fifteen meters, straight into the
water. Who hits the ball fifteen metres? Not even my kids when they were
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little – and they’re not little anymore, you met my son on the way in…
MARC: Yeah, he’s not little anymore.
LACHLAN: He’s much bigger than me, the rotten thing he is.
LAUGHING
LACHLAN: But even he could hit the ball more than fifteen meters. So if you –
MARC: It’s the psychology, and the psychology of the mindset of a champion, you
really only learn – and one of the reasons I shall maybe tell you the story of
why I actually play squash, and I play squash every single day I’m in
Sydney, when I’m not travelling. And the reason I started to play squash is
if you apply yourself in squash or any other endeavour other than business,
what happens is how you play that sport or how you play that instrument,
or how you devote yourself to that activity is basically mirrored in how you
actually live your life. And a lot of people – one of the shocking statistics,
and this isn’t just Australia, it’s all in the developed countries, and I’m
talking, you know, basically the US, Canada, and Australia for my
immediate experience.
Someone was telling me that in my generation, and I’m forty three, in my
generation eighty (80) percent of people in my age category had
succeeded in sport at some point in their life. So they’d achieved some
kind of sports excellence – whether it was in primary school, high school,
or university, eighty percent had achieved excellence.
LACHLAN: That’s amazing.
MARC: So they knew what it was to achieve. Today’s generation, the young
twenty year olds, eighty percent have – you have the Generation X or Y,
that generation, eighty percent of them, have never excelled at sport, even
though they’ve had that opportunity, I’m talking about people who have
already graduated from university.
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So what that means is what they lack is the ability to actually know what it
takes to actually excel at something. And I’m not advocating that you have
to be a sports fanatic, because that’s really not the point. But if you can
actually excel at something, whether it’s sport, or it’s a musical instrument,
or whatever, whatever the pastime might be, and there’s a lot of, you know,
very good endeavours out there – how are you going to recreate that in
your business and in your personal life?
LACHLAN: You can’t.
MARC: You can’t, because you have no point of reference. And that’s one of the
things that –
LACHLAN: That’s a wild thought.
MARC: It’s shocking when you think about it, it’s sad.
LACHLAN: Yeah, you know, we grew up, you know, I’m six years older than you, I’m
forty nine, you know, so, yeah, I’ve played cricket, I’ve played rugby union
at high school, I’ve played other sports -
MARC: Sure, you had a variety of opportunity.
LACHLAN: I’ve played -
MARC: To find what –
LACHLAN: Hockey and all that sort of stuff, and, you know.
MARC: So you know what it takes to win, and it’s not easy.
LACHLAN: No.
MARC: It’s not a given, it’s not just handed to you just because you happen to be
together, you did something -
LACHLAN: No, no, we worked together.
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MARC: You worked together, you developed patterns and strategies, and tactics,
and -
LACHLAN: Nobody could get near us.
MARC: That’s right.
TALKING OVER EACH OTHER
LACHLAN: We had one goal scored against in our last year together.
MARC: That’s incredible. That’s incredible.
LACHLAN: But it was the same thirteen guys, basically the same eleven guys on the
paddock all the time. You know, and we were basically invincible.
MARC: So that’s why I use this is as a metaphor, and I spoke at a public event last
year, and I just threw one of these sports metaphors out, and there was a
squash one, and somebody came after me, came after the event to talk to
me and said “That was an incredible sports metaphor”. He says “You’ve
got to use more of those metaphors, because sometimes you talk about
these business principles, and yes, we think we can intellectualise them,
but if you put them in something that we can visualise it makes all the
difference”.
LACHLAN: Our generation and the generation – and especially the generations that
come behind us, they’re extremely visual, because we all grew up on
television.
MARC: Oh, of course, yeah. The visual, instant gratification, and they want to be
able to picture what it is, yes, absolutely.
LACHLAN: Yes, - INAUDIBLE - it’s all that sort of stuff these days, because if you
don’t, you know, you lose half your audience, you know. The great thing
with radio is, you know, I just – we usually just go in short segments - but
metaphors is the way to go. Yes, amazing. Very good.
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MARC: So the metaphor I used in that particular example is that a lot of people in
business are focused on trying to hit the ball. And, you know, that’s a very
valid thing, you pick up a book on how to do whatever it is in business or
marketing or sales, and you read the book. But the funny thing is in
squash as we all realise, those of us who have played, and for those of you
who haven’t played, it’s a little black ball in a white room, and the goal is
basically, very simple, to hit it before it bounces twice. Now, this little black
rubber ball doesn’t bounce very much. Now, if you’re from Queensland it
bounces a lot, because it’s hot and the ball bounces, but especially in
winter, even in New South Wales in winter, the ball won’t bounce very
much. So the biggest challenge everybody has when they start is getting
to the ball.
So if I spent two or three hours with you as a business consultant, coach,
mentor, advisor, talking to you about hitting the ball, and you can’t get to
the ball, guess what?
LACHLAN: You’re wasting my time.
MARC: I’m wasting your time, you’re wasting your time, and then you’re getting
frustrated. So in business, you have to realise that which step are you –
are you trying to get to the ball? Because I can tell you techniques about
how to get to the ball. Then once you get to the ball, I can say look, have
some fun, hit it, because now you’re getting to it and it’s fun, but then once
you’re at the ball, then I can start telling to you how to actually hit it,
develop the strokes, and then once you’re good at that, then you can start
talking strategy. But there’s no use talking to you about strategy if you
can’t get to the ball.
LACHLAN: Yeah, exactly. Alright.
MARC: So it’s those kinds of things, and people realise – and you ask people “Are
you getting to the ball in these three or four dimensions of your business?”
And in some cases they’re absolute masters, and in other cases they
completely fall apart. It might be sales, it might be production, it might be
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client service, it might be marketing.
LACHLAN: Or the big one.
MARC: Which is?
LACHLAN: Getting the money.
MARC: Yes, yes.
LACHLAN: Accounts receivable.
MARC: Accounts receivable, yes, I mean, yes, I mean, no accounts receivable and
you basically don’t have a business.
LACHLAN: That’s right, yeah. If you don’t get any money in, you know, you’re wasting
your time.
MARC: Absolutely.
LACHLAN: Yeah.
MARC: So one of the things that I see is what’s called, in squash, is called bashing
the ball, and the men, unfortunately, with our testosterone and our egos,
we get on the court and we see that little black ball and we sit there and we
start bashing the ball, and it basically means, you know, playing full on, and
just smacking the hell out of the ball as hard as you can. And you think
that the faster the ball goes, the better it is. And the reality is you’re
expending and exerting a lot of effort. So for the first five minutes, you
might have an edge, but after five or six or seven or ten minutes, you
basically wear yourself out.
LACHLAN: Yeah, exactly.
MARC: And the, the analogy is bashing the ball versus hitting with a purpose. And
I remember I was up in, in – actually, I should say West, in Perth, and I had
a coach, and he said “When you hit the ball, what are you thinking?”
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LACHLAN: I remember what I was thinking when I first started playing, I wanted the
ball to come off the back wall and bounce on the ground.
MARC: Yes. But he asked me that question, and at that point I’d been playing for
maybe two years, or something, I’m embarrassed to say this, but about two
years, and I said “I’m not quite sure, I’m actually just trying to hit the ball”.
And he goes “But you hit the ball very well, so why are you not thinking
about what you’re trying to do with the ball, why don’t you hit with a
purpose?” And I said “Well, what do you mean by hitting with a purpose?”
He says “When you hit the ball, in your mind, before you hit the ball, think
of where the ball is going to go. Don’t just hit it to get yourself out of
trouble. So the minute you start thinking you’re going to go down the line,
or across court or a drop, hitting with a purpose, you’re going to be much
more effective”. So from that point -
LACHLAN: Yeah, because you’re wearing out your opponent.
MARC: You’re wearing out your opponent, because he or she’s not thinking about
hitting with a purpose. So what’s the equivalent in business? Well, in
business, it’s we get to work every day, and a lot of us, and I count myself
in this, so I’ve learnt a lesson as well, and I keep learning every day. I play
with a squash champion, his name’s Simon [Gogolin], and he’s great,
because he keeps teaching me lessons that I need to learn every day. So
we’re always, always learning.
And so by hitting with a purpose is when you come in to work every day,
instead of just bashing the ball to work really hard, you have to come in to
work with a purpose, a thing that you want to accomplish that day, and
outcomes that you want to reach. But if you come in to work and you’re
just there just to work hard and to do the ten or twelve hours, or the eight
hours, or whatever your day is, you’re really just really bashing the ball,
and you’re spending a lot of effort for nothing. And just take the time to
think of where you’re going with whatever you were doing this morning.
And how many of you are in the car today not quite sure what you’re going
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to do this morning?
LACHLAN: Well, a lot of people start off with Plan A, and end up with Plan Z, because
something happens on the way.
MARC: That’s right.
LACHLAN: Yeah, they don’t plan for the unseen.
BREAK
LACHLAN: You’re listening to Lachlan’s Business Breakfast and my guest is Dr Marc
Dussault, and we’re talking about squash.
MARC: Yes, just before the break we were talking about hitting with a purpose, and
we have to bring that home from the business point of things. When we
talk about hitting with a purpose, it means being specific about the
outcomes that we want for our business. The more specific we can be in
anything we do will improve our results. So if you just hit to hit across court
so the ball goes into the corner, that’s one thing, but if you hit the ball so it
goes into the cross court, it doesn’t bounce off the back wall, that’s a
slightly different outcome, a better outcome, and if you think about it, the
chances of achieving it are much better.
So for example you want to place an ad to get more sales, well, you know,
that is a very general outcome, but if you put an ad to get sales from a
specific target market with a certain percentage response rate with a call to
action that people will actually take action on, then that is going to get you
a better outcome than just placing an ad to get your brand across.
LACHLAN: Yeah. You spend two thousand dollars here, and you may or may not get
a result. – INAUDIBLE – word the ad slightly differently, then that two
thousand dollars, instead of being down the gurgler, as they say, could be
much better. You’re hitting with that purpose.
MARC: That’s right.
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LACHLAN: Very good, yeah, okay.
MARC: Now, another analogy from the game of squash is there’s two ways to play
the game, one is you can either develop the rally, so in other words you
basically hit the ball around, and then you wait for what’s called the loose
shot. And that’s what’s called strategic playing, so if you’re good enough to
hit the ball around, what you do is you wear out your opponent and your
game gets better and better, because if he or she is running fast – running
around more than you are, you basically get the advantage.
But what most people do when they start, is they want to kill the shot. That
basically means you stand there waiting to hit that winner. In business
you’d be surprised at how many people just stand – literally, like at the T in
the middle of the court just waiting to get that big hit. And you know what?
That big hit rarely ever comes!
LACHLAN: LAUGHING
MARC: No, exactly, you’ve got to move, and you’ve got to develop the rally
because if you get run around, guess what, that kill shot’s not going to
come.
LACHLAN: Not from you, anyway!.
MARC: Not from you, and not often enough. Because even if you get one or two
kills a game, if you’re playing a game to fifteen or to nine, you’ve got to get
nine or fifteen of those.
LACHLAN: Yeah. Or you have to know how to serve, etc...
MARC: You have to be able to serve, you have to be able to return the serve, you
have to do so many different things, it’s not about getting the kill shot.
There is no champion that can just stand there and just kill every shot.
Now, he can if he’s playing a beginner, but that’s not a game. And in
business you’re not playing with a bunch of beginners.
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LACHLAN: It’s not competition.
MARC: No. And the marketplace is so much stronger than that. To look at the
business analogy, what it means is when you’ve developed a rally, it
basically means that you’re hitting what you’re comfortable hitting. You’re
running the person around, so you hit the ball wherever they’re not. In
business it’s the same thing. The analogy is what you want to do is you
want to set up your marketplace so that when a client is ready to self-select
into your sales funnel, they will choose to do that, and then you can go for
the kill, you can go for the sale, you can go from making sure that you send
the invoice when they’re ready to receive it. It should be a foregone
conclusion that when that ball pops out of the wall, that you know that it’s in
your zone, boom you can get the sale.
What most people do is they provoke it prematurely, they provoke it, and
then what happens, what they do is they hit what’s called the tin, which is
the bottom -
LACHLAN: Yeah, that ugly -
MARC: The nice, ugly thing at the bottom –
TALKING OVER EACH OTHER, LAUGHING
MARC: It is a beautiful sound - when your opponent hits it, but not when you do!
LAUGHING
LACHLAN: That’s right, you go “Oh, out”.
LAUGHING
LACHLAN: How many customers do you go “clunk”?
MARC: Exactly. Hitting the tin is one of those psychological things that – you’d be
surprised how many times you hit it…
LAUGHING AND TALKING OVER EACH OTHER
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MARC: It’s just like the little creek in golf. And in business it’s the same thing, it’s
losing that account, that sale, and some of them, they’re small orders, right,
it’s just, you know, the beginning of the game, the point doesn’t seem to be
that important, so it’s not a game point every time. But if you stop tinning
the ball, guess what? You start winning more games.
LACHLAN: Exactly.
MARC: And I was playing with three or four different players, and I have multiple
partners that I play with, and one of my – well, my champion friend, his
name is Simon, he just basically said “Marc”, he says, “if you want to start
beating the other guys”, he says “all you have to do is stop tinning”. I said
“What does that mean?” He says “Just hit it up, and you’re better at
running around, chasing the ball than they are, and you’re just going to
start winning”. Guess what? From that week on, I started being
competitive with those players, and within two to three weeks, with a few
lessons, I started dominating. And it’s just one distinction.
LACHLAN: Instead of trying to go for [the kill shot]….
MARC: That’s right. And, and hitting the tin in business is going for the really
cheap sale. Really – and you know, you know when you’re doing that,
you’re provoking, you’re pushing someone, you’re forcing them into a sale,
they’re kind of reluctantly doing it because they feel like they have to, and
that’s not a good feeling, because they can either -
LACHLAN: Yeah, it’s not win-win, is it?
MARC: No, it’s not win-win. And it doesn’t get you referrals, it doesn’t get you
testimonials, and it doesn’t build the momentum that you want to build for a
business.
LACHLAN: They’ll buy once or one thing instead of – instead of becoming a life long
client, but they’re a one off sale.
MARC: Correct. And you know when you’re doing it, you actually know. Anybody
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who’s in sales, and you know, I can imagine how many people are in their
cars just going “Oh yes, I know, I’ve done that”, and it’s just a gut feeling
that tells you. And it’s hard to resist.
LACHLAN: Well, because the Neanderthal comes back out with the club.
LAUGHING AND UNCLEAR TALKING
MARC: Another thing is, and this is something that we all learn when, when we try
to improve ourselves, is, you know, what are we going to work on? And
one of the things I learned – I guess about three or four years ago, actually
– yeah, three or four years ago, is not to just play with one racquet and one
pair of shoes. I just thought “Well, what difference does it make?” The
reality is if you’re actually going to play regularly, you want to have multiple
racquets and multiple shoes.
You want to take that factor out of the equation, because if you only have
one racquet and one pair of shoes, when your shoes wear out, you have to
start with new shoes. Your new shoes are actually going to throw you off,
because they feel different, they grip differently. The racquet’s the same
thing, the strings will go, and then all of a sudden – first of all your strings
will break, at some point, and then you have to wait to get the new one, but
when you get your new racquet, it’s not the same feel.
So that’s a variable that you have to take out of your game. So if you’re
competitive, you have to have multiple racquets.
LACHLAN: Yeah, exactly.
MARC: But you don’t think about it until you get to the point where that actually
makes a difference.
LACHLAN: And then once you’ve got multiple racquets you can sort of say this one’s
got slightly older strings, I’ll start -
MARC: That’s right.
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LACHLAN: I’ll start with this one, and he thinks he’s got an advantage over me, I’ll
change racquets to the newer one about halfway through the game, and all
of a sudden the ball’s zinging past him and he doesn’t know what’s
happening.
MARC: It’s the same player, but, but the tool that’s being used is different.
LACHLAN: It’s slightly better.
MARC: In business, what you have to do is stop playing with variables. You have
to – and this is where you know, entrepreneurs – they’re great people. I
love them, because they’re so creative, and they’re so innovative, and
they’re so excited and have so much enthusiasm. But you know what the
problem is? They keep playing with stuff. They keep changing everything.
LACHLAN: Well, they want to change things, because that’s how they are.
MARC: That’s what makes them successful entrepreneurs. But you know what?
LACHLAN: They often have to bring somebody in behind them to keep playing the
game, keep playing the game right.
MARC: Yes, absolutely, yeah, you need an administrator for an entrepreneur to
actually systemise the business, but if you’re a sole business entrepreneur,
which, you know, ninety five percent of the businesses in this country are –
there’s one point three million small businesses in Australia – which is
great, because it’s entrepreneurial, you have to teach yourself that skill.
LACHLAN: Or get a bookkeeper.
MARC: Or get a bookkeeper.
LACHLAN: Thirty five bucks an hour. A few hours a week. Which, as you’re saying,
that’s bringing – that’s bringing in the other tool, that’s bringing another
racquet into the game.
MARC: That’s right, that’s what you want – yeah, exactly, it’s bringing that racquet
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into the game, and it’s taking that variable out. To do that you have to
have the discipline. You have to realise that as an entrepreneur you want
to come up with new ideas, but the minute you have something that’s
working, you need to stick to it, you need to make sure that the variables
for that equation that’s working for you – first of all is known to you so that
you know what you’re doing right, and so you know what you’re doing
wrong. Write it down, ideally, if you can, NO, not if you can, you definitely
have to write it down! Then use your innovation to do something else,
rather than keep playing with something that’s currently working.
LACHLAN: That’s what the old saying is, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. So if you want to
get creative, get creative with another product.
MARC: That’s right. So in squash it’s if your backhand is good, focus on your
forehand. If your volley’s not good, focus on your volley. If your drop shot
is weak, then work on your drop shot. But once you’ve solved one of the
problems, leave that alone, focus on something else. Work on your
movement for example, move on taking the ball early.
LACHLAN: Yeah, yeah, exactly. You’ve got to become more strategic in what you do.
Once you’ve mastered one part, yeah. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
MARC: One of the things that I learned having – I’ve had mentors, I’ve had
coaches, I’ve had people I’ve played with, and I’ve had people that are
much better than me. One of the things in the analogy was that I was
having problems with my backhand, and I do what’s called breaking my
backhand, so that means that my wrist is actually bent, and it shouldn’t be
bent, or it’s bent the wrong way, because it actually needs to be bent the
other way. What that means is I don’t get enough power to hit my
backhand. If I’m in the perfect position and everything’s right, yes, I can
get just as much power as the next guy. But I have poor technique.
So everybody up until that point said “Oh, you just break your backhand,
and therefore you don’t have enough power”. So I had a coach, and his
name is Neil Forsyth, he’s a really great guy. He’s retired now, but he’s
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been coaching here in Sydney for about ten years. And he said “Yes, I
realise you break your backhand, but the problem isn’t your backhand, the
problem is you getting to the ball”. I said “Excuse me?”. He says “Watch”.
He says “Just change this, and get to the ball differently. So go at it – go to
the ball from a different angle, and see what happens”. Within thirty
minutes, my backhand problems were fifty percent resolved. I still have
things to work on, but it’s getting to the ball that was the problem.
So what’s the analogy in business? The analogy in business is everybody
has challenges. Even including me, you know, I have, you know, expertise
in Jay Abraham strategies that have been developed over the last thirty
years, and they are formulas that you can use, and even though you can
be a master at these things, there’s always something that you can
improve. But the thing is what you don’t realise, unless someone else can
see from a different perspective, is that it’s not how you’re hitting the ball
that’s wrong, it’s how you’re getting to the ball. In business, it might be the
three things you’ve done before the sale, it might be your logo is
inconsistent, or your slogan or your unique selling proposition, is
inconsistent with your branding, it might be inconsistent with the
marketplace, the colours might be off, the vocabulary that you use for your
ads might be off, and yet your product is fantastic, and your staff is great,
and your customer service is great, but you don’t know what it is that you
actually need to change to get a better outcome. So if you can get a
mentor or a coach or an advisor -
LACHLAN: Or just listen to your staff.
MARC: Or just listen to your staff, or your clients -
LACHLAN: And the clients, yeah.
MARC: But you’ve got to ask, you have to ask for that feedback. That’s another
thing in sport, in this country, which is quite surprising when I started taking
lessons at my local squash club, I noticed, and then I asked my coach the
question, I said, you know, “How many people do you coach?”, and, he told
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me six, seven or eight people. He said “The funny thing is most of them
are foreigners”. And I said “Well, what do you mean?” He said “They’re
either American, Canadian, British or whatever”. I said “Well, why would
that be?” He says “The Australian philosophy, psyche, is not to get
coaching”. And I said “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
I mean, you know, first of all, Australia loves its sports, and we’re really
good at sports in this country, I mean, we’re world leaders with a
population of eighteen million, I mean, we beat Americans with a
population of three hundred million, you know, in many, many sports, so
we’re disproportionately excellent at sports, but the general population
doesn’t get the coaching that they should be getting, because there’s this
philosophy that “Oh, look, I think I can do it on my own”. Look, you can get
really far on your own, but you can get there a lot quicker if you have
someone there that helps you, you know, cut to the chase and give you the
distinctions.
LACHLAN: Yeah, exactly.
MARC: So that’s one thing, because you’d get that different perspective, and if you
listen to your clients, if you listen to your staff, because your staff are your
greatest asset, absolutely your greatest asset, you’d be surprised what you
can learn.
LACHLAN: Yeah. And the funny thing is how many people won’t listen to people, you
know, they think they know it all, it’s my product, I invented it, I did this, I
did whatever, and, you know -
MARC: It’s because they’re successful.
LACHLAN: Yeah, it’s working, I’m making money, but how much more money could
you be making if you listened to some people.
MARC: One of the things that’s really important, it’s not just about making money.
It’s about having balance in your life. If you can actually play the game
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well, guess what, you can get off the court and not be huffing and puffing,
and the huffing and puffing in business is you actually don’t need to work
sixty, eighty hours a week. You can actually get the same outcomes
working forty or fifty instead of sixty or seventy hours.
LACHLAN: Yeah. Or generally, the amount of work you do in the sixty or seventy, is
the same as for thirty or forty, it’s just a lot less efficient.
MARC: Yes. That efficiency is where you can get a lot of improvement. It’s little
things that all add up. In squash it’s about how you get to the ball, for
example, one of the things that I was doing when I was training with, with
my friend who ended up winning the world championship in the Masters
last year, we were doing court sprints. And court sprints basically means
you run back and forth -
LACHLAN: Up and down the court.
MARC: Up and down the wall, twenty times, in less than sixty seconds, and you do
that five times with a minute break in between. Now, I’m just tired telling
you that -
LACHLAN: I’m just thinking about it going “Nah!”
MARC: You might think it’s easy, but, you know, if anybody’s tried it, it’s an
absolute killer routine to do. What it teaches you, it teaches the brain that
you can run twenty times in less than sixty seconds. It puts it into your
neuro-associative system that one: you can do it, and second: that it’s not
going to kill you, and third: that the distance of the court that you run is
twice the distance that you would run from the T, because the T is the
middle of the court. So you’re always running half the distance. You’re
running there and back to get back to the T. But what it does is it
conditions you. Just being able to do that, just getting that level of fitness,
can pick up your game ten or fifteen percent.
LACHLAN: Because if somebody sends a shot and it drops it in the back corner, you
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can make it to the back corner. If he does a drop shot the next shot, you
know you can make it back to the front wall.
MARC: Not only can you do it, you can do that twenty times!
LACHLAN: Yeah, yeah, but you can do it, and knock your opponent out, because he’s
expecting to put it in the back corner, you to be rushing to the back corner,
and no way are you going to make it back to the front wall.
MARC: Exactly, that’s right.
LACHLAN: Then you get down to the front wall and put it in the back corner, and he’s
standing there, and -
MARC: And not only do you get it, but you get there in time to be able to make an
offensive shot rather than a defensive shot.
LACHLAN: Yeah, that’s right, that’s what I’m saying, you get there and -
MARC: Correct.
LACHLAN: - you put it in the back corner or you’ve -
MARC: You’ve dropped it.
LACHLAN: You’ve dropped it in front of your toes, there’s no way he can get to it, and -
MARC: No, you’ve put him on the run.
LACHLAN: LAUGHING
MARC: So in business it’s the same thing. If you can, if you can teach yourself that
kind of discipline, and you can do what’s called your own court sprints in
your business, and that means making sure that your systems are in place,
that your customer relationship management system is operational, that
your website is up, that everything’s integrated so when somebody places
an order it comes to you automatically, that you have another responder
that sends out the message “thank you very much”, that someone calls a
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week or two later to make sure they received the DVD or whatever, the
book that you sent, whatever the case may be. When you have that kind
of discipline, then you can count on yourself, on your business, on your
staff, to be able to deliver the result, because that capability is there.
LACHLAN: Yeah, no, it’s amazing. It’s great. You know, it’s amazing how, you know,
getting to the ball. Knowing where the ball is and – well, most people know
where the ball is, but getting to is that, the gap.
MARC: Absolutely. One of the things in business is it’s a very lonely experience,
and I’m sure a lot of people can sympathise, if they’re owner/managers,
business people, and one of the things you should get, just like you do in
sport, is get yourself a fan club. Look, I’m not, I’m not a world champion
(yet anyway), but I’m definitely my [World Champion] friend’s greatest fan,
and what happens is by having somebody encourage you, you know what?
You pick up your game.
LACHLAN: Yeah, you do.
MARC: So get yourself a fan club, either your spouse, your family, your staff or
your clients, it’s a great thing to have.
LACHLAN: Yeah, it’s fantastic.
BREAK
LACHLAN: You’re listening to Laughlin’s Business Breakfast on 2RDJ, and we’ve been
talking about squash, metaphors for business.
MARC: Squash lessons for business.
LACHLAN: Squash lessons for business.
MARC: Imagine that.
LAUGHING
LACHLAN: Sorry about the technical difficulties we’re having this morning, it gets a bit
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distracting when things don’t quite go the way they should, but -
MARC: We’ve had a few technical challenges, but I was just watching Lachlan play
around with all the buttons, and for those of you in your cars and listening
to the radio, you should see how many buttons there are in this place, it
really is incredible. We were just talking about technology, and to watch
him fiddle around with all the buttons, when you see a master at play, you
can see that, you know, you have the skill that you’ve developed over the
years, and it’s the same thing in squash and the same thing in business,
and whenever you can observe someone who’s good at what they do, as
you are, you can pick up distinctions, and just watching you, I’ve picked up
a few things that – you know exactly where everything is, so you don’t get
fazed by the technical challenges. And that -
LACHLAN: No, no, it’s distracting, but it’s not -
MARC: It’s a little bit distracting, but you’re under control. And that’s how you want
to be in your business.
LACHLAN: Of course, yeah.
MARC: But that’s what you realise, and sticking to squash analogies, once you
know how to play tennis, for example, you can usually pick up squash, you
can usually pick up badminton. And then if you’re fit you can pick up other
sports as well. In business it’s the same thing, so if you’ve worked on a big
[broadcast] desk, you can come to something here that’s multi-dimensional
where you’re doing basically everything, and you can adapt quite quickly,
because you have that inherent skill set.
And that’s what experience is, and in our businesses, and as business
owners, it’s just a matter of determining where our best skill set or the
highest and best use of our time is. And that’s interesting as well.
LACHLAN: Yeah, that’s good. It’s what we’re saying here, you know, most people
have the coordination as in, you know, ball skills, the bat on ball, whether it
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be -
MARC: Yes, eye-hand coordination, yes.
LACHLAN: Yeah, hand-eye coordination, same thing. So basically if you can play
cricket, golf, you can play – basically play any hand-eye coordination type
sport. And business is the same, you know, we think we know one
industry, that you would – you know, your skills are reasonably transferable
across industries that’s why not so many years ago we had the
diversification boom, if you like, where people thought “Hang on, I’m good
at this, what can I take out of this into the something else?” because of the
way the world was back in the late ‘80’s, early ‘90’s, things were crashing
left, right and centre, and, you know -
MARC: Oh, look, I’m forty three, and I grew up where people had single careers.
And my father’s still working, you know, in his early seventies, still working
full time and he loves his career as an engineer in Canada, and he loves it
with a passion, but he -
LACHLAN: Yeah, and he doesn’t go to work.
MARC: What’s that? No, he does go to work, to play building dams – you know,
hydroelectric dams for electrical power, and he just loves it, and, you know,
he goes out on a construction site, he’s found his calling. But I’ve had four
or five careers, and I think the average is something – a little under ten
different careers in a lifetime. That’s very exciting, but it’s also very
daunting, because every time you need to start over with the skill set that
you have, you’re starting to play something new, so there’s the excitement,
but there’s also the challenge of picking up something very quickly. So if
you get into the habit of learning how to pick these things up quickly, guess
what, you have a competitive advantage.
LACHLAN: Exactly, exactly.
MARC: And the sports analogy for that is cross training. So if you play squash and
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then you swim, or if you swim and then you play squash, or you run, or you
cycle or do whatever, what you’re going to do is you’re going to develop
your body’s capabilities in other ways. So obviously if you’re playing tennis
or squash, you’re going to develop your right shoulder, your right arm, or
your left arm if you’re left handed. But if you can actually cross train, what
you can – you can actually do and you can actually improve your squash
game by playing another sport. You can also destroy your game by
playing another sport. For example, most squash players cannot play
tennis at the same time.
LACHLAN: No, because they’re different muscle groups.
MARC: It’s different muscle groups, and it’s a different stroke. It’s a different
position of the ball relative to your hand on the racquet. So it can
completely throw your game. In business it’s the same thing. Sometimes
people want to diversify, and they say “Oh, if I do this, but if I just do this on
top of it, you know, I’m going to make more money”. No. You’re going to
destroy your game, which if it’s squash, which is your primary game by
playing tennis. Sometimes people get into alternative business models for
completely wrong reasons, because they think it will actually help them,
when in fact it will actually destroy what they actually had in the first place.
One of the concepts that we teach with the Jay Abraham strategies is a
term called antimimeticisomorphism, okay –
LAUGHING
MARC: That’s – that’s a big word, isn’t it? Now, it’s not –
UNCLEAR TALKING and LAUGHING
MARC: Now, if you take it into its components, it’s anti-mimetic-isomorphism. So
the first one is morphism. To morph is blending into things, everybody
knows what morphing is…
LACHLAN: Yeah, changing from one thing to another.
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MARC: Yeah, changing from one thing to another. The other one is iso, which
basically means the same, and mimetic means you mime, you copy
something, and anti means the opposite of it. So anti-mimetic-
isomorphism basically, in really technical terms, is monkey see, monkey
do.
LACHLAN: Right.
MARC: And what happens in business? When we start a business, what do we
do? We go into the marketplace and we look and see how everyone else
is doing business. And guess what?
LACHLAN: We copy them.
MARC: Yeah, we copy them, and guess what, we think we’re going to be smarter
than everyone else who’s been in this industry for twenty years. Guess
what? That doesn’t work. No. Because even if you get a five, ten percent
improvement, it’s not enough to have a sustainable competitive advantage.
You have to go counter culture, you have to do something different. And
that’s – you learn that skill by understanding other industries, and going to
trade shows for basket weaving, or handicrafts, or, or automobile
manufacturing, or anything that is outside of your realm of expertise, just to
see how the other half is living. What the other half is thinking. Certain
things that they’re doing that can have a massive impact on your business.
LACHLAN: Yeah, exactly.
MARC: And then all of a sudden, guess what? You have a shot that no one can
return. Guess what? You can win a lot of games pretty quickly.
LACHLAN: Well, look at Tiger Woods, you know, eighth year – eighth year in a row.
He’s been voted the best golfer in, in America, by his peers.
MARC: That’s right.
LACHLAN: That’s outstanding.
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MARC: He does a lot of things differently than most people. He weight trains,
which, you know, up until his era, very, very few [golfers] did. All he did
was not just play golf, he weight trains, he cross trains, and he’s got – I
think he’s got eight coaches. And it’s just a golf swing. But no, it’s not just
a golf swing. It’s multiple components of the golf swing.
LACHLAN: Well, it is, yeah, you’ve got to play golf to know that it’s not just a swing.
MARC: No.
LAUGHING AND UNCLEAR TALKING
LACHLAN: Where are your feet, where are your knees, where are your hips, where’s,
yeah, you know, it’s a real mind game. It’s a lot more of a mind game than
most people think. It’s probably – he’s probably also got a sports
psychologist.
MARC: Yes he has, yes. He’s got more than one. And he’s a brilliant – he’s a
brilliant individual, I mean, he was gifted from a young age, but it’s not the
physical talent that’s made the difference, because there’s people I’m sure
that were more talented than him, but didn’t have the mental acumen to do
what he’s done. And you have to be disciplined and focused.
One of the terms I use and – it’s actually quite succinct, it’s that you are
either reasons or you are results. The funny thing is – and you find it you
know, when, when you play any sport, and you win, and someone says
“Mate, how’d you go?” “I won”. That’s it, that’s all you have to say. Now,
the other guy comes off the court and you say “Mate, how’d you go?” “Oh,
you know, the ball was cold, you know, my racquet strings are off, my
shoes were slippery, the walls are dirty – did you see the crack in that wall?
The guy up in the gallery was talking, you know, I should have got more
lets” you know, and those are all reasons, and they’re excuses, you know.
You know what, sometimes it happens that you’re just not playing well, you
know, and everybody can understand that, because you can’t always win,
there is no champion in the world that wins every single game.
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But we all know that there’s a difference between losing and being beaten.
You know if the other person’s playing better than you, guess what?
They’re better on the day. But when you get off the court, and you know
that you could have beaten that person -
LACHLAN: Oh, that’s the worst.
MARC: That is such a bad feeling. In business it’s the same thing. We’ve all had
bids and tenders and clients that we know we should have gotten. And the
competitor just got it because we didn’t play full on and we didn’t do
everything that was needed. There are other times when, you know what?
The competitor deserved to get that account. And you know what? We go
to bed at night going “Damn, I wish I would have got that. But you know
what, they were better, they’re closer to them, they’re in New South Wales,
we’re in Victoria”, or vice versa, whatever the reason is… you can’t win
them all. No one wins nine love, nine love, nine love every game. You
have to get -
LACHLAN: We wish.
MARC: We wish. I get on the court every day, and like I was telling the listeners
earlier, I play with the world champion, and I’m not a world champion, yet
anyways, and he’s been playing for thirty years, and he’s a really great
guy, his name’s Simon. Every day I show up I want to beat Simon. I think
I’m going to beat him. Sometimes I do beat him, because he lets up, and
he lets me into the game, and I win, but I haven’t beaten him, he’s let me
win. But every day I go in hoping, expecting that I’m going to win.
Otherwise, why show up?
LACHLAN: Exactly. I used to – back when I lived in Melbourne, I used to play with a
couple of guys, one hit off nine, and one hit off thirteen.
MARC: Yes.
LACHLAN: And the guy that hit off nine was giving lessons all the time. I beat him
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once, which was pretty cool, and then I couldn’t beat the guy who hit off
thirteen.
MARC: Really?
LACHLAN: These guys played, you know, twice a week, I was lucky to get – back in
those days, I was lucky to get once a fortnight, never mind once a week,
and the last game we played before I came back to Sydney, I whipped the
pants off him. But my game had improved so much, and my first shot I just
nailed that first one -
MARC: And you knew the day was yours, didn’t you?
LACHLAN: Yeah, yeah, it’s just – yeah, you just know, whether you’re talking about
squash lessons or business -
MARC: Yes.
LACHLAN: I got it right this time!
MARC: Yes, you did!
LAUGHING
MARC: Yeah, it’s a different concept, a sports metaphor, to explain things that are
less tangible for business, to help business owners basically see
distinctions that can help them in their business every day.
LACHLAN: Yeah, no, it’s great, no, it’s fantastic actually. Yeah, so if you’re stuck in
traffic, you have to listen to us. INAUDIBLE
MARC: You definitely have our empathy, if you’re stuck in traffic.
LACHLAN: We were talking just during the break there about the – Marc’s big
commute to work, the four minute walk to the next block.
MARC: Yes.
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LACHLAN: It probably takes longer waiting for the elevator!
MARC: Yes, it does actually, and I’ve been living in the city since I got to Australia,
so I live right at World Square, and so I work – when I’m in the office I work
literally four minutes away, so I don’t have the pleasure of a commute that
most people in their cars right now will have. One of the things I miss
actually is the fact that when I did commute, early on in my career I did a
lot of driving, out on the road and selling for my company… I was doing,
you know, twenty, thirty thousand kms a year, that most small business
entrepreneurs would do. So I’d listen to a lot of tapes in my car, and I
actually miss that, because somebody was saying that half an hour in your
car every day – sorry, half an hour commute, so half an hour there and half
an hour back, it’s an hour a day. That hour a day, if you listen to a
motivational or instructional tape in your car, or, you know, CD obviously
now, it’s equivalent to a university semester every year.
LACHLAN: Wow.
MARC: Yeah. And you would never think that that would be the case, but it’s
equivalent to a university semester, because you’re a captive audience,
yes you’re driving and you’re seeing what you’re doing around you, but
because it’s an intense experience, especially if you’re alone, you can think
through, and you’re not distracted with other people talking in the car.
When I realised that, somebody told me that, I just thought “Wow, that’s
fantastic”, because now you can basically educate yourself on downtime.
It’s just a great thing to do, so if you don’t have those kinds of tapes, you
know, you should definitely get them, or they’re not tapes now, CDs, you
should definitely get them -
LACHLAN: Or iPods.
MARC: Yeah, iPods, absolutely, yeah, I’m using my iPod now to record this. And,
you know, I’ll replay it, and -
LACHLAN: Podcast it.
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MARC: Yeah, podcast it, and yeah, it’s great. Technology today is just, just
phenomenal.
LACHLAN: Yeah, it’s just accelerating away, isn’t it?
MARC: Talking about technology, when you talk about sports, you always want to
have the best equipment. You always want to have the best racquet, the
best shoes, the best socks, whatever. My socks I think are eighteen or
twenty five dollars each!
LACHLAN: Wow.
MARC: They’re a ridiculous price when you think about it, but they’re double lined,
and they’re made so that the friction between the two layers of the sock
removes the friction between your foot and the shoe.
LACHLAN: Okay.
MARC: So that you don’t get – you don’t get corns and blisters.
LACHLAN: Blisters, yeah, yeah.
MARC: And the socks will last easily more than a year. Whereas before my socks
would wear out, you know, every two or three months.
LACHLAN: Yeah, well, exactly, yeah.
MARC: So you have to have the right equipment, and in business it’s the right
CRM package, it’s the right – you know, equipment on your desk, it’s the
right computer, it’s the right telephone system -
LACHLAN: The right software, yeah.
MARC: The right software. And when I say the best, it’s not necessarily the most
expensive. Because sometimes the cheapest shareware is the best thing
for you. In the case of racquets I’ve used Wilson, Dunlop and Head, all for
different reasons. The first time when I got a Wilson racquet, I wanted
what’s called a hammerhead to get power. Then I went to Dunlop so I
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could get more feel with the ball. And now I use a Head, because the
Head has a new intellifibre technology that straightens my mis-hits. So if I
don’t hit in the centre of the racquet, it auto-corrects for that.
LACHLAN: Oh, wow.
MARC: So three different racquets, over the last six years, that I’ve used, so the
best racquet for me has changed. In business it’s the same thing. The
tools that you have are going to change. You have to keep abreast of
what’s out there, and it’s not necessarily what’s more expensive. With the
internet today, there are so many things that you can get, very
inexpensively, and, you know, I totally endorse buying all the software out
there, and not to make, you know, copies that are illegal, but you don’t
necessarily have to spend fifty thousand dollars on software.
LACHLAN: No, no, you don’t have to get a software manager in - a software engineer
in to do something else.
MARC: No. Now because you can have ASP or hosted solutions, you don’t even
have to buy the software, you just buy the server, and the software sits on
the server somewhere. You don’t have to worry about backups and
security because it’s all taken care of for you. But you have to determine
what’s right for you, what’s the best racquet for you, not because it’s two
hundred and seventy five dollars, or a hundred and sixty five dollars, it’s
the one that feels right in your hand and works for your business. You’ll
evolve your business as your needs will, as well.
LACHLAN: Exactly, yeah, you know, it’s, obviously some part of that is personal
preferences and comfort and feel and that’s fine, you know, you’re in the
business of making money, so, you know, a car’s a car, you know, you
could probably get away with a little tiny smart car, but, you know, who
wants to drive around in a smart car? Not everybody.
MARC: Not everybody, no. There are different cars and there are more cars now
than ever, because people want to individualise themselves.
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LACHLAN: Exactly.
MARC: In business it’s the same thing. So the other thing we’ve been talking
about is playing better players. You know, in sport, you always get better,
and everybody knows this, by playing better players. Now, how do you do
that in business? Well, playing better players in business basically means
you want to network, and you want to be amongst people who are as good
as you, or better. Not necessarily in your industry, because if they’re
actually in other industries you can be more open, you know, for
competitive reasons. But if you can get into a mastermind, if you will, that’s
what we call it, and it’s a special concept that was coined by Napoleon Hill,
everybody would know that from Think and Grow Rich, if you’ve read the
book, if not, you definitely need to read that book.
LACHLAN: It’s a book to read, yes.
MARC: It’s a classic, it’s an absolute classic, Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon
Hill. If you can be amongst better players, better business people, what
you’re going to pick up from them are tips and tricks that you can’t pick up
on your own. You know, they’ve gone the hard yards, and they’ve learnt
the lessons. And guess what – a five minute conversation can save you a
lot of heartache, and I think it’s an ounce of perspiration is worth a gallon of
blood.
LAUGHING
MARC: And I don’t remember who told me that, but I when I realised that I thought
“Yeah”. An ounce of perspiration’s worth a gallon of blood. So it’s pretty
graphic, but you know, if, if you can get to your destination with less effort,
why not take that road?
LACHLAN: Yeah, well… networking, it’s absolutely the thing to do these days. There
are so many events on, you know, and some are not that expensive, you
know, go and do a breakfast, you know, twenty bucks, big deal, fifty bucks.
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MARC: You’d pay that just for the breakfast.
LACHLAN: Yeah. Well, basically you’re paying for some food. Usually you get to sit
around, and hear somebody share something, but I don’t go necessarily to
listen to what the guy’s got to say, I go to meet people, you know, I just –
most events I go to I try to go by myself, I try not to organise a table, not
because I don’t want a table full of people, but if you go with a table, you’re
going to sit with people you know.
MARC: That’s right. The point is to meet new people.
LACHLAN: That’s right. I like to go by myself. Or maybe take one other person. And
the reason is that you get to meet people, share what’s going on, you
know, I love networking, that’s, you know, that’s one of the things that
really makes my day.
MARC: Yes, you’re definitely a people person, you enjoy talking to people, I can
tell that about you.
LACHLAN: Yeah, yeah, so, you know, and so going – I love events that have a
networking coffee time after – at the end, you know, they all try and do it at
the beginning. But nobody’s got anything in common at the beginning, you
know, we’re all strangers… To just sit around and have a cup of coffee
over breakfast, you don’t really get to talk – you get to meet them, but you
don’t get to – get to the nitty gritty. I like it when, you know, somebody’s
planned an event, and at the end of it there’s a cup of coffee at the end,
after breakfast. Or, you know, lunch is better, I prefer lunches, because
usually the speaker’s on fairly early, and they have dessert and coffee at
the end, or dessert and port at the end, or whatever, you know, and you
get a chance to sit and talk to people, you know you can pick their brains.
When you start going to some of these events, you get to know who’s
good, especially if you go to the same ones, you can target some people.
MARC: I mean, you know when you come across a champion of industry or a
champion of sport or, or in any endeavour, you know just by the way they
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carry themselves, and what I find fascinating is to ask them the questions
that nobody else asks. When you do, you find out stuff that you never
knew you’d actually find out. One of the things, when you hear a champion
speak, and it was funny when – well, not funny, it’s interesting to me that
when somebody wins something, whenever they win Wimbledon or, you
know, the Australian Open or whatever sport accolade it is, do you know
what the first thing they say, or they think? It’s now that I’m a champion, no
one can take this away from me.
LACHLAN: That’s right.
MARC: It’s true. Because everything else – you can lose your money, you can
lose your spouse, you can lose a whole bunch of things, but a
championship, you’re always that champion, you’re a world champion,
you’re a Wimbledon champion, you’re whatever. The other thing is when
they actually retire – and it’s fascinating, when Andre Agassi retired, I’m a
great Andre Agassi fan, because he’s such a fantastic individual on so
many different levels, when he retired he – and he admitted, like many
other people of his caliber do, is what they’ll miss are the goals and the
metrics that they lived their life by. Because if you’re at that level, you have
to literally measure everything, and you have that discipline. Some people
feel that discipline is like a four letter word, well, not four letters, but, you
know what I mean.
LACHLAN: Yeah, exactly, yes, it’s a dirty word.
MARC: Yes, it’s a dirty word, exactly, and they don’t realise that the discipline
actually liberates you, because if you have a systematic way of producing
success, guess what? You have the flexibility to do other things. Then to
have your personality – and Andre Agassi obviously had a lot of personality
in tennis, and when you can do that, it’s really great because it liberates
your mind, because the system, or the discipline, takes care of the
drudgery. I’m not one to like details, and I think most entrepreneurs really
despise details. But if you have a disciplined, systematic process, guess
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what? It [the business] takes care of itself so that you can dream and
create and innovate, because that’s what drives us as entrepreneurs.
LACHLAN: Yeah, like you say, sports is fantastic – you’ve got Agassi, who’s a fantastic
sportsman, not that he’s not a fantastic person, but, you know, he’s retired,
he’s, INAUDIBLE
MARC: Every time he got on the court, he came to play.
LACHLAN: He came to play.
MARC: Because he loved the game, and he had the passion, of playing the game.
LACHLAN: That’s right.
MARC: When you do that for your business, your clients know it, they absolutely
feel it and they get enraptured by that experience.
LACHLAN: Well, it’s like your dad, he plays with dams and electric motors and all that
sort of stuff, and -
MARC: He sends me e-mails, like being on a construction site, and he goes “Oh, I
don’t know if I’m still up to it”, and it’s like “Just be careful”, because he fell,
and, you know, he’s seventy something years old, and he’s still able bodied
and outgoing, and he’s on a construction site flying in helicopters and
things like that. I can just see him. He’s like a kid in a sandbox. Literally.
To see that – I mean, for me, I only have one hero, and it’s my dad,
everyone else I admire and I have mentors, but he’s lived his life as we all
want to, as business people, enjoying the passion of creating something. In
his case he creates dams that create electricity. In my case I build people
and I build businesses. We all have the passion that got us into business
in the first place.
LACHLAN: Exactly.
MARC: I wanted to share one more thing before we run out of time, and it’s one of
these things that when you think about it, it will just really blow your mind if
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you’ve never heard this story before. There was a coach – and this was a
basketball coach, okay. So it’s still a sports analogy, but it’s not squash.
He had a team, and it was high school, and he wanted to do an
experiment. So he took literally, you know, sixty kids, and randomly – so it
had nothing to do with talent – he took three sets of, of these high school
boys, and he said I’m going to do three things. One is I’m going to coach
them, and they’re going to practice two hours a day, every day, for three
weeks, okay? The next one, I’m going to coach them for an hour, and then
I’m going to have them lie down on the court and visualise for an hour.
And then the third group, they’re not going to touch a basketball for three
weeks, and they’re going to lie down, on their backs, on the basketball
court, and visualise for two hours, okay? What they’re going to do is
they’re going to visualise doing free throws, you know, when you stand
there and you try to – you know, after a penalty… Guess which group had
the best outcomes for free throws after those three weeks?
LACHLAN: The guys lying on their backs for two hours.
MARC: Yeah. And all they did was visualise. So what’s – what’s the conclusion?
The conclusion there is that you can be driving in your car, visualising
yourself doing something in your business, listening to a motivational tape
an instructional tape, whatever that is, visualise yourself doing things for
that half an hour, and that’s going to give you a better result than doing that
for that half an hour. Because you can actually visualise and experience
things faster in your mind than you can actually do them. So by watching
videos, by watching DVDs, by reading books, by visualising, you are
exercising that skill. It’s amazing what the mind can do. I was blown away
– I couldn’t believe it, I actually couldn’t believe it when I heard that.
LACHLAN: Yeah. There’s this basketball coach, it’s a team that had been to the
championship like five times, they’re the ones who had lost each time. So
before their last session, he gave them a pair of scissors.
MARC: A pair of scissors?
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LACHLAN: A pair of scissors.
MARC: Now what sport was this?
LACHLAN: Basketball.
MARC: Basketball?
LACHLAN: Because the winning team cuts the net off.
MARC: Oh yes, of course, yes, of course, yeah, the tradition, around the rim, yeah.
LACHLAN: They’d never done it. They’d never done it.
MARC: And so he gave them a pair of scissors. That’s great!
LACHLAN: He gave them – guess what they did that week? They went out and won
the championship, because they’d actually, you know….
MARC: That is such a great story, I’d never heard that one.
LACHLAN: Yeah, yeah, I was hoping you’d remember the team. It’s quite a famous
story, apparently, you know, I just remembered it as we were talking about
it…
MARC: I’ve heard a lot of them, but I hadn’t heard that one, I mean what that –
basically does, is it preframes you for the expectation of the outcome.
That’s beautiful organisational behavioural theory.
LACHLAN: Yeah, it’s amazing, isn’t it?
MARC: If you can do that for yourself, then you know, the things you can do – but
you have to start somewhere, you know, and that’s the thing, if anybody,
you know, that’s been listening today, I mean, if you can just start doing
something that we’ve talked about today, just anything today -
LACHLAN: One of them, would be great. It will change, it will change it. Any one of
the things that we’ve talked about would change it. Getting to the ball,
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that’s a good one.
MARC: I love that one.
LACHLAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was, yeah, that’s fantastic.
MARC: That’s your takeaway for today, isn’t it?
LACHLAN: How many people don’t get to the ball? How many people don’t get to
accounts receivable? How many people don’t get around to invoicing?
That’s a big one. Writing that invoice, you know.
MARC: We work with a company called The service manager. They help
companies that have people out on the road. Something like ten percent –
it’s shocking – ten percent of service businesses, you know, electricians,
plumbers and whatever, don’t actually invoice the work that they do.
LACHLAN: Wow.
MARC: Like, at least some of the work that they do. And I think the total turnover
is five percent of the value.
LACHLAN: Wow.
MARC: Because they forget, you know, it falls between the cracks. I mean, that’s
five percent. So if you’re an electrician, plumber, and you’re making, you
know, two, three, four, five hundred thousand dollars of billables, right,
because, you know, there’s equipment and whatever, I mean, that’s
twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars a year.
LACHLAN: That’s a retirement fund.
MARC: Of course it is. Because that’s every year… every year for twenty years,
that’s a million dollars! But you know what, they’re just not getting to the
ball, they’re just not taking care of those things. Now, if they have
software, or, or a system, to do that, then guess what, they can get to go
on vacation, they can have a very nice retirement, but at least they’re
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getting to the ball and doing something when they get there.
LACHLAN: That is wild. That is wild. The one thing, you know, on big picture,
entrepreneurial type, you know, the invoicing and getting paid, you know, if
you don’t have those two, you’re not in business.
MARC: You’re not in business. maybe the final squash analogy for everyone is
we’ve always been – we’ve all been at some point on a sports field or on a
squash court, tired. And when you’re tired, what happens, your game
breaks down.
LACHLAN: Yeah, it does.
MARC: And you have to get back to the basics. Squash is you want to play the
ball deep, you want to run the ball down, you don’t want to tin the ball, and
then you want to wait for the loose ball. In business, what you want to do,
whenever you’re tired, or you’re frustrated, what you want to do is you want
to get back to what you do best. And what you, Laughlan and what I do
best, are two completely things. Different skill set, different experiences.
Always go back to where you’re comfortable. Where your circle of
influence is, your comfort zone is. And then, you know what, just expand
that a little bit, step by step. But you know what happens, a lot of people,
when they hit that obstacle, and they’re frustrated and they’re tired and
they’re cranky, they start beating their heads, and beating themselves up
because it feels good to beat yourself up when you’re frustrated. It feels
good because you think you deserve it, but the reality is if you just get back
to your basics, and do what you do best, and just take a deep breath and
just go “Okay, what should I be doing now? What can I do best right now
for the next two, three hours?” Guess what? You’re mood will change,
and then all of a sudden your destiny will change. That’s one of the things
that I think is key for everyone.
Just wrapping everything up…
Sport is fun, you know, when people say it’s not about winning, yeah, you
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hear that all the time, but it is all about winning, it’s about winning the game
of playing – having fun, playing in a sportsmanlike fashion, and making
sure that you do things ethically. It’s not just about winning at any cost, it’s
about doing the right things for the right reasons, and enjoying the process.
I hope that everyone that has been listening in to this morning’s broadcast
has enjoyed the process, Laughlan and I had a great time about four or five
months ago when Jay Abraham was in town for the boot camp seminar.
When he invited me to come back this week, I thought “Well, this will be a
great opportunity to launch this new sports metaphor based on squash”,
because I’m an avid competitive squash player.
I just want to acknowledge my friend, Simon Gogolin, who’s a world
champion, for everything that he’s taught me about squash. It’s been great
sharing with you these concepts and thank you for listening this morning,
it’s been great fun.
LACHLAN: Thank you Marc. It’s been a fun and valuable morning.
END OF RECORDING
For more information on Dr Marc Dussault’s products and services,
please go to www.MarcDussault.com
For more information on Jay Abraham’s products and services,
please go to www.JayAbrahamAsiaPacific.com.au