[Interview] Tom Poland: What Every Small Business Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Mindset, Startups and Strategy

Podcast – West Loh on Leverage, Automation and Outsourcing Strategies, 100% Free!

Author, Founder ESP Coach, Serial Entrepreneur, Triathlete

Tom revealed some of his greatest learnings about business, startups and the mistakes he sees small to medium enterprises make. He also shared some of his views on leadership into the 21st century, and how to attain a solid work/life balance. You’ll love Tom’s warm demeanour and sage wisdom.

In this interview you will discover:

– Key Mindset shifts successful business owners take vs what 95% of what other business owners do

– Why most small and medium enterprise owners work way too much and how to take steps to streamline your time and maximise your profit

– The Biggest Mistakes people make when looking to start a new business

– Why your business should be a passionate extension of who you are

– How to evaluate new business ideas

– The “Conch Shell” effect and why its crucial for your success

http://www.8020Center.com

Click Play To Hear Streaming:

Download the Podcast [ mp3 – 40 mb – 49 mins ]

Full Transcript

Click To Read Full Transcript

West Interviews Tom Poland

Speakers:
West: West Loh
Tom: Tom Poland

West: Today we’ve got a very special guest, Mr. Tom Poland. I met Tom in one of his recent seminars and he was talking about entrepreneurship and a whole heap of things. But what really blew me away was his different approach. It’s not your conventional approach to entrepreneurship. And we’re going to explore a lot of Tom’s thinking throughout his experiences and the value he’s been able to add for his clients, and hopefully, be able to add to you as well as a listener.

So without further ado, Tom, welcome to the call.

Tom: Thanks very much, West. And thanks for having me here.

West: It’s an absolute pleasure. Why don’t you give us a little bit of a background on where you’ve come from so the listeners get an understanding from your perception?

Tom: Okay. Well, I started life as a teacher and did that for about twelve months before I quit. There wasn’t enough happening. Whilst I really enjoyed it, there wasn’t really enough autonomy. Then I started a series of my own businesses. In the middle, I had ten years in the corporate thing—very much enjoyed that. So I did a whole lot of stuff.

And then I hit this—I guess you could call it a mid-life chrysalis; I refer to it as a chrysalis. You know, it’s kind of that time of life when you start thinking, well, what the hell do I want to do with my life? And what’s it all about out there? It’s sort of like going back to when you’re sixteen and you start challenging some of those values. Sometimes you have those moments in life where the lightbulb goes off. In those days, I was a tape-o-holic. I’d have tapes in the car and I’d listen to them. And someone quoted Benjamin Franklin who said, “Time is the stuff of which life is made.” And I literally pulled my car over to the side of this country road and stopped and sat and thought about that because I had—in this corporate cage—I had five leave applications declined in one year because we were always restructuring or doing something. And I thought, you know what, I don’t have a life. I want to get my life back again. I don’t have control of my time but I want to have control over my life.

So I started another business. And that was back in 1995. I called it the Entrepreneurs Success Program. And I really wanted a vehicle that would add a lot of value to people’s businesses and their life. Our target market was very clearly people who owned their own business. And what we wanted to do was we wanted them to be able to grow their business but also have more free time, which meant we had to think pretty hard and long about exactly how you do that. But that’s just sort of kind of a snapshot of my business background.

West: Because I noticed that you have a strong emphasis on people doing well outside of their business lives as well. I mean, they need to kind of have balance rather than, you know, everything’s about the money. And that’s one thing that I really look up to in what you stand for, Tom.

Tom: Yeah. Well, if I could just reinforce that point…it’s just a whole bunch of things. Like, first of all, I think living your life that’s value-focused means you also have to prioritize those values. And when I prioritize my values, clearly, health was number one for me. If I did anything such as consistently overworking, it was going to diminish the quality of my mental energy and my physical well-being, then that was going to be detrimental and certainly not worth it.

And the second value that was most important to me was my family. I have four kids. I’ve got five grandkids now. And they were number two in my life. They’re only number two, because if I was dead I couldn’t help them—and that’s with the health thing.

And then the third thing was money. And that included the business. So I did things like relocated my business so I can be nearer my home. I made a commitment to my family. At that stage we had a foster kid at home. We had our own children at home. I was running two businesses; at one stage in two different countries. It was kind of busy. But I made an absolute commitment that I would only work late two nights a week, every other night of the week I’d be home by 6pm for dinner with the family and every weekend was absolutely sacred in terms of family time.

And West, the thing is, the moment you limit the amount of time you put into your business, you know what? It goes up because you have to think more. And that’s what I love about the work that you do—that money mindset. If you just rely on endless hours, that’s a no-brainer. Any idiot can work long hours. And it gets counterproductive. You know, some people should go home. It’s just like their body is in the office but their minds—lord know where that is—it’s not doing anything.

So one of the things I really want to strongly emphasize to people is that if you can reach an agreement, if you’ve got kids at home or you’ve got a partner—it’s different if you’re single—but even for the sake of your own mental energy and focus and productivity, if you limit the amount of hours you put in your business you’ll find the quality of your thinking will improve.

West: That’s very, very powerful. And it’s a win-win both ways, isn’t it? Because they get the quality time with their family and their own pleasure pursuits as well as a better business.

Tom: Exactly right, West. They get a bit of mental health. They get a bit of physical health. Their family gets to know them again and loves them and is enriched by them. And the business improves.

West: That’s awesome. I love that. And I’m looking forward to hearing what you are able to share with us a little bit later on because I know you’ve got something awesome happening with one of the groups that you’re running.

You mentioned before that you set two days a week to work late only and that impresses me, first off. And secondly, you have the self-discipline to be able to maintain that. And I know that a lot of the people listening to this call might set themselves goals but they just don’t seem to be able to stick to it. What worked for you, Tom? Like did you keep yourself accountable to someone or was it just something that you’re innately able to—from your training in triathlons and stuff like that?

Tom: Well first off, West, I discovered recently early on that there’s one thing to have discipline to do exercise and to eat right and all those other good things that we know that we should be doing. But the greater discipline actually wasn’t the things that I needed to force myself to do. It was the things that I needed to force myself not to do…like working mindless hours. So what I did—and a lot of guys and women have a business and they have a family—so I had a conversation—we used to call them ‘family conference time’—and the kids loved it. Any time there was a serious issue like ‘are we going to move house,’ ‘are we going to move country,’ ‘are we going to start a new business,’ ‘do we need to look at someone’s schooling,’ or whatever, we’d hold a family conference. And the kids loved it. we’d get the whole family together—it didn’t matter if they were three years old or thirteen years old, with the guys this is the issue, ‘what’s important to you, Libby,’ ‘what’s important to you Loribeth,’ Lance, Rachel—whoever’s there—what’s happening. So I reached an agreement with my whole family that that’s what I do. And if you really want to leverage discipline, share that with your family because, boy, they’ll remind you about it. But the other thing, I guess, is I didn’t want to sit on my rocking chair, age 75, and look back on my life and go, ‘Yeah, I really nailed the business but it’s a shame my grandchildren don’t know me and my kids barely talk to me.’ And I guess you’ve got to start with the end in mind and say, “Well, what do I really want my life to look like?” Therefore, how do I need to behave now?

West: Very powerful. And I’m sure you’ve actually set up a group of people that facilitate that way of thinking in a way that you’ve approached entrepreneurship and business, which we’ll tackle a little bit later on.

Now, I wanted to make a shift to talk about…I like to talk about the mindset you were going through. Firstly…for yourself, going through your own business; and then maybe some of the top clients that you’ve worked with, some of the change in mindset that you’ve helped them to achieve later on. But shifting back to yourself, when you were launching your business—and there’s always a lot of doubts that a lot of people have that’s self-imposed, conditioning that they can’t do it and stuff like that—did you have any of these what we call ‘blockages’ (in our program) that came up before you launched your, for example, Entrepreneurs Success program?

Tom: Yeah, I certainly did. And I think that’s a great question because often, what freezes people from jumping out of their corporate cage and becoming entrepreneurial is zeal, let’s face it. You know, I was…in 1995, the packages were around $200,000, there was company car, superannuation. I was pretty high up in the corporate scene. The problem was I didn’t have a life. But there was actually, relatively a lot of security there but those comfort zones can be very a insidious thing.

So to answer your question, what I did is I sat down—and I did involve my wife with this. My kids at that stage were a little bit too young to understand what was going on. But I wasn’t prepared to do anything unless I had the support of my wife. And I’ve got to tell you, she was amazing…a wonderful, supportive individual. But we sat down and we did this weird exercise that I learned from I don’t know who. But what you do is you sit down and you visualize the worst case scenario. And the worst case scenario in this case was we would lose our beautiful home, we would destroy what retirement savings we had, we’d have to give up our nice three-car family and probably get a pedal car or something. We’d have to start mowing our own lawns. We have to rent a house. And we went through the whole thing and we actually visualized it.

And once we had done that then all of a sudden, the motion comes up, you know, like, ‘Oh god, we’re going to die.’ And what it comes down to, it seems to me, is that we’re going to lose people we love. People aren’t going to love us anymore. But of course it was all ego, it was all untrue. But it was all unconscious barriers. And again, I just love what you’ve got West, what you do with your business because you’re smashing the stuff. And until you break the mindset, nothing’s going to happen in the physical world.

So anyway, we did this exercise. And as I said, you get a bit choked up and say, “Oh god, we’re going to die and no one’s going to love us and we’ll be homeless. We’ll be living in the gutters.” We actually really went through and visualized ourselves lying in the gutter. And you know, “Where are we going to sleep tonight?” And once we went through mentally and visually the pain of that worst case scenario, we snapped out of it and we said to each other, “You know what? Even if that happened, we could handle it because we’ve still got the family. We’ve still got our health.” So that’s what we did. And I don’t know… You’re an expert on this. I’m not the expert. But that’s what we did. And it was totally liberating because we had faced our demons.

West: Absolutely. I mean it sounds to me like you guys actually went to the point where you visualized it so vividly that you actually felt the feelings that you would have if that was your reality. And the fact that you guys can actually still love each other and still be together and still have your health and realize that’s a good thing, that would have been a overcoming a huge block for you.

Tom: Yeah. That was certainly a breakthrough for us. And the fact that my wife was so supportive—not a lot of wife would be, I don’t know—but she was prepared to risk and to back me up. I suppose that’s the other thing. You know, you’ve got to be able to earn that trust and respect with your wife by doing, you know, if you say you’re going to be home at 6 o’clock, get bloody home by 6 o’clock. Don’t phone 5 past 6 telling her you’re going to be late or you have to do whatever. But that’s what we did and it seemed to work for us.

West: Well thank you for sharing that, Tom. That’s very powerful. I think they’ll get a lot out of it. Do you actually find that when you speak to CEOs—I understand that you work with leaders of organizations and people very high up and medium to large enterprises—do they come to you for when they actually have self-doubts and they’re unsure of where they want to take things or there’s uncertainty in their company? Is that the kind of thing you talk to them about as well or do you just focus on…?

Tom: No. I focus on two things and two things only: getting a better strategy in their business and executing it.

I should just correct one small thing: I work for people in all shapes and sizes of businesses. With the larger businesses, I tend to do consulting work—for the Australia’s largest university, some multinationals I’ve worked with—but that seems to be strategic consulting work. I have a few clients from the old days that I do personal coaching with; and that is mindset stuff. But what you’ll quickly learn with these guys and women is that they put their pants on one leg at a time. And they have the same fears and doubts. They’re probably better at masking it than some of us, but they have the same fears and doubts and concerns as well.

You know, I really don’t buy into the idea that we can get ourselves to the point where we are totally free of the stuff. I suspect that as long as we’re in a human skin, we’re going to have something that’s coming up as a blockage—which is great for you because you’re always going to have a business—and then if we didn’t, we wouldn’t even be in a human skin. That’s part of the point of being here, part of our purpose in life: is to overcome these obstacles. And again, I just like the work you’re in because you’re dealing with the reality, the mental reality that most people face.

West: Definitely. And thank you for your kind words there. And I completely agree that it’s a process. And it’s kind of a journey that will never end. But as long as you’re aware of the journey and you’re always working on it and talking to people like yourself, getting a coach or getting someone that can point you in the right direction, then you’re always going to be ahead of your competitors and you’re always going to be on top of the game.

Tom: Yeah. I think that really comes down to being very self-aware. My lover had to rush back to Germany. Her mom’s ill, unfortunately. And so I’m here on my own and I just noticed my mind starting to think thoughts that created feelings which I didn’t enjoy. I’m not saying I’m very good at this but I was at least aware that this was happening and then I could start doing the visualizations, the affirmations that turn the mindset around. So to me it’s not about not having the stuff happening, it’s about knowing how to handle it.

West: Definitely. Another powerful analogy. This is going to be a call that I’d probably look back on and listen to a few more times before I release it to the guys to soak up the wisdom here.

Now let’s take a shift now to…for the people who are looking at getting into an entrepreneur mindset, Tom. And this is where you’re a real expert at. Maybe they don’t have a huge business at the moment but they’re thinking of starting an offline or online business—maybe from a strategy perspective—do people come to you and do they consult with you for that? What advice would you give them?

Tom: Looking at someone who perhaps want to start a new business? Again, my business is an extension of my personal philosophy in my life purpose and everything that I do—well I hope it does—that’s my intention at least. So the first thing that I’d want to know is, is this new business really going to add value to people’s lives—either professional life or personal life? And I know it sounds kind of like a dumb question but, I mean, if you want to start manufacturing cigarettes or any sort of…

West: Just to make money.

Tom: Yeah, just to make money or you just want to flood some products because there’s a big margin on it—forget it. I mean, that’s not fulfilling. And what someone like that would find is that their self-esteem suffers. They never feel fulfilled. They can have millions and millions of dollars in the bank—and I’ve met these guys—smiling happy families and inside feeling empty. So to me, it’s got to be fulfilling from a life purpose-perspective. It’s got to be able to add value. To me that’s the first one, the first P.

The second thing is you’ve got to be passionate about it. Don’t just do something for the money. Create a marriage between passion and purpose. To me, that’s the best of both worlds. Look, I don’t really go to work. I go to have play. I have easy play which is my leisure time and a hard play which is my work time. But it’s still play. It’s still stuff that I enjoy doing. And I’ve long since got past the point where I’m prepared to prostitute myself just to make some money.

So the first thing is: is it purposeful? Is it going to be fulfilling for me personally as an extension of my gifts and what I’m here for on planet earth?
The second thing is: do I love doing it? Do I love this game—whatever it happens to be?
And the third thing is: the pennies.

We’ve got the purpose. We’ve got the passion. Are there pennies in there? Is there a margin in this product? Because I don’t care how much you love washing dogs, there aren’t any money in it. There’s just no money in that. So those are the three things I look at: the purpose, the passion, and then the pennies.

And then once we’ve gone through those conceptual questions, I want to know what is fundamentally and radically different about their value proposition to everyone else’s in the marketplace. And so there’s only two ways you can do this. Are we going to be fundamentally different or are we going to be fundamentally both? If you’re real clever, you can do both. And I need for this person to be able to clearly articulate to me what their competitive point of difference is. In other words, why are you clearly and compellingly different? Or why are you clearly and compellingly better than other people in the marketplace? And it doesn’t have to be a product, West. That’s the thing. You don’t have to have a product that is stunningly better or stunningly different. I mean that really helps a lot, but you could have much better marketing compared to others.

West: Or even the customer service.

Tom: Exactly. I’ve now got eight of these things that I reckon the MBA teaches this three—I don’t think that’s true—I think there’s eight. You can have better leadership. You can have a better team. You can have a better product. You can have a better customer service. You can have a better marketing, sales, etc. You can have better money management and pricing and all those things that go with that like cashflow and clients. You can have a better digital platforms that support everything else and you’re going to have better data analysis.

I think of those as like eight pillars. You know the Parthenon in Greece, this big marble Parthenon, there are always pillars?

West: Yes.

Tom: Think of it as like eight pillars that you can build in your business.

What I suggest when I work with clients is I say to them, “Pick one. Not any one. But pick one that is going to give you the most rapid penetration into the marketplace because that’s what strategy is about. Strategy is about beating your competitors. It’s like war. It’s like a sport. There’s a scoreboard step called market share. And if you will pick the right strategy and execute it successfully, the scoreboard will work out for itself.”

West: I’m loving these analogies, Tom. I’m trying to madly take notes and give a good interview at the same time.

Tom: You’re doing a great job. I’m enjoying it.

West: Thank you. That’s great. I love your analogy of the Parthenon and the pillars. And I’m sure that you actually teach people through your philosophies, your products, your websites, and your programs how to actually define and develop all these different pillars. My question is—for the viewers on this call and now we’ve got limited time here—talking about purpose and passion. For someone who is sort of unsure, what advice or tips would you give someone looking to find what it is their calling, so to speak?

Tom: I call it your passion history. The seeds of purpose lie in passion.

West, just to tell you what most people do—and what I did initially as well as I was looking at dropping out of the corporate cage—I looked back and said, “Gee, what have I done in the past that I could do in the future?” [Imitates sound of a buzzer in a quiz show] It’s like I could do consulting work. I could do management. Or I could do whatever it is I’ve done in the past.

West: Because that’s a natural question to ask, isn’t it?

Tom: I think it’s a very limiting perspective. I mean you can plan based on the past if you wanted but all you get is more of the same. So what I call the passion history…you know, for example, when I did this exercise myself before I started the Entrepreneurs Success Program is the 80-20 Circle. I looked back, and the moments with the greatest fulfillments for me were when I supported someone to make a shift in their business or their personal life. They were at, say, on a scale of 1 to 100, they’re performing at perhaps level 20. And through a process of working with them and their commitment and everything else as well, we can go from 20 to perhaps 80. Or we could take them from 50 to 100. Or whatever. But there was a change in their life professionally and personally for the better. So that’s what I got off on. That was my passion history. That was the moment when I felt really, really fulfilled. And it doesn’t have to be something as sort of grand as that.

But to give people a story to illustrate: I sat on a ferry—this is a few years ago—and I was going to the other side. It was kind of a bit crowded so I ended up sitting next to this guy and ended up having a conversation. You know, “What do you do?”
“What do you do?”
And he said, “Well, I design car parks.”
I said, “You design car parks?”
And he went on for about—the whole ferry trip was about a quarter of an hour—telling me how you can get more cars into a car park but you could actually have the access and the exit even better and he drew some stuff. And he was getting off on this. And I thought, isn’t the world a wonderful place? I don’t like to design car parks. But here’s a guy who’s helping other people because of his passion and his capability in designing car parks.

I can think of a lady in the States that I’ve just been introduced to who helps breast cancer sufferers either go through the process and to recover…guess how? By giving them fly fishing. When she looked back on her passion history—she was a recovering breast cancer sufferer herself—she loves fly fishing. She has built a $1.6 million a year business. And if anyone does this, google fly fishing breast cancer recovery, she’ll be there top of the pops.

West: That’s amazing.

Tom: So look at your passion history. For goodness’ sake, do not get sucked into prostituting yourself doing some multi-level marketing thing you hate. If you love it, great! If it makes a difference…great. But if you don’t like it, don’t kid yourself. You won’t stick at it. Find something that really makes a difference, that you love to do, and there’s plenty of money in it as well. And that means you’re going to have to think.

West: Sit down and maybe go fly fishing is probably a good place to start. [Laughs]

Tom: There was another guy—just to tell you—this guy is a stockbroker. He was a stockbroker and he used to skive off from work because he hated his job and coach his son swimming because he loved to do that. And he was approached by a little person—now I’m not talking a child, I’m talking what people used to call a dwarf—and the little person said to him, “Do you know of anyone that can coach us little people?”
And the guy says, “No, I don’t.”
And the little person was after a coach actually for her son.
Anyway, this guy went home and had a sleepless night and thought, “I’ll set up a coaching clinic for little people.” He quit his stock brokering job. He now makes over $600,000 a year teaching little people how to swim.

West: That’s awesome.

Tom: And that’s the power of segmenting the market as well, which is a little byline there. That’s a strategy. Both of these people have picked a strategy which created a niche in the marketplace that was so niched, no one else was even there. They made the competition irrelevant because there wasn’t any.

West: I mean the last thing a competitor would do is think, ‘Let’s set up something as obscure as that.’ If they do, at least you have such a huge first move advantage. And obviously, if you’ve done all the right strategies they’ll be hard-pressed to catch you.

Tom: Absolutely. First advantage. And you’ve got your own name in the marketplace. But the point is that both of these people did something that they were passionate about. And to me—I mean, I’m real happy to work harder from winning. And I’m real happy to work harder from loving it. But I would have to drag myself into the office if you—I mean, well, I love these accountants, okay—but if you said to me, “Tom, you have to be an accountant for the rest of your life,” I’d find the nearest cliff and jump off because there’s no passion enough for me.

West: For sure.

Tom: But just to finish off, don’t just settle for the passion. Don’t just settle for something that’s really worthwhile. You can’t make any money out of it. Do the purpose. Do the passion. And do the pennies. You do that…the world will be yours—with a lot of hard work and thinking. But that’s the starting point.

West: That’s the starting point; a very strong foundation. Now I wanted to touch on a few more things before I leave you today, Tom. And one of them was leadership. Because I know that’s an area that you’re an expert in and people from all around the world come to you and talk about it.
What leadership obstacles do you see future business leaders need to address and overcome?

Tom: There’s a bunch of them but there’s only two that will be critical because everything else falls under these two. What normally happens is the leader does an MBA or something ghastly like that and says, “Oh gosh! We need a mission statement.”
And then they go, “Well, geez, if they want to see some cashflows, a bit of a strategic plan. We need a five-year cashflow projection. And someone—quick!—work on a spreadsheet.”
And then they go, “Oh boy, it’s still not working. Oh, we need a USP (unique sales proposition).”
So they whack that up on the wall and then they go, “We’ve got to have meetings. We’ve got to empower people through these meetings.”
And the problem is, is that they’re all good ideas in and of themselves—most of them don’t work, by the way but that’s part of…

West: Well I have to say, Tom, really quickly, that I do have an MBA and that sounds very, very familiar.

Tom: Sorry about that.

West: No, no, no. Listen, to be perfectly honest all the business plans and spreadsheets…by the time you finish them, your idea is already obsolete.

Tom: Yeah, my apologies.

West: No, no, no. I agree.

Tom: I’m sure you got a lot of value out of it. But it’s just…I mean I’ve stopped teaching mission statement, I’ve stopped teaching value statements, I’ve stopped doing USPs because people don’t use them. And if people don’t use them they don’t work. I mean they might work if people use them but people don’t use them.

West: It’s good in theory.

Tom: Exactly. But the first obstacle is what I call the conch shell effect. And let me explain. You know a conch is a sea shell? In the Bahamas, they dive off these long boats and the pick up 5 or 6 conch shells. Someone in the boat drills a hole through the shell, they tie a string and they throw it back on the water. So there are 5 or 6 conch shells in the water. Then they go to the next site. And at the end of the day, they come back and pick all the conch shells up. Now here’s the question: Those conch shells can swim and they’re not fixed to the ocean floor but why are they still on exactly the same spot when the boat comes back just waiting to be picked up?

The answer is pretty simple. One of them steps in one direction, another one in that tied bunch swims and feels it and pulls in a different direction. Now you’ve got 5 or 6 conch shells all swimming flat out, all pulling in different directions and going absolutely nowhere. And that’s what I mean by the ‘conch shell effect.’ Lots of people in the business working hard, working long, all good ideas—got the mission plan, got the business plan, got the meetings set and got the product review—but not all going in the same direction. Now the answer to that is better strategy. And that’s the thing that I bring leaders back to time and time again: “What’s your strategy?”

An international property development company asked me to review their strategic plan—which I did—and it was like this small encyclopedia. So I went to the CEO—and I took a bit of a risk; and we’ll call him Sam—I said, “Sam…”
He said, “Did you review the plan? What did you think?”
I said, “Why, it was spectacular. Can you turn to the page that has the strategy, please?”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “Well, can you show me in here what you’re going to do differently that’s going to kick butt in the marketplace?” I said, “Clearly you’re doing a lot of stuff that’s working because your business is growing. But I see cashflow projections, I see how many units you’re going to have, I see all these objectives…but I don’t see a clear articulation of what makes you different.”

So the first problem is getting leaders to understand strategies are not objectives. It’s not mission statements. It’s not any of that stuff. It’s clearly articulating through one of those eight pillars what you are going to make to strengthen your organization that none of your competitors can match.

So the first problem is ‘conch shell effect,’ and that’s overcome with better strategy.

The second problem I see leaders falling into is if they have a clear strategy, they’d get into what I call pinball leadership. Now if you’ve got a pinball machine, there are basically two things in that machine: A couple of flippers and there’s a pinball. And in my experience in life and in business is you’re either a pinball or you’re a flipper. If you’re a pinball, you’ve got to work and you answer emails and you bounce off client requests and you bounce off meetings, you bounce off staff issues and you bounce off a complaint, and you bounce off a problem with the IT…and you spend your whole day and all week—and possibly all year—reacting.

But the answer, of course, is to find a structure of accountability and reviewing focus. So you regularly put aside chunks of time to execute that strategy which means putting into place business processes, developing people and processes. And that’s how you execute strategy.

So the two problems:
The conch shell effect can bully the ship. You can overcome them with a bit of strategy and a better execution.

West: I love those analogies. And I think a lot of people who’d be listening to this call and just shaking their head and thinking, ‘I’m a bit of a pinball, unfortunately.’ But fortunately for them, we’re actually going to tell them a bit more about your 80 20 Club. You got me really excited when you mentioned. But before I ask that, I’ve got this question that I really want to ask you, Tom. You were mentioning before that you did a triathlon or you have done triathlons. And I just wanted to get a sense of the mindset that that has taught you in life in general, not just for running your business, but some of the values and some of the things—because it’s not just a normal triathlon, I believe. You did like an Ironman or some crazy distance—tell us about that really quick.

Tom: Okay. One of my philosophies is to set what I call Extraordinary Personal Goal or EPG. And an extraordinary personal goal has a few characteristics:
The first one is that when you tell people about what you’re going to do…they’ll either say, ‘Wow,’ or ‘You must be crazy.’
The second characteristic is it has to take you a long way outside your comfort zone.
And the third characteristic is your grandchildren will talk about this at your funeral.

If you can go tick, tick, tick…you have yourself an EPG or Extraordinary Personal Goal. One of the ones I set was to do an Ironman Triathlon which was a 3.8k swim, 180k cycle ride and then that’s the warm-up for a full marathon 42.2k run. And that’s one tough day at the office, I can tell you.

West: That’s crazy.

Tom: That’s one of the bunch of other sets I’ve done. But they all really come about to the same thing: and it’s an expansion of your mental capacity. You put yourself in a situation where it’s tough or you’re scared or you have self-doubts or you run out of money or you run out of time or you don’t know what to do next—a whole bunch of things.

I did Mount Cook as well, the Grand Traverse of Mount Cook. Now if anyone is thinking it’s kind of a small mountain, more people have died on Mount Cook than Mount Everest. It’s a tricky son of a b*tch. And I’m a mountaineering bunny. I’m no expert. I was pretty stupid about mountaineering but I was just smart enough to know that I was dumb at it. But I had a good guide so I managed to live.

But all of these things serve the same purpose. And that’s the expansion of human potential, expansion of your mind and your thoughts. And it’s uncomfortable. I’m not an advocate of creating some sort of comfort zone and, you know, these guys that tell you to ‘come to our wealth creation seminar, you’ll have all this money, you’ll just be able to retire and do whatever you like and la dee da dee da.’ Sorry, but that’s crap. You’ve got a human spirit. You’re here to grow and to learn and to develop. It’s the conscious creation of a big obstacle that you overcome and go through. When you get through to the other side, you’re a different person. And to me, that’s a big part of what life is all about.

West: And obviously it’s spread into all other areas of your life: your business, your family. It’s helped you to grow in all those years as well.

Tom: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be the outdoor stuff like I do it. You might be doing your own art exhibition or getting your book or poems published or something like that. When you get through the other side and you’ve been through all the obstacles—the internal obstacles and the external obstacles—and you still succeeded, as I said, you’re a different person. And the resilience and the persistence and the resourcefulness and the creativity and the innovation and all these other things that you develop, you can carry those over into your relationships, obviously in your mental health, into your business. Because when you hit an obstacle, hit a problem, you know you will find a way through. It might take you some time, you might not enjoy the journey very much but you don’t sit there and go, “Oh dear, I better just give up. It’s too hard.” And I also think, West, it’s a bloody great example for your kids.

West: For sure. For sure. And I’m just marveling because I’m actually an exercise physiologist as well. And knowing those numbers—I’ve trained a lot of elite athletes but most of them would be absolutely crazy to tackle something like that. So congratulations from me on doing that and still being alive at the end.

Tom: You’re very kind. I trust you. I mean I pretty much sucked at everything that I did but at least I did it.

West: You did it and you’re still alive.

Now 80 20 Club…I’m really excited hearing about it when you were mentioning it to me the other day. I want you to tell us how it was conceived, how it differentiates from other groups that are out there.

Tom: I really appreciate the opportunity, West. And thank you for that. This came about as a result of thirteen years of the Entrepreneurs Success Program—1,476 clients over that thirteen years, from small business to large multinationals. And I kind of got to the point where I was thinking, you know what, I’m ready for something different, something new. So I got a clean whiteboard out and thought, ‘If I was going to start a program or experience that was going to really, really, powerfully support people to grow their business quickly and increase the value of it quickly, what would I do?’

It didn’t take me long to figure it out. I did sixty seven interviews with past clients. It didn’t take me too long to figure out that a cohesive, aligned, streamlined strategy such as what I’ve been talking about is the first step. But once people have that, they were saying, “Okay, so now I know what I need to do but, Tom, do you know what the problem is? I’m not doing what I know I need to do. So can you give me a structure that keeps me focused and honest and accountable so that I push through the barriers of pinball leadership and actually execute the strategy.” Because, you know, it’s like a rugby team or a soccer team—it’s no good having a great strategy if the players don’t execute it.

West: Yes.

Tom: So how do we the 80-20 Circle? Well, first of all, I work with every single client one on one until their plan is set up. I share them what they need to do, I share them how they need to do it, I listen to them intently and we create one market-kicking butt strategy. And once that plan is finished—it’s a very simple plan, by the way, West. It’s not complicated stuff. It’s just needs to be prioritized and documented—once that plan is completed, they’ve got their better strategy. And normally, they’re pretty excited about that.

West: Absolutely.

Tom: The next thing is better execution. How I work is that most of my work is done virtually. So it’s on the phone, over the internet, webinars, which—for people who don’t know—is an online seminar, teleconferences, and video conferencing. Every single month, a client of mine, the first week of the month they turn up at this circle meeting with their peers and colleagues and they report on their progress. And there’s something extraordinarily that happen productivity-wise. Like next Wednesday, you have to report to your fellow circle members and tell them what you did about what you said you were going to do.

West: Yes. Very powerful.

Tom: Absolutely. Its like if you’re going for a run in the morning and you’re going to go on your own—well maybe it happens or maybe it doesn’t—but if you’ve got a friend waiting for you at the end of the street at 6am, you’re going to get out of bed.

West: Exactly. Or if you have a personal trainer who’s going to keep you accountable.

Tom: Yeah. And we have a special system called the ‘yellow card system’ which really increases the intensity of accountability. If someone doesn’t make progress on their plan and at the end of the day they tell us what they’re going to do, then they get yellow carded and they go away for two months and get themselves up to date. And during that two months, they still pay their fees which we donate to charity.

West: So it’s almost like taking it out of soccer where they get a yellow card. It’s almost like warning.

Tom: Yeah, that’s what I call it—a yellow card. For two months, go away, get your projects up to date and then come back. In the meantime, you still pay your fees but they will go to charity. I will not collect your fees. Well, I collect them but I’ll pass them straight on and send you a receipt.

So it’s that accountability thing. You know, if you just show up and say, “I didn’t do anything again,” well, sorry, you’re yellow-carded. So that’s week-1 of the circle meeting.

Week-2 is I have a business growth webinar. So we empower people through education. How do you hire good staff, how do you keep them? How do you create a competitive advantage through segmenting your marketplace or repackaging your product, etc? So week-1 is a circle meeting: accountability; week-2 is the webinar: empowerment.

Week 3, I do a laser-focused coaching course one-one-one with my clients. And it’s real laser-focused. They come with a question, a problem, a situation and we drill down into individual issues.

And Week 4, I do an interview like this with someone.

So that’s the circle. That’s the cycle. That’s how it works.

West: Wow. That’s impressive. We’ve got listeners on the call who want to find out more. What do they need to do, Tom? Do they just need to go to your website or do you have an 80-20 website or…?

Tom: No, I don’t because everyone else has one.

West: Okay.

Tom: So if everyone’s going west, I’ll go east, thank you. Pardon the pun, West. But what I do is I invite people who are interested once a month to attend a preview online. If anyone is interested, all they need to do is email me at [e-mail].

West: That’s your personal email, Tom.

Tom: That’s my personal email address. Well, I have a personal relationship with every client. I don’t want to lead this thing to the point where I lose touch with the client.

So all they have to do is email and say webinar or interested at something like that. And as a little bit of a gift to your listeners, West, I’m really happy to offer them an ebook which is Your Extraordinary Life. It’s filled with how to figure out their life purpose and how to set and achieve goals, like there are EPG examples. It’s a 103,000 words. It took me two years to write. It’s been published in the USA, Australia, distributed in New Zealand. And I’m giving them that for free, if they’re genuinely interested in knowing more about 80-20 Circle.

West: Yes, wow. Thank you for that. They’ll appreciate that. So that’s awesome, Tom. I love your strategies and I love your philosophy, what you stand for. I think you’re an advocate for personal, you know, people growing as people rather than just business. That’s very refreshing to see in the corporate arena, so to speak.

Is there anything else you’d like to add, Tom, before we wrap up?

Tom: If I could just say one thing, West, it would be back yourself, believe in yourself. Sure, have doubts but then act as if you’re confident anyway. I just see so many people underselling themselves. And again, I love what you do.

You know, when you catch yourself doubting, when you catch yourself like, ‘Oh god, I’m a screwball’ or ‘I messed up again,’ or ‘didn’t do it again,’ hook into those affirmations, hook into your visualizations and get your mind back on track because nothing happens until you think it, until you want to make sure you’re thinking the things that you want to happen.

West: Well, on behalf of all our listeners and members, Tom, I want to thank you for an absolutely mind-shifting call. It was awesome. I realized how valuable your time is so I’m sure everyone here would really appreciate it. So thanks again, Tom, and we appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Tom: Thank you, West.