He is so enthusiastic, but man, I could have used with a smaller book.
1. E-Myth Entrepreneur
a. A world class company looks, feels, performs better than any other
i. It is commitment to integration of passion, purpose, and practice
1. Understand that your passion is alive and well, even if you don’t feel it right now. It just needs stimulation.
2. Three times a day, at any time, when you’re feeling consumed by something you’re doing, stop. Just look around, experience life, and get back to it once you’ve sufficiently stopped.
3. Work, at the stop exercise, at seeing yourself dispassionately, objectively, and make steps to change it if you’re losing passion.
2. The Seven Essential Disciplines
a. Enterprise Leader Discipline
i. Concentration: I am a leader. I am called upon to do the work of leadership. How does one focus their attention?
ii. Discrimination: where to focus attention
1. Remembering:
a. The vision
b. The business model
c. The consciousness of the enterprise
d. The end game
iii. Practice for leadership operation
1. Write down everything you do each day, and then assign
a. E for Entrepreneur
b. M for management
c. T for technician
2. This will help you delegate
iv. Organization: set aside times of day dedicated to the three disciplines above – this shows you the difference between strategic and tactical work
v. Innovation:
1. Select what you want to improve
2. Determine the process for doing what you have selected
3. Quantify how your leadership’s effectiveness is
4. Rely on quantification to tell you where you can and need to improve leadership
5. Test it
6. Quantify results of Test
7. If positive, orchestrate use of new process. If negative, return to step four.
vi. Communication: do a critical assessment of your innovations
1. Inspiration: result of seeing clearly
2. Education
3. Application
4. Implementation
5. Continual improvement
vii. Innovation, Quantification, Orchestration
1. Creating a business plan
a. Start with what’s important to you
b. Approach planning as more of an art than a science
c. Create a framework that accommodates change
d. Treat the plan as a living, growing document
2. Get started
a. Be clear about what you want to achieve
b. Choose a time horizon for the plan
c. Get organized
3. Benchmarks for the business plan
a. Create a mental picture of the impact of the plan
b. Outline the business plan
c. Prepare a binder
d. Gather materials you need
e. ID what you need to produce
f. Conduct a planning meeting
g. Prepare, review, and revise your materials
h. Produce final business plan
i. Create mechanism for building change into the plan
4. How to quantify your business
a. Start with highest priorities
b. Start small and build
c. Garbage in, garbage out
d. Minimize the work of measurement and tracking
e. Focus on the meaningful
5. Management reports
a. ID business activities and results to be quantified
b. Establish the management report structure
c. Create a system for collecting data
d. Design the management report
e. Create systems for producing the management report
f. Continually refine and upgrade the report
b. Discipline of the Marketing Leader
i. Identify the picture other marketing leaders have created in other companies that understand what a marketing leader does
ii. Determine what a “franchise” means to a marketing leader
iii. Convert your idea into a visual reality. Story board it.
iv. Identify target markets
1. Use demographics
a. People:
i. Age
ii. Employment status
iii. Location
iv. Gender
v. Educatoin
vi. Race
vii. Occupation
viii. Marital status
ix. Ethnicity
x. Income
xi. Family status
xii. Physical Characteristics
b. Business
i. Industry
ii. Product line
iii. Size of business
iv. Type of business
v. Location
vi. Geographic scope of business
vii. Financial status of business
2. Determine a demographic model
a. Set up a product-market grid for your business (both consumer and product in consideration)
b. List on one axis the products or services as perceived by customers
c. List on the other axis the types of customers you serve
d. Fill in information on the grid
e. Designate primary target market and flanker markets
f. Create the Central Demographic Model for your primary targets
v. Customer Perceptions and Behavior: Understanding How Your Customers Think and Make Decisions
1. Watch out for “fatal assumptions” – thinking you understand your customer
2. Perception is reality – whatever you create in perception land is true
3. A Tale of Two Minds – impulse vs reason
4. Unconscious associations, Attraction and Avoidance – the essence of purchase decisions
5. Creating a psychographic model
a. Self perceptions
b. External perceptions
c. Drive
d. Emotional Associations
e. Gratification mode
f. Purchase preference
6. The purchase chain comes together
a. Awareness
b. Purchase motivation
c. Product Acceptance
d. Brand Preference
e. Purchase Transaction
f. Customer Satisfaction
7. Impulse is your best friend
vi. Positioning and Differentiating Your Business: Setting Your Business Apart from the Rest
1. The Positioning Development Process
a. Determine general classification of your products or services
i. Is your general classification a product, commodity, or brand?
b. Determine relative standing in the market
i. Prestige ID, preemptive persuasion, or brand or product imagery
c. Determine the dominant gratification mode and purchase preference of your target market
d. Develop other key psychographic characteristics of your target market
e. Redefine your product
i. Functionality
ii. Sensory impact
iii. Unconscious associations
iv. Conscious-mind conclusions
v. Price/value
vi. Access/convenience
f. Write your positioning strategy – everything you do in marketing springs from this
g. Develop your Unique Selling Proposition (slogan, tagline)
i. Short
ii. Vague to leave room for the imagination
iii. Convey a positive feeling
iv. Give it impact, punch, and emotion
v. Avoid defining product/service as a commodity
vi. Focus on the promise of emotional gratification, the result or benefit, not the technical work or features offered
vii. Make it consistent with relative standing, gratification mode, and purchase preference components
h. Develop your Positioning Statement
i. Product
ii. Problem
iii. Result
c. The Discipline of the Financial Leader
i. Decide what the meaning of money is to you.
ii. Create a list of indicators of your company’s financial health
iii. After a month with the list, organize it into categories like operations and marketing
iv. CEOs Financial Strategy for the Business: Maximize Company Value
1. Optimize the owner’s investment
2. Optimize revenues
3. Optimize borrowing
4. Maximize value added from business systems
5. Minimize expenses
6. Minimize taxes
7. Minimize vulnerability to “wild cards.”
v. Pricing
1. Pricing isn’t a science – it’s a craft.
2. Make a bottom-line pricing grid:
a. Price per unit
b. Number sold
c. Variable cost per unit
d. Fixed expenses per unit
vi. Decrease your “stuff” to increase cash
d. The Discipline of the Management Leader
i. Ask, “What is it about your business that, if given the opportunity to create a clean slate, you’d still want to retain? Are there any sacred cows in your answer, aspects of the current business you’re unwilling t give up, whether they support your World Class Company or not? And, having considered these questions, is it an Old Co or a New Co? Are you simply improving as an old company or creating a new company?”
ii. Make a list of responsibilities at the business. Pick the top five each person needs to master to be successful.
iii. Create a hierarchy for the organization of effort, a list, in order of importance, of the five tasks that must be done by the person fulfilling each role, every day, day in and day out. Tasks managers do.
iv. Create a High-Performance Environment
1. Integrate the vision
2. Build the structure
3. Train and provide the tools
4. Quantify and Evaluate
v. Operations Manuals
1. Make a list of all the positions in the company
2. Assemble the shells for every manual you’ll need
3. Identify and assemble existing company-wide information
a. Company objective, story, org chart, history
b. Products and services descriptions, positioning statement and unique selling proposition, brochures, basic info about competition and how company compares with them
c. Policies
4. Identify and Assemble Existing Position-Specific information
a. Position contract, generic copies of employment contracts and compensation agreements, docs describing logic behind it
b. Systems, with logical explanation
5. Establish the system and accountabilities for maintaining new masters and distributing updates
6. Create an implementation plan
7. Introduce operations manuals to your employees
e. The Discipline of the Client Fulfillment Leader
i. Make an exhaustive list of the different ways you capture the information you want and need from your new customers
1. You cannot ask your customer to do something which will make him or her uncomfortable
2. It should be easy
3. You can only do something that will add positively to your customer’s appreciation of your business
ii. Ask yourself what happens once the customer comes into the store. What is perfect action? What makes the transaction meaningful, captivating, exceptional in every sense of the word?
iii. Knowing that, what do you want to know about your client to be able to fulfill this?
iv. Now that you know, what do you do about it?
v. Establishing a baseline for production, delivery, and customer service processes
1. Identify the process
2. Describe the process inputs
3. Describe the process outputs
4. Estimate process costs
5. Select key indicators
6. Establish and document your baseline
7. Track key indicators and review periodically
vi. Innovating the Systems
1. Select a system for innovation
2. Observe the system on-site
3. Diagram the system
4. Determine the system baseline by looking at its input/output/cost
5. Analyze the system’s work flow
6. Apply the Innovation Checklist
7. Diagram the innovated system
8. Estimate the performance of the innovated system and compare with the current system baseline
9. Install and test the innovated system
vii. The Four Faces of Workflow
1. Task flow – the work activities of the system
a. Sequence
b. Dependencies
c. Balance
2. Materiel Flow – equipment used in the system including information
3. Management information flow – accounting data, operating instructions, indicators
4. Layout and traffic flow – physical location of work and the traffic around it
f. The Discipline of the Lead Conversion Leader
i. List 10 specific actions you could take that would accomplish this objective.
ii. Now make a list of 10 methods to convert a new customer into a repeat client and include how you would capture that information.
iii. List 10 things you’d do to convert a new client into a maturing client.
iv. List 10 thing you’d do to ensure that you never forget, diminish the value of, or take your mature client for granted. Make this client say “Your company didn’t have to do that.” What is that?
v. The Universal Five-Step Lead Conversion Process
1. Engage with your prospective customer
2. Repeat the emotional message of your “promise.”
3. Determine the customer’s needs
4. Provide a solution
5. Offer the product
vi. Designing your lead conversion process
1. Engage with your prospective customer
2. Repeat the emotional message of your “promise”
3. Determine your customer’s needs
4. Provide a solution
5. Offer the product
vii. Target Marketing to Your Customer Base
1. Designate Customers as a Target Market
2. Gather info about them
3. Create value added programs
4. Establish customer communications
a. Maintain credibility
b. Be nonintrusive
5. Quantify and monitor consumers
viii. Three Categories of Customer Communication and Why They’re Important to You
1. Admin Communications – forms, bills, statements – taken seriously
2. Service communications – customer benefit notices – taken seriously
3. Sales communicants – generally “junk to the receiver
g. The Discipline of the Lead Generation Leader
i. Trust that as you lead, as you pursue endless opportunities, you will discover an entirely new life.
ii. Have your employees do the same.
iii. Call one day, generate ideas
1. Medium – type of lead (mail, internet, etc)
2. Content – what is the offer you’re making
3. Process – Method in which you implement the activity
iv. Benchmarks for Selecting and Implementing Your Lead Generation Channels
1. Identify a range of appropriate channels that fit your target market
2. Evaluate each channel in terms of cost and coverage
3. Evaluate each channel in terms of relevant subject criteria
a. The channel’s fit with your company image and objective
b. Your company’s ability to use the channel effectively
c. Other subjective qualities of the channel
i. Impact
ii. Credibility
iii. Intimacy
d. List channels in order of preference based on evaluation
e. Determine budget
f. Prepare your lead generation channels implementation plan
v. Lead Generation Implementation Plan
1. Statement of Overall Positioning Strategy
2. Monthly lead generation plans
3. Monthly controlling calendars
vi. Reaching Target Markets with Impact
1. The 10-Step Process
a. Specify desired results
b. Determine context constraints and opportunities
c. Create the instant of connection
d. Define the logic of the piece
i. Self evident?
ii. Reasoning?
iii. Preexisting knowledge, beliefs, or attitudes
iv. Evidence
v. Testimony
e. Determine essential information and establish the format
i. The communication vehicle
ii. Your product
iii. Your target market
f. Establish qualifiers
g. Include brand identification
i. Print and display pieces
ii. Broadcast pieces
h. Present the action steps
i. Integrate the elements
j. Produce the piece