Lesson Sixty-One: The Pattern of Winners

There has been a crowd around here recently. It seems to me like a lot of new people have come into my life. I find these things come in waves. A big one just hit.

I like meeting new business people. I am fascinated by the stories of what they do, how they got where they are, and where it is they are going.

Every one of my clients are small business people. And I've met a lot of them, from single consultants to presidents of high-growth, multi-million dollar businesses.

I've noticed a pattern.There are basically two kinds of business people, and the size of a business is not an indicator -- Those that are lazy and those that are not.

A few years ago I was courting a potential client. This company provided environmental consulting services, had twenty or so employees and reasonable sales. They were owned by a much larger engineering firm who's mandate was for them to grow. The president and I met several times. He always surrounded himself with lots of his staff, and we went over the same ground again and again.How much it was going to cost, the strategy, and the marketing process we would use.

Finally we agreed on the work to be done. But two days later he emailed me to say the job was cancelled because the owners didn't want to spend the money. It was a cop out, and a cowardly one since he didn't even do it over the telephone.

In retrospect, I realized he never intended to buy anything. He went through the motions, initially hoping I would provide an easy answer. And when it became apparent to him that no easy answer was available, he retreated, seeking one elsewhere.

Instead of spending time developing his own vision of where his company needed to go and the steps it would take to get there, he shopped around for someone else to provide it.

(They went out of business shortly thereafter, chiefly, I believe, due to the laziness of their leader.)

Conversely, I had to tell a great client and friend that his customers were unhappy, but that it probably wasn't his fault. Even though he had built a respectable business doing a few million in sales a year, the nature of the business model was such that there would always be conflict between his clients interests and his own. To fix it he would have to radically alter his business model.

A week later, he called me down to his office and outlined a revised business model that took half an hour to explain, but brilliantly solved the problems I had identified.

He had laid awake each night rolling the problem over and over in his head until he found the solution.When it came to him at 4 am, he jumped out of bed and sketched the whole thing out.

Your success, or lack of it, has much less to do with your intelligence, education, ability, connections, or experience than it does with the effort you put into whatever it is you do.

Winners work harder. And whether you win or not is completely up to you.