Brian Tracy: Success Principles for Martial Arts Excellence

Brian is also the best-selling author of more than 30 books. In fact, he cranks out approximately four books per year these days. In addition, he has written and produced more than 300 audio and video learning programs, including the worldwide best-selling Psychology of Achievement, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. As a world-renowned speaker, Brian has spoken in 24 countries, and he addresses more than 250,000 attendees per year, sometimes in front of audiences as large as 20,000 people. His exciting talks and seminars on leadership, selling, self-esteem, goals, strategy, creativity, and success psychology have been proven to bring out the immediate changes and long-term results in people all over the world. Finally, I wanted to mention that Brian is an avid reader in business, psychology, philosophy, economics, and history. He’s worked in over 80 countries on six continents and speaks four languages.

Presently at age 60, he resides in Solana Beach, California with his wife and four children. So NAPMA members, we are extremely fortunate, and I am so very honored to have as our guest today the most listened-to author on the subject of personal and business success in the world today. Without further ado, let’s dive right into our interview, Success Principles for the Martial Arts Executive Part 1 with the one and only Brian Tracy. Brian Tracy, welcome to the Sounds of Success. Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. For starters, Brian, you’re a fellow black belt, and I’ll bet that a lot of our listeners didn’t know that. Please tell us a little bit about your background in the martial arts. Well, I started off, somebody took me to a karate school when I was about 20 years old, and I fell in love with it.

So for the next 10 years, I just ate, slept, and breathed karate. I was always going to classes six days a week. Finally, they gave me a school to teach, and I took a school that was completely demoralized, was a branch of another school, completely demoralized, and used what I had learned and turned it around and turned out several people who became champions and went on to accomplish great things. So my love for karate lasted 10 years, and I just lived it and breathed it. And I traveled all over the world, so I took karate in London, I took it in Berlin, I took it in Johannesburg, I took it in Tokyo, I took it in Bangkok, I took it in Montreal and Vancouver and Seattle. So wherever I traveled, I would stop and find a karate school and register, even Mexico City, for over a year.

Well, I had different instructors in every single place. I trained under six world champions in the course of my career, especially during the 60s and 70s, Nakayama and Kanazawa and Ochi and some of the others. So it was a great experience. My first major instructor was Stan Schmidt of Johannesburg, and he’s still one of my best friends. Interesting. And what style did you do?

[04:22] A Shotokan. That’s what I thought. And I also took, when I was living in Bangkok, they didn’t have a Shotokan school, so I took Taekwondo for 18 months. But my first love for Shotokan, the first school you go to tends to be your first love. What I found in this business is that people fall in love with their first style, and then they see it as being better than any other style. But whichever one you started with turns out to be the one that you think is the best. Brian, I heard that as a martial artist slash athlete, you trained so hard that you developed some challenges with your hips. That’s actually kind of common in our field. Tell us about what happened and what you might have done differently with your training if you could go back and do it all over again.

Well, I think there’s just two things. One is I’ve always been a vigorous athlete, so I pulled a couple of muscles. I pulled what is called an adductor muscle inside the hip, and this is the muscle that gives you the maximum flexibility for roundhouse kicks and sidekicks. If you don’t have that muscle there, it’s almost like a rubber band. You just don’t have that capacity. And then over time, what happened is I developed hip problems, which probably may have come from martial arts, may have come from the exertion of doing the roundhouse and back kicks and sidekicks and so on. So what I would recommend is that people stretch. I believe that there is really no better exercise that you can do at any age than to really warm up and stretch out thoroughly, which is why most good classes start off with 45 to 60 minutes of warm up and stretching exercises before people do things where their muscles can be hurt.

Let’s shift gears for a moment and talk about Brian Tracy, the author. You’ve written more than 30 books now. In fact, your new book, Getting Rich Your Own Way, is about to be released. Give us a synopsis. What’s that all about?

Well, I started off, as I said, I started off so far behind, I thought I was first. I didn’t graduate from high school. I worked at laboring jobs for several years. I backed into sales. I struggled and struggled. And finally, I began asking other people, why are some people more successful than others?

And I began reading books on the subject. And I began becoming just as aggressive as I was in karate. I was aggressive to learn the secrets of success. And what I found is that everybody starts off with nothing. Most people struggle financially all their lives, but some people become financially independent. So I studied them. It’s amazing, you know, the rule is follow the leaders, not the followers. Fly with the eagles and don’t quack with the ducks. So I began to study the eagles. And I find that everybody starts with nothing. Everybody learns certain things and doesn’t move over again until they master them. Very much like a kata. The first time you do it, you look embarrassing. The third time, the 500th time, you’ve got speed, flexibility and so on. So what I learned is that making money is a talent.

It’s a skill. It’s the same as driving a car or operating a cell phone. It’s like doing a kata. Almost anybody can do it. And anybody can do it at a satisfactory enough level. You don’t have to be a champion to be financially independent financially. So what I put in my book, Getting Rich Your Own Way, is all the different ways that people start from nothing and become financially independent, if not millionaires. And it’s probably the best book on personal and financial success ever written. It shows how people can start with nothing and invest their way to success. One of the best-selling books out now is a book by a friend of mine called David Bach. It’s called The Automatic Millionaire. It’s a best-selling book, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s accoladed everywhere, New York Times and so on.

You know what it says? It just saves 10% of your income throughout your life. That’s what it says. It’s got about 250 pages. But the bottom line is, just save automatically. Automatically put aside part of your income. Because if you don’t, the money will go. So that’s one chapter. It shows you how you can basically set yourself up on an automatic system that with time and compound interest will make you rich. It shows you how to become a money magnet, how to change the way you think. It shows you how to start with nothing in your own business. It shows you how to invest intelligently. It shows you how to socialize. So especially the big focus on entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, business development, all of which are skills that our listeners can learn. And when do you think this book will be on your website ready for purchase?

[08:32] It is on its way to the bookstores now. The official release date, I think, the 10th of September. It will be ready on my website, probably the 13th of September. I think that this is an important book for martial arts school owners because they’re trying to get rich in their own way doing what they want to do and that’s teaching the martial arts. Well, the dumbest thing in the world is for you to work year after year, decade after decade, and be out of money. Especially since people who make a lot of money are no smarter and no better than you. It’s just like saying, well, gee, that person is really good at driving a car. I sometimes ask my audience, can anybody here drive a car?

Everybody says yes. I say, you know, 90% of the population in the world can’t drive a car. Number one is they’re too poor. Number two is there aren’t any cars. Driving a car is a skill and it requires the coordination of several senses. It requires intelligence. It requires timing. It requires distance. It requires vision, view, insight, back sight, balance, and a whole lot of things. If you can drive a car, you can learn any business skill. If you can drive a car, you could become financially independent. You just need to learn how. Understood. I’ve always believed that in business, it’s absolutely critical to have a crystal clear vision of where you want to go. Could you please elaborate on the importance of creating a strong vision for our audience today?

Well, this is one of the most important things I’ve ever learned, is that successful people tend to be future oriented. Unsuccessful people tend to be present-oriented or past-oriented. You can tell if a person is going to be successful by listening to their predominant conversation. People who are going to be really successful think and talk about the future most of the time. They talk about where they’re going, not where they’ve been. They talk about what they want to accomplish rather than what’s happened. They talk about their goals rather than who’s to blame for their problems. So you find that unhappy people are always looking backwards, but successful people have a future vision. Now what is your vision?

Well, what we do is we have what is called a magic wand technique. Imagine that you could take a magic wand and you could wave it over your life five years from now, and your life would be perfect in every respect. If your life was perfect in every respect five years from now, what would it look like?

What would you be doing? How much would you be earning?

How much would you have in the bank? What kind of home would you live in?

What kind of lifestyle would you have for yourself and your family?

What kind of car would you drive? In other words, just fantasize. For this period of time, and I do this with Fortune 500 Corporation, I did this whole exercise with a $170 billion company a few years ago with their top people. And I said, let’s go through this. Let’s just pretend that our future is perfect five years from now. How would it be described?

And we just write down descriptions. How much money we’re making, the stock price, what we’re doing, and so on. Now I say, OK, now we have a clear vision of where we want to be in five years. Now let’s come back to the present and say, what would be the first step that we would take today to begin moving toward making that vision a reality?

And we say, that would be the second step, and what would be the third step?

And it’s absolutely amazing how your life changes when you imagine that you have no limitations. You create your ideal future vision, and then you say, all right, what would be the first step?

And then you take that first step. Well, for a martial arts school owner, that can mean how big of a school do I want?

How many staff members do I want working for me?

How much money do I want to be earning?

What kind of car do I want to drive?

And so on and so forth. Very, very important stuff here, folks. Yes, now here’s an important thing. Remember, there are always several ways to get there. So you start off with, you say, start with the end in mind. Say, how much do I want to be earning per month, per year?

[12:01] Now there’s several different ways you can do that. One person’s like, I’ll increase the size of my school. Someone says, I’ll open other schools. I have a good friend who developed a marketing system for school. So he has one system that he uses as a test. And then what he does is he sells his marketing system to other schools. So there’s all kinds of different ways, or you can upsell and sell more equipment, become a distributor of a particular type of equipment. There’s all kinds of ways you can achieve the financial goal once you have it. Let’s focus on the basics for just a moment. You’ve developed some of the most powerful and extensive goal setting programs of all time. And I know that many of our listeners might not be setting goals as often as they should.

Please share with us some insights into how to set goals and why proper goal setting is so important. Well, it is exactly the same as the story of the hunter who goes up to the edge of the woods and closes his eyes and shoots his rifle, bang, into the woods and says, boy, I sure hope something good runs into that. Well, that’s how most people live their lives. They’re walking around with their eyes closed, shooting themselves off at life and hoping that something good runs into it. When you set goals, what you do is you open your eyes and you adjust your sights and you set your crosshairs on very specific targets. Does it mean you’ll hit them every time?

No. But your chances of hitting them go up by 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times than if you have your eyes closed. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to give our listeners a powerful exercise. I’ve shared this with others all over the world. They come back and they say it’s miraculous. It’s transformed their lives. And so I’ll tell you very simply what it was and then I’ll give you an example. Well, what you do is you take a list after you’ve listened to this. You take a piece of paper and you write down 10 goals that you’d like to accomplish in the next 12 months. Income goals, health goals, car, new car, travel, whatever it happens to be. Then you go over the list and you say, if I could only accomplish one goal on this list, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on my life?

If I could just accomplish one goal and go over the list and say, all right, which one would it be?

Now imagine you can have all of them sooner or later, but you could have one within 24 hours. Which one would have the greatest impact on your life?

And it always jumps out at you off the page. I mean, you know what it is. So you put a circle around that and then you take that goal and you put it at the top of a clean sheet of paper. And then you set a deadline on that goal. You write it down and you set a deadline. I’m going to achieve this goal by December 31st, 2004. Now if it turns out that you don’t achieve it by December 31st, 2004, then you set a new deadline. But sometimes you’ll achieve it earlier, sometimes you’ll achieve it later. But you’ve got to have a date to aim it. Your subconscious mind needs a date to work on. So just do this. The next thing you do is make a list of everything that you could possibly think of that you could do to achieve that goal.

Henry Ford once said that the biggest goals can be accomplished if you simply break them down into enough small steps. So what you do is you write down every single step that you’d have to take. You’d have to read this and do this and talk to this person and go here and accomplish that and so on. Just write it down, write it down. And the more steps you write down, the more you become aware that this is an achievable goal. I can do this. All I have to do is do it one step at a time. There’s a story of a traveler who was traveling in ancient Greece. And he met an old man. And he said to the old man, he said, tell me, sir, he said, how do I get to Mount Olympus?

And the old man who turned out to be Socrates gave him a Socratic answer. And he said, well, if you really want to get to Mount Olympus, he said, just make sure that every step you take is in that direction. And it’s a very important thing. Once you’ve decided on your major goal, just make sure that every step is in that direction. So now you have a list. Then you organize the list in terms of priority and in terms of sequence. What has to be done before something else has to be done?

What is more important? What is less important? And you make a plan. Now you have a goal and a plan. The next step, number six, is take action on your plan. And step number seven is do something every day to move you toward that goal. Make every single day a step towards your goal. And what I can promise you is that by selecting this one goal, you’ll have your major definite purpose. By making a plan, you’ll dramatically increase your confidence that it’s possible. And by doing something every day, you will eventually achieve the goal, and it will transform your life. Really?

[16:24] Let me tell you a quick story. I was on a panel with a woman who runs a health studio, actually more than one. She was asked something by the audience, what was the turning point in your life?

And she said, well, it was going to Brian’s seminar, which I hadn’t known, by the way. She said, and he told me to write down 10 goals, pick one, make a plan, and work on it every day. She said, when I did that, she said I was divorced. She said, I had two children, and I was broke. She said, as a result of that, I decided to get fit. So I started taking aerobics. I liked aerobics so much, they said, why don’t you become an instructor?

So I became an instructor. Then the people said, you know, you’re such a good instructor, why don’t you start your own school, and we’ll back you. And so they backed me, we started school, and it was so successful. And I was so good at teaching aerobics instructors. I said, now I have 12 studios. I’m worth $3 million. She said, I have 150 staff. She said, I’m financially independent for life. She said, it took less than eight years, once I had the goal. Bryan, you’re considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject of time management. This is a critical topic for anyone who owns a martial arts school. What are some proven time management strategies that you’d recommend for our listeners?

Well, first of all, remember, the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your time management. And the number one reason that people fail is because they major in minors. They do things that are of low value, and they keep doing things of low value, and it soon becomes a habit to do things of low value. Guta, the philosopher, once said, the things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least. So here’s how you manage your time. It’s a very simple technique. Again, it’ll double and triple your output the first day you use it. First of all, always start with a list. The best time to make a list is the day before. Make out a list of everything you have to do the coming day. Write it down, write it down.

And if you think of something new, write it on the list. If somebody comes in and says, well, you do this, a phone rings, will you do this before you do it, write it down. So this is a very important discipline. The good news is that martial arts instructors are very good at discipline. I think it’s the most important of all qualities for success. So write it down. Make the list, and then go over the list and use what is called the ABCDE method of setting priorities. A is a must do. This is something that’s very important. It has serious consequences if you do it or not. So you go down your list, and you write A next to every task that’s really important. The second task is a B. And this is something that you should do.

It has mild consequences. If you do it or don’t do it, somebody may be unhappy. But it’s not as important as an A. And the rule is you never do a B task when you have an A task left undone. The third thing you do is a C. A C task is something that would be nice to do. Call a friend, read the paper, go for lunch. But it has no effect on your life. And so therefore, you put Cs next to the things that aren’t that important. Then in that last two are D and E. D is something that you delegate. And the rule is you delegate everything you possibly can that somebody else can do. Just because you can do it or do it well, if someone else can do it, delegate it to them.

And finally, E is eliminate. Is the only way that you can get your time under control is by stopping doing certain things. You’ve got to learn to stop doing things that are no longer as relevant as your A tasks and your B tasks. Now, if you have more than one A task, then what you do is you number them by A1, A2, A3. And then you start on A1. And you work on A1 until it’s done. And if you get thrown off track, you come back to it and keep coming back to A1, keep focusing on A1. If you finish your A1 task, you get a burst of endorphins. You feel happy. You feel elated, you have more energy, you feel in control of your life, you feel powerful. All successful people work on their A1 tasks and drive them through to completion.

[20:07] All failures don’t. It’s real black and white. One thing that I’ve been doing, Brian, is blocking out time for emails and then a block for phone calls and a block for some meetings in person. Do you recommend that approach?

Well, that’s a very good idea because you get into what is called the learning curve. You take a group of tasks that are all similar and do them all at once and you will get more and more efficient. In fact, if it takes you 10 minutes to do one phone call, it’ll take you 8 minutes to the second one, 7 or 6 minutes to do the third one and eventually you get to the point where you’re making phone calls that are even more effective in 2 minutes rather than in 10 minutes because you get better and better at it. It’s called the learning curve and it’s a very important part of time management. Here’s the flip side is you do a little phone call, do a little email, do a little work with your staff, do a little marketing and so on and you never get efficient in anything.

As you know, Brian, the martial arts is very much a personality driven business, so the success or failure of a school often depends upon the personality of the instructor. Please talk to us about the importance of having charisma and strong communication skills in the martial arts field or in any field for that matter. Well here’s an interesting discovery. You’re absolutely right. In professional speaking, which is very much like teaching or training, in professional speaking they say the most important thing is that people like you. If they like you can’t make a mistake. If they don’t like you can’t do anything right. So likability is number one. But where does likability come from?

Well likability actually comes from caring about the other person and so the very best instructors are people who genuinely care about other people. I told you I took over a school and the school was completely demoralized. I had about 30 students, they were thinking of closing it down, that had an ex sergeant teaching the school who was, I think it was a high level brown belt. But when I went in to take over the school, they pulled him out, sort of an emergency, went over to take over the school, I found that he always taught with negatives. In other words, he said don’t do this, don’t do that, stop doing this. And then he would stand up in the front of the room and he’d say now do this and he’d demonstrate it and then he’d say alright now do this and then he’d criticize.

Now don’t do that, I told you not to do that. No, don’t put your foot there. Don’t punch like that. Don’t hold your hand this way. Well what I found very interesting is you can’t teach with negatives. You can only teach with positives. And because the human mind cannot conceptualize, you can’t think of a negative. If you say to a person don’t trip, a person cannot visualize not tripping. But if you say pick up your feet, a person can visualize picking up their feet. So what I had learned from my instructor, I had learned to teach in terms of positives, now do this, now do more of this. Now hold your hand this way, now move your foot this way. And instead of saying here’s how to do it, say alright now everybody follow me, now do it this way.

So I’d have everybody do it rather than demonstrate it. And within two weeks that whole school was transformed. Everybody was thinking in terms of positive performance. They could visualize themselves doing it well. And that is what gives you charisma, personality, causes people to like you, bring their friends, come back again and so on. So focus on the other person and focus on positive things. Another thing that you do is always compliment, always compliment. Even if a person does a cat or a move poorly, you can always find something that they did well. You say you know you’re moving your feet really well. Now what you have to do now is coordinate your hands with your feet. Okay so next time do it this way. Always when you teach say next time you do this, try it this way.

Next time try it that way. Never ever criticize and always be positive. And those are the things that cause people to like you because they feel happy, they feel more empowered, they feel that they’re making progress, they feel that they’re growing. So you don’t have to be a Dale Carnegie graduate, you don’t have to be loving and hugging and gushing and puking and so on. You just have to be yourself and you just have to be positive in everything you say to your people. And if you can get the people to like you, that’s going to have a very positive effect on your attention of students as well. Absolutely and be courteous. Always be respectful of people. Thank people for coming and thank you for being here today. Thanks for being on time. Always be positive.

[24:21] Always be building people up. You know everybody has need to have their self-esteem built up and their self-image reinforced. So always be encouraging people and it’s absolutely amazing. As I say you get you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. And by simply focusing on that you don’t have to worry about changing your personality or trying to be Mr. Nice Guy or anything else. Just be positive. Just be caring. Just be respectful. Just constantly encourage people. One of your landmark programs, Brian, which I’ve listened to many times, is the psychology of selling. In our line of work, selling is primarily enrolling and renewing students into the school. What advice can you give martial arts school owners that would help them develop the right mindset for selling and feel more comfortable with the sales process?

Well this is an interesting subject. I’m just working on a new book on selling. And what we have found is that if you’re not good at selling, you feel uncomfortable or clumsy with it. You feel awkward. It’s like doing a cat for the first time. Is you feel you know uncoordinated no matter how good you are in other areas or with other catters. So many people say well I’m not very good at selling. So what they do is they avoid it or they do it poorly or they feel clumsy about it. What I found and this term changed my life when I was a young man is that selling is a skill like driving a car or riding a bicycle and that you can learn the skill of selling. And as you probably know from my work is the most successful people in martial arts are good sales people because our business is entrepreneurial.

Our business requires that we find people, that we talk to them, that we convince them it’s a good idea and that we close the sale. And the more confidence you have in your ability to ask people to make a decision to sign up, the better you do it and the more relaxed you are and more effective you are. So here’s the best advice I can give you is to learn how to sell. I’ve had countless people who’ve been just on the verge of quitting their business, frustrated, unable to sell and they have received or given bought or been given my audio program, the Psychology of Selling, which is the best selling audio program on sales in the history of the world. Brilliant. 16 languages, 24 countries, million graduates and more millionaires as a result of that program, more rags to riches stories than any other sales influence in history.

Not to brag but the statistics that keep coming back are incredible. Sure. Is get my program, I guarantee it for a year. So you can get the program off my website, Psychology of Selling and take it, look at it, listen to it, make it a requirement. Hundreds of companies, thousands of companies make it a minimum requirement for new sales people to listen to that program. Yet they have not listened to that program within the first week they fire them. And I was talking to a young guy just two days ago and he said, you know, he started off a poor family, struggling and he got Psychology of Selling and he became the top salesman in his company, was hired by a bigger company, hired by a bigger company, started his own company. He now has 300 sales people working for him.

It’s not an MLM company. It’s a services company, 300 sales people. Every single one of them is required in their first week to listen to this program. And he said, it’s astonishing how many of these people come in lacking self-confidence, not very good. And within a few weeks, these people are on fire. They’re making more money than they ever thought possible. So it’s very important that every single person in your field, in your studio, is thoroughly trained in professional sports. You know, I speak foreign languages. I speak French, German, and Spanish. And I’ve always thought it amazing. Travel in Latin America, I immediately click into Spanish. So I’m traveling in Europe, I go into French or German. It’s absolutely amazing. If you speak the language, suddenly you read all the signs. Well, it’s the lifeblood of the school.

[28:09] If you’re not reviewing and enrolling students on a regular basis, sit in the school, wither away, do my job. You can get better deals. Everything if you speak the language. But if you don’t speak the language, you stand there just like a fence post. You don’t know what to say. You feel clumsy and awkward and you know, you sign language. That’s what most people do who don’t know the language is selling. They just feel clumsy and awkward. So but if you learn, well, you have it for the rest of your life. While we’re on the topic of selling, a lot of school learners are very passionate about what they do. But as you know, the whole selling thing is a problem for some instructors. Can you give us some tips on how to close the sale, that final critical 10%?

Well, again, you’re asking me, can you teach me how to make a dish in the kitchen?

Because there’s several ingredients. The first thing is to be positive. You should be very positive yourself. Like you cannot imagine high levels of positive expectation. You cannot imagine a person not joining. And then the second thing is you explain. And we teach what is called educational selling. Educational selling is where you don’t try to sell so much as you try to teach the person what they will get. Is when you get it, you will be fitter. You’ll be trimmer. You’ll have more confidence, better balance, better poise. You will feel more confident than yourself in any social situation. You will have higher levels of aerobic fitness. You will be more attractive to members of the opposite sex. These are all the things that go along with martial arts. These are the sort of things that are important to you.

A person says yes. You say, well, does what I explained make sense?

The person says yes. You say, well, when would you like to get started?

How soon would you like to get started? Would you like to start today?

Would you like to start this week? What is the first day that it’s convenient for you?

We have a class that starts at seven tomorrow evening. In other words, ask for the order. Sure. Just ask them to make a buying decision. don’t bring them to the edge and say, well, what do you think?

Ask them, give them a specific action that they can take. Well, if you decide to start tonight at 7 o’clock, we probably have a uniform that will fit you. This would be the best time we have some of our best people here and one of our best instructors, or I’ll be teaching it personally. In other words, give them a bump, a reason to start immediately. The sooner you can get them to start after you’ve spoken to them, the more likely it is that they will stay. If a school owner has trouble closing the sale, I know you have a program for that. It’s 24 Techniques for Closing the Sale. I actually have that. It’s great. Actually, it’s a video called 24 Sales Closing Techniques. It’s the most popular video on closing in the world. It’s used by Fortune 500 companies to train hundreds of people.

Okay, Brian. As you know, martial artists are fighters, so they’re used to applying strategy every day when they train or teach their classes. Can you explain why it’s critical to apply military-like strategy when one is seeking to become more successful in business?

Well, I’ve written a book on the subject. It’s called Victory, applying the military principles of strategy to sales, business, and personal life. What it basically says is that strategy is thinking things through. Here’s one of our great questions. What is the highest paid work in America?

The answer is thinking. Thinking about what you’re going to do before you do it. It’s the highest paid work. Planning things in advance. A good strategic thinker begins with great clarity. As I said before, great clarity with regard to the objective. What is my real goal? What am I trying to accomplish?

Am I trying to increase enrollments? Am I trying to increase retention?

Am I trying to increase referrals? Am I trying to increase gross revenues or net revenues per person?

Am I trying to expand at a particular level?

In other words, be clear about what you want to accomplish. Other than that, you’ll just be floundering around, trying to do a little bit of everything. So that’s number one. So that’s called the principle of the objective in strategy. The second is the principle of the offensive, is develop your plan of attack. What specifically am I going to do? What specifically am I going to say?

[32:06] And there’s an old saying that proper prior planning prevents poor performance. The more you think through how you’re going to accomplish the objective, and then you look at different ways to accomplish it, never be satisfied. Never say, well, this is what I’m going to do. Say, well, what else would be a good way to achieve this goal?

Or what would be another strategy that might be more effective?

And sometimes you find, well, maybe I’ll do a sort of a joint venture or strategic alliance with a health food store, maybe with a store that sells health equipment, and or maybe with chiropractors. In other words, who are the other people that people who could be students go to?

And so then you say, I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell my students to go to your store to get vitamin and mineral supplements. You tell people if they’re interested in physical fitness to come to my studio and talk to me. And go back and forth. In other words, what are all the different ways that you can approach it?

Now, the third is called the mass. So it’s objective, offensive, and mass means to concentrate your powers. Don’t try to do everything. Pick one strategy and focus your energies on that. I was watching a Civil War story on History Channel yesterday, and it was the Battle of Antietam, which is one of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War, which was fought to a standstill against Robert E. Lee, even though the Union troops under McCollan had twice as many forces. But the mistake that they made was that the general was hesitant. He committed his troops piecemeal. He’d send one regiment and then another regiment and then another regiment. They said if he had just sent them all at once, they would have literally overwhelmed the southern troops and may have even entered the war a year earlier.

But what they did is they sent them in piecemeal. In other words, instead of massing their forces, they spread them out. So one of the most important things that a martial arts instructor does is they focus on one particular strategy, single-minded, all day long. Rather than trying to do several things at once. And then, of course, there is the maneuver, try different things, be creative. If something’s not working, try something else. Think of approaching things differently and so on. So using strategy as a set of principles enables you to think better. And the people who think better get better results and make more money. And that should be easy for martial arts school owners because they’re always thinking strategy. They wouldn’t go to a tournament without a strategy. They wouldn’t step into the ring without a strategy.

So you can’t really approach business that way either. There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Success Principles for the Martial Arts Executive Part 1. Join us next month for the conclusion of our exclusive interview with the legendary Brian Tracy. The Sounds of Success is produced in Clearwater, Florida. It is intended exclusively for members of the National Association of Professional Martial Artists and their staff. Brian, I recently re-listened to the Psychology of Achievement, one of my favorite programs that you’ve produced. Could you please give our audience some pointers on how to develop the necessary psychology for achievement as it pertains to growing their schools?

Well, the Psychology of Achievement has become the best-selling audio program on success in the world. Again, that one is now in 22 languages in 35 countries. Wow. Phenomenal program. So what it does is very simple. It starts off with how people think and feel about themselves. We say that everything you do on the outside is determined by your self-concept on the inside, and the core of your self-concept is your self-esteem, which is how much you like yourself. The more you like yourself, the bigger goals you set. The more you like yourself, the more persistent you are. The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have. And so we teach people to say over and over again, I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. In fact, the key to success in your business, the more you like yourself, the better you’ll do your business, and the better you do your business, the more you like yourself.

[36:14] There seems to be a reciprocal relationship between your level of self-esteem and your level of self-efficacy or how well you do what you’re doing. So people who really feel good about themselves do what they do much better than people who don’t. One of the keys to building your school, by the way, is that people feel really good about themselves as a result of going there. That’s why constantly encouraging people, constantly giving them praise, constantly upgrading them and moving them up and so on makes them feel like winners, makes them have high self-esteem, makes them associate feeling good about themselves with you and your school. So that’s how the psychology of selling begins. Now, I’m sort of a psychology of achievement. Now, one of the things that I learned, which I still say every single day, is I like myself and I love my work.

I like myself and I love my work. It’s amazing. Sometimes people think, oh, geez, another class, I’m tired, I didn’t get up that much sleep, and so on and so forth, so then they go out to teach the class. They realize that they could just put a big sign on their forehead that says, I don’t like being here. Because everybody can pick it up. They can tell. But if you say to yourself, and you get yourself pumped, just like warming up, saying, I like myself, I love my work, I love my work, I love my work, I really appreciate these people being here. I love my work. Get yourself psyched up, and when you go out there, people are going to have a feeling before you even open your mouth that you’re happy to be there and you’re happy to see them.

So it’s really important. The second, probably the most important part of the psychology of achievement is the importance of accepting responsibility. It’s to be up to me. There’s two types of people in the world, winners and losers. Winners think about what they want and how to get it. Losers think about what they don’t want and who’s to blame. Winners are always thinking about the future and what they can do. Losers are always thinking about the past and who did something or didn’t do something. And so you find that most psychological problems, all psychotherapy, psychiatry, all mental illness, is people who are mired in the past. They just can’t, they’re trapped in the past, like a person halfway into a pool of mud or quicksand. They can’t get out, they’re stuck. Whereas really successful people think about what they want.

Here’s an interesting thing. When you accept responsibility, you talk about the solution rather than the problem. You don’t talk about the problem, what happened, who didn’t come, so on and so forth. You say, okay, what’s the solution?

What do we do? Where do we go from here?

Because responsibility is like a springboard. If you accept responsibility, it’s always responsibility for what?

And the answer is for taking action. So you find that highly responsible people are very action oriented. They have clear goals, they know what they want, and they get busy and they’re moving ahead. They’re always trying and doing something new and different. I had a woman recently, great story. She was married, a real bad husband, got divorced, the guy who took off, left her. She had no income, she had two little kids, a different person from before, by the way, and she decided to accept welfare. She went down to the welfare office, and somebody had given her the psychology of achievement to listen to, and so she began listening to it on the way down to the welfare office, about a 45 minute drive, two kids in the back seat. So she’s driving down, listen to this, listen to this, listen to this.

She got to the welfare office, she sat there and she listened, and she just listened for another half an hour. And she said, the heck with this. She turned around and she went back, she said, I’m not going on welfare, I’m taking charge of my life. She saw a real estate office near where she was working. She walked in and she said, I’d like a job, I’d like to work here. They said, well, do you have a life?

She said, no. She said, but I can do everything else to support… people who so they said well great we need a sales secretary so she got a job as a receptionist assistant sales secretary as she goes to be hired immediately I’ve seen started studying for life and she got a license to begin to sell she became good at selling she got so successful that she moved to another branch in the branch met the top salesmen for the olando area making five hundred thousand dollars a year they got married they live at a million dollar houses they have another child she said she said absolutely phenomenal she had just literally transformed every part of my life so so what’s going on inside you is more important than anything else in terms of what’s going on outside as I’m sure you’re aware brian a martial arts school is a small business and if run properly it too can be highly profitable what universal tips would you give school owners on how to grow rich doing what they love to do okay well here’s and again in my book getting rich your own way and my program getting rich in America we talk about the fact that everybody starts off with nothing that every successful entrepreneur started off as an unsuccessful

[40:50] Entrepreneur and that all self-made millionaires not all the seventy nine percent of self made millionaires in America are people who started and built their own businesses for out of five of your chances of becoming financially independent which must be a goal will come from starting building your own business now here’s the other thing is you only learn to do it right by doing it wrong and you only learned to do correct things by making mistakes so in the first part of your business you will make a lot of mistakes and you’ll be very frustrated and what most people do when they make mistakes and their frustrated they quit if they will it’s obviously not for me I’m not really cut out for this I’m not good at this remember the reason you say that is because you have not yet learned the skills that you need to learn here’s an important point it’s easy to start your own business it’s hard to succeed in it and many people think well this is easy to start a business or a studio so therefore it should be easy no the only thing that’s easiest starting after that everything is hard harder still and harder even still harder even more so therefore what you do is you learn you become a learning machine

You take in information continually I have a book I have a program called how to start build manager turnaround any business it’s a twelve-hour program two hundred pages that simply walks you through what I call it street smart entrepreneurial nba it shows you how to start build manage a business every single phase how to sixteen different ways to raise money if you don’t have enough money people think we’ll have to borrow money from the bank no no bank in one thing to any money are you kidding you’re not a good credit risk nobody could you get it out of your head yeah the only time they’ll lend you money is when you can get convinced them that you don’t need it bankers the kind of person who meant you an umbrella when fun is trying to demand it back when it starts to rain you know so so so ninety nine percent of your success is going to come from your own money and generating resources out of cash flow so you need to learn the skill the wonderful thing is that entrepreneurship is a skill you can learn and master the skill and when you learn and master the skill you can do it over and over again and get better and better at it

Interesting and what percentage of new businesses go out of business these days well it about eighty percent of new businesses go out of business in within the next two first two to four years now sometimes they shut down persons as well this is not working they shut it down sometimes they go broke ruin their family sometimes they merge some businesses move to another place that’s it so so here’s the rule it takes two years to learn how to break even in your business it takes two more years to learn how to make a profit it takes seven years to be successful it’s two years four years seven years and this has been demonstrated it over and over again peter druger says no business makes a profit within four years and if you think you could start a business and suddenly going to be a runaway success then you’re living in kaukuku land you don’t deserve success because you have not paid the price of it yet it’s the same as saying I’m going to join karate studio and I won’t let him get my black belt in about six or eight weeks no you’re not and if you do get a black belt and you better not get into any trouble with with anybody because you get killed so so so I think I said that they said what

[44:00] Seven years geez that’s a long time I think yes but let me point out something to you the time is going to pass anyway seven years from now seven years will pass seven years from now you’ll either be flat line you’ll be still struggling for seven years from now you’ll be an extraordinary creative experienced entrepreneur with the ability to make an incredible living anywhere you go so the only question is how much you learn and so constantly be learning it would win whenever you are not achieving a goal you want what you do is you say here we go again here we go again obviously I need to learn and practice something new don’t ever assume there’s anything wrong with you because there’s not you have the ability to learn anything you need to learn you everybody listening to this can become a millionaire and you will the very fact that you have your own studio means that you have a special instinct that only one percent of the population have you have the courage and the vision and the daring and the knowledge and the willingness to take a risk like that to start a studio wow you’ve got it and you’ve got the core it’s only like having a good physical body now you can just train that body

To accomplish anything you want okay moving on the first time I ever heard about the pareto principle I was listening to one of your cassette tapes in my car I still think that this is one of the most important and valuable concepts I’ve ever learned in my studies of human potential and I even wrote about it in my book for those folks out there who may have never heard about the pareto principle would you be so kind as to enlighten them now the favorite parade or what and it was an italian economist and in eighteen ninety five he was studying the structure of wealth in italy and he noticed that the top twenty percent of people controlled all the money or eighty percent of the money and he called these people the vital few versus the trivial many and then he began to apply this to other economic events he found that in any industry twenty percent of the companies made eighty percent of the profits in selling twenty percent of the sales people make eighty percent of the sale in entrepreneurship twenty percent of the entrepreneurs make eighty percent of the money in even with customers twenty percent of your customers will represent eighty percent of your business twenty percent of your members will represent eighty percent of your

Referrals and so on so what he said is the key is to focus on the top twenty percent identify who they are what they are where they are for example if you do a survey of the people in your studio your members you’ll find that about eighty percent of them come from twenty percent of the occupations available you may find that that most of your people come from fail if I did most of your people may come from one school area if I did most of your young most of your kids come from families with father does a particular task and if the most amazing thing when you start looking for it you’ll find that if that’s the case and that’s we focus your effort twenty percent of your activities will cover eighty percent of your results twenty percent of what you do account for eighty percent of the profits of your business you constantly identifying the top twenty percent now one of the things that we have found is that that with regard to procrastination is that everybody procrastinate top people procrastinate and mediocre people procrastinate the only difference is what they procrastinate on and what we find is that top people procrastinate on the eighty percent of things that are not very important whereas successful people procrastinate

I’m going to have an unsuccessful people procrastinate on twenty percent of things that are important so therefore you’ll never be able to do everything that you have to do so you always have to choose that’s why working from a list is so important setting priorities so important concentrating on your a one is so important because other than that you just get bogged down like trapped in a bog in a quick stand with little tasks that don’t contribute anything to your life or to your profit being in business myself brian I’ve learned that in order to grow you’ve got to delegate but sometimes martial artists have a tough time with this because they’re so used to always being in control what advice can you give us when it comes to delegation the one of the most important words you can learn in success is leverage how do you leverage yourself the way you leverage yourself or multiply your skills is to get somebody else to do certain things and there’s a rule called the seventy percent rule if somebody else can do medium important tasks seventy percent as well as you let them do it you see what we get into is what is called needless perfectionism in order to be successful you become very good at certain things

[48:25] Then you demand that everybody be equally as good well the fact is that they were equally as good as working for you so you ask you make a list of all of your tasks and you say what could I delegate to other people and here’s something I learned as a manager and I’ve run large organizations with hundreds of people working under me a person would come to me and say well how do I do this and I would say oh well I’d say I’d explain it to somebody else and say well how do you do this well what I learned eventually was that teaching is the key to delegation is that the way that you get free of any task is you teach someone else how to do it and so I think wow teaching is one of the great time management techniques that there is if I teach somebody else how to do this and then just supervise them until they’ve mastered it then I can become free of that task altogether that frees me to do more valuable things so look upon teaching don’t ever become irritable because if you become irritable and somebody said I don’t know how to do this when you become irritable what that happens is it causing them not to want not want to do it at all

So therefore you look at the various tasks that you do and when you start off you have to do everything so it’s almost like a pyramid that’s divided into slices when you start off you have to do everything but things at the bottom of the pyramid are not that important so the very first things you delegate are the things that are the easiest for someone else to do then for example when I started my own business I typed my own letter but the very first thing I did is I got a part-time secretary who typed my letters and then a part-time secretary who typed my letters time secretary to type my letters and answer the phone. Then a part-time secretary to type my letters and answer the phone and sort of prepare things. Then I made her a full-time secretary and I kept passing on test and I hired an assistant and so on. I kept passing on test since I worked up the pyramid so I’m doing only the things at the top of the pyramid. The things that are the top 20% or maybe even the top 10%. The folks listening to this Sounds of Success CD own or operate martial arts schools. Whether they know it or not, they are managers. Please talk to us about key result areas. What are they and how

Can school owners use them to create a more efficient and profitable business?

Okay, well, this is really important. There are seven key result areas in selling. There are seven key result areas in management, seven in business. And one of the most important things that a martial arts studio owner does is ask how much do I want to earn each year? And it’s very important. How much do I want to earn each year? And let us say that you want to earn $50,000 a year. Well, the average studio owner works 2000 hours a year, the average working year for an entrepreneur. So 2000 hours into $50,000 is $25 an hour. So that means that you want to earn $25 an hour. We call this your hourly rate. So in everything that you do, you say, all right, I earned $25 an hour. I only do things that pay $25 an hour or more. And there is what is called the law of three in every business. The law of three says that there are only three things that pay you your desired hourly rate. There’s only three activities. Everything else is a support activity. It’s something that needs to be done, but it doesn’t need to be done by you. So you say, okay, I want to earn $25 an hour.

If you want to earn $100,000 a year, it means that you want to earn $50 an hour. So what are the things that pay $25 or $50 an hour? Well, they’re almost invariably selling new people into classes, delivering the classes in such a way that people are really, really happy, and probably keeping in touch with people, making sure they’re happy getting referrals. Okay, maybe those are the three things like a triangle. Everything else you do is a support activity because those are the only things that pay you the kind of money you want to earn. So this brings us back to key result areas. Now in key result areas, we find that you are successful to the degree to which you have mastered all seven in each area. And all of your problems will come from a weakness in one of the seven. So let me give you quickly the seven in selling.

[52:22] Sure. They are, first of all, prospecting. Second of all, establishing rapport so that people like you and trust you. Third is identifying their needs. Why would they take lessons in the first place? Fourth is presenting, showing that their needs can best be satisfied by your studio, by your method of training, by your location, and so on. The fifth is answering objections or concerns. What if I miss a class? What if I’m short in a month? And so on and so on. The next is closing the sale. Ask them for the order. Number seven is getting resales and referrals, getting the person to sign up again, retention, and getting them to bring friends. So those are the big seven. If ever you’re having problems in your sales, you have a weakness in one of the big seven.

That’s why it’s so important that you learn to sell. Now in managing, now this is the other answer. There are seven key tasks as well. Number one is planning, is thinking through and planning. Now here’s a rule from Peter Drucker, is the leader, the manager, has to think about the future, has to plan because only he or she is tasked to do it. None of your staff is responsible for planning. None of your tasks can plan the future of your studio. Only you can do that. And if you do it well, you’re gonna have a great future. And if you do it poorly, you’re gonna have a poor future. So therefore, really good people think a lot about the future. They plan. Alright, number two is organizing. It’s pulling together the resources that you need. Getting the studio, getting the money that you require, getting the people that you require, getting things set up. So organizing to fulfill the plan is number two. Number three is staffing, is getting the right people to help you. Your ability to find the right people is very often the hinge upon which your whole business turns.

If you get one wrong person, it can really hurt your business. I have a business, by the way, and the business was growing. Then it plateaued and began to decline in a growth market. And we went out, we found out what is going on. Well, they’d hired a couple to run the front office during the day who were downright rude to people. If people would come in and they would turn away from them and ignore them. And then they turn around and say, what do you want?

And they say, well, I’d like to buy what you’re selling. Well, we’re busy right now. Can you wait? I mean, it was the most amazing darn thing. And when we picked this up, we fired them on there, you know what? And they say, well, our job is to manage the business. No, your job is to be nice to people. So you could have one person who’s driving your people away. And when you’re there, they’re smiling and charming and friendly. But when somebody calls in, they’re short, they’re brisk, they’re unfriendly. One really nice person can make your business. So staffing is important. Number four is delegating, is telling people exactly what you need them to do and so that they fully understand it and then making sure that they do it the way that you want. Giving them regular feedback. Teach your people the way you would teach your students. Number five is measuring, is be very clear. I’m sorry, number five is supervising. It’s supervised and make sure that people do it. Remember, the delegation is not abdication. You still own the task. You’re still responsible. You’re just like a doctor with a patient in intensive care. You keep taking their pulse. You keep watching to make sure that their chart is okay. So number six is measuring, is set

Measures and standards for every day. How many people are you going to call each day? How many new students do you want to sign up each day? How many tasks is a person expected to do each day and how will you measure their success? The rule is if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And what gets measured gets done. And then finally, number seven is reporting, is keep accurate records. If you have bank loans, your banks will want to know exactly how you’re doing financially. If you have investors, they’ll want to know. Your spouse will want to know. Your friends will want to know. So measuring and keeping accurate track of what you’re doing and then reporting that on a regular basis is essential to good business management. Now, here’s what we’ll find. We’ll go back again. It’s planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring and reporting. If you’re having any problems at all in your business, it’s a weakness in one of those seven areas. As our industry continues to grow, commercial martial arts schools are in greater need of quality employees than ever before in the history of the martial arts. Please give us some sound advice on how to build peak performing teams. Well, the key to peak performing teams is that

[56:45] Everybody feels like they’re a part of the team. There’s no insiders, no outsiders. My staff has an average length of time with me of 12 years, which is phenomenal in a small business. But in my business, I have two or three ethics. Number one, my job is to maintain harmony. So I make sure that everybody there gets along with everybody else. If we make a mistake and hire a negative person, we encourage that person to go somewhere else very quickly. Number two is I have an open door policy. Anybody can ask me anything at any time. So everything is wide open. Everything is printed. Everybody can see what’s going on. Everybody feels like they’re part of the team. There’s no need to know or private information. Another thing is everybody’s high responsibility is I don’t sit on people’s shoulders and demand that they come or go or so on. I make sure everybody knows their job and is happy with their job.

And then if they need to go out for some reason or if they come in later, leave early or something, I expect them to be high responsibility. Ninety percent of your people, if you give them higher levels of responsibility, will honor that. Ten percent will not. You get rid of those ten percent as soon as you find that they’re taking advantage of your system. But number one, number two, there are two things that for building a high-performance team. Number one, everybody feels in the know. And number two, there’s a very high level of trust. It’s based on years and years of research. Okay, Brian, I want to focus for a moment on one of the most important topics of all, leadership. To begin with, what constitutes quality leadership in your opinion? Well, a leader is a person, again, who has a very clear idea of where the business is going and who’s able to convey that to other people, who says, this is what we’re trying to accomplish and this is how we’re doing. And so people want the leader. They say the key of the job of the leader is to get followers. And since people can do whatever they want, and the more talented they are, the faster they can walk. The only reason they stay with you is because they want you to be the

Boss. They feel that they can accomplish more working with and for you than they could accomplish on their own. So leaders set very clear goals and visions. Leaders are always optimistic. One of the most important qualities of entrepreneurship is that you’re an optimist. This is a great business. This is really great. You really like what you’re doing. You’re really happy there. Leaders set high standards, by the way. I’ll give you a very simple example. I have an executive coaching program and we have martial arts specialists who take this program. After you’re making more than $100,000 a year to take this program. But what we teach you is how to double your income and double your time off within 12 months. And our success rate is phenomenal. Anyway, so we have people come in and I say that one of the things the leader does is set a high standard with regard to the way the business looks. And I said, you would be surprised, but many people have crummy looking waiting rooms, reception areas.

They’ve gotten some used furniture that they had in their garage or they got from their mother and they’re trying to save money. And they say, well, it doesn’t really matter because it’s a karate studio. So person walks in. The first thing they see is a junky reception area. And I had several people kind of look away and look down and sometimes they come as couples and look at each other like somebody just farted in an elevator, you know, and they say, well, you know, we didn’t, that isn’t really important, isn’t it? What we do with the customer important? Yes, but the first impression the customer gets is cheap, schlocky, poor quality. So I’ve had people go back and spend a few dollars making their waiting room look really beautiful. Just clean it up, put up carpets, put wallpaper, put nice furniture, new magazines, put some flowers, and maybe even some just gentle music playing. So people walk in, the first impression is, hey, this is a quality place. Now here’s the interesting thing, it’s called the halo effect. It’s the halo effect says that if the first impression is positive, the customer develops a halo with regard to you and sees everything is positive. It must be a better school, better training, it must be worth the money, it must be better people, it must be better students. Everything

[1:00:45] Must be better if the first impression is good. And exactly the opposite. If the first impression is mediocre, then everything must be poor. So really good leadership, you look the part, you insist that everybody looks really good. They’re well shaved, they’re properly groomed, they have clean uniforms, they look like professionals, they look really sharp. And people are immediately impressed by that and unconsciously they want to be part of it. The other thing is that when people feel they’re part of a quality organization, they set higher standards for themselves as well. They treat people better, they treat each other better. So that’s the key job of leadership. And on this note, what can martial arts school owners do to improve the quality and effectiveness of their leadership skills? How do they get started?

Well, again, every person has the natural qualities of leadership. It’s really quite amazing. I’ll tell you, if you found yourself in a lifeboat with your family, you’d find yourself a leader, you’d push to the front. What Peter Drucker said is there may be natural-born leaders, he said, but there are so few of them, they make no difference in the great scheme of things. He said, leadership is learned by practice. And you learn how to lead by leading. And the way that you lead is you make a decision of where we’re going. You say, all right, let’s go here. This is our goal. This is what we want to accomplish. All right, how do we achieve it? You discuss it. The more people can discuss the strategy, the plan of action, the more committed they are to it when they start. And the faster they will find ways to change it or improve it. So what leaders do is they say, here’s what I think we should do. What do you think? And the more you ask people for their input, the more enthusiastic they become about following through. And suddenly you become a leader.

And the people come to you and say, what about this? What about that? You say, well, that’s a good idea. Give it a try. Give it a shot. And so you always encourage people to try things out. And when they do something, if it didn’t work, you say, well, what did we learn from this? You never jump on people. You’re always building them up. So people, there was a book called A Great Place to Work. And what they found was the most important place, the most important requirement of a great place to work with regard to leadership is people felt they could make a mistake without being dumped on or criticized. And so therefore you say, well, let’s go in this direction. And if people make a mistake, you say, wow, that hurt. Okay, what can we learn from that next time? And you never dwell on it. Just get on to the next step.

You’ve created a comprehensive program called the High Performance Leadership Series. What’s unique about this particular approach to leadership and how can the information in this series benefit any martial arts professional who makes the investment to own it? Well, this is a 30 part series. It’s 30 videos. It comes with workbooks which lay out every key point and it has an audio soundtrack so you can listen to it in your car. And it costs about $2,000. It’s a $3,000 program, costs about $2,000. So we’re not encouraging everybody to get it. However, every single company that does get it, even mom and pop companies, is absolutely staggered. I had a man come up to me in Boston recently and said he became a millionaire in two and a half years during his own business as a result of using that program. He said the program either made or saved him more than a million dollars because instead of spending years and years and years learning how to run a business effectively, he said he just played the videos every single day. Played the videos, listened to it. If he had to interview somebody, he went to the section on interviewing. If he had to delegate, he went to the section on interviewing. If he wanted to build teams, he

[1:04:14] Went to the section on team building. If he wanted to set strategy, he went to the section on strategy and so on. So he basically had it all at his fingertips. Remember this is in the 21st century, knowledge and skill are the keys to the future. You cannot become successful simply by working longer and harder hours. You must work smarter and you can’t work smarter except to the degree to which you take in new information. So what this program will do and again we guarantee everything for a year. We say take the program, try it out, maybe get it and share it with some of your friends nearby but pass things around and learn the skills. There’s 30 critical skills that the American Management Association has determined are the critical skills for high performance in running any kind of a business including an entrepreneurial business. If you have those skills, you’ll be years ahead of people who don’t have them. A lack of a single skill can be fatal. For instance, one of our skills is firing. How do you fire people? Most people don’t know how to do it. As a result, they don’t. They keep people there who should have been fired a long time ago or if they do fire them, they get

Sued. So the skill of how to fire is a critical skill in management. I work with some very large companies and whenever they are in the process of hiring, the executive goes to a special library room with a TV monitor and plays the program on hiring. If they have to fire somebody, they are required to go to that room and spend 20 minutes watching the program on the hiring and they have made much better hires and they’ve never been sued in terms of letting people go. Never had a problem. They said it’s absolutely phenomenal. Nobody in our company is allowed to take action in any critical area without once more reviewing the video in that area. After having produced more than 300 audio and video programs and conducting more than 2,000 seminars worldwide, it’s pretty clear that you are huge on continuing education. In your own words, Brian, please explain to our audience why continuing education is one of the very best things that they can ever provide for themselves and their up and coming staff members. Okay, here’s a simple example. If you want to know how high they are going to build an office building downtown, you simply look at how deeply they build the foundation. If they are going to build a 30 or 40 story building, the foundation will be 100, 200, 300

Feet deep. So that’s how you can tell because the depth of the foundation determines the height of the building. Now let’s say that a building has been built and there is a tremendous demand for space. Can the owner go back and dig the foundation deeper in order to add more stories of office space? And the answer is, of course not. It’s too late. For the human being, here’s my point. A human being is also the same, is the height to which you can grow is determined by the depth of your foundation of knowledge and skill. But you, at any given time, can increase the depth of your knowledge, which will increase the height of your accomplishment. If you want to earn a huge amount of money, then you have to become more knowledgeable and more skillful.

And at any given time, you can start to learn and grow and dig your foundation even deeper. And this is the key to success. All successful people are lifelong students. There’s a young man recently sent out a questionnaire to all 500 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies on everything they learned about how to be successful. And he was quite amazed. 83 filled out the entire questionnaire and set them back. 83 was the top business people in the country. He took it all together and assembled it and wrote a book on it. And it’s a very successful book. I don’t even, I don’t remember the name, but the book is very successful. And he found three things. Number one, they said integrity is the key to success in business. Number two is always treat people well. Number three is never stop learning. Those are the three most important common denominators of successful people.

[1:08:04] Practice integrity, treat people well, never stop learning. So that’s why continuous learning is the key to the future. Moving right along here, many school owners out there still run their schools like their instructors did years ago. They haven’t changed or evolved at the times. When you coach clients in this category, Brian, how do you help them let go of the past and change their thinking for the better?

Okay, one of the things that we do is we do what is called the walk across the street method. Imagine that you arrived at your studio and he had burned the ground. All right. And you had to start over again. And fortunately across the street, there’s a space available and that you can walk right across the street and start again. So then you ask yourself some questions. If I was going to start this business brand new from the beginning, knowing what I now know is what would I do differently? If I wanted to make this studio the very best studio within 100 miles, knowing what I now know, what would I start up again? What would I not start up again? What would I do more of? What would I do less of? What would I do differently and so on. And imagine that you could start the very best studio with the way you treat people, talk to people, etc. Very, very best studio. What would it be? The second question you do is imagine all of your staff were standing around the parking lot and you’re going to start over again. Which people would you take with you and which people would you leave in the parking lot? Then you have to do another thing as you look at your

Clients. You know, everybody has what are called clients from hell. These are people that are just a pain in the you know what they’re always complaining. They’re late. They don’t pay their bills. They disrupt the class and so on and so forth. But when you’re young and starting off you want every single customer, every client, every member. But as you get a little bit older you realize there’s some people that you really don’t want. They’re just not worth the trouble. down along the Mexican border we say, novale la pena, you know, it’s not worth the pain. And so what you do is you say, if you could decide who you’re gonna take with you, who would be your ideal students?

And you draw a description of your ideal students. These are the people we like the most. They pay regularly, they come regularly, they bring their friends, they’re positive, they’re enthusiastic, they contribute to the class and everything else. So you always do this, what is called the walk across the street method, and imagine you were starting over and you could do or not do anything based on your current experience. And what that does is it frees you from the past. It’s zero based thinking. Knowing what I now know, is there anything that I wouldn’t get into again if I had to do it over?

Knowing what I now know, if I was starting over again, what would I do differently?

Yeah. In closing, Brian, it’s no secret that you’re one of the most accomplished people in the world today and you’ve had the opportunity to network with many of the sharpest minds on the planet. I’m just curious, what would you say is one of the most important lessons that you’ve ever learned in life?

What we’ve already talked about, Rob, number one is set very clear goals for your life. Number two is be open to the reality that nothing really works right the first time, that you’ll have lots of slips and failures and disappointments and mistakes and setbacks and so on. But number three is resolve in advance to persist until you succeed. Make a decision that failure is not an option. Is that every single experience is merely feedback. It’s not failure, it’s just feedback. It’s giving you guidance like a guided missile that gets feedback from the target that enables it to keep changing direction. So therefore you decide and invest, I’ll never quit. I’m going to be successful at this. I’m going to be successful, I’m going to make a great living, I’m going to do great work, I’m going to be financially independent and it’s only a matter of finding out how.

And so the only question you’d ask is what is it that I want and how do I achieve it?

And how becomes your operative word for the rest of your career. And failure is not an option. Brian, what a magnificent interview. What can I say?

You’ve been one of my mentors since I’ve been a kid and it’s truly been an honor working with you today. On behalf of the entire martial arts industry, the NAPMA organization, all of your fellow martial artists out there, I want to thank you for all the time that you’ve spent with us here today. You’re very gracious. You’re more than welcome, Rock. You have a great day.