“A business will only grow to the skill or belief level of the owner, whichever is lower.” — Joshua Long

The first of the three fundamentals of business success is luck, commonly masquerading as good timing. By getting into a business or market at the right time, the market factors act like a rising tide that lifts all businesses.

“The reactionary owner earns a salary, while the proactive owner builds assets.” — Joshua Long

Congratulations! You have invested more effort than many of your peers to get to this point of the book. I hope you found useful insights and strategies throughout that will make you a better business owner and help you unlock new growth by finding and fixing your bottlenecks.

My goal with this chapter is to reward you for the hard work of getting here.

“Cat: Where are you going?

Alice: Which way should I go?

Cat: That depends on where you are going.

Alice: I don’t know.

Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short-term failures in order to gain long-term competency.” — Dave Ramsey

If you’re like most business owners, you suffer at times from Commonsense-itis. It’s a sneaky disease that labels so much of what you know and believe as common sense, expecting everyone you interact with to make the same decisions you would in any situation. The higher your intelligence, the higher the odds you are afflicted with it.

“Systems permit ordinary people to achieve extraordinary results predictably.” — Michael Gerber

As I’ve mentioned earlier in this book, nearly every one of my clients came to me with a marketing need, typically focused on generating more leads to help grow their company. In roughly half the cases, they actually had a systems problem or, better stated, they didn’t have anything documented to keep from having to reinvent the wheel every day.

“Your success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations you are willing to have.” — Tim Ferriss

If you’re anything like me, you’ve grown up with a healthy dose of altruism burned into your subconscious. We’re taught that putting others’ needs before our own is a worthy character trait, and I don’t disagree with that. I just think it gets severely distorted, especially when used as a method of control or manipulation.

“Management by objective works . . . if you know the objectives. 90% of the time you don’t.” — Peter Drucker

I’ve found a single activity that helps solve all of your management problems, while also setting you up well to move toward the ROWE (Results Only Work Environment) model in the future if you want.

“The productivity of work is not the responsibility of the worker, but of the manager.” — Peter Drucker

Business owners have the habit of believing that how they think is “common sense,” and that it is handed out to everyone like candy on Halloween. They think it’s “common sense” to show up on time, to call ahead if you’re going to be late, to double check all of your grammar in email communication, and never to yell at anybody on the phone. Their list of unstated expectations is seemingly endless.