Thursday, May 13, 2021 • 11min
285[Entrepreneurship] Wrong Sequencing will Kill Your Business | Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard P. Rumelt
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Wrong Sequencing kills more businesses than anything else. Here is how to get your sequencing right so that you can run a successful business. 7 Day FREE Trial to “The Entrepreneur's Book Club”: https://2000books.com https://2000books.com Get my Coaching & Mentorship on scaling your Online Business: https://www.2000books.com/grow https://www.2000books.com/grow
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Mani Vaya
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Mani Vaya
00:00
Well, hello, hello, my ambitious friends and welcome to 2000 Books where we bring you the most important actionable ideas from the world's greatest books for ambitious entrepreneurs and I'm your host and former computer engineer turned entrepreneur Mani Vaya.
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00:14
So what I want to talk about today isn't necessarily coming from a specific book, it's actually a confluence of different ideas that have been rolling in my mind for quite some time.
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00:26
It's been my experience of building 2000 Books from experience of coaching hundreds of other online entrepreneurs at this time as a business coach, it's not really from a specific book but from a lot of different books and strategy books and autobiographies and biographies and business books and all of those things.
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00:43
A lot of different things have come together to help me come to a very powerful realization that business is all about getting the sequence right. In many ways business is the game of sequencing.
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00:59
I noticed so often that the biggest challenge for most entrepreneurs is not knowing what is the perfectly right thing to do at this stage of business.
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01:10
I see so many times entrepreneurship are just banging their head against the wall, doing the wrong thing, doing things that have very little leverage and spending weeks, even months on those things because at any given stage there are so many things you can do, there are hundreds, if not possibly thousands of moves you could be making in your business right now.
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01:30
You could be doing email marketing, you could be running
Facebook
ads, YouTube
content, YouTube
ads, hiring a team member for operations for finance, doing virtual summits, doing webinars, doing challenges, fixing your website, creating courses, hiring a copywriter. The list just goes on and on and on and on and on.Share
01:46
And most entrepreneurs, they spray their energy on doing all these different things: one day they're doing this next day, they're doing that. And they're just all over the place and what happens as a result of trying all these different things and not knowing which of these things will really produce results. Ultimately, what happens with most entrepreneurs is they either run out of time or money or both.
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02:12
So either the business dies or they end up building a business that feels like a never ending job or they end up building a business where they also need a side business or a side job and so on and so forth. And the challenge that comes up again and again and again is that they haven't gotten their sequence right. They don't know what is the right thing to do at this stage of business.
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02:37
And the truth is at the current stage of your business, there are very, very, very few things that have extremely high leverage. And your only path to growth and massive scale is to focus on these high leverage moves, one or a few of these high leverage moves, and stop doing those 999 other things that have that you have on your list.
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03:00
You could go down the list of 5000 things to do, but the truth is there is one move you need to make right now in order to take your business to the next level and that is all strategy. That is all strategy.
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03:14
In the book, Good strategy, Bad Strategy,
Richard Rumelt
talks about the idea that strategy is all about finding points of extremely high leverage. You have to find crucial pivot points in your business where even the smallest effort unleashes the greatest effect.Share
03:30
You see if you keep finding these points of maximum leverage where the smallest effort unleashes the greatest effect one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time, one quarter time you end up building a great business.
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03:44
Because you're using your key strengths to magnify the effect of your force on these crucial pivot points, you have to concentrate all your force on that pivot point and make it move.
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03:56
The thing is, the thing to understand is that every business is different, every entrepreneur is different, their conditions are different. So that is why everyone's crucial pivot points are going to be so different. You have to find your unique strengths in the business so that you can magnify the effect of your force.
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04:16
Focus. Ultimately focus is all about figuring out what it is that is truly important at this stage of the business and focusing on that critical leverage point, focusing all your resources, all your energy, all your time, all your attention, focused action on that and saying no to everything else, that is the essence of strategy, my friend and most entrepreneurs don't get it right because they don't know what is the right thing to do at this stage of your business.
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04:47
I see again and again the struggle, the big struggle is they don't get the sequence right, they're doing things out of order out of sequence, they're doing the wrong things at the wrong time and the business suffers.
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04:59
And every time you get past the current stage, there's the next stage and at that point again you have to find the next point of high leverage and focus on it and not do the 999 other things that you could be doing right now.
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05:12
So business ultimately is a game of sequencing, that's what I figured out: your job as an entrepreneur is to focus on the highest leverage move at this stage and then again, find the next highest leverage move at the next stage.
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05:27
So the big question is, how do we identify this highest leverage move at any given stage of a business?
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05:35
The question is not, if any of the available moves are good moves in general. The question is, what is the next move that is perfect for you and your business at the current stage of your business?
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05:48
And that's something that of course can't tell you or some blog posts can't tell you because that's something that only comes when when there's a two way communication, when someone has perspective on your business and that's when they can tell you what exactly is going on.
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06:02
You have to figure out the question that you have to struggle with is what is the perfect next move for you and your business, which will give you 10X, 100X, even 1000X returns on your effort compared to everything else you're doing in your business right now, what is the next move in the sequence of moves you need to make In order to grow your business.
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06:21
If you get the sequence right, you get rewarded, you have massive business growth, but if you do things out of sequence, which is what 99% of people are doing, they're just throwing stuff against the wall hoping that one of these things will take off does not happen. All that happens is they're doing the wrong things at the wrong time and all that gives them is pain.
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06:40
So right sequence of moves is effectively right strategy and that is high leverage, my friends so remember strategy is a game of sequencing.
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06:52
In the book, Good strategy, Bad Strategy
, Richard Rumelt
says there are three steps to devising a good strategy, three steps:Share
06:59
Step one is diagnosis, where you diagnose the current problem.
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07:03
Step two is the guiding policy, where you, once you diagnose the problem, now you figure out what is the overall approach to overcome the challenge.
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07:11
And step three is a set of coherent actions, as in specific actions to take to overcome this current challenge or problem.
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07:18
So strategy boils down to three steps diagnosis guiding policy and set of coherent actions diagnose the current problem, find out the overall guiding policy that you need to take in order to approach this challenge and then the specific actions you need to take, that good strategy devised.
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07:36
Okay, so let me give you an example instead of just talking in general in in definitions, let me give an example of one of my coaching clients. He came to me When he came to me for help. He had launched an info product price at around $199, and he felt like it was not making him enough money. He wanted my help to get multiple six figures without running any ads.
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07:57
His diagnosis was my funnel. His diagnosis was that his final and his sales page for this product product was broken. He had gotten some help from some marketing guy And he came to me saying, Mani, you need to you need to help me fix this problem. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I need to get to multiple six figures.
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08:16
Now turns out his diagnosis was that his final and his sales page for this product are broken. But the truth is, he had the wrong diagnosis and because he had the right, wrong diagnosis, he was fixing the wrong problems. And that's why he was doing the 999 there were things that he wanted to do to grow the business instead of doing the one thing.
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08:36
So I found out my diagnosis was that he was doing the wrong product. This was the wrong product to sell at this stage of his business because he had a list of only around 4,000 people and his audience was so small that selling this low price product would not get him to multiple six figures in years.
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08:54
In fact, it would not even keep him in business. His business would die. He had the sequencing wrong.
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08:60
You see there's nothing wrong with selling $199 product to a sales page, but everything is wrong with it if he's trying to use that to hit multiple six figures given the size of his list, given the traffic that he has.
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09:16
To make $200,000 to make multiple six figures, he would have to sell 100 units or 1000 units of that $199 product to make 100 and $99,000 which is impossible to do when the list is only 4000 people and you're not running ads. No amount of tweaking the sales page or the final would make him multiple six figures because the conversions will never get so high.
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09:38
The problem is because the client had never been there, He had never walked this path. He didn't understand the challenges that were in front of me. He died of him and he was diagnosing the wrong.
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09:51
He, he had diagnosed the problem wrong and he was trying to fix the wrong problem. And that is a profoundly challenging way because that will basically keep you stuck for years and years and years because you're solving the wrong problem.
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10:07
And once I gave him the diagnosis, once I told him that this is the wrong product to sell, given where you are. My guiding policy was to sell a higher ticket coaching program and sell it through phone sales and my set of coherent actions where I told him exactly the steps to implement that.
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10:22
So look at this, he came with a big goal and he came with a diagnosis that was wrong and that was something that some marketing dude had given him because the marketing dude himself had never built a great business.
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10:35
So as you can see, the challenge is that most entrepreneurs struggle and get stuck because they have the wrong sequence. They think they're doing the right things, but they're wasting months and months of effort doing the wrong thing.
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10:48
The challenge is business ultimately is a game of sequence. And how do you figure out the right sequence of things to do in order to grow your business well?
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10:58
You have two options, you can spray your time and energy and money on the 100 different things or the 1000 different things and hope that one of them will be the right thing that will take you to the next level. Or you can get guidance mentorship coaching from someone who has done this before you, someone who has built a successful business before you, not a coach who makes money by teaching others how to make money.
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11:18
So if you want me to coach you and mentor you in building your online business to grow your business and save years of heartache and tons of money, apply for my coaching at 2000Books.com/ Grow, that's 2000Books.com/grow.
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