September 17, 2024 • 17 mins
The SBA tells us 50% of businesses fail in five years, but my experience is only about 1% (or less) actually fail due to outside circumstances. The other 49% experience something that was entirely avoidable. If you ask small business owners why they might go out of business, they will tell you they need a loan, or the market is just collapsing, the economy sucks, they can't find good people, or the competition is burying them.
We'll show you owners who have thrived in the face of all these obstacles because they avoided the one thing that actually will put you out of business. Circumstances don't make me who I am. How I respond to them does. This one response makes all the difference.
Check our special offer for the Making Money is Killing Your Business: https://bit.ly/m/3to5Club
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:05):
Welcome back to the Get Off the Treadmill
podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs, where
we show you how to build a successful
business and to have a life too.
We're going to dive into another topic that
helps us make more money in less time
and to get off the treadmill so we
can experience a life of significance.
And now your host and the author of
(00:25):
the number one bestselling business book, Making Money
Is Killing Your Business, Chuck Blakeman.
Hi, I'm Chuck Blakeman, and today I want
to talk to you about the only reason
your business will fail and how to avoid
that fate.
I've built 13 businesses in 10 industries on
four continents, all from scratch, all bootstrapped, and
that experience, along with deep dives into research
(00:48):
for a couple of decades, show me that
the long list of reasons you've been given,
we've all been given for why you won't
make it, just don't hold water.
With almost no exceptions, those are not causes
of failure, but the result of just one
failure we'll identify in this podcast.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says one
out of five businesses will fail in the
(01:08):
first 12 months, 50% in the first
five years, and 66% in 10 years,
and 80% are gone in 20 years.
Why?
Why do so many businesses fail?
Studies by institutions like the NFIB, SCORE, the
US Chamber of Multiple Gurus, and a myriad
of academics and articles in business magazines like
(01:28):
Entrepreneur all identify over 40 reasons why businesses
fail.
Some show up near the top of most
of these guys' lists, like bad leadership, bad
planning, bad research, bad financing, bad execution, bad
hiring, bad partnering, and bad marketing.
While any one of these can keep us
from succeeding in our first, second, or even
(01:48):
third attempts, my experience building 13 businesses and
the research as a whole shows none of
these things will actually keep you from succeeding.
And almost without exception, we don't fail because
of any of these things.
If we look objectively at the 40 plus
reasons researchers say we fail, all of them
are things we can pretty much control, with
the rare exception of things like pandemics, becoming
(02:10):
disabled, and a very short list of other
things we can't control.
All of which rarely happen more than once
or twice in a lifetime.
But if you ask small business owners why
they're struggling, they will tell you they need
a loan.
I heard that almost universally in working with
business owners in Central Africa for years.
And of all the reasons cited why businesses
fail, this is nowhere near the top of
that list.
(02:31):
Remember, I built 13 businesses and never took
a loan to build any of them.
Before we ever get to where a loan
is needed, we need to do a much
better job at finding out if there is
a market for what we're selling.
If we have the ability for the right
stuff to sell it, and if we can
build and lead a business.
Great ideas, great financing, great people on the
bus, great marketing, and great market conditions.
(02:52):
They're all nice things to have, but none
of them will make you successful.
In 2009, during the worst recession since the
Great Depression, in a real estate market that
had been nearly cut in half and that
resulted in an eight-year supply of high
-end homes.
I met a contractor in a coffee shop
who was busy building 23 high-end homes
all at once.
(03:13):
And four of them were being built on
pure speculation.
Somehow he was not succumbing to the notion
that the world around him had dictated his
success or his failure.
I also got invited to that recession and
decided not to RSVP because I knew that
the people who were attending it were bummers
to be around.
The world was dealing them a bad hand
and they were just waiting on the sidelines
for the world to finally give them the
(03:35):
conditions they needed to be successful.
From 2008, when the recession started through the
end of 2010, we grew our business 409%.
Not because we were special, but because we
just didn't leave our destiny in the fate
of those around us.
It's one of the wonderful benefits of owning
your own business.
You know, if you work for somebody else
during a recession, you can work your buns
(03:55):
off and be their highest producer, and you
can still get cut because you have less
tenure than the goof off sitting beside you.
If you own your own business, you can
take your destiny in your own hands and
figure it out.
So the first thing we need to understand
about why we fail is that it's not
somebody else's problem.
And the list of 40 plus reasons really
show that in spades.
(04:16):
They're all things that are within our control.
So what is it that separates those who
make it from those who fold?
Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's, is a shining
example of the one thing you need in
order to be successful.
I want to say I don't align with
Ray Kroc and how he moved in the
world around him.
His values, his principles, and his practices all
showed a focus on getting what Ray wanted
(04:36):
at the expense of the world around him
and everyone that crossed his path.
So the first thing we know about Ray
was that he wasn't successful by serving others
or attempting to do good in the world.
You can be successful even if your motivation
is purely self-focused.
Ray was also not a good business person.
Having studied his life at almost every turn,
he was making short-sighted, badly conceived, almost
(04:57):
knee-jerk decisions, any one of which could
have taken him down and many times did.
He also didn't understand numbers or financing.
He did not understand how to build a
process, how to work with people, how to
motivate them, how to market these things.
None of it.
We've identified the seven elements of every business,
and Ray was only good at one of
the business developments.
And even there, his toolbox was pretty limited.
(05:20):
Ray Kroc was not successful because he understood
business or how to build one or how
to instill vision for the future.
Even after 30 years in business, Ray was
not a particularly successful business person.
For 15 years, he sold paper cups, then
three or four years selling ironing boards that
fold up into your wall, and then another
15 years hawking milkshake mixers out of the
trunk of his car to restaurant owners.
(05:42):
34 years later, Ray had a good personal
income but didn't have any business assets to
speak of.
He pretty much owned a job, nothing more.
Nobody spends 34 years of selling paper cups,
ironing boards, and milkshake mixers if they are
a business genius and a visionary entrepreneur.
Yet at the age of 54, without any
idea what he was doing, his wife actually
(06:02):
had to explain to him a few years
later, hey, you know what you've got here?
At the age of 54, he started down
the road to building and owning one of
the largest, most successful franchises in the history
of the world, and ended up a raging
financial success who everyone perceived to be a
business genius and a visionary entrepreneur, two things
he most assuredly was not.
(06:22):
Even in the process of building his empire,
he didn't exhibit the attributes we all think
of in order to be successful.
He had no vision for where he was
going.
He visited the McDonald's Brothers in California because
for their five restaurants, they were going through
milkshake mixers at a rate well beyond anything
he had ever seen.
He wanted to see why and offered to
help them franchise so he could sell more
milkshake mixers as they grew their business.
(06:44):
They had already franchised a number of their
restaurants, so Ray struck a deal to get
a tiny percentage if he could help them
continue.
He was dogged about signing up new owners
for them, but after adding a few dozen
restaurants to their business, he really wasn't making
much off the fee he collected for signing
them up.
Yeah, he was selling more milkshake mixers, but
that wasn't enough.
He hadn't thought to write himself in as
a possible owner if he did X or
(07:06):
anything to reflect his efforts beyond a small
fee per restaurant.
He was basically a franchise broker and nothing
more.
So he went about figuring out how to
steal the whole thing from the two brothers.
He fumbled his way through wrestling the business
from them and started aggressively finding more franchises
for his new business.
But at just over 100 restaurants, he was
(07:27):
still unable to figure out how to make
an income from the business.
His income was still coming from the one
McDonald's restaurant he owned himself in Chicago, which
he probably called McDonald's location number one.
It was actually the sixth location behind the
five that McDonald's Brothers had built and the
rest of his revenue came from milkshake mixer
sales.
In fact, the business was doing so badly
with 100 restaurants that if he didn't land
(07:49):
a big loan very quickly, it was all
going to go under.
I've met a number of people who own
just a few restaurants who make a really
good income.
If you can't figure out how to make
an income from 100 plus restaurants, you're probably
not a very good business person.
This whole business was saved by a serendipitous
meeting.
Ray was at one of the many banks
he pitched to give him a loan.
(08:10):
The banker had done his homework and mentioned
Ray's failure in the ironing board business and
other bad business dealings and denied him the
loan.
But there was a guy sitting at the
next desk overhearing the conversation who pursued Ray
out the door of the bank.
He took a look at Ray's financials and
saved the business by informing Ray he was
doing it all wrong.
Instead of focusing all his efforts on getting
franchise fees from owners, he needed to buy
(08:32):
the land on which the restaurant owners would
build, then lease the land back to them.
From that day forward, McDonald's shifted from being
in the hamburger business to being in the
real estate business and profits soared.
None of it thanks to Ray himself.
But some would say, wasn't he incredibly innovative?
No, he didn't invent franchising, nor did he
come up with any of the novel business
(08:53):
ideas that McDonald's was so famous for.
For many years, the McDonald's brothers had used
their speedy service system to throw food through
a window at customers.
The yellow and red look and feel, including
the famous McDonald's arches, it was already in
use before Ray met the brothers.
The whole franchise model was up and running.
And just about every great idea he ever
got credit for came from somebody else.
(09:15):
And he usually resisted it.
Ice cream freezers were a huge drag on
profits, and in the early 60s, one of
the franchisees introduced him to the polymer-based
Reed plastic milkshake, which needed no refrigeration.
It was a game changer that Ray initially
resisted.
One of his locations started selling breakfast, and
(09:35):
that nearly got them shut down by Ray.
And the Quarter Pounder, the Big Mac, the
Egg McMuffin, Ronald McDonald himself, Happy Meals, and
just about every other innovation you can think
of in McDonald's was dreamed up by one
of his franchisees, and after Ray saw it
created more revenue for them, he stopped resisting
it and took it national.
(09:56):
His biography understandably presents all of this in
a very different light, including the title, The
Founder, which, of course, he wasn't.
The McDonald's brothers were the founders.
So if he wasn't a visionary, he wasn't
a good leader, a good business person, a
kind servant of others, he wasn't a good
innovator or a good strategist or a good
tactician, if he wasn't any of these things,
(10:18):
how did he end up with so much
success in business?
One thing made Ray Kroc successful and covered
for all his weaknesses in business.
He had it in spades, and the McDonald's
brothers, the true geniuses and the true great
business people, had almost none of it.
He was relentless.
With whatever he was doing, he was all
(10:39):
in and pushed forward relentlessly.
Defeat was never defeat.
It was what Churchill famously said, success is
not final, failure is not fatal, it is
the courage to continue that counts.
And he epitomized Vince Lombardi's belief that it's
not whether you get knocked down that matters,
it's whether you get back up.
(11:01):
The one thing that separates the successful from
those who quit is the willingness to be
relentless.
It's not grit, resilience, fortitude, or many of
the other great attributes that we should definitely
all embrace.
I want all of them.
But those are all reactive, defensive attributes.
(11:21):
They are the attributes of the pioneer who
built a mud and thatched cabin on the
prairie and withstood every possible challenge and difficulty
that came their way.
Those attributes will help us survive and do
so with a great attitude.
Being relentless is at a different level.
It is leaving the thatched cabin for good
and striking out for new horizons, knowing that
(11:43):
in doing so, you are creating trouble for
yourself that you would never have faced if
you just hunkered down with resilience and grit
in that cabin year after year.
Being relentless isn't about surviving.
It's going beyond that to thriving, never stopping,
never laying down, always getting back up, and
then actively pushing forward to learn, grow, and
(12:06):
become more than we were the day before.
Relentless is by definition always moving forward.
A stream does not have grit or resilience.
A pond that isn't going anywhere might have
that.
But a stream is relentless.
It's always pushing forward, knowing that in doing
so, it will cause trouble for itself that
(12:27):
the pond will never experience.
It invites the trouble because it knows that
in every beaver dam, every waterfall, every meadow,
and yes, every pond that it has to
get through are all necessary to fulfill its
purpose to get to the ocean.
They're all just bumps along the way.
And when the stream runs into a beaver
dam, it's not surprised that it doesn't get
(12:48):
emotional.
It just figures out a way to deal
with the trouble.
It has proactively gone and found.
Ray Kroc would take a record player on
the road while he was hawking milkshake mixers
from town to town, and he would play
a motivational LP record about perseverance over and
over and over.
Perseverance is the sister to being relentless.
Relentlessness refers to an unyielding, unwavering, and often
(13:12):
aggressive pursuit of a goal without regard for
obstacles or opposition.
It assumes trouble is part of the package.
And in fact, it's the trouble that will
guide it to success.
Perseverance is the quality we add to being
relentless that basically says never give up.
Ray Kroc had both in spades.
(13:33):
He was relentless, and he just kept going.
Steve Jobs famously said, I'm convinced that about
half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the
non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
None of the other things.
It's just relentlessness, perseverance, pushing forward, and never
giving up.
While we've been taught by our mothers, our
(13:54):
teachers, society, and even the small business administration
that we should play it safe and not
take chances that could end up in failure.
But to paraphrase Kipling, we should treat victory
and defeat as the imposters that they are.
I just love that statement.
And as Churchill said, it is the courage
to continue that counts.
(14:16):
I titled this podcast The Only Reason Your
Business Will Fail and How to Avoid That
Fate.
So the only reason we ultimately fail is
this, we get tired and we stop pushing
forward.
We run out of gas like the McDonald's
brothers did and just don't have the juice
to be relentless.
We use the analogy of being on the
treadmill, always trying to make money and never
(14:38):
figuring out how to build a business that
makes money when we are not there.
And that mindset of making money will wear
us out.
These podcasts are designed to help us find
and embrace the principles, practices, and tools that
will help us get off the treadmill, keep
us from wearing out, and give us the
energy to stay relentless.
So if you want to be successful, it
(15:00):
will definitely help if you're a good leader,
have great ideas, are a good visionary, have
good financial backing.
If you've got good people on the bus,
are good at execution and working with people
and have a great product or service to
offer, all of these things are great.
And this podcast going forward will focus on
getting you all those tools.
But if you don't decide to be relentless
(15:21):
and if you don't decide to actively push
forward causing your own trouble instead of waiting
for trouble to come find you, you have
almost no chance of being successful no matter
how many of those other goods you have.
And yet as Ray Kroc and countless others
have shown, if you lack a lot of
the skills, the talents, and the resources that
everybody says are essential, but you are relentless,
(15:44):
you may not be successful the first time
and instead experience the imposter called defeat.
But if you are relentless, you will get
right back up and you will eventually get
past all the troubles that are necessary for
you to be the small stream that gets
from the side of the mountain to become
the roaring river that finally finds the ocean.
The big idea here is this, know what
(16:07):
you want, get moving, take the first step
and then the next and use each trouble
that you cause in your journey to learn
and get stronger.
Don't sit around waiting for trouble to come
find you.
Get moving, get in trouble, and stay in
trouble.
It's the only way you're going to find
your ocean.
(16:27):
Keep going.
That wraps up another episode of the Get
Off The Treadmill podcast.
If you found this podcast helpful, please subscribe
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grow your business and to get off the
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If you want more information on the three
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book Chuck as a business advisor, speaker, or
(16:50):
workshop leader, you can contact us at grow,
G-R-O-W, at cranksetgroup.com.
Until next time, have a great week.
Welcome back to the Get Off the Treadmill
podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs, where
we show you how to build a successful
business and to have a life too.
We're going to dive into another topic that
helps us make more money in less time
and to get off the treadmill so we
can experience a life of significance.
And now your host and the author of
(00:25):
the number one bestselling business book, Making Money
Is Killing Your Business, Chuck Blakeman.
Hi, I'm Chuck Blakeman, and today I want
to talk to you about the only reason
your business will fail and how to avoid
that fate.
I've built 13 businesses in 10 industries on
four continents, all from scratch, all bootstrapped, and
that experience, along with deep dives into research
(00:48):
for a couple of decades, show me that
the long list of reasons you've been given,
we've all been given for why you won't
make it, just don't hold water.
With almost no exceptions, those are not causes
of failure, but the result of just one
failure we'll identify in this podcast.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says one
out of five businesses will fail in the
(01:08):
first 12 months, 50% in the first
five years, and 66% in 10 years,
and 80% are gone in 20 years.
Why?
Why do so many businesses fail?
Studies by institutions like the NFIB, SCORE, the
US Chamber of Multiple Gurus, and a myriad
of academics and articles in business magazines like
(01:28):
Entrepreneur all identify over 40 reasons why businesses
fail.
Some show up near the top of most
of these guys' lists, like bad leadership, bad
planning, bad research, bad financing, bad execution, bad
hiring, bad partnering, and bad marketing.
While any one of these can keep us
from succeeding in our first, second, or even
(01:48):
third attempts, my experience building 13 businesses and
the research as a whole shows none of
these things will actually keep you from succeeding.
And almost without exception, we don't fail because
of any of these things.
If we look objectively at the 40 plus
reasons researchers say we fail, all of them
are things we can pretty much control, with
the rare exception of things like pandemics, becoming
(02:10):
disabled, and a very short list of other
things we can't control.
All of which rarely happen more than once
or twice in a lifetime.
But if you ask small business owners why
they're struggling, they will tell you they need
a loan.
I heard that almost universally in working with
business owners in Central Africa for years.
And of all the reasons cited why businesses
fail, this is nowhere near the top of
that list.
(02:31):
Remember, I built 13 businesses and never took
a loan to build any of them.
Before we ever get to where a loan
is needed, we need to do a much
better job at finding out if there is
a market for what we're selling.
If we have the ability for the right
stuff to sell it, and if we can
build and lead a business.
Great ideas, great financing, great people on the
bus, great marketing, and great market conditions.
(02:52):
They're all nice things to have, but none
of them will make you successful.
In 2009, during the worst recession since the
Great Depression, in a real estate market that
had been nearly cut in half and that
resulted in an eight-year supply of high
-end homes.
I met a contractor in a coffee shop
who was busy building 23 high-end homes
all at once.
(03:13):
And four of them were being built on
pure speculation.
Somehow he was not succumbing to the notion
that the world around him had dictated his
success or his failure.
I also got invited to that recession and
decided not to RSVP because I knew that
the people who were attending it were bummers
to be around.
The world was dealing them a bad hand
and they were just waiting on the sidelines
for the world to finally give them the
(03:35):
conditions they needed to be successful.
From 2008, when the recession started through the
end of 2010, we grew our business 409%.
Not because we were special, but because we
just didn't leave our destiny in the fate
of those around us.
It's one of the wonderful benefits of owning
your own business.
You know, if you work for somebody else
during a recession, you can work your buns
(03:55):
off and be their highest producer, and you
can still get cut because you have less
tenure than the goof off sitting beside you.
If you own your own business, you can
take your destiny in your own hands and
figure it out.
So the first thing we need to understand
about why we fail is that it's not
somebody else's problem.
And the list of 40 plus reasons really
show that in spades.
(04:16):
They're all things that are within our control.
So what is it that separates those who
make it from those who fold?
Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald's, is a shining
example of the one thing you need in
order to be successful.
I want to say I don't align with
Ray Kroc and how he moved in the
world around him.
His values, his principles, and his practices all
showed a focus on getting what Ray wanted
(04:36):
at the expense of the world around him
and everyone that crossed his path.
So the first thing we know about Ray
was that he wasn't successful by serving others
or attempting to do good in the world.
You can be successful even if your motivation
is purely self-focused.
Ray was also not a good business person.
Having studied his life at almost every turn,
he was making short-sighted, badly conceived, almost
(04:57):
knee-jerk decisions, any one of which could
have taken him down and many times did.
He also didn't understand numbers or financing.
He did not understand how to build a
process, how to work with people, how to
motivate them, how to market these things.
None of it.
We've identified the seven elements of every business,
and Ray was only good at one of
the business developments.
And even there, his toolbox was pretty limited.
(05:20):
Ray Kroc was not successful because he understood
business or how to build one or how
to instill vision for the future.
Even after 30 years in business, Ray was
not a particularly successful business person.
For 15 years, he sold paper cups, then
three or four years selling ironing boards that
fold up into your wall, and then another
15 years hawking milkshake mixers out of the
trunk of his car to restaurant owners.
(05:42):
34 years later, Ray had a good personal
income but didn't have any business assets to
speak of.
He pretty much owned a job, nothing more.
Nobody spends 34 years of selling paper cups,
ironing boards, and milkshake mixers if they are
a business genius and a visionary entrepreneur.
Yet at the age of 54, without any
idea what he was doing, his wife actually
(06:02):
had to explain to him a few years
later, hey, you know what you've got here?
At the age of 54, he started down
the road to building and owning one of
the largest, most successful franchises in the history
of the world, and ended up a raging
financial success who everyone perceived to be a
business genius and a visionary entrepreneur, two things
he most assuredly was not.
(06:22):
Even in the process of building his empire,
he didn't exhibit the attributes we all think
of in order to be successful.
He had no vision for where he was
going.
He visited the McDonald's Brothers in California because
for their five restaurants, they were going through
milkshake mixers at a rate well beyond anything
he had ever seen.
He wanted to see why and offered to
help them franchise so he could sell more
milkshake mixers as they grew their business.
(06:44):
They had already franchised a number of their
restaurants, so Ray struck a deal to get
a tiny percentage if he could help them
continue.
He was dogged about signing up new owners
for them, but after adding a few dozen
restaurants to their business, he really wasn't making
much off the fee he collected for signing
them up.
Yeah, he was selling more milkshake mixers, but
that wasn't enough.
He hadn't thought to write himself in as
a possible owner if he did X or
(07:06):
anything to reflect his efforts beyond a small
fee per restaurant.
He was basically a franchise broker and nothing
more.
So he went about figuring out how to
steal the whole thing from the two brothers.
He fumbled his way through wrestling the business
from them and started aggressively finding more franchises
for his new business.
But at just over 100 restaurants, he was
(07:27):
still unable to figure out how to make
an income from the business.
His income was still coming from the one
McDonald's restaurant he owned himself in Chicago, which
he probably called McDonald's location number one.
It was actually the sixth location behind the
five that McDonald's Brothers had built and the
rest of his revenue came from milkshake mixer
sales.
In fact, the business was doing so badly
with 100 restaurants that if he didn't land
(07:49):
a big loan very quickly, it was all
going to go under.
I've met a number of people who own
just a few restaurants who make a really
good income.
If you can't figure out how to make
an income from 100 plus restaurants, you're probably
not a very good business person.
This whole business was saved by a serendipitous
meeting.
Ray was at one of the many banks
he pitched to give him a loan.
(08:10):
The banker had done his homework and mentioned
Ray's failure in the ironing board business and
other bad business dealings and denied him the
loan.
But there was a guy sitting at the
next desk overhearing the conversation who pursued Ray
out the door of the bank.
He took a look at Ray's financials and
saved the business by informing Ray he was
doing it all wrong.
Instead of focusing all his efforts on getting
franchise fees from owners, he needed to buy
(08:32):
the land on which the restaurant owners would
build, then lease the land back to them.
From that day forward, McDonald's shifted from being
in the hamburger business to being in the
real estate business and profits soared.
None of it thanks to Ray himself.
But some would say, wasn't he incredibly innovative?
No, he didn't invent franchising, nor did he
come up with any of the novel business
(08:53):
ideas that McDonald's was so famous for.
For many years, the McDonald's brothers had used
their speedy service system to throw food through
a window at customers.
The yellow and red look and feel, including
the famous McDonald's arches, it was already in
use before Ray met the brothers.
The whole franchise model was up and running.
And just about every great idea he ever
got credit for came from somebody else.
(09:15):
And he usually resisted it.
Ice cream freezers were a huge drag on
profits, and in the early 60s, one of
the franchisees introduced him to the polymer-based
Reed plastic milkshake, which needed no refrigeration.
It was a game changer that Ray initially
resisted.
One of his locations started selling breakfast, and
(09:35):
that nearly got them shut down by Ray.
And the Quarter Pounder, the Big Mac, the
Egg McMuffin, Ronald McDonald himself, Happy Meals, and
just about every other innovation you can think
of in McDonald's was dreamed up by one
of his franchisees, and after Ray saw it
created more revenue for them, he stopped resisting
it and took it national.
(09:56):
His biography understandably presents all of this in
a very different light, including the title, The
Founder, which, of course, he wasn't.
The McDonald's brothers were the founders.
So if he wasn't a visionary, he wasn't
a good leader, a good business person, a
kind servant of others, he wasn't a good
innovator or a good strategist or a good
tactician, if he wasn't any of these things,
(10:18):
how did he end up with so much
success in business?
One thing made Ray Kroc successful and covered
for all his weaknesses in business.
He had it in spades, and the McDonald's
brothers, the true geniuses and the true great
business people, had almost none of it.
He was relentless.
With whatever he was doing, he was all
(10:39):
in and pushed forward relentlessly.
Defeat was never defeat.
It was what Churchill famously said, success is
not final, failure is not fatal, it is
the courage to continue that counts.
And he epitomized Vince Lombardi's belief that it's
not whether you get knocked down that matters,
it's whether you get back up.
(11:01):
The one thing that separates the successful from
those who quit is the willingness to be
relentless.
It's not grit, resilience, fortitude, or many of
the other great attributes that we should definitely
all embrace.
I want all of them.
But those are all reactive, defensive attributes.
(11:21):
They are the attributes of the pioneer who
built a mud and thatched cabin on the
prairie and withstood every possible challenge and difficulty
that came their way.
Those attributes will help us survive and do
so with a great attitude.
Being relentless is at a different level.
It is leaving the thatched cabin for good
and striking out for new horizons, knowing that
(11:43):
in doing so, you are creating trouble for
yourself that you would never have faced if
you just hunkered down with resilience and grit
in that cabin year after year.
Being relentless isn't about surviving.
It's going beyond that to thriving, never stopping,
never laying down, always getting back up, and
then actively pushing forward to learn, grow, and
(12:06):
become more than we were the day before.
Relentless is by definition always moving forward.
A stream does not have grit or resilience.
A pond that isn't going anywhere might have
that.
But a stream is relentless.
It's always pushing forward, knowing that in doing
so, it will cause trouble for itself that
(12:27):
the pond will never experience.
It invites the trouble because it knows that
in every beaver dam, every waterfall, every meadow,
and yes, every pond that it has to
get through are all necessary to fulfill its
purpose to get to the ocean.
They're all just bumps along the way.
And when the stream runs into a beaver
dam, it's not surprised that it doesn't get
(12:48):
emotional.
It just figures out a way to deal
with the trouble.
It has proactively gone and found.
Ray Kroc would take a record player on
the road while he was hawking milkshake mixers
from town to town, and he would play
a motivational LP record about perseverance over and
over and over.
Perseverance is the sister to being relentless.
Relentlessness refers to an unyielding, unwavering, and often
(13:12):
aggressive pursuit of a goal without regard for
obstacles or opposition.
It assumes trouble is part of the package.
And in fact, it's the trouble that will
guide it to success.
Perseverance is the quality we add to being
relentless that basically says never give up.
Ray Kroc had both in spades.
(13:33):
He was relentless, and he just kept going.
Steve Jobs famously said, I'm convinced that about
half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the
non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
None of the other things.
It's just relentlessness, perseverance, pushing forward, and never
giving up.
While we've been taught by our mothers, our
(13:54):
teachers, society, and even the small business administration
that we should play it safe and not
take chances that could end up in failure.
But to paraphrase Kipling, we should treat victory
and defeat as the imposters that they are.
I just love that statement.
And as Churchill said, it is the courage
to continue that counts.
(14:16):
I titled this podcast The Only Reason Your
Business Will Fail and How to Avoid That
Fate.
So the only reason we ultimately fail is
this, we get tired and we stop pushing
forward.
We run out of gas like the McDonald's
brothers did and just don't have the juice
to be relentless.
We use the analogy of being on the
treadmill, always trying to make money and never
(14:38):
figuring out how to build a business that
makes money when we are not there.
And that mindset of making money will wear
us out.
These podcasts are designed to help us find
and embrace the principles, practices, and tools that
will help us get off the treadmill, keep
us from wearing out, and give us the
energy to stay relentless.
So if you want to be successful, it
(15:00):
will definitely help if you're a good leader,
have great ideas, are a good visionary, have
good financial backing.
If you've got good people on the bus,
are good at execution and working with people
and have a great product or service to
offer, all of these things are great.
And this podcast going forward will focus on
getting you all those tools.
But if you don't decide to be relentless
(15:21):
and if you don't decide to actively push
forward causing your own trouble instead of waiting
for trouble to come find you, you have
almost no chance of being successful no matter
how many of those other goods you have.
And yet as Ray Kroc and countless others
have shown, if you lack a lot of
the skills, the talents, and the resources that
everybody says are essential, but you are relentless,
(15:44):
you may not be successful the first time
and instead experience the imposter called defeat.
But if you are relentless, you will get
right back up and you will eventually get
past all the troubles that are necessary for
you to be the small stream that gets
from the side of the mountain to become
the roaring river that finally finds the ocean.
The big idea here is this, know what
(16:07):
you want, get moving, take the first step
and then the next and use each trouble
that you cause in your journey to learn
and get stronger.
Don't sit around waiting for trouble to come
find you.
Get moving, get in trouble, and stay in
trouble.
It's the only way you're going to find
your ocean.
(16:27):
Keep going.
That wraps up another episode of the Get
Off The Treadmill podcast.
If you found this podcast helpful, please subscribe
and hit the like button to ensure you
are receiving the latest tools you need to
grow your business and to get off the
treadmill.
If you want more information on the three
to five club, the Crankset Group, or to
book Chuck as a business advisor, speaker, or
(16:50):
workshop leader, you can contact us at grow,
G-R-O-W, at cranksetgroup.com.
Until next time, have a great week.
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