Techniques For High Achievement

I sat down with a new business owner a few years back to help him overcome some struggles and succeed. I had never worked with this guy before but had helped hundreds of other business owners, so I imagined we could make something happen. We will call him, John (not his actual name).

“Hey John, I am excited to work with you. Tell me a bit about your business.”

“Okay (long pause), it’s complicated.”

I stepped in and said, “Let me stop you for a minute. If you imagine that your business is complicated or hard for others to understand, you will lose people right off the bat.” He took another deep breath and slowly let it out, then responded.

“I have been trying to get people to see how important this business is for 6 months and nobody gets it. I never thought about it being me that was making it tough for others to get. How do I simplify it?”

The first technique for high achievement is centered around clarity. You have to get clear on what problem you are solving. Then, you have to clarify how that benefits both you and the potential customer to solve the problem. Potential customers don’t really care about how much time you spent creating the product you have. What they care about is whether or not your product/service makes their problem go away for a reasonable exchange of value. When you are clear on the outcomes you create (the problem you solve), you have the ability to simplify your explanation.

John and I worked for a couple of hours to create real clarity around the outcomes he could create and then organized that into a clear statement of value. Once we had that, and he was happy with how easy it was to understand how he helped others, he asked the obvious question,

“What now?”

I said, “now we create a roadmap of where you want to be in one year, then reverse engineer what would have to happen to make that a reality.”

The second aspect of high achievement is to have a clear, actionable roadmap of how to get from where you are to where you want to be. This isn’t just setting goals. This is mapping the daily habits and key processes that make your success automatic. Another couple of hours into the process, we had a clear roadmap, with measurables by week, that would get John the success he wanted while solving problems for customers.

He was getting excited now. For the first time, he knew how to clearly articulate what he did and had a plan to get the life he wanted. The third step really pulled the other two steps together. High achievers seek win-win relationships. They want the client to feel they got an incredible deal in the value exchange. And, they make sure they are compensated for the outcomes they achieve for, or with, their clients. I explained,

“You have to focus on the client feeling they got significantly more value than they paid for. When you consistently deliver more than expected, you keep getting new opportunities. How can you ensure they always feel you went above and beyond?”

As we discussed the outcomes he would achieve for his customers, we built in measurables for the clients, so they would know the value being delivered. I told him how each year, millions of quarter-inch drill bits are sold, but nobody actually wants one. Everyone wants quarter-inch holes. The person wanting the quarter-inch hole wins when they have the drill bit, and the person selling the drill bits wins when those needing that problem solved makes a purchase. In business, it always has to be about both parties winning.

The end result was John taking his business from losing money to profitable in the next 45 days, and he remains profitable to this day. It isn’t complicated to achieve what you want in this life. It really does come down to those three simple steps.

1. Create clarity around the problem you solve.
2. Create an organized and measurable plan for getting the future you want, by a specific date.
3. Keep your focus on creating win-win relationships and solving the problems your customers want solved. Then, go above and beyond.

Go out and make something amazing happen!