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Last Thursday Sir Richard Branson posted on Linkedin a letter he wrote to a 12 year old female fan who had written inquiring about the key enterprising skills he used when first starting out. Here’s what he wrote:

Dear Olivia,

Many thanks for getting in touch. I’m honoured you have chosen yours truly as the subject of your business studies project. As somebody who did not particularly enjoy school, I hope you have some fun finding out about Virgin’s adventures!

As you pointed out, my life in business started with Student Magazine when I was a few years older than you are now. We set up Student to give a voice to people like me who wanted to protest against the Vietnam war and the establishment. I didn’t have a career in business in mind, we just wanted to make a positive difference to people’s lives. I soon learned one of the best ways to do that is to become an entrepreneur.

The key enterprising skills I used when first starting out are the very same ones I use today: the art of delegation, risk-taking, surrounding yourself with a great team and working on projects you really believe in. As you mentioned in your letter, I suffer from dyslexia but was able to turn this to my advantage. I delegated the areas I struggled with to people who also believed in the project. This freed up my time to focus on what I was good at – the strategy of the magazine, making contacts and developing marketing.

We had very little money so had to take risks to get our magazine on the map. I approached to be in Student people like Mick Jagger and David Hockney, whom somebody with more experience may have been too intimidated to contact. For some reason, they said yes! I secured advertising by calling up big brands from the school phone box, telling them their rivals were already advertising with us and playing them off against each other.

It was all great fun, and we learned so much about business by taking chances, getting things wrong and getting up to give it another go. Back then, people who were interested in starting their own businesses were not encouraged in school. Nowadays, while I still think much more could be done to encourage entrepreneurship in education, there are lots of tools and mentors to help you get started in business. If your GCSE studies spark your interest too, then that’s brilliant. If you don’t get top grades, remember there’s a lot more to life than some letters on a piece of paper.

Have you thought about your own first business idea yet? When you do, be sure to let me know.

All the best,

Richard.

Buried there in the middle of the letter is the sentence. It doesn’t tell the whole story, but it reveals an enormous truth often found in the lives of successful business people.

For some reason, they said yes!

For some reason, Sir Richard had the courage to ask. For some reason he was not intimidated to ask the likes of Mick Jagger to do something he knew would be powerful to help him.

He was bold. Daring. Courageous. Unafraid. Driven to try.

In 1972, as a high school teenager, I discovered a quote attributed to Goethe. It’s disputed where the quote originated, but it was a powerful set of words for the 15-year-old version of me. It still is.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back — concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:

that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

~ Goethe

Sir Richard was committed. I don’t think anything metaphysical was going on. Nor do I believe anything metaphysical ever goes on. No, I don’t believe in the “law” of attraction, but I do believe in the power of decision and commitment.

It’s also worth noting Sir Richard’s last question to his young fan, “Have you thought about your own first business idea yet?” Two things: 1) he inquires about her own idea and 2) her first idea. It’s important that whatever decision or commitment we make – that it’s our own. And we’ve got to start with our first idea. There’s no harm in changing it or morphing it into something completely different, but we’ve all got to start somewhere.

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How Being Unintentional Leads To Unintentional Failure

“I thought we’d sign up more people,” he said.

A haphazard, ill-planned, even more ill-planned execution of a marketing effort have left him depressed. Hundreds of dollars spent in in a direct mail campaign hardly qualified him  as a big spender, but for his small business it was a significant investment. At least in dollars. It was over $500 and he won’t spend that kind of money flippantly.

Unfortunately, he didn’t spend more than a single hour of effort. It’s not like he was throwing money at the problem. No, that wasn’t it. He wasn’t thinking that he’d simply write a check and all would be right with the world.

However, he was given to the false notion of “build it and they will come.” We’ve all done it. That is, we’ve not given enough thought to our offer, but succumbed to the thought, “Yeah, people will want this” when in reality, nobody wanted it. Other times, the offer may have been fine, but our timing was wrong. I’m reminded of the countless stories of Internet marketers who launched and forgot it was a national holiday where lots of people are traveling. Stupid mistakes that most of us with any experience have made at one point or another.

Sadly, those weren’t the issues that plagued him. Not this time. No, it was something far more sinister.

It was his fault. Period.

He simply hadn’t paid enough attention to the effort. Well, that’s not entirely true. He had given plenty of thought to the offer and the delivery of the offer. He simply had spent no time at all on filling the room.

If the room is empty, it doesn’t matter how prepared you are.

If people don’t buy, the quality of the product, service, presentation or “fill-in-the-blank” just doesn’t matter.

It’s that tree falling in a forest when nobody is there to listen quandary. It doesn’t matter how big a THUD the tree makes. Nobody can hear it. So, what does it matter?

The fact is, he wasn’t aiming for success, but he was expecting to experience success. It’s a natural law that God put into place.

Gal. 6:7 “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

You reap what you sow. Not what you expect. Not what you hope for. Not what you feel you deserve. Not what you think you need.

What you sow.

Last time I looked sowing involved work. Hard work. Doing something. Going out into the field. Preparing the field for seed. Breaking up the hard ground. Then sowing the seed. Followed by cultivating the seed. Hours of weeding, fending off pests and doing everything possible to help the seed grow. Hours, days and weeks of hard work result in a harvest.

Patience is a virtue missing in many business plans.

I don’t mean formal business plans. I mean daily business plans. I mean the objectives people have in their business enterprises.

People want to sling the seed without much thought and reap a bountiful harvest. Well, wake up Mr. Seed Slinger, it doesn’t work that way.

We love outlier stories. Stories of blind pigs finding truffles, blind squirrels finding acorns and broken clocks being right twice a day. Those stories fill popular business culture. And it’s pointless to doubt them. It’s also pointless to spend your time trying to replicate them. Or to even listen to the details.

Close examination of how the guy hit a hole in one won’t help you do it.

Some things simply happen. Like the blind pig, blind squirrel or broken clock. To be sure, the golfer who hits a hole in one likely has some ability to play golf, depending on the distance to the hole. I mean, take  a guy like me who can’t hit the broad side of a barn with a golf club and I’m not going to ever hit a hole in one. But the world’s greatest golfers won’t likely have better odds over the average player, except for the fact that they’re playing golf more often.

Hope is a poor strategy, but so is trying to replicate an outlier.

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“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
– Woody Allen

It’s the Pareto principle. Everywhere you look it turns up. The 80/20 rule. Wait a minute, what?

If 80% of success is showing up, does that mean we just need to show up 20% of the time? That’s about right. Seems like lately I’ve had about a 20% chance of getting service – of any kind. Twenty percent chance of getting an email returned. Or a phone call returned. Nah, wait a minute. That’s high.

If 80% of success is showing up, does that mean 20% of the people are succeeding? Maybe that’s right. But wait a minute. That means 80% are failing. Seems high, doesn’t it? Then again, I guess it depends on how you define “success.” Maybe 80% of us are failing. That would explain our level of misery and dissatisfaction.

If 80% of success is showing up, then what makes up the missing 20%? Yeah, that’s what I want to know. I know how to show up. I’m interested in what I’m missing – other than showing up.

And once again, I’m hit in the forehead with professor Sutton’s seminal work in The Knowing-Doing Gap. If people know they have to show up to succeed…well, to be fair, if they know 80% of success is determined merely by showing up, then why don’t they? Show up, that is.

They know it, but they don’t do it. See, it’s that infamous gap that continues to plague us. We’re so busy chasing our tail to learn stuff we don’t know while the stuff we do know goes UNdone. Makes no sense, but it happens all the time.

The sad thing is, you’re not even up to the Sucking Level yet. 

Yep, I’ve expressed that to business owners before. And salespeople. And waiters or waitresses. And store clerks.

“Man, you grumpy old man,” you must be thinking. And I am, in some ways, but I’m not hateful. Intolerant of poor service? You bet. I’ve never had a stomach for it – the curse of starting a career in sales when I was 16.

People have too many options. Getting customers is too hard. Helping people make a decision to buy from you is tough work. This business stuff isn’t as easy as falling off a log. Then again, I wouldn’t know, having never fallen off a log. Doesn’t seem pleasant to me. Or easy, for that matter.

Let me tell you two stories of my recent experiences. The stories stem from a quote I read back during the inflationary years of the late 1970’s when I was in the early years of my business career. People were fighting hard for business. In one of the business magazines of the day I remember reading a quote by a lady management consultant who said, “We’d all buy a lot more if we could just get waited on.” It’s been almost 40 years since I first read it. I think of it almost weekly – every time I encounter poor service.

Disclaimer: I admit I may have a superior expectation when it comes to customer service. Not high maintenance kind of stuff. Not ordering off the menu type of stuff. Just solid, “do what you’re supposed to” kind of behavior. It’s shocking how difficult it is for some people to just show up.

• Salespeople, get a cell phone from your company. If they won’t buy you one, use your personal phone. Do not trust the switchboard at the office. Don’t assume the voicemail at the office works. Be available when prospects or customers need you. And if you’re not available when they need you, at least give them the chance to leave a message directly with you, knowing you’ll get it.

• Call people back promptly. Not all calls need a fast response, but some do. Return phone calls based on the promptness required. Without exception!

• Use email. Push it to and from your smart phone. Be available via email because many of your customers prefer it over the phone. Besides, you can reply quickly and set a more precise expectation. “I got your message. I’m in a meeting for the next 2 hours, but I’ll be back in touch by 4pm today.” Two sentences tells me all I need to know as a prospect or customer. Now I can move on with my life ’cause I know you’ve got the ball and I’m going to expect to hear from you before 4pm today.

• Give me the rules of the road and it’s likely I’ll comply with them – and be happy in the process.

Whether it’s on the phone, via email or in person – 80% of success is showing up, but it’s showing up on time, prepared and doing what you’re supposed to. There’s a lot to showing up. Most – that’s right, I said, “MOST” – can’t or won’t do it. I’ve got a lifetime of business experience and I can attest to the fact of my statement. It’s just not that hard to show up your competition because no matter what space or industry you’re in – most of your competition is barely able to answer the phone before the 5th ring. And if they pass that test, most of them won’t be able to call you back within 4 hours. Nobody will call you “right back.”

You don’t have to go back to school. You don’t need any high dollar training or consulting. You need to get your act together and start acting like you want and need the business. You need to let prospects see how much you appreciate their attention. You do that by being there to serve them when they’re ready.