The secret to business success
Wilson Luna The way to succeed in business is to learn from experience … but there’s no rule that says you have to get that experience the hard way, or even that it has to be yours!
Building a successful business can be exciting and incredibly rewarding, but without the right knowledge from the right mentors and models it can become an exhausting experience, filled with pain, problems and pitfalls.
I’ve spent the best part of my working life surrounded by successful, top-tier businesspeople from a broad range of different industries, and over the years I’ve discovered that there’s not much about business that can’t be learnt from other people’s experience and – more importantly – their mistakes.
In fact, modelling the right mentors can be one of the most valuable assets a business can have, saving you thousands of dollars and thousands of man-hours in trial and error as you learn what works – and what doesn’t.
The Entrepreneurial Model
Modelling success is one of the fastest ways to replicate it, and the best part is that you already know how to do it. Almost everything you’ve ever learnt to do in life has been learnt through modelling: watching what someone else does and copying them to get the same result – in fact, you’ve been doing it since you were born. It’s how you learnt to walk, talk, read, ride a bike, drive, hit a ball … you name it, on some level you learnt it through modelling.
Since you’re already a natural at learning through modelling, all you need to do is decide how you’re going to use it to create your success.
Take Oprah. When she was first auditioning to get into television, she had no idea what to do, so she pretended she was Barbara Walters. She imitated everything Barbara did: the way she dressed, spoke, sat and even the way she tilted her head. And it worked – Oprah got the gig and became the superstar we all know today.
Modelling it works across any industry. When Sam Walton, founder of America’s Walmart, which is the world’s largest retail organisation, with 9,667 stores and 2.1 million employees in 28 countries was first starting out, he saw that his business was struggling to compete with other variety store chains were going ahead in leaps and bounds. So he headed out and studied everything the other stores were doing – he looked for what was making them successful and then took it away, worked out how Walmart could do it better, and made it happen. The foundation of Walmart’s success was built on Sam Walton’s willingness to learn from the experience of other successful retailers.
The choice is yours
The secret is choosing the right mentor and adopting their mindsets, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of the people who have achieved the success you want to achieve. And the thing to remember here is that if you want to be excellent, you need to model excellence, so your mentor should be someone who is already excelling in the area you want to master.
Just as importantly, you need to know whether these things are congruent with your beliefs and values. For example, Donald Trump is famed for being ruthless in business and while there’s no doubt that works for him, it might not work as well for you if it doesn’t ‘fit’ with your values. So copying that characteristic probably won’t work. And that’s the best bit about modelling – you get to pick and choose the things you want to copy, and tailor-make your own personal ‘model of excellence’!
Everyone who has ever achieved excellence has done so because their mindset, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours have made it impossible for them to not succeed – and if it worked for them, it can work for you too. All you need to do is grab hold of the things that made them successful and create a ‘success blueprint’ that works for you.
There’s no doubt that modelling great mentors is one of the foundations of business success … but it’s only the first of seven critical steps. To discover what the other steps are, you need to attend the Financial Game of Life Bootcamp … for dates and venues for this free one-day workshop, check out www.yourfamilyyourmoney.com/bootcamp.
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