The basic difference between and ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse. - Don Juan
The Fatal Assumption: if you understand the technical work of a business, you understand a business that does technical work.
To the "Entrepreneur [part of the psyche]" most people are problems that get in the way of the dream.
An Entrepreneur does the work of envisioning the business as something apart from you, the owner.
'I wonder what that business would be?' is the truly entrepreneurial question. The dreaming question...I wonder is the true work of the entrepreneurial personality.
If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job.
The purpose of going into business is to get free of a job so you can create jobs for other people.
[As a business owner] your job is to prepare yourself and your business for growth.
Companies like McDonald's, FedEx, and Disney didn't end up as Mature companies. They started out that way.
The very best businesses are fashioned after a model of a business that works.
The Entrepreneurial Perspective:
...how must this business work?
...sees the business as a system for producing outside results - for the customer - resulting in profits.
...starts with a picture of a well defined future and then comes back ot the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision.
...envisions the business in its entirety, from which is derived its parts.
...an integrated vision of the world
...the present day world is modeled after his [future] vision.
The Entrepreneurial Model: a business that fulfulls the perceieved needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way.
The Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created by of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed.
To the Entrepreneur, the business is the product. [how can i make a business that is so desirable, people will fight over buying it?]
The Entrepreneur knows that within the customer is a continuing parade of changing wants begging to be satisfied. All the Entrepreneur has to do is find out what those wants are and what they will be in the future.
The system isn't something you bring to the business. Its something you derive from the process of building the business.
Business Format Franchise: It is a proprietary way of doing business that successfully and preferentially differentiates every extraordinary business form every one of its competitors.
[A business is] an organism that will live or die according to how well it performs its sole function: to find a keep customers.
Pretend that the business you own is the prototype for 5,000 more just like it.
The rules of the Franchise Game:
1. The model will provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders beyond what they expect.
2. The model will be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill.
3. The model will stand out as a place of impeccable order.
4. All work in the model will be documented in Operations Manuals.
5. The model will provide a uniformly predictable service to the customer.
6. The model will utilize a uniform color, dress, and facilities code.
So what could your Prototype do that would not only provide consistent value to your customers, employees, suppliers, and lenders but would provide it beyond their wildest expectations.
How can I create a business whose results are systems dependent rather than people dependent?
When you intentionally build your business around the skills of ordinary people you will be forced to ask the difficult questions about how to produce a result without the extraordinary ones.
Structure [order] provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. It is these relatively fixed points of reference that an orderly business provides its customer and its employees in an otherwise disorderly world.
The Operations Manual is therefore best described as a company's How To Do It guide.
What you do in your model is not nearly as important as doing what you do the same way, each and every time.
The difference between creativity and innovation is the difference between thinking about getting things done in the world and getting things done.
Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.
To the franchisor, the entire process by which the business does business is a marketing tool, a mechanism for finding and keeping customers. Each and every component of the business system is a means through which the franchisor can differentiate his business from all other businesses in the mind of his consumer. Where the business is the product, how the business interacts with the consumer is more important than what it sells.
The next time you want somebody to do something for you, touch him softly on the arm as you ask him to do it. You will be amazed...
What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?
Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything.
Orchestration is the elimination of discretion, or choice, at the operating level of your business.
The definition of a franchise is simply your unique way of doing business.
Then the system must provide the vehicle to facilitate predictability...to give your customer what he wants every single time.
Innovate, Quantify, and Orchestrate. Because the world, moving as it does, will not tolerate a stationary object. The world will collide with whatever you've created, and sooner or later destroy it.
There needs to be a set routine. Because without it, there would be nothing to improve upon. And without improvement, there would be no reason to be.
While going to work on their business, people begin to realize that it is a powerful metaphor for going to work on their lives.
To imagine that some will walk through your door with the intention of buying your business - but only if it works. Imagine your smile inside as you say "Let me show you how it works."
The Business Development Program:
Primary Aim
Strategic Objective
Organizational Strategy
Management Strategy
People Strategy
Marketing Strategy
Systems Strategy
The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.
After all, here was a man who had lived a life that baffled good reason. Whatever he chose to do, he did. Whatever he did, he was good at.
Until you move beyond your Comfort Zone, you will never know what it is you were missing out there.
Once you realize that what you and I really want is to have the room, the openness, to expand, to grow, to be more of ourselves, whatever that means, and to find out what that means is what's most important to us. Once you see that you can then turn to the business that's going to help you get there.
In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope.
The truth is, nobody's interested in the commodity. People buy feelings. How your business anticipates those feelings and satisfies them is your product.
Stratedgic Objective:
When is your prototype going to be completed?
Where are you going to do business?
How are you going to be in business; retail, wholesale etc?
What standards are you going to insist upon?
[Fruit from own gardens] is going to be something unique about All About Pies that differentiates it from every other bakery or small pie shop. Truly homegrown. With homegrown gentle care.
Most companies organize around personalities rather than around functions.
A Position Contract is a summary of the results to be achieved by each position in the company, the work the occupant of that position is accountable for a list of standards by which the results are to be evaluated, and a line for the signature of the person who agrees to fulfill those accountabilities.
In creating their Organizational Chart, Jack and Murray had also generated the blueprint for their Franchise Prototype.
Only when the Sales Operations Manual is complete does Murray run an ad for a salesperson.
Management System: The more automatic that System is, the more effective your Franchise Prototype will be.
This is our Operations Manual. As you can see, its nothing but a series of checklists.
If you want it done, you are going to have to create an enviroment in which 'doing it' is more important to your people than not doing it.
The most menial work can be a piece of art when done by an artist.
Its the first place I've gone to work where there was an idea behind the work that was more important than the work itself.
What was important was how seriously I took to playing the game he had created here.
There is nothing more exciting than a well conceived game.
That is what a business can do; it can create a Game Worth Playing.
And so I see my experiences...as the beginning of a philosophy for my business, a philosophy that my business needs if I'm ever going to offer anything of true value to my employees and my customers.
You need people who want to play your game. Not people who believe they have a better one.
Hierarchy of Systems
-How we do it here
-How we recruit, hire, and train people to do it here
-How we manage it here
-How we change it here
the 'It' is the stated purpose of your business. (i.e. caring)
It is the system, not only the people, that will differentiate your business form everyone else's.
Your marketing strategy starts, ends, lives, and dies with your customer.
If you know who your customer is (demographics) you can determine why he buys (psychographics).
Find a perceived need and fill it.
The challenge of our age is to learn our customer's language. And then to speak that language clearly and well so that your voice can be heard about the din.
The owner of a business must start out by asking marketing questions.
That is what marketing is. That is what your business must be. Alive, growing, committed to keeping a promise no competitor would dare to make.
A system is a set of things, actions, ideas, and information that interact with each other, and in so doing, alter other systems. Everything is a system.
One powerfully effective message: that you are All About Pies, and that there is no one, absolutely no one else like you.
You must analyze your business as it is today, decide what it must look like when you've finally got it just like you want it, and then determine the gap between where you are and where you need to be in order to make your dream a reality.
