MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

This is a key insight shared by Chet Holmes. He was a very suc­cess­ful busi­ness exec­u­tive, and one of his biggest accom­plish­ments was work­ing and run­ning one of the com­pa­nies at Berk­shire Hathaway.

Char­lie Munger is the vice-chairman of Berk­shire Hath­away and War­ren Buffet’s the CEO. These guys are like demigods in the busi­ness world.

Chet Holmes was said to be “America’s great­est sales and mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive” by Char­lie Munger. He said that he had run 40 busi­nesses and never seen any­body con­sis­tently achieve the kind of break­through results that Chet Holmes had achieved again and again.

Chet Holmes shared his for­mula and it is SO sim­ple that I’m already smil­ing because I know what kind of “That’s it?” reac­tions this will get. What he man­aged to do is pretty impressive.

The com­pany he ran started at about 20M in rev­enue per year. After one year, he took it to 40M. After another year, he took it to 80M. And by the third year, he took it to 160M. Those are impres­sive results. It’s more impres­sive that to grow from 20M to 40M, he didn’t grow his head count nor his resources. Basi­cally zero –no addi­tional fund­ing, cap­i­tal, nor people.

He didn’t share the spe­cific stats for the fol­low­ing years’ growth so I can’t make them up, though I wish they were also zero because that would be really com­pelling but I’m sure at some point the com­pany had to grow to han­dle that kind of increase in volume.

Chet said that he did only one thing to keep grow­ing the com­pany, year by year.

How to gain mastery

He said to pick one thing, and do it bet­ter than any­thing else, and do it bet­ter than any­one else. Pick that one item and own it com­pletely. His key mes­sage is to for­get about being a scat­ter­brain and chas­ing 50 dif­fer­ent ideas because that doesn’t work.

He said that if you can do 4000 activ­i­ties 12 times, or 12 activ­i­ties 4000 times, which would you pick.

4000 activ­i­ties 12 times might be fun, depend­ing on the situation…I wouldn’t want to watch 12 movies 4000 times, for exam­ple. But there is a trade-off.

Chet Holmes is a ‘turn-around expert’, and he chose the lat­ter option: 12 activ­i­ties 4000 times.

In every com­pany he went into, he noticed that peo­ple are doing a gazil­lion things a few times, and they end up mediocre at every­thing. You might say that what he did was almost bru­tal: he went in, div­ing into the sales orga­ni­za­tion and com­pletely turn­ing it around by ask­ing the ques­tion, “How are we going to become mas­ters at sales?”

This is how he achieved break­through with no new sales peo­ple and no addi­tional resources. He would just fig­ure out how to make the com­pany mas­ters at sales and turn the com­pany around. Find out what the 12 things are, and become world class at doing those.

One thing he empha­sized was the impor­tance of weekly train­ings. He said it is absolutely vital because it’s the only way to get break­through results. In addi­tion, in every train­ing, he would teach the same thing. He wouldn’t repeat him­self, of course, but it would all fit into the 12 dif­fer­ent activities.

We all start at a mediocre level, and you have some train­ing, and your insights go up. And then you go back to doing some nor­mal stuff, and then slowly work your way up. But, it’s not going to be done just because you have one train­ing session.

Tim Fer­riss in his book, the 4 hour work­week fig­ured this out. How do you get to a state of mas­tery? It’s by intensely doing some­thing over a short amount of time very fre­quently. He won the World cham­pi­onship in Tango danc­ing at 4 months, which is amaz­ing con­sid­er­ing that some peo­ple spend their whole life learn­ing and prac­tic­ing and don’t get close to that. It’s about the inten­sity of experience.

Chet Holmes did the same thing. He is also bril­liant at sales, which helps because that was how he could train peo­ple and turn things around. He would pick one bat­tle, pick a strat­egy, mas­ter one skill and exe­cute that to the nth degree. I found that inter­est­ing because peo­ple do many things at once, which I agree is some­times a danger.

In Mind­Val­ley, we have iden­ti­fied a few things as our ‘core DNA’ and we are focus­ing on those. Our weekly train­ings began when we read Chet Holmes’ book, the Ulti­mate Sales Machine, because it was one of the 12 things he said you have to do to grow your busi­ness. He said to drag your peo­ple into the train­ing, repeat key points, and push your team to implement.

Remem­ber, to achieve results espe­cially on the Inter­net where there is so much to dis­tract you, repli­cate a proven sys­tem –find 12 things to mas­ter and watch your busi­ness grow.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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