Anyone who thinks it’s easy to start a business has never tried. It takes a lot more perspiration than inspiration to have a successful, money-making business, and there are a multitude of pitfalls along the way. But easy and simple are two different stories.
Marc Allen, co-founder of publishing company New World Library (with Shakti Gawain), was “a total poverty case through my twenties and well into my thirties.” Taking a few simple steps, like listing his goals and making simple one-page plans for those goals, changed his life dramatically in just a few years. Since then he has guided his company from a small start-up to its current position as a serious player in the independent publishing world, and created a healthy income for himself. Here he offers some guidance to intrepid entrepreneurs.
In your book, Visionary Business: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success you write, “You have to have a higher purpose than making money in a business.” Was that something that all these companies getting bailouts simply forgot?
If you make business decisions motivated only by your desire to make money, you can make some very poor decisions that can end up really hurting you. Look at Enron; look at Merrill-Lynch and all the banks and insurance companies that are in deep trouble now. They forgot their main purpose in business, and when they just focused on making money, they ended up building a house of cards that came tumbling down.
It’s good to reflect on your own higher purpose in business and in life, and find it in your own words. But one thing I know is that it will involve service of some kind. Every business, even every artistic expression, is there to serve people in some way. Enron forgot it was serving people by distributing energy. The big banks forgot they were serving their customer’s financial needs. When we forget our purpose, we can make really dumb decisions that we will regret later on.
You’ve said in interviews that one phrase from Napoleon Hill changed your life. What is the phrase, and how did it change your life?
I reached my financial low when I was thirty-five: The company I had started was on the verge of bankruptcy, with no cash, and I was $65,000 in credit-card debt, with no cash. Then I heard one simple phrase on the radio — someone later told me it was said by Napoleon Hill: “Within every adversity is the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
I put that quote in big letters by my phone. Later on I added my own words: Within every problem is an opportunity. And I started asking myself repeatedly, what were the benefits, opportunities and gifts in my situation? What benefits can there possibly be in being nearly bankrupt? And I found an amazing thing: When I asked that question, I started getting answers.
When I acted on those answers, my business and my whole life turned around dramatically. Within a year, our business was solidly profitable and I was a millionaire with no credit-card debt.
You say every business should have profit sharing with every employee. Every business? Are there any exceptions?
I’ve never been able to find any exceptions. The post office should have profit-sharing. McDonald’s should have profit-sharing. Every little mom-and-pop business that has one part-time helper should have profit sharing. Profit sharing makes every employee think and act like an owner. And once they think like an owner, every employee realizes s/he can either increase sales or reduce costs (or both!) — in other words, every employee can contribute to the bottom line. Profit sharing works miracles; this has been proven to me over and over.
I know absolutely — I can show you on paper — that because I give about half my profits to my employees, we make more than twice the profits that we would have made otherwise each year, year after year. It’s a win-win scenario for everyone. A business based on partnership with its employees, with its customers, and even with the community and the whole environment will, in the long run, grow and prosper.
One of your favorite sayings is, “Love change, learn to dance, and leave J. Edgar Hoover behind.” Where did you get that quote, and what does it mean?
I heard it many years ago, in a news report about the Pepsi Corporation. They had improved profits by an average of 30 percent per year for the previous six years, ever since the new CEO took over. When asked for the reasons for his success, he said he had just three rules: “Love change, learn to dance, and leave J. Edgar Hoover behind.”
I reflected on those rules, and realized they were great keys to success, so I ended up not only using them in my company but writing about them as well:
Love change! Things change all the time, don’t they? We either accept change or resist it — and resistance does us no good.
Learn to dance. This is a beautiful way to encourage people to use the partnership model in all their dealings with other people. Successful business is a dance, not a struggle. Dance with people, work with them to give them what they need, find the win-win solution to every problem or obstacle.
Leave J. Edgar Hoover behind. The old-style, top-down management where the person at the top controls everyone else is obsolete because it’s completely inefficient. Work in partnership with all your employees; let them tell the people in charge how best to do their jobs. A phrase has entered business: Flatten the pyramid. Manage from the bottom up as well as the top down. Have people at all levels work together in ways that allow everyone to contribute.
You write, “The ultimate purpose of visionary business is to transform the world by doing what you love to do.” Can business transform the world?
Absolutely. The world is transforming all the time. I’m old enough now to have seen tremendous changes in so many areas of life. And we’re just beginning a huge wave of transformative change. As Riane Eisler (author of The Chalice and the Blade and The Power of Partnership) put it: “This is the great work ahead of us: the reinvention, the re-creation of society so it is built on partnership rather than domination.”
Often it takes crisis before great change happens. We’re in a time of crisis, and great change is happening. We can either resist it, and get nowhere, or we can all contribute to it, each in our own unique way, by finding and sharing our talents and gifts with the world.
In the last part of Visionary Business, you write about “The Three Essentials of Success.” What are they?
It took me many years to discover this very simple key to success. And it is simple — so simple it seems obvious. There are only three essential things you need to succeed in any business or career, and none of them are all that difficult. They don’t require any special talent or education, though an ability to do simple arithmetic is helpful.
The first essential you have to have is, obviously, a product or service. Every business, every artist, everyone with any kind of career is serving others in some way. The key to real success here is to do what you love. If you put the other two essentials in place, then you can succeed by doing what you love.
The second essential you need is some way to market and sell your product or service. The key to success here is to have a multi-pronged strategy that doesn’t take no for an answer. There are a huge number of different ways to market and sell your product or service. Keep trying different ways until you find something that works. Look at those who have succeeded, and do what they have done. If that doesn’t work, try something completely original. Now that we have the worldwide impact of the Internet, the possibilities are limitless!
The third essential took me about five years to discover after I started my own company: You need financial controls. You need to carefully record and watch every one of your expenses, and move to a place as quickly as possible where your income surpasses those expenses. After five years of losing money every month, I hired a woman who looked at other companies in our industry and made me a chart of industry averages, comparing our expenses with other publishing companies’ expenses. It was a real eye-opener. It showed me all the areas in which we were spending far too much money (mostly developing our books and printing them) and even where we weren’t spending enough (on marketing).
To this day, even though we’re highly profitable, we watch our expenses and compare them to the previous year’s expenses in the same category.
That’s all you need, and it’s not that complicated.
Do you really believe it’s possible to succeed by doing only what you love, and to succeed, as you put it, “in an easy and relaxed manner, a healthy and positive way”?
I have proven it in my own life. It’s all a matter of our underlying beliefs: If we believe we can, we can. If we believe we can’t, we can’t. Working on our beliefs — becoming aware of them, and then learning how to change those that don’t serve us well or limit us in some way — this is some of the most vitally important work we can do.
Bottom line: Do you think anyone can succeed?
Absolutely! We all have these phenomenal physical bodies, with these truly miraculous brains, and we all have a connection with something mysterious and powerful that can help us to succeed, as we choose to define success. I usually call it our subconscious mind, or the universe, or our intuition, but whatever you choose to call it (you can call it God if you wish, or the quantum field) we are all connected with some force that is linked to the force of creation. We can summon that force through many different means, including simply our intention, and once we summon that force, there are no limits to what we can accomplish.
Here’s one way I often put it: The universe says yes to every thought we have. When we say, “I want to succeed doing what I love to do!” the universe in some mysterious way says yes, and then goes about showing us exactly what we need to do, what steps need to be taken next. But if our next thought is, “Oh, but it’s so hard to succeed, so few people succeed,” the universe says Yes, it’s so hard for you, with that thought. And then the universe goes ahead and proves to us just how hard it is.
The bottom line is that our beliefs are not true in themselves — many other people have a very different set of beliefs — but our beliefs become true in our experience if we believe them. So it’s essential to become aware of our beliefs, and to change the ones that aren’t working for us.
It can be done. I’ve done it myself. It takes no special brilliance or imagination. All that’s necessary is being willing to be totally honest with yourself. Where are you holding yourself back because of your limited beliefs? Once you see what beliefs you hold, you can change those beliefs. Because the truth is that you’re creative and powerful and here to contribute to the world in some way. And there are no excuses that are valid — unless you believe them to be valid.
Anyone can succeed, when they understand this. Even me. Even you!
If anyone can succeed, why don’t more people do it?
How many people do you know who dare to dream of succeeding in the first place? How many dare to dream of doing what they love, and making that work for them? Of those that do, how many sit down and write a plan to get there — even just a simple one-page plan? Of those that do that, how many take the next obvious steps they need to take in order to realize their dreams? Very few.
But if you take those simple steps, you can be among those few who succeed in doing what they love to do for a living. The only way to prove if this is true or not is to try it for yourself and see what happens.
Marc Allen is the author of Visionary Business: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success, © 2009. Published with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.
