By the time you read this, it will be Saturday...
Game day...
I’ll be watching my beloved Florida Gators “welcome” Ole Miss to the Swamp.
In case you’ve not been following Florida football, we have a new coach--Jon Sumrall--this year.
And he said something recently that I’ve been repeating to myself, and to the team...
He said...
“No matter what happens, we say ‘GOOD!’”
“Something good happens, we say ‘GOOD!’”
“Something bad happens, we say ‘GOOD’!”
Last week in our march to VICTORY on the plains of Auburn, Alabama, our Heisman-candidate running back misplayed a pass...
Tipped it in the air for an interception... on our own 9-yard line.
Not good.
Sumrall said he pulled the player aside when he came off the field and told him... “When something bad happens, we say ‘GOOD!’ Now you have an opportunity to turn a bad thing into a good thing.”
The player ended up rushing for 162 yards in the game.
Why am I telling you all of this?
Because I think this is the single most important mindset in business.
And we don’t teach it to our teams enough.
Too often, we’re critical of what goes wrong.
But every bit of progress comes from the things that go wrong.
That’s where the growth lives.
I’ve made so many bad calls in my 35 years in business; I’ve lost count.
In my first business...
I made bad hires (a lot before I figured it out).
I once missed a regulatory filing deadline on a client project. I had to go hat in hand to the client and my boss and mentor at the time.
I took bad clients.
I misquoted projects and lost money.
Invested $50k in a 12-month print ad run that produced 0 leads.
And in 2007 I had a business built on residential development in Florida, and government contracts 100% funded by municipal bonds. Not a good combo in hindsight.
But I learned...
How to hire and build a great team and culture. Clients tell me almost weekly how much they appreciate the team we’ve built. That doesn’t happen without the mistakes along the way.
That $50k ad investment I made turned me into a student, then an expert in marketing and sales. I vowed to never again be uneducated on marketing and sales. Without it, I wouldn’t have built this business, written 5 books, and published close to 400 books for our clients. That one mistake turned into at least $10M in added revenue.
In this business...
I launched offers nobody wanted.
Invested in agencies and vendors that didn’t produce.
Fewer bad hires, but still some.
Invested $100k in a series of nationwide events looking for a 5x-10x return, and got a 1.5x return.
But I learned...
→ How to build a machine that turns an event sponsorship into 60 booked sales appointments.
→ How to build a winning and fully remote team culture.
→ How to create offers so good people feel foolish not buying.
And more...
And I know there will be more learning for me.
And there will be more for you too...
Business is just a string of events like that missed pass...
“When something bad happens, we say ‘GOOD!’ Now you have an opportunity to turn a bad thing into a good thing.”
That’s the game.
You have to have a short memory of the bad, and a long memory of the lesson.
And your teams need that too.
We’re in a time of rapid change.
The tendency when the world is chaotic and changing is to sit and wait to see what happens.
That’s usually the losing path.
Fortune favors the bold.
But bold action does not mean foolish action.
You and your team have built decades of learnings.
Now is the time to mine those.
To seek what is unchanging.
And to act boldly to expand on those things.
NOW is the time to make growth moves.
Everyone else is sitting back, playing wait-and-see.
The playing field is yours; take it.
Steve “We say GOOD!” Gordon
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