A valuable lesson I learned is if I have enough money to hire five people , instead of hiring five average people , I ’ ll spend all that money on two rock stars and they will far outperform 10 average people .
Post Your Culture On The Wall . Your culture should be visible everywhere and written on the wall . Employees were not fired for making mistakes , but they were fired for violating values . This didn ’ t just apply to employees . Hoffman turned down multimillion-dollar deals because the business didn ’ t align with his values .
“ What you don ’ t want is somebody saying , ‘ I didn ’ t know that was important ,’” Hoffman said . “ If it ’ s a value , it ’ s on the wall . Build a culture . Even if you are a one-person company , start noting what you care about and what your culture is and start defining the answer to this question .”
Make A Habit Of Info-Sponging Every Day .
Your daily habits matter . Just like the best professional athletes practice every day , Hoffman practices at being a better businessperson . To make sure he is constantly innovating and staying ahead of his competition , he schedules time to do what he calls “ info-sponging ” where he looks at things outside of his own industry .
“ I noticed the really successful people take time to see what the rest of the world is doing ,” Hoffman said . “ They scheduled a few minutes each day to actually pick up shiny objects . I challenge myself to learn one new thing every day that I don ’ t need to know . It ’ s not in my industry .”
Hoffman challenged the audience to schedule 10 or 15 minutes once a week — or daily , like he does — where you pretend you don ’ t work for your industry . He chooses things that look interesting or make him curious . The goal is to learn one new thing you don ’ t even know why you ’ re learning about and then write down one sentence about it .
For example , he read a story about selling distressed inventory and wrote down the sentence , “ Distressed inventory requires a shielded pricing channel .” Another day he read about selling bananas . His sentence had to do with selling perishable commodities . “ Think of every piece of knowledge you acquire like a puzzle piece ,” Hoffman said . He says by collecting the puzzle pieces and moving them around each day , you can study patterns and figure out what the pieces make . “ What happened one day was we ’ re in Connecticut putting all these pieces together ,” Hoffman said , “ and what came out of that was a distressed inventory , perishable commodity yield management-driven sales system . Today , that is a company called Priceline . com and it ’ s worth $ 98 billion .”
The most important thing is that you can ’ t scale a company by yourself . Hoffman won because he found rock stars he trusted , then he empowered them to make decisions for his company . Spend time finding rock stars and building a team of them . Create a network for when you need it by having conversations with people and assessing them everywhere you go . By learning their story , you might just find a person you want on your team one day . When you hire people , find out what their vision is for an epic life , then focus on how you can help them get it . Lead them by serving and don ’ t be greedy . Build a culture of values and post it on your walls . Follow your curiosity and trust your gut as you search to see what the rest of the world is doing , then be the first to bring it to your industry . Do these things and you ’ ll crush your competition , scale your business , and win in life and business . n
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