WINNING
HOW WINNING IS DONE
BY ROBIN ROBINS
When Colonel Sanders retired at the age of 65 , he was flat broke , with his only income a $ 105 monthly pension check . Knowing he couldn ’ t survive on that , he drove from restaurant to restaurant across the country , often sleeping in his car , to attempt to sell them his secret fried chicken recipe for a small royalty for every piece of chicken sold . He was told “ No !” 1,008 times before he got his first sale . After two years , he had secured a total of only 5 restaurants . But 12 years later , he had a restaurant franchise that he sold for millions of dollars and a mainstream brand name .
J . K . Rowling spent 6 years working on her first book while living on government benefits . Twelve publishers turned her down before it was finally accepted , earning her billions .
I once called , emailed , and faxed ( yeah , I ’ m old ) a prospect I wanted a meeting with every week for three months before he agreed to talk to me . In the early years , no one would pay me to speak , so I offered my services for free , even paying my own travel and expenses , for the opportunity to get on someone ’ s stage , suffering a lot of abuse and crappy gigs , eking out just enough money to make the rent , but not much more . I took clients on based on a percentage of sales and repeatedly got swindled out of my money . Early on , I was a target of ridicule for many , with a handful of people determined to undermine my speaking engagements , client relationships , and reputation ( guess not much has changed ).
The point is , most people just don ’ t have the ability to push through a ton of criticism , difficulty , rejection , and crappy work that you often need to go through before you get your act together and start earning the big bucks . I know of many MSPs who traveled a similar journey , starting out small , climbing over boulders , and swimming through sewage-filled alligator pits of problems to get to where they are today . Real resilience .
The world is full of really smart , extremely talented people with a ton of potential and ability . Not many have the pigheaded determination and single-minded tenacity to stick with something long enough to make it work . At the first sign of setback or failure , they ’ re quick to start pointing fingers .
Take marketing , as an example . Someone sends out a direct mail piece that fails . Instead of giving actual thought to what they did wrong , they jump to “ Direct mail doesn ’ t work in my business ” to brush it off and move on to something else . Admittedly , it ’ s a lot easier to blame something else or someone else than to dig in and figure out what role you played in the train wreck .
Clients I work with do have an advantage over those who aren ’ t investing in learning how to do marketing and selling the right way , speeding up their pace and chances for success . But still . If you can ’ t handle a lot of frustration , problems , setbacks , chaos , and things going wrong all at once , you ’ ll never reach any significant level of success in business . Yeah , I know , you certainly don ’ t want to hear that , do you ?
Rocky Balboa famously said , “ You , me , or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life . But it ain ’ t how hard you hit . It ’ s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward . How much you can take and keep moving forward . That ’ s how winning is done .”
I ’ m very good at putting together marketing campaigns that generate results . It ’ s very , very rare that I do something that is a total flop — but it does happen . Further , I am , more often than not , fixing , adjusting , revising , adding on , and struggling through a goal . It ’ s rare to have a single email that produces all the leads , all the sales , all the new clients I need or want . Life does take a toll on all of us .
Given the fact that marketing campaigns that generate a 2 % response are considered a home run in the advertising industry ( which means 98 % of the people ignored us ), I ’ ve developed a higher-than-average tolerance for pain and true resilience in the face of adversity . It is also my observation that this is true of all successful entrepreneurs . They embrace chaos and push through the problems , doing what ’ s necessary , not what ’ s convenient or easy .
We don ’ t spend a lot of time trying to avoid the work and obstacles . We just accept it as part of the process and embrace it .
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