Last week, I shared The E-Myth with you. While an influential book, it lacks the detailed execution strategies needed for success.
This week, I’ll discuss two books that showcase how small the world has become.
Traction and Who Not How
The first book this week is Traction by Gino Wickman. Traction wouldn’t exist without The E-Myth. It came out of Wickman’s work to turn The E-Myth’s concepts and promised outcomes into tangible results.
The second book is Dan Sullivan’s Who Not How. He also authored 10x Is Easier Than 2x, another good mindset book.
Dan Sullivan’s promo blurb on the cover of Traction underscores its significance:
“This book is a must for any business owner and their management team. TRACTION provides a powerful, practical, and simple system for running your business.”
Now, to that small world.
Gino Wickman has been a long-time member of Strategic Coach®, Dan Sullivan’s entrepreneurial coaching program. The idea for Dan’s Who Not How came from another Strategic Coach member and direct mail legend, Dean Jackson. Dean made a statement at a Strategic Coach meeting, and Dan ran with it.
I’m going off on this name-dropping tangent for a reason. These are three very smart people who have helped thousands of people realize their dreams through the content they have created.
While they all have different expertise, they would agree that their network was the main impetus for their success. It was the regular social gathering of the eminent people at Strategic Coach that sparked their creativity and supported them while they fleshed out their ideas.
Long-time motivational speaker Jim Rohn said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. While Wickman is the author, he would be the first to acknowledge that other entrepreneurs like Dan Sullivan inspired him to create the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) explained in Traction.
My vision for Author Nation is for it to be the room where it happened. The place authors like you go to exchange brainpower, spark new ideas, and foster a sense of community—much like the spaces that fueled Wickman, Sullivan, and Jackson.
While Traction wasn’t written for the solopreneur, it offers a great accountability system — that includes yourself. If you are considering building out a team to get you back to writing, I suggest you pick up this book for a workable system.
A significant part of Traction revolves around hiring the right people and getting them in the right seats. Similarly, Who Not How is based on the hypothesis that highly successful people are successful because of who they work with, not how they work.
I first encountered this idea when I was at a three-day intensive retreat with Dean Jackson. There happened to be three people there who were currently in or had been part of Strategic Coach®. At one point, Dean said to me, “That’s a who, not how, question.”
The Strategic Coach people nodded in agreement.
I was confused.
A guy named Norm, who was running twenty businesses, chimed in, “You don’t need to figure out how to do that. You need to find who can do that best and get them to do it for you.”
Too often, when looking at our business, we get hung up on our way or how we think things should be done, rather than the best way. Instead, start by saying, “Here is the outcome I would like. Now, who is the best person to make that happen?”
When building something great, how often do you just settle on who is available or comfortable with a task, rather than saying, “I need to find the best ‘who’ for the job?”
Now comes the irony—something I have seen time and time again with authors running a business and struggling to scale it. The thing they won’t let go of, the one they hate doing, and that takes them away from creating more content, is also the thing they suck at. If they were interviewing for that job, they wouldn’t get a call back. But they can’t imagine giving up control to a more competent person, thus proving they aren’t very good managers either. If that stings, ask why? The real answer will get you and your business to a better place.
If you are considering bringing someone on board to free up your time, here are some parting thoughts. Even if you need to build out a full-blown team, start with one person and become more comfortable with the process.
Try the following method as a starting point:
- Identify the top three things you don’t like to do.
- Assign how much time they take from you and what money they could generate if they were done well.
- Take the one with the biggest time-saving and money-creation potential and decide what outcome you want.
- Create a job posting to drop in VA groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Read: Why Visual Models Are a Surefire Way to Improve Your Business Structure