20 Things I Learned After 20 Years in Business

1. First who, then what. Business researcher and author Jim Collins states that his most important discovery across all of his research is the principle of “First Who, Then What.” Companies that place a disproportionate emphasis on Who decisions outperform the companies that focused first on the What decisions. Who we go to work with each day is a greater predictor of a firm’s performance than the What decisions we make, like strategy, tactics, capital allocation, and technology—all of which are important, but they always take a back seat to the Who decisions.

2. To care is to care about the workout (the product or service). Almost 20 years ago, I read a blog post from entrepreneur, speaker, and author Seth Godin. He wrote about Steve Jobs being loved as a CEO despite the fact that he was, in the opinion of many, a jerk.

We loved Steve Jobs because we could sense how much he cared about what he was making and how it would be used. Rather than only caring about our customer (and we should care about our customer), we should care—and, in fact, obsess—about the product and service we’re providing the customer.

I think this applies to all industries. My father recently had a minor heart procedure. I was less concerned with the surgeon having a good personality or building rapport with my father. Instead, I wanted the surgeon to care about the surgery.

The surgeon being affable is a bonus, but to Godin’s point: Care more about your product and service, and your customer will love you.

3. Be cautious about benchmarking. Benchmarking is dangerous for two reasons. First, benchmarking compels us to become more similar to our competitors. (See No. 7: Differentiation is the foundation of strategy.) When we benchmark and aim to have similar KPIs as the rest of our industry, our business becomes more similar to our competitors’. This is the collapse of strategy and is a major problem in our industry.

The second reason is that we generally don’t know how our competitors are actually doing. I spent the first 10 years of my business trying to mimic what my competitors were doing until I found out that most of them weren’t making any money.

4. Marketing is a tax paid for by the unremarkable. This is a phrase credited to Robert Stephens, the founder of GeekSquad, and reworded differently by author Jay Baer. (I highly recommend his book “Talk Triggers.”) A better and more accurate phrasing of that concept might be, Baer writes: “Advertising is a tax paid when you’re not good enough at retaining your current customers..." Focus on creating a better product or service, and the customers will come. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Tesla ad. The focus: Build an awesome car, and people will talk about it.

5. The customer is the hero of the story. In his book, “Building a Story Brand,” Donald Miller asserts that most brands mistakenly position themselves as the hero of the story while wise brands position the customer as the hero of the story, with the brand positioned as a guide. If your website talks about being family owned, how many years you’ve been in business, and leads with your values and purpose, you have positioned your brand as the hero.

6. Be known for solving one problem. If you want to grow a company, Miller states that you need to be known for solving one problem. The difficult part is that, in our industry, we solve so many problems. But if we want to grow, we need the discipline to talk in our marketing about only one problem we solve.

Once someone becomes a customer, we can then educate them on the other problems we solve. Every one of your staff (and, ideally, everyone in the market you serve) should be able to answer this question: What one problem are we known for solving?

7. Differentiation is the foundation of strategy. Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon, in her book “Different,” teaches us that our goal shouldn’t be to be better or the best. Instead, we need to understand how we are different from our competitors, and our competitors should agree with us. Hint: The answer can’t be “we have better people” or “we have great classes” or “we’re committed to member service,” because everyone is saying the same thing. Identify the three things that make you different, not better on paper.

8. A service business is actually a training and development business. Service businesses like law firms, medical practices, and fitness businesses involve the equation: raw material + training and development = economic value. The more training and development we provide our people, the more economic value we can produce.

9. You don’t have to wait to be big or great to do what great companies do. I learned this from Collins at an HFA convention in 2006. We can be serious about things like culture before we’ve scaled revenue.

10. Meeting cadences matter. Leading great meetings is one of the most important ways that leaders grow an organization. Patrick Lencioni, author of “Death by Meeting,” argues that leaders should establish a predictable cadence of meetings, each with a distinct purpose, frequency, and time frame. He asserts that most people hate going to meetings, because most leaders don’t know how to run effective meetings.

11. Answer the vision component questions. What are your values? What is your core purpose (this has nothing to do with the technical work)? What business are we in (what do we say yes and no to)? What is our 10-year goal? And, of course, once these questions are answered, the role of the leader is to remind people of these answers over and over. The CEO is more aptly the CRO (chief reminding officer).

12. The greatest risk to a business is that the founder runs out of will. I learned this from a workshop I took with Alex Hormozi. If you are a founder, you need to protect and cultivate your will and passion if you want to grow your business.

13. Maintain operations tenacity. I’m massively inspired by McDonald’s. As I studied McDonald’s, I learned there was no genius behind McDonald’s and no secret to why McDonald’s, with no special advantage, dominated an industry. The only secret that all of their competitors agree on is this: McDonald’s is simply more tenacious about operations.

14. Learning drives passion (not the other way around). Howard Schultz, the longtime CEO of Starbucks, asserts that we mistakenly assume that if we’re passionate about a topic, we’ll learn more about it. Shultz says that he’s observed that this is not the case, and, in fact, the opposite is true. The more we learn about a topic, the more our passion for the topic increases. And with passion, we are unstoppable. Of course, we want to learn so we can remain or become experts, but perhaps the primary benefit is that our passion is ignited.

15. Growth requires simplicity. We can’t simply tell someone to focus. Instead, start by simplifying the business (or any part of the business), and focus will follow. I highly recommend “Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success,” by Ken Segall, a book about how Apple treats simplicity as a religion.

16. Colleagues matter. My closest relationships over the last 20 years are health club colleagues, strength training colleagues, strength and conditioning coach colleagues, academic exercise scientist colleagues, and other CEOs across all industries that I am connected to. A problem shared is a problem halved. The best meals and best conversations I’ve shared over the last 20 years are with colleagues I care deeply about.

17. Standards and accountability matter. Danny Meyer, founder and longtime CEO of New York-based Union Square Hospitality Group (award-winning restaurants in New York City), told me a year ago that the secret to his business is three words: Don’t f’ing settle. The message is to build great companies by having high standards and holding people accountable to those standards.

18. Extraordinary customer service leads to extraordinary revenue growth. Customer service is a core growth strategy, and extraordinary customer service pays dividends that are compounded by each positive encounter. As the saying goes, people may not remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.

19. The greatest customer is you. You have to be in love with your product or service. And if you are in love with your product or service, your team, your customers, and the marketplace will feel it. Ultimately, this is the foundation for an authentic brand.

20. Keep moving forward. My favorite quote from any Rocky movie (and I have a lot of favorites) appears in “Rocky 2.” Apollo Creed is in discussion with his camp about a rematch with Rocky. His manager and trainer, Duke, is trying to deter him. Duke says, “He's all wrong for us, baby. I saw you beat that man like I never saw no man get beat before, and the man kept coming after you. Now, we don't need no man like that in our lives.”

Stay passionate. Stay driven. And never stop.