No BS Ruthless Management of People & Profits

Welcome to my No BS Ruthless Management of People & Profits summary!

Review on Amazon: “It’s outdated. Instead of write a long review, I’ll just provide one example to demonstrate my feelings towards this book. In Chapter 34 the author makes the bold claims about 5 secrets he’s about to reveal, “If you apply these secrets to YOUR marketing, you’ll get two to four times the number of sales or customers from the same batch of leads.” And, “not only will you close a lot more sales from your leads, but you’ll also do it in less time, your margins will be higher, and your job satisfaction will be greater than ever.” The secrets are to follow up with leads (rule #1, 2, 3, 5) and to keep a customer database/CRM (rule #4). The book was written in 2009 and this was revolutionary then, but not anymore. Every somewhat mature business has a CRM and follow-up in terms of emails, calls, webinars, etc., is common practice today. It’s not a terrible book, it was just recommended to me various times by a friend, to my ultimate disappointment.”

Did you know I’m an author? I wrote four books on real estate investing, travel, and language learning.

“The purpose of a business is to make its owner rich.” (Loc5841)

The author hits it hard that your employees are not your friends and don’t care about you, and, in fact, will try to take advantage of you. He does make a good point in illustrating that your employee’s incentives are not aligned with yours as the business owner. He’s very anti-perks and uses Google as an outlier. It seems that he’s too purely focused on making a profit. While I do understand it, I also think there needs to be some kind of balance. I think he might be going hard on that fact for a persuasive reason because it seems too much. I know many people who run businesses successfully and who attribute that success to how they treat their team, and that may be an incorrect reason for success on their end. But I also know that people work at places for other reasons and making them seem valuable and an integral part of the business is important.

25% in and the author is still going on about being ruthlessly in business for max profit. He says his hourly rate is $1,600 per hour. Mine is half that. We both have books. He’s sold more. Does he know better what he’s talking about? It would be hard to argue otherwise. But I’ll give my anecdote. I am most definitely NOT in business 100% for profit. I am in business to help Airbnb hosts, many of which really need it, and depend on this income for basic or essential needs. I am an expert, one of the, if not, the best in the world. I can help people with my knowledge. Maybe that’s the difference. He’s selling physical goods, I am selling knowledge.

He does make good points about true employee costs highlighting a $12,50 employee actually costing something like $35 per hour. Currently, I pay an employee 13-37% commission on products that I sell and she delivers. I think it’s a lot. She’s satisfied. I recently doubled my prices after 6 months work and, as predicted, she asked if my raising my prices means a raise for her. Totally absent how I got from $350 to $700 per product.

Lots of selling, pushing his free offer, his newsletter, the credentials and offers of the guest writers of which there are a lot.

The longest chapter, by far, was on ‘bean counters’, a ridiculed name for an accountant or finance employee. Obvious personal issues here; could have been said with many fewer words.

This guy is balls-deep with the marketing and sales staff. I feel like I’m listening to someone talk/brag about their firstborn.

Chapter 34: Maximizing the Value of Your Sales and Marketing Personnel gives BIG promises:

• If you apply these secrets to YOUR marketing, you’ll get two to four times the number of sales or customers from the same batch of leads.
• Not only will you close a lot more sales from your leads, but you’ll also do it in less time, your margins will be higher, and your job satisfaction will be greater than ever.

His first secret “Cherry-Picking” tells you to follow up with warm leads without further specifics. His second secret is a repeat of the first: follow-up. Secret three is to integrate the marketing (bringing in the leads) and the sales (getting those leads to purchase) teams for….better follow-up. Let’s pause here because it just hit me. His information is outdated. How long we’ve come since 2009! Wow. He’s essentially saying here to keep a customer database with segmentation information (CRM, very common nowadays, is secret number four) and to follow up (calls and emails, also very common, basic nowadays). Secret five: follow-up should be educational, repetitive, and have variety. I shit you not. He repeated the same secret 4 of 5 times.

The book is dated in that it doesn’t talk at all about remote work. And it focuses on retail shops or sales companies with sales staff (like how to motivate sales employees, specifically).

Powerful Quotes:

• You will take control of your business when you create processes to control your business. (Loc 883)
• All wealth is based on systems.
• Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go but systems remain constant.
• For a business owner, systems set you free.
• When you go to sell your business, how much is it worth if you’re critical to it? Not much! (Loc941)
• Customers give each of you your paychecks, and your vacations, and your raises, and everything else you get, you simply do not lose customers due to poor customer service. (Loc1426)
• For high performers t have confidence in you, they must know you are ruthless towards poor performers. (Loc17540)
• The fact of business life is: you can’t go far if you require exceptional people. (Loc 2067) There’s not enough of them, they’re expensive, they’re hard to keep
• Your leadership role here is to figure out exactly what your customers value most vs. value least in a relationship with a business like yours. Not what’s important to you. Not what you think should be important to them. What IS important to them. To figure out what aspects of your business offer the opportunity to “wow” your customers and give you some sort of competitive advantage. (Loc3193)
• It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? (Loc4149)
• If I wake up three mornings in a row thinking about you and we aren’t at least occasionally having sex, you gotta go. (Loc4860)
• Here’s what I’ve come to believe to be the single biggest “secret” of extraordinary personal, financial, and entrepreneurial success combined: the use or misuse (or abuse by others) of your time. (Loc5678)
• Success and productivity are not the same things, nor does maximum productivity necessarily translate to success. (Loc5893)

I really liked the advice about finding as many ways as you can to tell your customers that you want to know if they are not happy. I do this with The Belmonte Penthouse, but it’s essential to keeping the employee in line. This way you turn every customer into a manager. It also helps me be a better manager if I know there is a direct path to me and my time.

His notion of Present Bank (Income) and Future Bank (Equity, or customer lists) bears re-reading.

Refer to figure 23.1: The Four Responsibilities of Business Owners in Dealing with Employees

Cool words:

• equine
• moribund
• leviathan
• dregs
• harangued
• sundries
• bellicose
• bucolic

You read my book review and summary by Dan S. Kennedy. Be sure to check out my digital bookshelf for 100+ book summaries.

Thanks for visiting and thanks to Dan S. Kennedy for writing No BS Ruthless Management of People & Profits!