The Butler Project

What’s on your to-do list today? I don’t care if it’s actually written down or just in your head, what things do you plan to accomplish today?

Right now, you’re reading this blog. Was that on your list? Is it helping you with your big picture? Is it moving you forward to the person and the place you really want to be?

If you’re related to Mark or me, and you’re reading today out of obligation; quit it. If you’re a friend, simply interested in what we’re up to; quit it. If you subscribed at one time, haven’t found any value, and now are just too lazy to unsubscribe; unsubscribe. It will probably cost you two or three mouse clicks. It’s worth it.

If the information you’re spending your time reading at The Butler Project is not inspiring you to make changes in your life, to move forward and really live the life you want to have, then stop spending precious parts of your life here, and find something else!

If there is one thing I’ve learned from listening to, transcribing, and blogging about Mark’s interview with our multimillionaire business owner, Jim, it’s that you’ve got to be efficient! You’ve got to know where you want to go and find the shortest path to getting there. For Jim, that meant flying in to visit the offices he managed on the early Monday morning red-eye so he could have more family time on Sunday. It meant sleeping on the couch or (gasp!) the floor of pest control offices so that he wasn’t wasting time or money on hotel rooms. It meant always looking for ways to be more productive, more efficient with his time.

So, if you haven’t learned one thing yet from this blog, if you haven’t taken some positive action in your life because of it; it’s time to find something else. Something that will help you move forward passionately, and, (for lack of a better phrase) Be ALL You Can Be. And, as long as I’m quoting slogans: Just Do It!

And I’m not just talking about money here; money is just one part of the overall equation. We interview financially successful people because when you have more money, you have more options. Because the path to creating wealth is paved with the principles of self development. Because we personally continue to learn and improve with each interview.

Since you haven’t quit reading yet, I’ll leave you with a little excerpt from Mark and Jim’s conversation:

Mark: you have used a word a lot as we’ve talked, which is “indolent.” And I think that’s a powerful word. It’s a strong word, so define it for me. What do you mean when you say indolent? What does that person look like?

Jim: You know, that’s a great question… I don’t know what the dictionary would say, but in my mind, when I say indolent… it’s the antithesis of productivity. It means you don’t get things done, it encompasses procrastination, excuses, sitting around, perhaps avoiding responsibility, and again, to me it’s just the antithesis of productivity and efficiency.

Mark: Wow. Makes me not want to be indolent.

Don’t be indolent today! Find one thing you can do today, one small thing, if that’s all you have time for, and move yourself forward. Start becoming your best self today.

Here’s another excerpt from an interview Mark did with Jim, who is a pest control company owner worth “many millions of dollars.” When I first listened to this interview, I thought Jim’s ideas were way too far out there in left field to apply to real life, but I finished this post with a new respect for the man and myself.

Jim’s actually brilliantly efficient because he sees the big picture and shoots straight to get his desired results. I’m not sure I could ever spend the night on the couch in a pest control office, but I’m definitely looking for ways to apply Jim’s methods in my life because I would really, really like to have similar results. Enjoy this story:

Jim: In my capacity as a regional manager [for a national pest control company], the job description was very vague; [it] was “Get your regions to perform well, and here’s where we expect sales to be, and here’s where we expect costs to be.”

And I looked at the sales training model that . . . the company had been following the last couple years, which had not been yielding very good results. So I spent the off season going and speaking with all of our competitors and just the top tier of people who had been successful. And I developed a totally different sales training paradigm, and that’s the paradigm that my company rejected (see Why I Quit My Job).

When I would get together with my associates who were the other regional managers, they seemed to be very excited that they now had this corporate account where: “Look at the nice rental car I can rent,” and, “I get to go stay in a nice hotel.” And it made them feel like executives, and so they were able to again rationalize how they could spend their time.

Their Sales Training Model

When they (the other regional managers) would go work with an office [it generally looked like this]: on Monday they’d fly in at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and maybe they’d go to a baseball game or out to a nice dinner. They’d meet up with their team at night. The next morning they would maybe do a sales training, and then go into an office with a manager.

[The] next day they’d take their manager out to dinner or breakfast and maybe they’d spend a couple of hours doing direct training with salesmen … Then they’d fly home, [after spending all their nights] in a hotel.

My Sales Training Model

Here’s how I planned the same trip: I would fly out Sunday night. I would get to where I was going at 1 o’clock in the morning Sunday night, so I could spend Sunday with my family. I would get up then at– if I was on the [west] coast, I’d get up at 4 o’clock in the morning so I could contact my offices on the [east] coast and do phone interviews and congratulations based on sales training.

At 6 in the morning [local] time I would go in [to the main office] with [the] manager … and see what needed to be done [there]. At 9 [or 10] o’clock, I would show up with the salesmen … and conduct the sales training meeting and then be with them in the field all day long until literally 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night.

Then I’d sit down and do performance reviews, evaluations, [and] put together specific training action plans for each individual rep that I worked with, and I would stay in the office the three days until I finished those plans. I didn’t get a hotel; I got the cheapest rental car that you could possibly buy, and I slept on the floor or the couch in every instance for two years.

Comparing Results

So when we got together … to evaluate our efficiency as regional managers, here’s what it looked like: I was on the road three times more … I specifically spent [3 or 4 or 5 times more] time direct training reps than the next manager in my position. And my costs, even though I was on the road that much more, my costs were less than a third of what anyone else’s were. And that wasn’t MY company! That was me just being a responsible steward for the person I worked for.

And then people would have the gall to come to me … and say, “you made … the owner of the company probably in the neighborhood of 2, 3 million dollars, and you only got paid this, doesn’t that make you mad?” And I’d say, (laughing) “You gotta be kidding me! First of all, I made a lot of money. I mean, it certainly wasn’t what [the owner] was making, but I was under the assumption that this was [his] company, it was his contract and he paid me to do this, and that if I made him a lot of money, well, doesn’t that make him want to have me around and perhaps pay me more in the future?” I mean, isn’t that my job as his employee?

The whole mentality of the fact that you did well and so therefore the employer should be penalized or that he cheated you . . . [he] honored his agreement with me, he paid me what he was supposed to pay me! Of course, I didn’t feel cheated!

I Couldn’t Avoid Becoming a Millionaire

Not only that, it provided me an opportunity to work and grow… I think the other managers, the other leaders, were specifically trying to rationalize and take advantage of finding opportunities to be indolent instead of finding opportunities to improve, be productive and be efficient. I’m saying you do that over a period of time.

If one person’s consistent habit is finding a better way to do it, being more efficient with their time and other people are trying to figure out the newest kind of rental car to drive or the nicest hotel to stay in or how to be able to take in an Astros game while they’re in Houston. In one day, that doesn’t change things very much; over the course of two or three years, you have one person who’s stagnant and not improving, and some significant skills can be developed by someone else to where in my case, I couldn’t avoid becoming a millionaire. Honestly, that is the true reality of it.

Another excerpt from Mark’s interview with Jim, multi-millionaire pest control company owner:

Jim: So the first [pest control] company I was with before I was an entrepreneur, I rose up in that company because of my results which were specifically sales related and management related and human resource related . . . I didn’t even want to stay in the industry but I was successful, so they’d offer me a lot of money to come back, and so I did.

The turning point year for me was: I was a regional manager with this company and there [were] three other regional managers. We all had the same amount of employees; we all supervised three different offices. I had no experienced employees in my region, none, and everyone else did have experienced employees . . . I was specifically assigned to three offices who had failed the year before, the other people did not have such offices.

I came up with a new paradigm of “Hey, I think this is where we’re failing as a company. I think this should be done this way.” I did my own research to figure out how I thought things should be done. I don’t want to go off on a tangent and be specific as to what that was, but it was a lot of things.

When I told the owners of the company what my plan was [to improve my region], they said, we think that that’s really outlandish, and we’ll put you on a short string, but we don’t want anyone else doing that, so keep it to yourself.

Well, within a month of the summer I had . . . outproduced any other region by over 85%! And I had zero employees quit, everyone else had a minimum of 30% of their employees in their region quit. And by the middle of the summer, I was put in charge of the whole company!

But it’s because I was thinking outside the box . I would say that the behavior when you continually think outside the box and exceed what other people are going to do, that you just start going to fast and you end up being thrust into doing your own thing because you get ahead of the curve a little bit and you think, “I’m just going to go start my own thing because it’s inevitable.”

Mark: And if I’m not mistaken . . . I personally know the owner of the company you’re talking about, and are they not now pursuing your same business model?

Jim: Yeah, yeah, they are.

Mark: (laughing) So . . .

Jim: I presented to them 12 years ago, and said, “Either do this or I’m going to leave, resign next week.” And they rejected the model and I resigned the next week.

Then they came back and said, “Okay, we’ll give you all this equity and all this money to stay and we’ll do your business model.”

And I said, “I’ve already made an agreement with someone else; if you’d have said that a week ago, we would have done it, but I’ve already made an agreement.”

And they said, “Well, did you sign a contract?”

And I said, “Well, I did something more powerful than that, I gave my word, and had a meeting of the minds . . . So we’re going to stick with the commitments that we’ve made. And I gave YOU a commitment last week that if you didn’t do it, I was going to resign next week, and that week’s past, and I resigned.”

Jim was one of Mark’s longest interviews; he gave so much good stuff. Yesterday and today’s post give you just a little idea of the importance Jim places on commitment and discipline.

Think about your own level of commitment:

• Do you consider giving your word to be more powerful than signing a contract?
• Have you been assigned tasks where it seemed the odds were stacked against you?
• What was your reaction?
• What was your outcome?

Later this week I’ll tell you about how Jim took those three failing pest control offices and turned them into the best selling region in the United States; the guy is crazy!

Today’s post is an excerpt from an interview Mark did with Jim, successful owner of a pest control company. Jim is fanatical about commitment and discipline. This week you’ll read stories about how far he was willing to go to make his ventures succeed.

Mark: Was it a specific intention to become financially very successful, or did it just kind of happen?

Jim: That’s a good question. I personally did not foresee myself being an entrepreneur. So, I had a lot of my work associates when I began college who knew they were studying business, and they knew they wanted to be entrepreneurs. I, like probably most young people certainly thought, “Hey, one day I’m going to be financially independent.”I grew up very poor, and I always felt like I was running on the heels of bankruptcy and having the carpet pulled out . . . from the family I grew up in.

Mark: Really?

Jim: So I felt like I needed to establish a sense of security. I felt very motivated to establish some financial security, but I tended to think that would come from either getting a law degree or getting an MBA and being an executive and doing it through someone else’s business.

And I have many friends who’ve done that, and I think that would have been a great way to go because the principles are the same.

I moved to Texas to start my first pest control company, and we quickly met a group of seven or eight friends; there were three attorneys, there was me (the entrepreneur), and there were a couple of other CPAs.

One of the attorneys said to me, “Look, I didn’t go to as good of a law school as these other guys, but since I’ve gotten my first job as an attorney, I’ve really applied myself. I became the best attorney at the firm where I was, which was a mediocre firm, and I have advanced to now a really good firm, a firm that you almost, to get hired out of law school, you have to be from a first tier type of a law school.”

And he said, “Look at our friends in this group - see these other attorneys that complain that they don’t want to work more than 40 hours a week with their young families? See the accountants . . . all of them complaining, ‘I’m not going to work more than 40 hours a week, because I want to be there for my kids. I want to be there for my family; I want to be there to fulfill civic or church responsibilities.’”

He said, “Pay attention and you’ll see that really that’s the great lie that they’ve used to convince themselves to be indolent. For me, I work over 60 hours a week. In three years I’ll be a partner at the firm where I am, and In 5 years I’ll be making $800,000 a year at the firm where I am, and I will be there for my children and for my church and for my other responsibilities more than my friends.”

Well, what’s happened since then is all the other attorneys still make between, (they’ve now been out of law school 10 years), they make between 100 and 200 thousand dollars a year; the CPAs, the same. . . decent career jobs. I haven’t seen any of them coaching any of their children’s softball teams, basketball teams, or T-ball. I haven’t seen them get actively involved in their church, they’re just there. They’re going through the motions like zombies.

They’re living okay lives . . . they’re involved in all the fantasy sports leagues, they will play the x-box until 1 or 2 in the morning, regularly, and that’s all well and good. My friend, last year he made over a million dollars, he is a partner at the firm where he said he would become a partner. He has two children . . . he’s been the softball, soccer, and basketball coach for both of his kids’ teams every year. And he’s been very, very involved civicly, meaning he’s just become competent, he’s just become efficient. Instead of starting off with an excuse of “Why I’m going to be indolent,” he’s saying, “I reject that. It’s okay to say I’m going to work very, very hard; I’m going to have a fantastic career and It’s not going to be a substitute for the other roles that I want to do; it’s not going to be a substitute for my civic or church or work responsibilities. I’m going to make up the ground by being efficient, by being hard working, by being industrious, by developing better habits . ”

So, I think your original question that you asked me was did I see myself becoming financially independent. I saw myself more heading toward where my friend was as a corporate attorney or an MBA. I think that that would have been a good career path, I’m not here to tout that you should be an entrepreneur, I’m here to say that . . . the skill set is your behavior and your discipline, regardless of whether you’re an entrepreneur. I would say it’s easier for me to be successful as an entrepreneur than it is climbing the corporate ladder, but it’s the same skill set that gets you to where you want to be. It’s having the same vision and discipline of working hard, not just for a week, but always.