Here’s the second half of Altitude takeaways from my mastermind meeting on February 12.

Again - if you have the chance to get these DVDs… DO SO! I’m only skimming the surface of brilliance here.

1. Although people are INSANELY important (in fact, Bill Gates had said something like, “Take my 20 best people away and Microsoft is nothing.”)… they’re maybe 5% of the results.

95% of your results come from your SYSTEMS. This brings me to an Eben quote that I love.

2. “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process… you don’t know what you’re doing.”

3. A lot of people get stuck in the minutia and can’t zoom out.

This was a great point for me, and why I decided to do so much outsourcing last week.

4. Short term results are often very different from what long term results are going to be, and that needs to be taken into consideration.

Don’t let variation freak you out… but make sure you chart it. Like a crazed bulldog. (That was one of John Carlton’s power phrases. I love it. ;))

5. Once a system is stable , it’s VERY difficult to change… so keep it moving constantly. If someone gets trained wrong, it’s ridiculously hard to change them.

This is HUUUUGE. Eben mentioned this at the Altitude follow-up too, and I’ve really taken it to heart. He talked about how he tells his team from the start, “I’m going to be changing my mind constantly, so expect it.”

I tell people that I outsource to that as well… so they know from the beginning, and I don’t feel like I’m being as annoying when they know it from the get-go.

(It was also really nice to have the validation that I’m not the only one who wants to try 3827432 different things. :))

That being said, he also mentions that you should identify what you never want to change and what you constantly want to improve. For example, with Wal-Mart, they’ll always be the lowest priced company… but they might want to tweak customer service, customer experience, etc.

6. Character is also a stable system that’s hard to change. Eben told a story about Jack Welch, and how he went golfing with some of his top employees. He saw one of the guys cheat at golf, and fired him that Monday.

7. A win is very dangerous for you and your team. People are cocky and feeling invincible. Be careful. Eben told a story about an older woman who was scheduled to be on the Titanic when it sunk. She saw an ad that said something like, “The Titanic - the ship that even God couldn’t sink.”… and so she cancelled her ticket.

Another important point is that most people only associate with success, and disassociate from failure. The classic, “I trained my team to make $700/hr.”, but “They messed up that account.”

8. Tips for creating effective systems…

a) Hook everything up, run it, THEN make guesses about future results.

b) Track results visually - don’t delude yourself any other way.

c) Proactively look for unintended consequences, and EXPECT them.

d) If you want to change a result, look at the SYSTEM, not the SYMPTOM

e) Focus on the strengths, not the weaknesses. I think I might have blogged about this before, but one huge takeaway I got from Joe Polish’s SuperConference was this quote (”If you focus on all your weaknesses instead of your strengths, at the end of the day, all you’ll have is a bunch of strong weaknesses.”)

f) Constantly look for bottlenecks in your system.

Here are more notes from the next week of Altitude DVDs (you need to get your hands on these):

1. Hiring people on emotional bases is VERY damaging. In fact, Eben says that if you like someone a lot when interviewing them… that’s your first red flag.

A lot of people will hire people because they’re like them… which is disastrous, especially for entrepreneurs. If you’re hiring another entrepreneurial type… you’re just asking for a) someone to go and make a competing business, and b) someone to not be around for long.

He also says that you shouldn’t hire someone because you want to help them (family, friends, someone in a bad situation, etc.) He says it’s hard - even for him to this day - but crucial.

His last mistake to avoid is only seeing the good in people. This is one mistake I know I’ve made in the past, but am avidly working on now.

2. He says to surround yourself with stars - star CUSTOMERS, star TEAM MEMBERS, star PARTNERS, and star MENTORS. This is a fantastic point on all accounts.

Tim Ferriss mentioned the customer part in Four Hour Workweek too, and it’s so super-important. It’s SO less stressful to deal with people that are, in my terms, “good at life”.

I had a copy client a while ago who told me he was going to do something small for me… I don’t even remember what it was, maybe return my questionnaire… but he didn’t. Anyway, I called him on it and told him that if he couldn’t keep his word, I didn’t want to work with him. Dude did a COMPLETE 180, and ended up giving me one of my best testimonials ever. And my life was much easier.

Even with yayFOOD… if I get serial complainers, or people who aren’t taking action… I promptly refund their money and peace them out of my site.

And when all’s said and done… I’m one of the happiest people I know.

3 . Finding stars isn’t always easy, because most of them lay low. Eben says most entrepreneurs will never meet a star… because stars only speak “star language” to people that they believe are stars themselves.

4. There’s A, B, and C players. A players are the ones who are the stars… C players are average at best. C players turn A + B players into C players, and are pure toxic. Even having just one C player on your team is insanely dangerous.

Stars, on the other hand… they multiply each other. Two stars together is the equivalent of 3 stars, and 3 are the equivalent of 6.

5. Stars see life differently than other people. They take responsibility for their actions. They have specific aspirations (i.e. they have concrete long term goals if you ask). They’re usually well connected with friends and family. They don’t need to be managed… just led.

Lastly, they’re not “flashy” people (which confirms what I read in Good To Great, about how the CEOs of all the “great” companies were simple people, didn’t like “fancy graphs”, etc.).

6. A great way to test people out is to ask them to take 5 minutes at the end of every day and ask them to report:

a) What they did and the results they got

b) Any problems or challenges they faced

c) Any questions they have

By reading these every day, you “put your finger on the pulse”. It’s harder with knowledge workers to get concrete results (versus assembly line workers, for example, where you can easily account for specific output).

Geeeez, I have tons more pages worth of notes. I’ll post-date the next half for a few days from now. The next part is on systems anyway, so this is a good time to break off.

I’ve got to say though - these points are huge, even if you don’t have a team. I started implementing them and found THREE stars this week. THREE!

One of them is so passionate about yayFOOD that she wanted to work for FREE.

I found another one on a bidding site. I put a project up where someone had to find 100 ultra-specific YouTube videos to put in my video database for yayFOOD. The process is actually quite grueling and obnoxious, and I’d been putting it off for a while. I asked for people to include 2 sample videos in their bid, and to consider how long it took when they made their delivery length claims. It took me like 20 minutes to find 2 that fit what I needed, which is why I had been putting it off. This person wrote to me with 10 or so different videos and said she’d deliver within 24 hours. And for $50! And she was LOOKING FORWARD TO IT. I asked her some “Star questions” and come to find out she’s not just “good at life” - she’s AMAZING at life!

The other one is one of the best writers on the Internet, period. And she gave me a week deadline for what she was going to do (a few reports, articles, blog entries), but said she’d probably get it done even sooner because she liked to get things out of the way right away. I totally get that, I’m the same way with my copy clients. It’s AWESOME to find someone who feels the same.

:)

Back in February of 2008, I was watching Eben Pagan’s Altitude DVDs. I originally had tons of notes on my personal blog, but decided to delete them and put everything right here.

These are some of my best take-aways from one week:

1. Use “If-then” statements in copy more often. Eben mentioned this in the DVDs, and Ray Edwards mentioned it at Idea Incubator.

(i.e. “If you need to lose weight, then this letter might be the most important letter you’ve ever read.”

This is great because it pre-qualifies people and makes them think, “Yes! She’s talking to ME!”

2. Must-must-must upsell and cross-sell more!

3. There’s always an alternate currency… it’s what you’re really selling to the customer. For example, if someone wanted to lose 100 pounds, what would it be worth to them? If $1000… would 10 pounds be worth $100?

If you can help someone lose 50 pounds (worth $500), what can you charge to make the deal a no-brainer? $300?

Another example would be for art. Evan, one of the people who was in my mastermind, is an artist. His currency is either the experience that people get when they look at his art… or the reactions of others (he’s going to be talking to more people to find out how they feel.)

You’re supposed to create a currency that appeals to pain and urgency, the irrational passion that your customer is experiencing, etc.

4. People don’t want to be told what the answers are - they want to feel as if they’ve discovered them themselves. Make people think they came to the conclusions on their own.