Focus on What You Can Control
You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
In graduate school we had a wonderful teacher named T. P. Hall who taught us principles of leadership as well as the more nuts-and-bolts business of business. One day Professor Hall was talking to us about what it’s like to be the leader of a large group.
“When you’re at the top of an organization,” he said. “You function like a big gear. Move even the slightest bit, and immediately you cause the next, smaller gears in sequence to move more, which in turn makes the even smaller gears move even more … and by the time you get to the lower layers of the organization you have hundreds or thousands of little gears all spinning furiously. All that frantic activity is all caused by that one, tiny movement you made.
“So here’s the question: What happens if you keep changing your mind and moving in different directions?” He paused long enough for that picture to form itself in our minds, and then confirmed what we were already seeing: “That’s right. All you’re going to accomplish is to break the teeth off all the gears that are holding the whole thing up.”
That was not a bad description of how the people of Primerica were feeling as we entered the new century. If Rick and I didn’t want a lot of gears spinning like crazy and breaking off all their teeth, we knew we had to be extremely clear and consistent in our focus.
The question was: Focus on what?
When you’re the leader of any kind of organization, you have to be the most focused person on the team. This means you can’t afford to let yourself be attracted to all the distractions. The further up some people get and the broader their responsibilities become, the more they lose focus on what the main thing is. They get a mile wide and an inch deep. Most people have the focus of an octopus on roller skates, a whirr of activity but no direction. You can’t run a company effectively that way. If you’re acting like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel, how are people going to follow you?
In every company, every organization, every project, every career, there are a hundred things you could focus on, and one or two things you should focus on. Those hundred things all seem important. They may even seem extremely important. But 98 of them are either secondary factors or things you can’t really control. Those one or two key things are factors that can spell the difference between butting your head against a wall and surging forward, between failure and success.
Most people have the focus of an octopus on roller skates, a whirr of activity but no direction.
If you want to lead a business effectively, you’ve got to focus your effort, energy, and time on what’s going to produce results. There are some things you can change and some you can’t. If I had one piece of management advice for leaders in charge of any organization, it would be: Find what you can control and focus on that.
This principle applies no matter what business you’re in or what kind of group you’re leading. If you want to succeed, you have to become really good at focusing on what you can control and then letting the rest take care of itself.
Find what you can control and focus on that.
Every business, no matter what size it is or what industry it’s in, has its share of complexity. Whether it’s a multinational corporation or a local diner, there are a million different aspects to consider and keep track of. If you go looking for advice, you can find a million different advisors; from books and blogs to the actual people you pay to advise you. They will give you this suggestion, that admonition, and the other “secret sauce” for what you have to do to make your business work. It’s incredibly easy to get lost in the weeds.
Forget about the complexity for a moment. As a leader, it’s your job to get your head above the weeds, look around you, and see the big picture. If you don’t, if you let yourself be led around by all that advice and all those details, you’ll just break the teeth off all the gears that hold the whole thing up.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to get the details right. And you need to have the right people in place who know how to manage their areas, people you can trust to do it right so that you’re running a tight ship. It’s not your job to personally keep track of every nut, bolt, rope, and engine part on the ship.
Your job is to make sure the ship is heading in the right direction.
The “secret” to making any business work is to figure out where your leverage is, the point where you have some tangible influence, and then focus all your time, energy, effort, leadership, money, and everything else you’ve got on those things that will move your business forward.
The thing you’re looking for is like the ship’s rudder. There are two things about the rudder that make it important. The first is that it determines which way the ship goes. The second, equally important to the first, is that you can control it. You can’t control the ocean. You can’t control the weather, or the seasons, or the tides. You can control the rudder. When you’re looking to figure out where to put your focus, remember those two things. What is the key factor or factors that a) determine what direction this thing is headed in, and b) are in your sphere of control?
Once you find that rudder, put your hand on it and keep it there.
As we left the nineties behind and opened the next chapter of our company’s story, finding that rudder was Job One.
When Rick and I stepped into the CEO’s office, it was the first time in a decade that the company was being run by people who grew up within the company, rather than by someone brought in from the outside. It was an incredible opportunity, a chance for the two of us to seize this thing by the horns and shape it into the truly massive success we both knew in our hearts it had the potential to be. It was our chance to serve hundreds of our friends who worked at the company, and tens of thousands of loyal men and women in the field.
It was also one enormous challenge.
No matter how big the responsibilities or how broad the authority, it’s an awful lot easier being number two than moving into the hot seat as number one. It’s always easy to say, “Boy, if I were in charge, here’s what I’d do. …” Then the day comes when you wake up and say, “Wait a minute—I am in charge!” People don’t realize just how giant a step it is from being the guy just one rung down the ladder from the guy at the top to being the guy at the top. All of a sudden, it’s all on you.
For any leader, the greatest challenges are never the circumstances, the economy, the marketplace, the management, or the employees. Real leaders know that the greatest challenges come from within themselves.
Leadership is like money. It doesn’t change who you are or make you into a different person. It takes who and what you already were and amplifies that. Any issues you might have, whether it’s with ego, insecurity, the ability to get along with others, or whatever else, are all on display when you step into the spotlight of leadership, and they’re all brighter, bigger, and bolder than ever.
Real leaders know that the greatest challenges come from within themselves.
The key here is awareness and self-knowledge. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. What are your weaknesses and potential pitfalls? The more honest you are, the more aware you are, the better positioned you are not to let this challenge get in the way.
For Rick and me, the first potential pitfall was us—and more specifically, the fact that there were two of us.
Typically, having two people share the CEO spot is a recipe for disaster. When you’ve got two CEOs, usually what happens is they end up fighting each other, each one trying to destroy the other to be the big honcho. Big ego is what ultimately spells the death of most businesses.
Fortunately for us, we’d already had years of working together in our “anchors to windward” role. Those years had given us the time and the opportunity to learn each other’s areas of strength and weakness and how we each complemented the other. We already had that functional relationship down cold. We each had our distinct areas of responsibility. I didn’t try to do Rick’s job, and he didn’t try to do mine. We each took care of those areas where our strengths lay, which couldn’t have been more opposite. That worked out perfectly. Everything Rick worried about, I didn’t have to worry about. And everything I worried about, he knew he didn’t have to think about. Between the two of us, we worried about everything. We had also sorted out how our different temperaments worked together when it came to decision time.
Big ego is what ultimately spells the death of most businesses.
Rick is extremely patient and methodical, where I’m a spur-of-the-moment, make-a-decision-now kind of guy. We laugh at how he buys a car versus how I buy a car. Rick will have a spreadsheet mapped out. He’s looked at every model and every feature, every variable, and weighed them all carefully against each other, before he lays down his money and takes possession. Me, I’ll step out for lunch and decide to go buy a car. Done. I force Rick to make a decision quicker than he wants to, and he forces me to slow down. Because of that constant give and take, we typically ended up making pretty good decisions together.
The way I describe our relationship: it’s 1 + 1 = 11.
It wasn’t as if we operated in isolation from each other. As I said, it’s an organism, not an organization, and you can’t completely separate marketing from operations, or sales from administration. We consulted with each other constantly, taking the other’s perspective into account and using it to check-and-balance our own. We were both involved in every major decision. Rick never made major financial moves without the two of us sitting down and talking about it first. Likewise, I never launched any big marketing initiatives without talking it over first with Rick. We approached being co-CEOs as a very participatory process, but we each knew our own strengths and played to those strengths.
What really made Rick’s and my relationship work, though, was that we never competed to see who was going to come out on top. Neither of us had our ego going up against the other. Yes, we had perfectly complementary skill sets. Rick takes care of the financial and operational side of things. I focused more on marketing strategy and leading the field. Having complimentary skills was important. What was far more important was that we both had the ability to take our own ego down a notch and not think we had to have the answer for everything.
Another potential pitfall, whenever you step into a leadership role, has to do with the challenge of succession.
This is a big one. Taking over the reins from someone else always offers a huge opportunity to set a new course for the organization, along with the equally huge temptation to bad-mouth the previous leadership. When new CEOs take over, often the very first thing they do is tell everyone how terrible the person who came before them was and make a big deal out of all the problems that person left behind. That buys them some time and maybe some good will. I’ve noticed that politicians tend to do this too, always blaming their biggest problems on the previous administration.
Here’s the problem: If you do that, you’re focusing your people on the negative. You may think that talking down your predecessor gives you the chance to look good by comparison, but if you do, you’re kidding yourself. Human nature doesn’t work that way. Once you start focusing people on the negative, the negative is what they start seeing. And what people see is what they’ll tend to do.
Here’s the good news about human nature: Whatever you focus on, that’s what you get more of. Here’s the bad news about human nature: Whatever you focus on, that’s what you get more of!
If you’re coaching a kid on a baseball team who’s up at the plate, what do you tell that kid?
You can say, “Now, Billy, whatever you do, don’t strike out! Don’t mess up, buddy, your whole team’s counting on you, so no matter what, do not swing and miss!” Keep doing that, and Billy doesn’t have a chance. You and I both know what’s going to happen. The poor kid is going to strike out. You’ve hammered it into him so hard, now he can’t think about anything but striking out.
Once you start focusing people on the negative, the negative is what they start seeing.
That’s not how to coach effectively. Here’s what you want to say:
“Okay, Billy, you got this, buddy. Just keep your cool, stay loose and ready, and keep your eye on that ball. If it looks bad, let it go. But if it looks good to you, you show it what you’re made of and knock it out of here. Don’t worry about the team, don’t worry about the score, they’ll take care of themselves. Right now it’s just you and that ball, nothing else—just you and that ball.”
Focus Billy on hitting the ball, and you’ve just boosted the odds of him hitting it out of the park.
What you focus on is what you get. In fact, what you focus on grows.
If you focus on your problems, they’re going to grow. If you focus on what’s wrong, more things keep going wrong. As a leader, if you spend time criticizing the way your predecessor screwed things up, all you’re doing is inviting criticism to flourish. Pretty soon you’ll be the one it’s directed at.
A house built on a bed of criticism is doomed. Put energy into blaming your predecessor, and sooner or later people will realize that all you’re doing is evading responsibility.
Fortunately for Rick and me, this challenge—like the challenge of having two CEOs—was no challenge at all. We had talked this issue over thoroughly, long before Joe left and we became co-CEOs. We were in complete agreement about it. We emphatically did not want to negate or in any way run down the leadership that had come before. We’d both seen it happen a hundred times, a thousand times. It’s always poison. Right within our own Primerica culture, we’d already seen firsthand how detrimental it could be to have people stuck in the past.
Besides, it just wasn’t our style. Both by design and by our natures, we were determined we were never going to say anything bad about anybody that came before us. And we never did. We had already been through a ton of cultural changes at the company. We didn’t want to try to change the culture. We wanted to honor it but take it further. We wanted to take the best of what made A.L. Williams great in the eighties, and the best of what Joe and Pete and the others had brought to the table in the nineties, and focus it all on explosive growth in the new century.
Respect the past. Live in the present. Focus on the future.
We knew how to work together. We knew we needed to focus on moving forward without denigrating the past. The $64,000 question—or in Primerica’s case, more like the $6.4 billion question—was, again: focus on what exactly?
During the nineties, the executive leadership had tried all kinds of strategies to stimulate more growth. Often these strategies were aimed either at those people in our sales force who weren’t producing much, to get them to do more; or at people who’d quit the sales force in the past, to get them to come back. A lot of energy and effort went into trying to figure out what we could best do to get the “inactives” active again. As Rick and I took the helm in 2000, I was pretty sure I knew the answer to that question. I knew exactly what we could do to get all those people who’d quit over the years to come back. It came down to one word: Nothing.
A big part of focusing on what you can control is not focusing on what you can’t.
There was absolutely nothing we could do that would cause inactive people to suddenly become active again. When executives would ask, “What if we did this, or did that, or made this change or that change, could we get all those people who’ve quit to join us again?” The simple answer was: Nope. So let’s not put energy into something we can’t accomplish.
A big part of focusing on what you can control is not focusing on what you can’t. Sounds simple, right? Yet it’s amazing how much time, energy, and emotion people devote to focusing on things that are completely beyond their control.
We all do this, to some degree. It’s human nature. I love the University of Georgia football team. I’m a big Bulldogs’ fan and go to every game I can. Like a lot of sports fans, I have some peculiar habits in relation to my team. For example, I’ll wear the same socks to every game, the same shirt, the same hat. If they get behind, I’ll stand up and move to a different place. If they start winning, I’ll stand right there in that exact spot for the rest of the game.
Why do I do these things? Out of the completely irrational sense that anything I do could have the slightest influence on the outcome of the game. Of course, that’s just plain silly. The reality is that I have no control whatsoever over the next play or any player’s behavior. I know that. There’s a portion of my brain that fully understands that Georgia did not lose the game today because I couldn’t find my lucky socks this morning. That’s nothing but pure superstitious nonsense—and I do it anyway, laughing at myself as I do.
But not when it comes to business.
When it comes to the things that really matter, there’s no room for indulgence or superstition. When it comes to business, I pay very close attention to what I can control and what I can’t.
I cannot control Congress or the state of the economy. The president of the United States has so far not called me up and said, “Hey, John, what do you think we should do about this?” Neither has the chairman of the Federal Reserve. The reality is that I don’t have any more influence on the state of the overall business climate than I do on the outcome of that Georgia ballgame.
What I have control over is what I do and how I behave every day.
“[I]n our world,” wrote Tolstoy, “everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.” Whatever change you want to see in others, you have to be that change. If you want people to be more excited, then you’ve got to be more excited. If you want people to work harder, then you’ve got to work harder.
If more people spent more time working on themselves and less time complaining about everyone else, it’d be a much better world. People would be able to accomplish a lot more. I’m not preaching morality here. This is simple physics. There are things you can influence and things you can’t. Why waste time and energy on the latter?
People tend to be attracted to their distractions, but distractions are just places where you’ve got no traction. Because businesses are nothing but collections of people, businesses do the same thing. So many businesses pour enormous amounts of time and effort into trying to change things that will never change. You can push against the mountain all you want, but that doesn’t mean the mountain’s going to step aside.
So, back to the strategic question we faced in 2000: How do we increase the percentage of people in our sales force who are doing a significant amount of business? We could spend the next decade trying to come up with solutions to that puzzle, or we could just cut to the chase and accept the commonsense answer: We don’t.
You could take all these thousands of people who haven’t done anything in years and send them an inspiring letter about all the changes you’re making and all the great things you’re doing and how exciting this is gonna be. Will they suddenly start getting engaged? No, they won’t. Sure, at the margins you can improve people’s productivity, but by and large, when someone’s done, they’re done. Throwing alarm clocks into the cemetery won’t raise the dead, and planting a dead stick in the ground doesn’t make it a tree. You can plant it, water it, and fertilize it all you want. It’s not going to grow.
You can’t change human nature. You can’t force people to be what they’re not or do what they don’t want to do. People are people. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. You can’t change their buying habits. You can’t change their preferences.
Apple became the largest technology company in the world by building devices people could use the way they wanted to, instead of trying to make people adapt themselves to how the devices wanted to be used, which is what everyone else was doing. Southwest Airlines became the number one carrier in the United States by letting people fly the way they wanted to—no penalties for changing flights, no penalties for booking flights one leg at a time, no extra charges for luggage—instead of trying to force their customers to accept the way the airline wanted them to do it like everyone else was doing.
These companies became incredibly successful by facing the realities they were dealing with, and working with them instead of trying to change them. They focused on what they could control, and didn’t try to affect what they could not control.
The reality we were facing in our business was that it’s a volunteer army. In our business, we attract part-time people. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. We don’t get to decide who joins. And we’re always going to attract a lot of people who join just because they like to join things. There are plenty of people who will join anything. They’ll go to the meetings, and they’ll have a great time being part of the excitement. They love the feeling of belonging to something. The majority of them aren’t necessarily going to really do anything major. We’ll never change that.
What we needed weren’t more joiners. What we needed were leaders. A lot of people start out as joiners, maybe without even realizing they have leadership in them, and develop into leaders only once they’re in the right environment with the right support. But you can’t tell who’s who when they first join. You have to just let them be who they are. The only way we were going to get more leaders was to bring in a lot more people and let the leaders show up, like cream rising to the top. The reality of our business is that you have to attract a ton of joiners to find a handful of leaders. That’s just the way it is.
We didn’t need our people to do more. We just needed more people.
And there was our answer. Our growth strategy starting in 2000 boiled down to three words: Focus on recruiting.
Our corporate leaders throughout the nineties had viewed recruiting as one part of the whole equation, but that wasn’t going to do it. It had to be the most important part of the equation. Recruiting had to be the tip of the spear. Without that sharp point, all we’d have was a big stick.
To explain the strategy to our team in Duluth, I told them about the car I had had back when I was a college freshman, a red 1973 Ford Maverick. That car had terrible alignment, and there wasn’t one darn thing you could do about it. You could leave it at the best shop in town and get it adjusted absolutely spot-on perfect, and when that thing hit a bump in the road five minutes after you picked it up, Blam! There it went, right back out of alignment again.
This, as I explained to my team, was a condition that was beyond my control.
Pretty soon I figured out what I had to do. If I wanted to make that thing go straight, I had to oversteer it to the left. It was that simple. I had to accept the condition I couldn’t control, and compensate for it.
“This business is just like my red ‘73 Maverick,” I told the team. “The thing that drives our field is human nature. People have problems in their lives. They have challenges. They quit. We can’t stop that. We can’t make them not quit, and when they do, we can’t make them come back. There’s not one thing in the world we can do about it. That’s how they’re aligned. If we want this company to grow, we have to oversteer it toward recruiting. We have to focus everything we do on supporting the field to recruit. The message has got to be consistently recruiting.”
That was our rudder.
The thing that made our business work was pretty simple: new people bringing in new people. If we didn’t have that happening, we weren’t growing. And if we weren’t growing, then we were dying.
You’re either green and growing, or you’re ripe and rotten.
This business is all about momentum. The thing is always in motion, at all times either growing or declining. It never stays put like a constant number. Any time you take your foot off the gas and try to coast, Murphy’s Law tends to take over and make hash out of things. Momentum is a lot easier to lose than it is to build, and when you lose it, you better fight like a junkyard dog to get it back.
You’re either green and growing, or you’re ripe and rotten.
This was exactly what we had to do now.
Leaving home for college in the fall of 1975 was one of the toughest transitions of my life. Looking back it seems almost ludicrous to me now. The University of Georgia in Athens was barely fifty miles away from where my parents and I lived, less than an hour’s drive. Obviously I could come home at anytime to visit. But to me, I might as well have been heading off to the University of Alaska. I was leaving my home, my friends, my neighborhood, and going off to live in a strange environment with thousands of students and gigantic classes.
Arriving at the campus in Athens was an experience of total culture shock. I’d grown up in a tiny community on the outskirts of a town of maybe five thousand people. Now there were four times that many people just in my school.
One of my first classes, Political Science 101, took place in a huge amphitheater with several hundred students. I took a seat in the back row and looked around. A lot of these students had come from the wealthier sections of Atlanta and gone to prep schools. They were ready for this place and looked like they fit right in. I felt like I’d relocated to Mars.
That first day of class, the girl sitting in front of me raised her hand. When the professor called on her she said, “Are we going to receive a syllabus today?”
A syllabus? What on earth was that? I had not the slightest clue what the word meant. I thought, The class hasn’t even started yet, and I’m already behind! Had these people all taken a course in how to go to college? Because they all seemed like they knew what was going on, what to expect, what to do, and I was absolutely lost.
After that demoralizing political science class, I went back to my dorm room and called my dad from a pay phone at the end of the hall. “Dad,” I said. “I hate it here. I don’t like the people. I don’t like the place, and I don’t want to stay. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I want to quit school, come home, and get a job.”
He said, “Look, Son. We’ve already paid your tuition. You’re already there. Tell you what. Wait till Christmas, and then we’ll make a decision.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot.” I hung up feeling heavy-hearted. Christmas seemed like an awful long way away.
That first semester at college was the first and only time in my life when I found myself saying, “Okay, so this is what being depressed is all about.”
A few weeks later, we had our first political science exam. When they handed around our graded papers, I was thrilled to see I’d made a 98. I peeked over at the girl who sat in front of me, the one who’d asked about the syllabus on day one. Because of the slope in the amphitheater seating, if I leaned forward a little I could just see her paper as she looked at it.
She’d gotten a 46.
I sat back in my seat, stunned, the realization echoing around my brain like a thunderclap. This girl had almost made me quit! Of course, she didn’t know that. And it wasn’t actually her who had almost made me quit. The fact was that I’d been just looking for a reason to disqualify myself, a reason to say “I’m not good enough.” It was me who almost made me quit.
Now, this was weird. It wasn’t like I’d grown up with parents who told me I was a loser. I didn’t come from a miserable home. I had two of the greatest parents anyone could wish for. They never yelled at me, never hit me, always encouraged me and believed in me. I had a very happy childhood. Yet here I was, fully expecting myself to fail, for absolutely no good reason. I had this deep sense of inadequacy, this conviction that I wasn’t good enough. Where did that come from?
I’m now convinced that it just comes with the territory. It’s part of being a human being in the world. People are designed for success but get conditioned for failure.
You are not supposed to be broke. You are not designed to settle for mediocrity. But somewhere along the line, the world starts beating you down, programming you with the idea that life is hard. It starts telling you that as soon as you get out of school you’re going to go “get a job,” which is code for “go find something that’ll allow you to just get by.” Day-by-day, week-by-week, you gradually give up on your dreams and start accepting what you think life has to offer.
People are designed for success but get conditioned for failure.
Of course, if you had an especially tough time as a child, growing up with people who were constantly cutting you down and undermining your confidence, then it’s easy to understand how you’d arrive at adulthood carrying a pretty big burden of belief that you were a failure. But what I was seeing in myself shocked me. I realized that it doesn’t take a terrible, abusive, Charles Dickens type of childhood to do that to you. Because even if you grow up in the most supportive environment imaginable, it seems to be part of our human nature that we beat up on ourselves. Yes, circumstances can put up roadblocks and smash potholes in our path. But far more insidious are the ways we undermine our own forward motion ourselves.
They say most plane crashes happen in the first 90 seconds after take-off. I think most careers are like that too. We sabotage ourselves and talk ourselves into outright failure or its sullen cousin, mediocrity, before we’ve even gotten started. Right there in my first week of college, I’d almost quit school. I’ve often wondered: if I had quit, how differently might my life have gone?
Most people wake up every day looking for a reason not to win, a reason not to do great things in their lives. Looking for a reason to fail. Some people, as the saying goes, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. When they see a doorway of great possibility open in front of them, they turn the other way.
I’ve seen people who started out in life with an “I’m gonna conquer the world” mindset. As the years tick by, that optimism fades. They start living in the past. By the time they’re 20, they’re already reminiscing about the high school football days. By 25, all they talk about is what they did in college. Some people are old at 30; the best of their life is behind them. Yet I’ve met 80-year-olds who are incredibly young. Chronological age is completely beside the point. I don’t care how old you are, if you want to live your best life, if you want to be someone who leads others, who makes a difference in the world, then you need to be focused on the incredible possibilities that lie ahead on the path at your feet.
I believe the single most important factor in your success is to take responsibility for where you are in your life and for moving forward from there. You’re the one who sits where you sit, the one whose task it is to figure out what you need to do now to get to someplace better.
You will never rise above the image you have of yourself. And the person in charge of that image is you. Nobody else. You are in charge of your life—not the people who doubt you, not the people who question you, not the people who put you down, not the people who look down their noses at you. If you want to win, don’t waste any time beating yourself up about the mistakes you’ve made or the ways you think you don’t measure up. You can’t let life overwhelm you. You have to be the one who goes out there and overwhelms life, the one who seizes life by the horns and wrestles it to the ground.
Taking responsibility for your life doesn’t guarantee you’re going to do well, or that you’re going to succeed. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee much. But it does guarantee this: that whatever happens, you’re the one behind your own steering wheel.
You will never rise above the image you have of yourself.
I don’t know if I can say this came to me as a fully formed revelation, exactly, sitting there in my freshman political science class, and I wouldn’t say I exactly went out there and overwhelmed life. But I did finish that first semester with pretty decent grades. I started to have a glimmer of understanding that I was the person in charge of my life. That in order to be a winner, I would have to start looking at myself as a winner, talking like a winner, acting like a winner, thinking like a winner.
This was how the whole team at Primerica needed to start thinking again. During the nineties, we had experienced a period of changing visions for the company. The company had made a lot of positive strides, but all the changes had also taken a toll. On the positive side of the ledger, we focused on needs-based selling and implemented business systems that allowed the company to navigate a changing regulatory environment. But these changes also had our team wrestling with how to build their businesses. I felt that we were applying the gas pedal and the brakes at the same time.
The changes were very important—critical in the IPO process a decade later—but our sales force was more focused on what and how to do business and not on why to do the business. They and we were focused on the business as a business and not a cause. We wanted to keep all the good that had been done and unleash the fun and excitement in the business.
Rick and I knew what our growth strategy was: Focus on recruiting. The next question was: How exactly were we going to put that into action? We could talk about recruiting till we were blue in the face, but we couldn’t force anyone to go out and do it. They were the ones who had to go out and do it. “They,” in this case, meant about 80,000 independent agents spread throughout the country. People who were not on the payroll. People who were 100 percent volunteers and didn’t have to do anything.
A lot of people in the sales business talk about training and business systems. An enormous amount of time, energy, and money goes into devising new ways of training people how to do the business. But it’s not about the training. It’s not about the system. And it’s not about the thousand and one ways the products are great or all the product information you can cram into a website. You can take the same great products, the same brilliant system, the same time-tested training, and still wind up with thousands of people at a dead standstill because people are not going to care much about the how or the what until they are first inspired, motivated, and plugged in to their why.
Too often leaders think they can get results by lighting a fire under people. That rarely works. When it does work, it doesn’t last for long. If you want real results, you have to light a fire within people. Instead of trying to focus them on what you want them to do; you have to focus them on why they want to do it.
Bottom line: Primerica is not at its core an insurance business, or even a financial services business. At its core, it’s a people business.
In fact, this is true for any business. Every business is a people business, and people are pretty much the same wherever you go. People are people are people. They want to be made to feel special. They want to be recognized. Before they’re going to be interested in focusing on all the details and particulars of their job or task, they want to be part of something exciting, something fun, something compelling, something great. Every organization is ultimately driven by a sense of mission and the importance of what the people in it are accomplishing. If it isn’t, then people are just punching a clock, and that won’t take anyone very far. Simply doing it, whatever the “it” is, to earn a paycheck is just not going to cut it for long.
Instead of trying to focus them on what you want them to do; you have to focus them on why they want to do it.
Logic would tell you that the people in our sales force are here for the money, right? After all, there’s a pretty significant financial opportunity here. Some of our people, those who’ve been here for years and grown tremendously in their leadership abilities, have been able to build up to some truly impressive income levels (as we’ll see a little later on). Boe Adams, one of the company’s legendary figures going back to the early days of A.L. Williams, used to say, “For salespeople, the most sensitive nerve in the body runs from the wallet to the brain.” Boe had a good point. As I said, the key indicator that corporate always needs to have their eye on is checks to the field.
But what I’d learned through my years with the company was that even though they do it for the money, they don’t do it for the money. Is that a contradiction? Yes, it is. It’s also true.
Is the money important? Of course. But by itself, the money’s not enough. You can have all kinds of financial incentives in place, but if you have a toxic environment with terrible communication, no recognition, and no sense of adventure or fun, then all the financial incentives in the world aren’t going to get that thing off the ground.
Every organization is ultimately driven by a sense of mission and the importance of what the people in it are accomplishing.
People are people. Yes, they need to run their households, and obviously, the money has to work or it isn’t worth their time. The money may even have been the driving reason they looked at joining Primerica in the first place. Hey, if you stuck a microphone in their face and asked them, “Why are you here? Why are you in this business?” they might even tell you that it’s to make extra household income, to provide for their families, to help make ends meet. But I can promise you, the money is secondary. That’s not what makes them stick, and it’s not what makes them grow.
What makes them stick, what makes them grow, is how they feel about what they’re doing. When things aren’t going well, when things are a struggle, that’s what keeps them going.
And bottom line, that was the biggest problem we faced as Rick and I took office. Little by little, we had been drifting away from this simple truth for years.
Our meetings had become too focused on things, content, the how-to. New products, new presentations, new tactics and new ways of conducting the business. Don’t get me wrong. Knowing your product inside and out, being properly trained in how to talk to people, having the knowledge that drives your business, these are all important. But that wasn’t our problem. We had that part down. The information was all good, but effective meetings aren’t about information. A meeting isn’t just a meeting. It’s an event.
An event can’t just be a product symposium, where everybody walks out the door with their heads filled up with product knowledge. If you want to light fires within people, you have to create something that inspires people to go home and start calling, e-mailing, and texting their friends to say, “Wow, you have got to be here at the next one!” Your event has to become a showcase of success.
Over time, our focus had become business, business, business. I wanted to get us back to people, people, people—the spirit of the family, the team, who we are, our cause and our mission. I wanted to get us back to the understanding that this wasn’t just a great business, but that we were changing people’s lives.
We couldn’t control what the sales force did. We couldn’t control what anyone did, except ourselves. What we could control was what kind of message we gave out from the home office and where we focused people’s attention. That was pretty much it. That’s what we had to work with. Everything else would be a waste of energy.
What you focus on grows. If we created an environment of fun and excitement and a sense of shared mission, focused everything within that environment on recruiting, then recruiting would grow.
At least, that was the idea. Would it work? We’d soon find out.
We had to hit the ground running, so we didn’t waste any time.
We wanted to take all the good that had been accomplished and jump-start recruiting. You can’t wait for success to create an environment of excitement. That’s backwards. You have to create excitement first because you need excitement in order to generate success. We had to show them that things were going to be different. We had to create something exciting, something that would have everyone talking. And that’s exactly what we did.
In January 2000, we held a meeting in Atlanta with about 500 of our national sales director teams to kick off the new era. Our theme was One Team, One Dream. This wasn’t about Rick and John, and it wasn’t about the corporate team over here and the sales force over there. It was about us—the Big Us. The collective team.
“We’re going to do great things together,” we told our leaders. “While most companies focus on earnings per share, we’re going to be focused on earnings per chair.”
That January meeting turned into something more like a revival meeting than a company conference. The level of spirit and enthusiasm in that room was electric. The five-hundred-odd people who were there took the spirit of that day out to the rest of the field, and people started getting lit up again everywhere.
During that meeting, we also kept coming back to this core message:
“We’re going to put the fun back in fundamentals.”
Our number one task that year was to make the entire environment at Primerica more fun. We had to get back to having fun, without repudiating all the compliance elements that had been put in place to make the business work better. That became our rallying cry for the rest of that year.
And it wasn’t just talk. We instituted new programs to drive the message home.
This being 2000, we created something called the Millennium Leaders Council, which was essentially an incentive program for brand new reps. Every month, based on their numbers in recruiting new people and sales production for their first 100 days in the business, people could qualify to be part of the Council. We would fly the top 100 to Atlanta every month to be in the audience and be recognized in my monthly TV broadcast. We would chauffeur them in from the airport, and when they got to headquarters we had a red carpet out there for them. We treated them like royalty, because they were royalty. New people were the lifeblood of the business, and we acted like it.
We put a tremendous amount of emphasis on field incentives. Not just incentives to earn cash bonuses, but incentives to earn cash plus all kinds of recognition. We expanded our contests and dramatically increased the number of slots people could win. We designed it so that more people at all levels of the sales force could win, not just the folks toward the top of the company. We made it so that more new people could win, and made recruiting a more important part of our contests.
Things began to grow. And grow. And then they grew some more.
Over the months after that first leadership event we started seeing significant momentum, both in recruiting and in sales. That momentum lasted throughout that year and kept right on going.
One day in the early fall of the following year, I was in Washington, DC, at a board meeting of the Direct Selling Association. The DSA has represented direct selling companies for more than a hundred years. During the nineties, we had worked with some people from their organization and bit-by-bit developed a strong association with them. They’re great people, and it’s a great organization. At this point I was serving on the board of directors.
On this particular Tuesday, while I was in an early morning meeting there, I got a phone call from Dayna, my long-time executive assistant, who told me I needed to tune to the news. We switched on the TV in the boardroom and saw the World Trade Center in flames.
A few minutes later the second plane hit.
We were meeting at the St. Regis hotel, a few blocks down from the White House. Just outside our doors the military was already heading up the street. It was chaos out there. Some of my colleagues were saying they thought they might have to make arrangements to catch a flight out of DC that afternoon.
“I don’t think so, guys,” I said. “This is a whole different thing.” I knew right away that all air traffic was going to be grounded, and not just for a few hours.
I got on the phone with my office and was able to get a ride through one of our senior national sales directors from North Carolina, Andy Young, who is one of my best friends on the face of the planet. Andy has family, as well as a large organization, in the DC area, and he got me set up right away. Andy’s brother Randy and his sister Debbie drove me and my friend Stuart Johnson down to Greensboro, where Andy met us and drove us the rest of the way down to Georgia.
When I reached the office, plans were already under way for a special event we would hold a few weeks later in the New York metro area as a tribute to the people who had perished in the attacks. Our sales force was very strong in the New York and New Jersey area, so it had a huge personal impact on many of our field leaders, who had lost close friends there.
The events of September 11 were both tragic and sobering for everyone in the country. For us at Primerica, they also had the effect of shedding a stark light on the reason we were all there, doing what we were doing. Every time there’s a major tragedy where many people die, it always brings into clear focus the importance of what we do because it directly affects our clients. We are, after all, first and foremost a life insurance company. Helping families cope with the impact of loss is what we do. The reason Art founded this company was to make sure ordinary Americans were as fully protected from financial catastrophe as possible.
Let me give you just one example.
We had a brand new agent in New York at the time who went out and created her first client on Sunday, September 9, a man named Miguel Alvarez.
Miguel was a classic American success story. An immigrant from the Dominican Republic, Miguel had a lovely wife and three daughters. He also had a fantastic job as maître d’ at Windows on the World, one of the most famous restaurants in New York City. (Note: I’m using pseudonyms here to protect the family’s privacy.)
Miguel wanted to get the policy, but his wife was reluctant. She saw it as one more bill they’d have to pay every month. The agent was very encouraging and pointed out that the family had no insurance and no savings, not a nickel, other than what Miguel earned at his job. Between Miguel and the agent, they convinced Mrs. Alvarez to let them go ahead and write the policy. The agent wrote the application right away, that Sunday, and planned to turn it in to the local Primerica office a few days later, on Tuesday evening. That is, on the evening of September 11.
As maître d’, Miguel would not normally have been at the restaurant at eight o’clock in the morning. But for whatever reason, on that particular Tuesday he went in early. Windows on the World was situated at the top of the North Tower. He was there when the plane hit.
We didn’t actually have Miguel’s application in our office at the time (in the chaos of the day’s events, the agent wasn’t able to turn it in as planned), so strictly speaking the policy was not yet in effect. It didn’t matter to us. They say “Intent is nine-tenths of the law.” The Alvarezes’ intent was good enough for us. We paid the claim in full, immediately, and gave our rep a check to deliver to the family for $250,250.
“I cannot imagine what would have happened to that family with three daughters and zero income, if they hadn’t taken out that policy. It really drove home to me what it is we do at Primerica,” Joan White, the agent who delivered the check to Mrs. Alvarez, later related.
We had clients on every plane, in every building. We paid $10 million in death claims in connection with September 11.
A few weeks later, we put on our event at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. The whole purpose of the event was to pay tribute to the people who had died and express support for their families. It also served to underline the seriousness and importance of what we do for our clients. It ended up having the effect of further focusing our entire sales force.
Yes, building financial success was important. Yes, having a lot of fun while doing it was equally important. But more than anything, we were all here together to help as many people as we possibly could to make their lives better—both in the good times and the bad.
Back in March 2000, just a few months after Rick and I took over the CEO spot, the Nasdaq crashed, the dot-com bubble burst, and the overall business climate began to darken. Now, in the months after 9/11, the whole economy slid into the pits, as a full decade of record economic growth began grinding to a halt. But not at Primerica. The souring economy didn’t especially touch us. In 2002 and beyond, our business continued to grow.
When Rick and I took over at the end of 1999, Primerica had about 79,000 licensed life insurance reps in the field. By the end of 2006, we were over 100,000 strong. During that time, sales force cash flow went from a little over $400 million annually to over $600 million annually.
One of our goals was to significantly increase the number of people earning six figures. When you’re earning $100,000 or more per year, you’re bringing in more than $8,000 a month. In my experience, most families can run their household on that without feeling a pinch. That’s full-time income.
When you increase the number of six-figure earners, you also automatically increase the number of seven-figure earners, that elite group of people who are earning a million or more a year. That’s important, too, because even though these folks are by definition always going to be a tiny minority, they also serve as a very real inspiration to the rest of the field. And that’s not all. When you increase your number of six-figure earners, that also means you’re increasing the number of five-figure earners—the part-timers who are bringing in $800 to a few thousand dollars a month. For these folks, that can mean a car payment, a house payment, or even the difference between making it versus going under. These guys and gals are in many ways the heart and soul of the business.
From 2000 to 2006 the company doubled the number of $100,000 earners and doubled the number of million-dollar earners.
These years were amazing. In the summer of 2001, we held our biennial convention in the Georgia Dome, an enormous stadium in the heart of downtown Atlanta. We did the same in 2003, 2005, and 2007. For both the 2001 and 2003 conventions, I hired a motor coach to drive out to Salem and pick up my Mom and all her friends—including my uncle, A.W. Dalton—and ferry them over to the Dome in Atlanta, where they were seated in VIP seats down in front. They got to see Little Johnny up there in front, talking to those thousands of cheering Primericans.
FIGURE 5.1 Cash Flow to the Sales Force, 1999–2007
I’ll never forget the look on my mom’s face that night in Atlanta. I’d made her proud. No better feeling in the world.
Business had never been better. By the mid-2000s, we were receiving so much mail that the U.S. Postal Service gave us our own zip code.
We were on a roll. There was no stopping us.
At least, that’s how it seemed at the time.
Focus on What You Can Control
As the leader, you have to be the most focused person on the team. There are some things you can control and some you can’t. The secret to making any business work is to figure out where you have the most tangible influence and then focus everything on those things that will move your business forward. What you focus on grows.
A real leader knows that the greatest challenges come from within. Be brutally honest with yourself. Ask yourself: what are my weaknesses and potential pitfalls? The more aware you are, the better positioned you are not to let this challenge get in the way.
Treat your predecessors with respect and give them the benefit of the doubt. It can be tempting to badmouth the leadership that came before you, but doing so will only weaken your own leadership. Focus on what you need to do, not what your predecessors did. Take the best of what came before, and focus on what you need to do to build for the future.
You can’t change human nature. You can’t change your customers, your employees, or anyone else. All you can change is what you do. There are things you can influence and things you can’t. Why waste time and energy on the latter?
You won’t get real results trying to light a fire under people. You need to light a fire within them. Rather than trying to focus them on what you want them to do, focus them on why they want to do it. A manager tells people what to do. A leader helps people find why they’re doing it.
ACTION STEP
In your present situation—business, organization, career—list those factors influencing growth that you can control, and those you can’t. Among those you can, choose which one you think is most important. In other words: Find your rudder.