I’ve learned some valuable lessons as a result of tough times in business, and the power of leverage in The Hunt is high up on that list. I’ve always been conscious of the difference between leaders and followers, but I’d never really appreciated the pull of the herding mentality, especially in more traditional industries such as hunting. When I was able to look back unemotionally at my lone-wolf approach to the WHA—keeping my plans secret from the big dogs in the industry, cooking up elaborate money giveaways and promotional teasers, then springing up out of nowhere with a glitzy media launch—I couldn’t help but laugh about how far off-target I had been. But I stopped laughing when I thought about how quickly the campaign against me and the WHA had spread. The outdoor world’s online ecosystem was a lot more muscular than I could have guessed, and the industry lobbyists certainly knew how to leverage it.
But when I took the time to scan the endless web pages of the forces aligned against me, I realized that I was looking at a leverage point I could use, too. I knew that I had to own a good portion of online real estate that would allow me to activate a message, power a brand, and move the herd in whatever direction I wanted to take it. That would put me in the alpha position.
Step one, though, was to find some way to bring the WHA back to life. Through a number of phone calls and visits, I’d begun the process of disarming the industry lobbyists who’d been gunning for me. Now, I knew I had to offer up the only real leverage point I held. I let them know that if they worked with me, I’d move the tournament to a traditional format and take the animals in a traditional way. I had no idea how my investors would feel about the move, but my hunter’s instincts told me I had to take it. I needed a win, and I had limited weapons. Using this one would get me back in the hunt. And it was the only possible path for getting my business and my investors on the path to profit.
Am I an opportunist? No doubt! All animals are; that’s how we survive. Life is tough and unpredictable, so animal instincts are targeted on leveraging every opportunity in the environment. The best opportunists get the most food, hook up with the choicest mates, find the safest shelter, and avoid the fiercest predators. In other words, opportunists rule the pack.
Great hunters have to be ultimate opportunists. They know how to use every skill, experience, person, place, idea, issue, or event to move closer to their target. To thrive in any environment, you have to exercise your instinctive ability to scout out and use every opportunity that comes your way. That’s why True Hunters master the critical skills of leverage, including
It took me thirty-nine years and some deep conversations with trusted colleagues and mentors to realize it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred, there’s a winning path wide open before us if we know how to find and leverage opportunities effectively. Leverage creates intersections between people, places, and issues that build strong success and push you toward the flow state of intensely focused and hyperproductive performance. Instinctive leverage extends your reach, amps up your power, and enables you to do more than you could even imagine doing without it. Think of it as the fuel that keeps the wheels of business turning.
Let’s say you work in real estate. You could raise $20 million and, with the right financial leverage, turn that fund into $80 million or even $100 million worth of deals. Creating and building on the right relationships might allow you to bypass endless phone calls and superfluous meetings and to gain direct access to the power brokers you need to deal with. If you’re on the trail of the biggest whitetail of your life, you’ll take it only if you are able to spot and exploit every potential piece of cover, sight advantage, and wind change. True Hunters know that leveraging opportunity isn’t wrong or greedy; it’s authentic. And it’s the key to taking trophies on The Hunt.
Here’s some good news about getting better at The Hunt: You already have the most important tool for upping up your personal performance. In fact, you were born with it. I’m talking about your unique nature, which is your go-to arsenal for any hunt. Every human is born with the instincts and skills of a super-predator, but that birthright alone won’t make you a successful hunter. Before you can pull everything around you into sharp focus, you have to get clear about your own nature—who you are, what you’re capable of doing, and how you can tap both your strengths and weaknesses to advance toward your target. By understanding your capabilities, the things that turn you on or off, and the seasons and cycles of your performance patterns, you position yourself to leverage every weapon you’re packing to achieve peak performance, every time. When you know what you uniquely bring to The Hunt, you can use it for all it’s worth.
It can be tricky to get a handle on your nature—something I remembered when I sat down to meet with Kyle, a member of my team at OutdoorHub. I’d hired Kyle to help OHub bring all of its video assets and web publishers together, so we could create a multichannel partnership with YouTube, which would be an incredible monetization opportunity for us. We had brought in Kyle to set up the program, digitize the first five or six hundred videos, get them ready for the Web, and then grow out this area of our business. But just five months after starting the job, Kyle had turned in his resignation. In his exit interview, I was determined to find out why.
I’d been watching this guy work, and I thought he was really sharp. I’d lined up a number of plans for leveraging his talent in the months ahead, which I told him as our meeting got under way. I asked him to talk to me about why he was leaving. Kyle quickly tracked back through the past decade of his career—basically, telling me about every job he’d had since college. He wanted me to know that he’d never had a job that worked out. He said he had no real explanation, but he’d jumped from one thing to the next so much that he’d never made any real progress in his professional life.
“Really?” I asked. “Haven’t you been able to leverage any of those experiences?”
The question just seemed to confuse Kyle, so I dug in a bit further with some simple questions about his work at OHub: Did he learn a lot about setting up a multichannel platform on YouTube? “More than I could have ever imagined,” he answered. Did he learn a lot about developing an idea into a reality, by scouting out all of its assets and using them to build a platform? “Oh yeah,” he said again, “without a doubt.” So, could he take those multichannel platform skills to another level, another channel—something that could help him with his career as TV continues to trend toward an online life beyond cable?
Kyle was nodding to show me that he got where I was going. But then he looked down at the floor and kind of reluctantly admitted to me that the biggest reason he was leaving was so he could go freelance—sit at home in his underwear, work when he felt like working, and earn the same salary he was making at OHub in about a third of the time. “The only reason I made it for five months instead of five weeks was because I was questioning all of those past times I’d walked away from a good job,” he added.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s clear some things up. First, I’m not upset with you for leaving. I can leverage the platform you started building here—the logo, the watermarks, the stuff you digitized, the process you put in place. I’ll staff it with a young kid fresh out of school who’s hungry to get into video and will keep moving the work forward. But I’m curious: why did you take me on that walk through your career history—the story about how you ‘just can’t stick with a job’?”
I could tell that Kyle was starting to get lost again, so I yanked him back to the central issue: “I totally get why you want to go freelance—hey, I’d be happy to use you on a contract basis. But you gotta stop acting like a victim of your nature. You are who you are, man—stop fighting it and start using it!”
Kyle’s expression changed from confusion to clarity. I think he finally felt free to follow the path his personality had been pushing him toward since he’d left college. He didn’t have to apologize to me or regret the fact that he couldn’t fit into an office environment; he just needed to own it and use it to move his own hunt forward, toward his own targets. And he had about ten years of on-the-job training and experience he could leverage on that hunt, too.
Kyle and I have continued to work together on a contract basis, and he seems like a whole new hunter—happy, confident, more in charge of his life. I hope he always remembers who he is and what he’s hunting for.
Now, I don’t think Kyle lied to me about his commitment when he took the job at OHub. I think he was lying to himself, sleepwalking through his life, putting in time at one office job after another and doing what he guessed he should be doing, instead of getting clear about who he really is and using that clarity to build the life he really wants. Understanding and leveraging your unique nature doesn’t require that you leave everything behind and stalk off on some lifelong vision quest through the desert. But it doesn’t give you a license to rape and pillage your way through life, either. Hunting with leverage simply demands that you look at yourself and your life with clarity and then use what you see to get where you want to go.
We all know where that hunt begins: up in the tree stand of consciousness. You need to put yourself above the noise of conformity and common wisdom and all of those illusions about what should be, because none of that is reality. When you can see the world as it really is, you’ll be able to see yourself clearly, too—your life and all of your past experiences (good and bad); the things you’re drawn to and the things that you despise; what you’re good at, and what you struggle with. Then you can own and use every aspect of your nature you’ve identified. Everyone has “soft spots”; by coming to grips with yours, you’ll be better able to connect with a difficult client, understand an angry teenager, troubleshoot a dysfunctional work process, avoid a bad outcome, or propose a better strategy.
You need to abandon the idea that you can “fix” your nature; you can’t. But you can know and leverage every aspect of it. Then the personal growth, the getting better, the “fixing” will happen all on its own. You’ll be operating at peak performance levels, and there’s nothing more you can ask of yourself—or anyone else.
Quicken Loan founder Dan Gilbert always says, “Nothing clarifies like clarity.” I repeat that expression a lot, and I’ve seen how its simple yet incredibly powerful message tends to skate right over the heads of people who aren’t really listening. Clarity helps you get a tighter grip on every aspect of your life. And leverage is impossible without clarity. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t possibly know the best way to get it.
Early in my career, I had the blessing and curse of working with my father, who brought me right from school into his real estate business. Not long after I started working for him, Dad made me a property manager and handed over a tough portfolio of properties. That morning, we sat down in his office and he asked me: “What is your job as the property manager?”
I knew this one! I began to tick off the list: “Making tenants comfortable. Making sure the properties are in the right shape. Making sure leasing signs are up. Making sure everything’s right—”
“Stop it!” Dad said. “What is your job as the property manager?”
We did this a couple more times—him asking, me stumbling through my answers, until finally I got it. “Wait,” I said. “My job is to collect the rent.”
“Yes,” he said. “Your job is to collect the damned rent, whatever it takes. Everything else you do as a property manager is merely leverage that helps you collect the rent. And the minute you don’t understand that, we’re screwed. At the end of the day, either you will have done your job or you won’t. Banks don’t care about all of the other wonderful things you’re doing if you aren’t collecting the rent.”
My dad was helping me get the same kind of clarity Dan Gilbert talks about. When you’re clear about what you’re hunting for, you absolutely will know how to find and use every leverage point available to help take your target. That’s your job, hunter—and nobody should know it better than you.
Every hunter knows there are specific times when animals are more active. For the most part, those periods depend on the position of the sun and the moon in relation to earth. Dusk, dawn, midday—those solar positions have a daily influence on all animal behavior. They determine when animals sleep, hunt, mate, and search for food.
The moon has its own gravitational pull on all of us animals here on earth. The full moon is a bow hunter’s kick-back time. We can sit around, talking and drinking beer late into the night, because the deer we’re after are active just about all night—out courting, fighting, and generally living large under that big, bright moon. They aren’t going to be up and at it early in the morning, so we don’t have to hit the woods early, either. On all other days, I know that the three-hour period around dawn is the most likely time to find animals actively moving, looking for food or mating opportunities. So if the sun rises at 7:00 a.m., I’m going to be in my tree stand well before 6 a.m. and on hyper focus until 9:00 or 10:00, without fail.
If you think that the seasonal or cyclical aspect of the natural world doesn’t hold much sway in your own life, you’re wrong. We may have replaced our knowledge of the sun’s position in the sky with an alarm clock, but our instincts are finely tuned to natural cycles, and we respond to those on a gut level, not through our intellect. Some of those cycles come with the package: human fertility cycles coordinate with the lunar phases, and the sun’s position plays a role in shaping human sleep patterns. Other cycles are based in our own unique nature, on what our own “internal clock” tells us about our performance curve—when we should be up, when we should hit it hard, and when we should be kicked back and recharging our mojo. Every piece of understanding you gain about your unique natural performance patterns offers a potential advantage for you in The Hunt. When you know how to leverage your natural cycles and peak periods of performance, you improve your chances of taking the trophies you’re after.
I have always been an early riser. My passion for hunting and fishing just cemented that early morning aspect of my nature, because it forced me to be up before the crack of dawn, even on days when I didn’t have school. And though I learned everything I could about animal peak activity periods, I didn’t give much thought to my own.
As I began to grow in my professional life, though, I realized that I was pacing my day around my own unique rhythms. I was up around 4:00 every morning, and by 5:00 I was ready to tackle the tough stuff—the grittiest jobs of my day—during that early morning time slot. Fortunately, those are hours when most of the other humans I work and live with are focused on their own morning rituals, so I’m working at my best and without interruption. I can do ten times the work during those hours than I can do at any other time during the day. When I gained that clarity about my performance patterns, it changed everything about the way I approach my job and plan my day.
To get the most benefit from your own peak activity window—let’s just call it your PAW—you need to identify those hours and then leverage them to tackle your most demanding work. The artificial schedules by which we live can make our daily peak activity windows harder to recognize and use. Although our schedules tend to be controlled by outside forces, our natural cycles are strictly internal—which makes their pull much more powerful. Many people can do their strongest cognitive work in the morning, when they’re fresh and have higher energy and clarity. But that may not be your hunt. Your PAW may run for two hours, starting at noon, or you may have a five-hour period of daily peak performance that starts at 7:00 p.m. and runs to midnight. You might even have one two-hour period in the morning and another at night. No matter when your specific PAW begins and ends, you definitely have one. And when you can identify and leverage it effectively, you have a ticket to getting a lot more accomplished in a lot less time.
You don’t want to waste your PAW by using it to clear out boring, blah-blah, check-the-box work. You can do that when the phone’s ringing, people are running in and out of your office, the kids are yelling for your attention, or the construction crew is just starting to do the rehab next door. Instead, use your PAW time to take on work that demands critical thinking and heads-down concentration and decision making. When you’re in that PAW, your ability to think clearly and see the best path forward is at its peak, too.
So how do you identify the most productive hours in your daily pattern? You can start by using your hunter’s consciousness. Be the Scout and track yourself through the day. Gauge your moods as well as the quality of the work you’re turning out. When you realize that you’ve just plowed through tough tasks with relatively little pain, note the time. When even the simplest tasks seem difficult, note that time, too. When do you find yourself finally taking on the jobs that you’ve been putting off for days? And how did that work go for you? Look at the type of thinking you find yourself doing at different times of the day, too. You might find that you want to take on those big, cognitive tasks early in the day, but that you’re better at creative work late in the evening, when your brain is starting to unspool from the demands of others and you’re better able to focus on abstract ideas. Tap into your authenticity to be very clear about what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and why. By scouting out your performance patterns, you can leverage that knowledge by matching the kind of work you have to do with the best times for you to do it.
Don’t expect to be able to revolutionize your results in a heartbeat. It will take time to get with the rhythm of your new schedule. And don’t push it. You can’t stretch your PAW beyond its natural borders so you can go full-bore on mind-bending work all day—that will fry you out. Just find your pattern and then go with it. Remember, you are an animal, not a machine. As much as we have to march to other people’s schedules sometimes, we will never be at our best when we ignore the patterns of our own nature. Over time, as you begin matching your schedule to your natural rhythms, you’ll find your daily peak performance pattern. I promise that the change will do you good.1
I was recently in a meeting with the staff and COO of one my companies. I’d listed the Desired Outcomes for the meeting right off the bat, but instead of digging into them, the team started getting hung up on a bunch of personality issues—this client, that vendor, that guy who runs that other company. They were bringing up things that had nothing to do with the reasons we’d come together for the meeting.
I let it go on for about eight minutes, and then I interrupted the dish session. “We have fifty-two minutes left in this meeting,” I said, “and a big agenda in front of us that we have to tackle. Seems to me, though, that we sound more like an episode of Gossip Girl than a company trying to nail its priorities. I know all this trash talking might seem relevant, but unless it has something to do with the DOs that we’ve laid out, I suggest we stop talking about other people and start talking about solutions and what we’ll need to do to make them happen.”
I’m happy to say that no one in the meeting wasted another minute defending their time-killing gossip fest. We just got down to work.
Time and energy are two of your most precious resources for the hunt; you need to value and respect them. And even though these two commodities are very different, they’re pretty closely linked. Time is an external force, determined by the solar cycle and outside our control; energy, on the other hand, is ours to build and burn. The way we use one directly affects the other. Our level of energy determines how we make use of our time, and the way we use our time shapes the payback we get from our energy expenditures. To get the most possible leverage from our time-and-energy treasury, we have to remember a piece of advice I handed out early in this book: Don’t confuse activity with results.
As you begin scouting out your performance patterns, I suspect that you’ll be surprised by how much time you flush away every day. I’m not talking about down time. We all need time to just stare out the window and think, or to occasionally take the longer, more scenic route on the way to whatever end result is in front of us. Getting clear, scouting, fueling up for the next leg of the hunt—spending that kind of time can bring hefty returns.
On the other hand, here are just a few of the ways you can waste time:
Most of these time-killers are born in ego. You’re acting uncertain because you want to feel justified about something you can’t really justify. You’re circling around this because you’re stuck on that. Wasting time can feel a lot easier than actually moving forward: “Well, I could work on getting my taxes together. Or I could spend the next hour complaining about why my taxes are so high.” You don’t need me to walk you through the pros and cons of that kind of decision. Just remember this: You can’t hunt like a master if you are a slave to your fears.
Guarding your time requires that you rise above your ego and get clear about just what it is you’re hunting for. Then you can target your actions on hitting those DOs, rather than getting caught up in useless time-wasters with no real return. If you’re hunting whitetails, for example, you’ve got one great morning sit—those first few hours when the deer are up and active. If you’re still scrambling to get on the road when daylight hits, you might as well stay home. In fact, taking it easy must have been more important to you than hunting. When you’re clear and honest about what you really want to get out of your time, you’ll know where you need to invest your energy. That’s one of the most important ways that you leverage your nature.
Preparation is another necessary tool for guarding your time. That means doing the prep work necessary to make a quick, clean kill of the object you’re after—the deal, the promotion, the new budget, whatever. Being prepared means that you position yourself to be in the right places at the right time and then leverage every opportunity that presents itself in that moment.
Protecting your PAW is critical for conserving your time and energy, too. When people become aware of your work cycle, you can become a sitting target. You don’t have to give distractions a shot; let everyone know when you’re unavailable, and then be unavailable. It’s not always easy to carve out limits like this; but then again, turning in peak performance isn’t ever going to be easy. No matter how many people and issues are competing for your attention, it’s your job to defend your time.
Of course, we’re often our own worst enemy when it comes to time wasting. We can become so used to spending hours of our day caught in time-killing traps that we don’t even notice them anymore. So take a good long look at how you’re spending your time. Once you’ve formed a clear picture of any time-wasting habits you’ve developed, create a list of ways to avoid them and post it where you can see it every day. Here’s an example:
We’re never going to be perfectly functioning time organizers, but perfection isn’t the point—discipline is. That’s what it takes to use your time and energy wisely and, in fact, to leverage any aspect of your nature. Just as we make a habit of brushing our teeth, all of us can make a habit of controlling what kind of junk we expose our brains to and the kind of time sinks in which we indulge. But there are plenty of really worthwhile investments you can make with your life—family, relationships, personal growth, long-term goals, community. Guarding the most valuable commodities you control—your time and energy—is a habit worth developing.
Years ago, early in November, I was at the farm up in Ellsworth, Michigan, where I do a great deal of my hunting. There’s an area with a bunch of overgrown Christmas trees and a ridge above it that funnels down into an area we call the Skinner Swamp. On this particular day, I was hunting the area for a monster buck that I had been scouting since early summer. I’d racked up several hours of watching this deer, so I felt like I knew him and the places he liked to frequent, inside and out.
The area around Skinner had very little cover, but there was one small patch of thick growth that the buck traveled through a lot—the trees in that patch had rubbed spots all over them from his antlers. This buck’s tracks were very identifiable, and today the tracks told me that he was a few hundred yards south of that patch, chasing a doe through a small stretch of land that runs alongside a lake.
I was following the buck’s trail when I saw that he’d turned north with the doe. I had an immediate flash of intuition: he was going to cut across the road at Skinner Swamp, then go into that overgrown patch to work his way through the funnel. I formed my strategy in a heartbeat. As soon as that deer headed into the trees, I needed to run full speed into the other end of the overgrowth, get myself into position at least three hundred yards north of where I thought he’d be, get on one knee, dig myself in, and trust that he would come to me.
When the buck entered the trees, I ran as fast I could and worked my way around, using the wind direction to my advantage. I got in position and crawled up next to an old downed tree that was right in the path I was certain he’d take. I knew that buck wasn’t going to try to leap over the tree. He’d cut left—and I’d be waiting. I sat down where I could draw clean, took the quiver off my bow, and had just looked up when I heard the buck crashing toward me. He was right on that doe’s tail, moving into such thick undergrowth that he couldn’t possibly run. Just as I predicted, this beautiful buck walked right in front of me, and with him twelve yards away and looking straight at me, I released the arrow.
How did I do it? I was leveraging Hunter’s Wisdom, which involves three types of understanding:
That’s Hunter’s Wisdom in action, and you can use the same kind of understanding to score wins in every type of hunt you take on. By walking in others’ skin, using that insight to inform a data-based strategy, and then leveraging observation and intuition to anticipate next moves as you implement your strategy, you can take down the biggest, wiliest, most mature targets, no matter how many times they’ve escaped you in the past. Hunter’s Wisdom is one of the most lethal types of leverage you can master in The Hunt.
We live in a culture that prizes individuality, but for hunters, the ability to achieve oneness with others is actually a lot more valuable. That’s not as difficult to do as it sounds. First of all, we may have a different type of ego, consciousness, and thought process from other animals, but we’re all still animals. Eating, sleeping, mating are pretty much the main activities of hunter and hunted alike. And the aspects of our nature we all share make getting inside another human being’s head even easier. The more clearly you understand that you aren’t that different from the other animals you work, compete, or live with, the more likely you are to find the strategies and to make the gut calls that will move events toward your Desired Outcomes. That’s leverage in action.
The first step in working a Hunter’s Wisdom is to put yourself into the mind-set of the animal you’re hunting with (or for). Becoming one with the animals in your hunt enables you to answer critical questions like these:
Believe it or not, you don’t necessarily have to like someone to put yourself in their shoes. I once consulted with a company that was having real problems dealing with a showdown between its COO and one of its frontline managers. When I met with each party to the conflict, I heard two entirely different versions of the events that had triggered it. Whereas the COO felt that the manager had demonstrated a stubborn refusal to cooperate, the manager had perceived a lack of clear vision and guidance on the part of the COO. The parties were in agreement about one thing: they’d reached the breaking point.
I pulled the two together and walked through specific examples of how their views differed. By helping them see the problems through each other’s eyes—and by steering them away from defensiveness or blame—I was able to help them realize that much of their conflict was simply the result of their very different personalities and perspectives. As soon as they acknowledged the obvious contrast in the lenses through which they viewed the world, both were able to look beyond those differences to focus on the common ground of DOs they both were targeting. Although they’ve had to do ongoing maintenance to keep their alliance intact, they’ve now directed their energy toward hitting company targets rather than toward proving each other wrong.
In business, you have to see the world through the eyes of the person sitting across the table from you, no matter who they are or what they do. When you start by acknowledging how alike we all are, you’re in a much better position to identify the things that make any individual unique. And remember to keep the Judge out of the process. Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes is a lot easier without your ego in the way. When we can develop an understanding of the authentic nature of the animal we’re dealing with—whether it’s a monster buck, a killer competitor, a critical client, or a much-loved family member—we can leverage that understanding in the hunt ahead.
An inexperienced or lazy hunter relies on luck to take an animal, but super-predators rely on their Hunter’s Wisdom to build a strategy that maximizes their leverage. Their strategy positions them at the right place and time, and then they strike. When you’re able to combine your ability to get into the head of the animal you’re hunting, along with leveraging the data points gained through close observation, you’ll earn all of the luck you need to take any target.
On a micro level, your strategy is guided by the essential nature you share with your target. On a macro level, you have to cover the target’s variables. So, for example, if you’re hunting whitetails, you know the main thoroughfares or runways that the deer have been traveling on. You know where they’re going to eat in the morning, and where they’re returning to sleep after they’ve finished. You know where they go in the evenings, and when and how they’ll get there. By covering the variables, you ground your strategy in evidence.
Of course, an observation-based strategy starts with clearly defined desired outcomes. With your goal clearly fixed, you can do the kind of ego-free observation that pulls in the data points you need to craft a strategy that maximizes opportunities. This is how you increase power through leverage.
As a hunter, my scouting and strategy are shaped by the seasons and cycles of my prey. Because I began using that seasonal approach to strategy back when I was just a kid, it was natural for me to apply the same approach to scouting and strategizing in my businesses. Just about every business has its own cycle, based on seasonal customer needs, organizational buying patterns, grant awards, funding commitments, or whatever. To be able to leverage the variables of a customer, partner, competitor, or client, you need to adapt your scouting and strategy to those cycles. Here’s what I mean:
Of course, when you’re gathering data on a competitor you need to take down or a company you want to partner with, you have to understand more than your target’s business cycles and seasons. That in-depth data comes from careful groundwork. You have to know how that individual entity performs in its marketplace—who guides its decisions, where it gets its strength, where its weakest elements are hiding, what types of ideas they’ve been driven by in the past, and where they’ve hit their biggest obstacles. And whether you’re gathering data on a buck or a business, you have to stay in the background, so that your target doesn’t know you’re watching. The minute you become part of your target’s story, the variables shift. You’re no longer observing; you’re influencing. Tackle this phase of scouting like a hunter, and you’ll find that you’re uncovering more data that you can use.
Observation-based strategies are grounded in evidence. That hard-core reality, along with your hunter’s experience and intuition, allows you to consider your strategy’s details carefully and uncover any weaknesses—which typically occur where you’ve allowed emotion (“We’ve always done it this way”) or ego (“That’s not my problem”) to override your Hunter’s Wisdom. It’s important that you do a really tight review of your plan by thoroughly vetting the details, the way you would any major decision. Unvetted strategies are losing propositions, more likely to damage your prospects for success than to aid them. You can avoid that kind of self-inflicted wound by staying clear, maintaining a neutral mind-set, and targeting every action toward your DOs. Then, instead of relying on old information, common wisdom, or “what you’ve always done,” scout out your data and put it to work with your primal understanding and intuition to create a strategy that works on this day, to take this target. Follow that path, and you won’t miss too many of the opportunities for leverage that wait for you along the way.
Any hunt will require that you call on one other aspect of Hunter’s Wisdom to take your target: your ability to anticipate your target’s actions. Yes, a big part of that ability is built into your strategy and based on data. But True Hunters also rely on their intuition to know how to act and react without conscious reasoning. That’s why intuition and visualization are key elements of leverage in The Hunt.
I’m betting that from the time you were a kid you had moments where you felt like you knew what was going to happen before it began. Some people view intuition as a foggy, feel-good idea, no more than lucky hunches with little basis in reality. But as a hunter, I rely on my intuition. I know that it comes from my instincts and inherent nature—as a super-predator, a human being, a man—and it’s fed by experience and observation. That last point is crucial, because relying on intuition alone can take us down the trail of fear and paranoia. But when you arm intuition with data, you have a powerful set of tools for decision making at your disposal.
In the real estate business, you won’t make it if you can’t anticipate growth, so you know in advance where the need for new development will crop up. When I first started in the business, there were no electronic VA (Void Analysis) programs to tell you, down to the inch, where you should spot your new locations. You had to watch what retail players were doing, go to conferences like the International Shopping Center Convention, and talk to experts about what was happening around your state or in any area in which you were planning a move. After doing that for a number of years, I eventually developed a feel for projecting growth areas. I had hard data to go on, too, and my competitors had most of the same intel. But I also had my instincts and intuition telling me what was going to happen next—guidance to which nobody else had access. I was used to leveraging my intuition as a hunter in the field, so it was only natural that I’d work it in my professional life, too. And that leverage helped make me very successful in both kinds of hunting.
When you start exercising your intuition, you’ll discover that your brain has logged lots of data that you’re not even aware of, and it feeds it to you without any conscious request. You will learn to stop and listen to your gut instead of shooting from the hip. You won’t ignore facts, the world around you, or logic and reasoning. In fact, your consciousness pulls all of that data into your memory bank. But you will be open to wisdom that reaches further and deeper than any of that—wisdom based just as firmly on reality, yet not visually or physically available at your fingertips. Your intuition, along with your strategic and elemental understanding of your prey, will help you automatically size up the signs and determine your target’s next move. And it allows you to pivot on a dime when you need to.
The best way to hone your intuition is by listening to it, testing it, and having confidence in it. Over the years, I’ve learned to ride my intuition like a motorcycle, bobbing and weaving around obstacles, speeding through clear territory, and zipping into tight places that I might not have been able to access with the heavier gear of conscious reasoning. You can do that, too, and you’ll be amazed at the results.
You must be able to trust your intuition. When I’m preparing to carry out a strategy in any hunt, I fully believe that I’m going to land the trophy I’m aiming for. I don’t walk into the woods with a “Gosh, I really hope I take that deer” attitude. I know I’m prepared to take the prize, because I have all the pieces of the puzzle before me. And over the years I’ve learned that the final step in implementing my strategy is to hunt with a full-on belief that wills the win to happen.
There’s nothing supernatural or psychic about leveraging your intuition to anticipate the next moves of those you live and work with. It’s a skill that you can develop, based on tools you’re born with—your senses, your brain, and your ability to think things through, connect the dots, and project data from past experiences into future events. Like a lot of the techniques we’ve talked about in this book, beefing up your intuition and using it to anticipate next moves really is just a practice. When you’re evaluating a client or competitor, or deciding how to advance an alliance or relationship, do a gut check. Ask yourself how you think the story is going to develop, based on everything you know and feel about the situation. Make the call, leverage your hunter’s intuition, and then act on it with conviction. Don’t be tentative. Trust your gut to help you stay one step ahead of whatever you’re hunting for.
The world is full of leverage points for True Hunters; some will work with your values and needs, others won’t. The more practice you have in the leverage of The Hunt, the better you’ll be at spotting and using what works. Then you can leave behind the shiny objects that don’t play any useful function in your hunt. And the more you use leverage points—people, events, issues, chance meetings, weather changes, you name it—the faster you’ll move, and the more new ones you’ll spot. That’s how you create what I call a Leverage Jet Stream. When you have the power of that jet stream with you, you can fly. Your hunt gets stronger, your targets get bigger, and the possibilities in front of you are limitless.
A Leverage Jet Stream is an amazing pathway to rapid success that’s available to just about anyone. Simply put, when you have a developed network of connections—including people, resources, events, ideas—that network becomes a power source that continues to pull in more opportunity and build more power. The more you understand the Leverage Jet Stream’s efficiency, the better you’ll be able to use it. For example, technological advancements and globalization are creating new niche industries all the time, in everything from antique violin restoration to medical tourism management to plant-based alternative energy development. If you’re working in a niche industry, you very likely have some contact with just about every person, area, and element of that niche. Now think about how all of those elements are connected to each other and how all of them connect back to you. By visualizing those connections, you’re positioning yourself to build a jet stream in that niche that will offer you the fastest possible path forward. Then you can put together a strategy that will set your Leverage Jet Stream in motion.
Leverage Jet Streams don’t have to be complex to bring great results. When I was in real estate, I once sat on a board with the president of a local college. He talked to me about his organization’s vision, which involved expanding the campus and its facilities. Weeks later, I was contacted by a local school district that wanted to relocate its administrative offices but first needed to sell its current location—which was adjacent to my fellow board member’s college campus. I was scheduled to give a talk the following day to community leaders about strategies for maximizing the value of real estate holdings, and I was pretty sure the college president would be there. When I saw him in the audience, I made sure to emphasize the importance of owning real estate adjacent to core operations, and I included specific examples involving academic and medical campuses. I approached the president after my talk and told him about my client’s interest in selling the real estate directly connected to his campus. The deal brought me a commission, and it established a working relationship between my firm and both academic organizations that led to multiple offshoot deals down the road. That simple confluence of client, contacts, and opportunities is a perfect illustration of a Leverage Jet Stream in action.
Lots of people have the makings of a Leverage Jet Stream. However, they can’t figure out how to get it moving, or they need to be better at navigating as it picks up speed. The techniques and approaches you’re learning in this book will help you build that bridge over those obstacles. First, you need to know where you want this jet stream to take you. When you’ve achieved complete clarity about your Desired Outcome, you can continue to use consciousness to see your situation, the ecosystem in which you’re hunting, all of its elements, and the connections that link them together. After that, your authenticity will help you find the leverage points within those connections that fit with your goals and values and move you toward your target. With that strategy in place, you can begin to execute, using your leverage points wisely, moving quickly and effectively toward your DOs, pivoting when necessary—but always staying on track. When you do this, your Leverage Jet Stream begins to grow.
Sometimes, mapping your leverage points can help you jumpstart your Leverage Jet Stream. Begin by drawing a visual diagram of one of your current desired outcomes and the people, events, locations, and issues that surround it. Next, map the connections among those elements, to form the most direct and effective path toward the goal you’ve listed on the diagram. If you have trouble with this exercise, start by identifying one experience in which you recognized a connection point with some other person, place, event, or issue in your industry or territory and then were able to leverage that connection to advance toward your desired outcome. Diagram that experience by connecting the leverage elements you used to the outcome you achieved. The practice of identifying leverage points and then visually charting their connections to a success is a great way to begin honing your leveraging instincts.
Your Leverage Jet Stream will continue to become bigger and more powerful over time, but only if you remember one critical truth: if you want to tap into the other sources out there, you must be a source of leverage yourself. You can’t dismiss people when they come to you for a boost in building their own Leverage Jet Stream. In fact, you bulk up your own leverage power by offering your leverage to others whenever you can. You give, and you get, and that’s how the world goes around. No one succeeds alone. We all need to leverage the power of other people, other organizations, other systems, just as we need the good luck that comes to all able navigators.
Jim Schiefelbein is an incredible guy; he’s an avid hunter, CEO, entrepreneur, and an outstanding example of the power of leverage. In 1996, Jim quit his job as a service writer at Toyota, and he and his wife sold off their assets and moved to the little town of Ottawa, Illinois. Their house had a four-car garage, and Jim’s dad, a retailer, saw a good use for that space. He’d recently begun buying printer toner cartridges from a guy who was building them in his garage, and he told Jim the business looked simple and lucrative. Jim did some scouting and saw his opportunity. The printer supply industry was in its infancy stages—no after-market support, nothing but expensive OEM brands available. Leveraging his remaining assets and every credit card he had, Jim started Clover Technologies and began building toner cartridges in his own garage. Through trial and error, he came up with some unique manufacturing solutions and soon had staked a claim in the marketplace, offering high quality at a killer cost. Now he needed another round of leverage to grow the business.
Jim turned to the Small Business Administration for help. “I took advantage of community development assistance programs,” he told me, “to buy and sell things to create equity, so I could build credibility to get some loans.” Then Jim built and leveraged strong relationships within his industry. “I robbed Peter to pay Paul and worked closely with vendors and customers,” he said. “I had great relationships with both sides, and I communicated with them very well along the way.”
When Jim landed office-supply giant Staples as a client, his business jumped to $6 million in sales very quickly—and he had an account that was going to require a lot of capital. To power up his Leverage Jet Stream even further, Jim formed an alliance with a customer-turned-friend who was looking to get into a new business.
“He was really familiar with our business and our industry. I brought him in for some equity, and that’s when we took on some bank financing. Then it really started to jump.” By 2001, Clover Technologies made Inc. magazine’s list of the Top 500 Fastest-Growing Private Companies, and it remained on that list for the next three years running.2
As the business grew to $50 million, then $100 million in sales, Jim knew he had to leverage different kinds of expertise and opportunity. “We hired an investment bank, and I really got my feet wet in private equity.” Keeping his eye on the core business, Jim began to diversify Clover Technologies, “from recycling to remanufacturing to electronics manufacturing to any kind of other remanufacturing component in that business model.” He explained, “We added layers of management and created the tools we needed to make the business effective. When you’re growing like that, you’re not necessarily efficient at all. But then you grab your leaders in around you, you communicate your message, and you make sure they’re always around everything that’s going on.”
Jim’s relentless leveraging paid off. When he sold the company in 2004, Clover had grown from a one-man, garage-based business to a company with customers on five continents and over $300 million in sales. As of this writing, the company’s at $1 billion in sales and still growing—a rapid rise to success that was launched through the leverage of a True Hunter!
Everyone talks about networking, but not all that many people are really good at it. A lot of networking failures are really just the fault of an ego that got in the way. Leverage is about getting into the right space, but you have to get next to the gatekeeper before you can get through to the other side of the gate. Instead of running up and banging on the door of whatever king-maker you want to leverage, you need to outline your best path forward. The process is similar to others in The Hunt:
Depending how big a dog you’re chasing, you may have to work your way through even more tiers to get access to him or her. Let’s say you’ve created a line of products decorated with the University of Michigan logo, and you want the university to help market those products. Your DO is to get to and leverage the person at the university who can okay U of M’s involvement:
The more groundwork you do, and the better your scouting, the more people you’ll find to fit these tiers, and the more tiers you’ll uncover. Tiered leverage is crucial. If you can get Tier 2 or 3 to love and endorse what you are trying get done, you’ll immediately take on more credibility with Tier 1. And, always, the most desirable leverage position you can be in is a win-win situation. You’ll get the most leverage in your hunt from the person who stands the most to gain by giving it to you.
That’s the most important thing to remember about leveraging your way up. All along the way, people are going to want to know how they can benefit from helping you. “If I help you score a meeting with CEO X, what benefits will I get from any relationship that develops?”
Then, when you’re able to pull a power player into your corner, everyone else will come sniffing around, wanting to know how you took the trophy and how they can share in your prize. “Who is this guy? Should we be doing business with him?” You can’t be sidetracked by those kinds of distractions. Your challenge is to find and leverage the gatekeepers—the people who can walk you through the door and move you closer and closer to the big dog you need to win over.
In the summer of 2011, I wanted to expand OHub’s model into agriculture—an initiative I called AgHub. I was able to leverage the jet stream of advertising agency connections we’d formed at OHub, many of which represented advertising brands in the agricultural world. We also leveraged opportunities with some of our outdoor clients that had advertising budgets available for playing in the ag world—budgets to which we’d never before had access.
OutdoorHub had the technology and tools behind us to stake a claim in this new market. But to really move our model into prime territory, I had to have an incredibly strong marketing and sales team. I hired the best agriculture sales exec in the country, and I convinced him to join us by leveraging the success we’d already built online. That guy knew all of the best sales reps working in the ag world today, and he went out and brought some of them in to build our team. And with that sales group in our corner, we had our gatekeeper—really, a team of gatekeepers. Through them, we were able to get in front of some of the biggest advertisers in the U.S. agricultural market. I worked my way through the tiers and landed the big dogs I needed to establish my proven model in a new market.
Getting through the gate won’t help you, though, if you don’t stay smart and use your leverage wisely. That sounds like basic info, but planning your pursuit of a Tier 1 contact isn’t always easy. Let’s say you’ve got a meeting with someone who really carries some weight in the territory you want to hunt. You’re not sure how you want to leverage this connection, but you’re certain that building a relationship with this person could bring you endless opportunities. You’re already familiar with the answer here: You have to fall back on your DOs.
Go into that meeting with one or two Desired Outcomes clear in your mind. They don’t have to be your ultimate outcomes, just clear problems or questions or results that you want this person to help you answer or achieve. Because your time will be limited, you need to plan the presentation of your DOs accordingly. If your meeting is scheduled for an hour, plan on spending no more than twenty minutes on your DOs. Then go into the meeting with a neutral mind, willing to go with the direction the conversation takes you. You want to see and retain as much as you can, and to be flexible enough to spot opportunities that you hadn’t expected to find. Finally, remember to shut up and listen. To help keep that in mind, I write the letters “SUL” at the top of any DO list I take into meetings that could offer important leverage opportunities.
Of course, all of this advice is just one piece of the bigger process of leverage that we’ve been talking about throughout this chapter. Whether you’re leveraging your time with the owner of a major corporation or one of the guys who cleans the cafeteria there, remember these basics:
We all have access to a whole herd of leverage points, but not everyone is able to spot or use them. Even the biggest opportunity is only as good as the knowledge and skill of the hunter who leverages it.
Because it’s such a critical skill, leverage really should be as instinctual to you as breathing. In fact, it’s an act of success and survival. If you overlook, ignore, or refuse to leverage an opportunity, you’re wasting the time and effort you’ve invested in every other aspect of your hunt for success. But no matter how weak you might think your leveraging muscles have become, you can get them back in shape. You just have to wake up your instincts and put the skills and techniques we’ve talked about in this chapter into practice. Racers train for the race, weightlifters train for the trials, and you have to train for The Hunt. Leverage is just one of the muscles you’ll need to hit your target—but it’s one you can’t do without. So it’s worth the work it takes to develop it.
I know how it is; you look around at your über-social friends or at other people in your office, schmoozing the crowd, working the room, looking like they were born with some kind of supernatural gift for getting what they want out of every situation that comes their way. And yes, some people are more skillful than others at spotting and using opportunity. So what does that have to do with you? Get above your ego, True Hunter, and survey this situation for what it really is. You aren’t limited by someone else’s success. Instead, you need to find a way to leverage it. What can you learn from all of those schmoozers? Could you leverage what or who they know to start your own Leverage Jet Stream? Where have you seen them tank, and what can you learn from that? Whatever you might think, very few of them are killing all the time—and you can learn as much from their misses as you can from their hits.
Most important, don’t get caught in a swamp of fear and negative expectations. Be clear, and be real. With practice, you’ll get better at recognizing available opportunities and choosing the strongest and most effective options among them. Then it’s just a matter of acting with purpose and courage—remaining on target as you uncover and use new opportunities, assessing your own value as a leverage point for others, and networking relentlessly. That’s how you build your leverage muscle, and that’s how you push through and find the wins.
Remember: nobody makes it alone in this world. The day you stop using your leverage is the day you drop out of The Hunt.
Leverage is the power that keeps life moving. Take these ideas about leverage with you on every hunt: