Have you ever seen film footage of a cheetah taking down a gazelle? The big cat crouches low as it stalks through tall grass to get close to the herd, then locks on a target as the animals bolt for their lives. The cheetah dodges rocks, leaps over fallen trees, and weaves through undergrowth, to stay close on the heels of its targeted prey. If that animal moves out of range, the cheetah adjusts course in mid-stride to go after another that represents a more likely target.
Every act and instinct in the cheetah’s hunt is directed toward one goal: capturing food for survival. That’s real-time execution—the kind of seamless, agile, and intensely focused pursuit that brings home the goods for any hunter. Real-time execution can move you through hazards, around obstacles, and on toward whatever targeted outcome brings you success.
You don’t have to go to the African savannah to see real-time execution at work. Individuals, organizations, even governments have to be strong, flexible, and tightly focused to take down their own targets in a world that changes rapidly and is unforgiving of failure. Peyton Manning, who I think may be the best quarterback in NFL history, is a master of real-time execution. Manning seems to see the whole field and every player on it as his territory. His DO is to win the game, to do whatever it takes to move the ball down the field and score points: making decisions in real time, calling an audible on the fly, exploiting the best available resources, and pivoting to take every available advantage.
In the process of navigating my company around the obstacles I’d thrown in my own path with the WHA launch and then on through the hazards of months that followed, I certainly had to become a master of real-time execution, too. It was a process that helped me fully understand the essential role of this fourth pillar of The Hunt.
Getting the DC lobbyists off my back hadn’t been enough to save my business. My startup cash was running out, and I was struggling to find a way to bring the WHA back to life. One day, while deep in meditation, I had a breakthrough idea. I didn’t have to continue fighting my way through this swamp; I could change direction.
So I began scouting a new path. I went online and researched the places where advertisers were spending money—like the websites of Field and Stream and Outdoor Life—along with the sites my attackers had used as their weapons to go after the WHA. I also dug into the ad agencies’ own sites—and immediately saw an opportunity. If I became the aggregator that brought all of that online ad space together in one package, I could build a valuable business—fast. I knew that business would make way more sense than the original tournament idea for hitting my ultimate goals of (1) making money for my investors while (2) bringing more mainstream attention to the outdoor industry and the sport of hunting.
In a heartbeat, the WHA was dead—and OutdoorHub was born. I restaffed my business and began reviewing every phase of the existing online advertising model to find ways to bump up our profit margins. Then I scheduled a meeting with my investors. The rapid pivots I’d made with the business had shaken their confidence in me. But when I promised that the business would be profitable within ten months of our meeting—by October of 2007—they calmed down and left me to live up to my word. That solid date gave my investors a concrete metric for my on-the-fly execution.
I got to work immediately, aggregating the combined traffic and reach of a large number of previously fragmented sites. To maximize that network’s profitability, I moved away from the traditional revenue-sharing model to a fixed-rate model that bumped our profits by another 30 percent. Now I had to start selling through the ad space. I began by offering big-name advertisers ninety days of free advertising with the deal that if they were satisfied they would put me on a buy for the next quarter; they agreed. After landing that first collection of big fish, I went after the next-biggest, who were happy to jump in, too. With that, I was halfway to my goal of profitability.
I doubled down on my efforts, leveraging a contact from college who worked with GM. He saw the value we brought to the table and agreed to do a three-month test. The test run was so successful that Chevy agreed to a monthly ad buy, which hiked OHub’s profitability right up where I’d promised my investors it would be, and right on time. After that, there was no looking back.
I still had plenty of challenges ahead, but I’d hit my target—and the partnership between GM and OutdoorHub remains mutually beneficial to this day. I achieved that success through real-time execution, the same kind of powerful hunting technique a cheetah uses to take down its prey.
In The Hunt method, real-time execution involves these specific elements:
Sometimes, making a very powerful shift is a simple maneuver. A slight shift in the trail can be easy to miss as you go forward yet seem incredibly obvious in the rearview mirror. Making successful on-the-fly pivots is what real-time execution is all about. When you train yourself to operate with real-time execution, you’re positioned to spot—and act on—the small but mighty opportunities that lie hidden all around you.
And, believe me, they’re there. Some of the greatest innovations in the world are less about radical invention and more about tiny but ingenious tweaks that make all the difference. Take Facebook; that global game-changer was really a slight alteration to the now largely forgotten MySpace model. Or consider Amazon—simply an online version of a massive retail catalog. Remember when Entertainment Book or Valpak almost exclusively dominated the coupon world? Groupon is just an online version of the traditional coupon-book idea. The list of market-revolutionizing tweaks goes on and on. Real-time execution—in combination with other pillars of The Hunt—helps you recognize even the most well-camouflaged opportunities that cross your path and then make the on-the-fly pivots necessary to leverage them. And finding the right tweaks can make all the difference in your outcomes.
Real-time execution requires that you remain present and focused on finding the best way forward instead of sticking with an ineffective plan. It means allowing yourself to be guided by faith in your skills, your process, and your ability to make the best call and then act on it. Real-time execution is a key weapon of any great hunter and every great business leader, and it’s a critical element of The Hunt method. From launching the pursuit of a Desired Outcome, to taking the shot that makes that trophy yours, when you bring the skills of real-time execution to your hunt, you exponentially increase your chances for realizing exceptional results.
Identifying your Desired Outcomes means that you must really understand the ultimate goal you’re shooting for, because you may have to shift directions rapidly as you make progress toward that outcome. When you go after what you want with intensity, you have to be both nimble and focused. You have faith in your process, but at the same time you’re being guided by real-time events and opportunities.
To execute change fluidly, you need to have the data necessary to trust what’s happening as it happens and make the right calls as your strategy develops. That data will fit into two categories:
So, let’s say that I’m getting ready for a November hunt in Kansas. I’ll look at macro data to determine whether a hunt there will be worth the trip. I’ll assess seasonal weather patterns and recent reports and see what other hunters in the area have said about the rut. This macro data is important in business for the same reasons. Knowing what the other players in your market are doing and what overall economic trends or world events are influencing the field allows you to determine whether you’re interested in moving into that territory—or taking off in another direction entirely.
When the macro data checks out, you can begin pulling in your micro data. In Kansas, I’ll scout out the best ranges to hunt, the best places to locate my stand. I’ll look at what’s going on in the woods. Do I see bucks chasing does? Do I hear them grunting? Can I hear young fawns bleating because their moms left them alone to go off with a buck? That’s the kind of micro data that lets me know breeding season has kicked in and this spot is hot. You’ll have to do the same kind of on-the-ground tracking to turn up the micro data you’ll need to build a strategy for taking targeted outcomes in your own pursuits.
For example, OHub is in the internet business, which means that if I want to build out a strategy for growing its business, I need to track the internet and media markets. Is TV up this year, or down? Is video pre-roll ad space up or down? Is display advertising hot? At a macro level, these kinds of questions help me determine where big advertisers will focus, so I can be certain that we’re going to deliver products that meet that market’s demands. Think of this phase as that time when the cheetah stalks through the tall grass, eyeing the herd and choosing his target.
Then I break it down to the micro data. What are my direct competitors offering? What are people buying from them—and what are they ignoring? By visiting the websites of OHub’s competitors and their customers, I can begin to piece together the strategies top competitors are using. Then I drill down deeper, identifying flaws and looking for ways I can exploit them. By tracking what the industry is doing on a macro level, and what my competitors are doing on a micro level, I can pull together my own strategy for taking down the DOs I’ve identified for the year.
We’ve talked about scouting multiple times in this book, so I don’t need to rehash the details of that process here. Just remember that you’ll never be able to hunt with real-time execution if you don’t carefully target your DOs and track down the data necessary to take those big wins. Events can change in a heartbeat. And your research gives you the muscles and flexibility you’ll need to make any fast pivots necessary to stay on the trail of success. That buck I’m tracking in Kansas may get killed by another hunter on the second day of the season. If I’m not out there in the woods, following the trail and taking in data in real time, I could end up hunting a ghost instead of identifying and switching to a new target and moving on to take it. If your focus wavers during your own hunt, if you stop tracking available data, you can find yourself chasing unachievable—or even undesirable—outcomes, too. That’s a sure way to fruitlessly exhaust your resources.
When hunting on our family farm in Michigan, I always used a favorite tree stand. But one year I realized that the deer activity around that stand had dropped off dramatically over the past few seasons. As I studied the area from above, I started thinking that perhaps I was missing deer movement in a dense cluster of cedar trees to the west. So I waited until the deer were down for the night, and then moved my stand over to that area.
The change-up worked. That patch of cedars had grown so thick that it had formed a perfect cover; even from just forty yards away, I couldn’t see or hear the deer crossing through it. That small, quick pivot in location became the breakout moment of my hunt. I wrapped up the season by taking a beautiful nine-point buck from that stand, along with an important lesson: I’d chosen my original location after a lot of careful scouting and tracking, and it had worked well for a while. But things change. By rethinking my approach and reconsidering the available data coming to me on the fly—by hunting with real-time execution—I was able to change my approach and score a win that had been escaping me in these woods for the past few years.
The question isn’t whether you’ll have to pivot; it’s when. No brand, product, message, or approach will carry you forever. And sometimes the biggest opportunities and most lethal competition will come from a person or company or marketplace or material you’ve never even heard of. Nothing in Blockbuster’s business model prepared it to deal with Netflix. Borders wasn’t positioned to deal with competition from online booksellers or the technologies that evolved into e-books and iTunes. For these and many other businesses that once ruled their marketplace, a slow response time proved to be fatal. You never know where the most deadly fire will come from, but you can be certain that someone, sometime will have you in their sights. If you aren’t agile, you risk being taken down.
Even though you can’t predict what new disruption will flip your marketplace, you can know your own business model thoroughly and then view it from the elevated perspective of consciousness. That clear, unemotional vision, along with ongoing scouting, tracking, and targeting, will help you identify areas of vulnerability in your operation or approach that represent opportunities for others to jump into or even reshape your own marketplace. You can leverage that intel to build a barrier to your competitors’ entry, or to leapfrog over them and lay claim to new territories. When you know which path you need to take forward, you have a big part of the information you’ll need for executing the move.
But mighty or mini, fast shift or slow turn, every pivot in the real-time execution of any hunt involves three elements:
Knowing when it’s time to pivot is a skill you develop over time. To master any process, though, you have to understand exactly what it involves. So let’s look at these steps in more detail.
You know it’s time to pivot when you uncover a point of vulnerability in your model. That takes some scouting and reflection. When Netflix saw the growing popularity of video streaming, it had to pivot quickly from its DVD-through-the-mail model and begin offering monthly subscriptions that gave customers instant online access to the films they wanted to see. As voices of concerns about obesity and heart health grew louder in the United States, fast-food franchises like McDonald’s and Wendy’s pivoted to move beyond the meat-and-potatoes models that built their successes by offering salads and fresh fruit options, and announcing plans to eliminate trans fats from their products. In fact, you have to be watchful and proactive to stay on top of any important hunt. If you want to scout out vulnerabilities in your own business model, you’ll need to ask yourself questions like these:
When you follow the pillars of The Hunt method, you position yourself to see where your business—or your life—is trending. That can help you determine what path your pivot should take. Then you can make the moves that will put you just far enough in front of that trend to own it. Remember, your goal in executing any change isn’t necessarily to be a radical pioneer, leading from so far out in front that you’ve lost your followers. At OutdoorHub, I made a really radical change of direction through a series of pivots.
Very few of us are successful at making dramatic, game-changing shifts in a heartbeat. If your doctor wants you to lose weight and lower your blood pressure, for example, she probably won’t recommend that you leave her office, drive to the nearest gym and do a two-hour workout, then stop at the grocery store on the way home to buy all of the food you’ll need to completely revolutionize your diet, beginning with that evening’s meal. The biggest rebuilding efforts sometimes have to begin with small, incremental efforts. If you swing in with a wrecking ball, you can damage your infrastructure to the point that it falls apart before you have an opportunity to reshape it to your needs.
You execute this kind of step-by-step shift fluidly by testing every step and every pivot against your Desired Outcomes. What are the goals you originally set out to achieve? Are they still valid? Where will you be if you accomplish your DOs? Is that your idea of success? What do you have to do to get there? Sometimes the answers to these questions can lead you to change up your DOs. Other times, you’re going to have to tweak—or even transform—your approach, so that you’re happy with the model you’ve put in place. When you have a clear and unemotional vision of the real world—where you are, how you got here, where you want to go, and how you want things to be when you get there—then taking the next steps necessary to build a model that will get you to your goals will be as natural and fluid as a stream flowing into a river.
In the end, your strongest weapon for pulling off effective pivots is your ability to be there. People, ideas, events—the world is constantly firing new information, new roadblocks, new opportunities at you. If you can stay alert to that action, you’ll be two steps ahead of the sleepwalking world and ready to pivot toward a better path or jump on an opening.
My brother Andy once asked me to handle a showing with a large tenant that was in the newspaper and print business. While I was walking the team through this building, it became clear to me that they hated the space and the location—and given what they were looking for, I didn’t disagree with them. I realized that these people were there as a favor to our company, and there was no way they were going to take this space. But I also realized that the CEO of the newspaper agency was one of the people on the tour, and she was in charge of content for the tenant’s organization. That gave me an idea for turning a losing afternoon for the real estate business into a positive opportunity for OutdoorHub, where we were just beginning to syndicate content. I scheduled a meeting with the CEO for the following week, and we began working on a syndication deal to make this organization a pilot paper for our content.
If I’d mentally checked out during the showing and merely gone through the motions, the idea for that pivot wouldn’t even have shown up on my radar. Initial objective: build a relationship with the tenants in order to lease them some space from Farbman Group. Pivot: build relationship and try to get a content deal done for OutdoorHub.
Simply being there—paying attention to body language; listening to and understanding what people are really saying; watching the way people, businesses, marketplaces, even countries interact with each other—doesn’t require any kind of superhuman strength or skill. But it’s an essential element of understanding when, where, and how to pivot. When you walk through the world with a closed mind, you close off your access to any number of pivot points that can move you further down the road toward your Desired Outcomes. Without those open avenues, you can end up walking into a big mess, when—not if—you have to rethink your way forward.
Most of us spend a lot of time prospecting for new clients, deals, or other business in today’s high-pressure environment of heavy hunting and a hard economy. To succeed in that territory, you need to operate in stealth mode—mindful of both your own moves and those around you. Your goal in entering new territory is to get out in front of your targets without letting anyone know you’re within range. By the time your quarry senses your presence, you are at full draw with your arrow nocked and aimed straight at their heart. Here’s what I mean.
In 2003, Manoj Bhargava sampled a sixteen-ounce energy drink at a natural products trade show in California.1 Bhargava liked the amped-up energy the drink delivered, and was certain that he could sell it. But he was sure that sixteen ounces wasn’t a necessary fit with the product’s promise. As he saw it, the drink’s strongest selling point was its ability to make you more productive, not less thirsty—so why position it to compete with soft drinks?
So Bhargava began producing his own energy drink in a two-ounce bottle. His team hustled to get it placed near the cash registers of stores like GNC and, in a major score, Walmart. In just eight years, 5-Hour Energy drinks became a billion-dollar business. Bhargava wasn’t experienced in making and marketing beverages, but he was a pro at moving into and mastering new territories. From clearing debris from crumbling neighborhoods in Philadelphia, to helping at his family’s PVC manufacturing company in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or doing construction on ashrams in India, Bhargava had become a master of execution. His winning development of 5-Hour Energy was no exception; he quickly identified an existing product’s strongest selling point and vulnerabilities, and he devised leveragable tweaks that would position his version of the product outside the range of its most threatening competitors. That’s the way to use real-time execution to stalk into new territory and start taking trophies.
Let’s face it: you enter a new market with the ultimate hope of owning it, and real-time execution is your key in that quest. Whether you’re a start-up or an established business trying something new, Step One is to ask yourself the same types of questions you ask at the beginning of any pivot:
With your targeting and real-time tracking data before you, you can put together your plan for breaking into the market—or not. If you’re tracking game, and you find signs that several other hunters have been in an area over the last two weeks, you know that the territory is overly pressured. You have to decide whether your skill level and techniques are going to give you a good chance to go in and succeed in that area, or whether you’re just going to be one more unlucky hunter aiming for (and unlikely to take) targets in a crowded space. Remember, True Hunters don’t confuse activity with results.
Step Two is to connect the data you’ve gathered to your current skills and strengths by looking beyond market boundaries and buzzwords and into the ideas and events and people that are shaping the space you want to own.
Once you know the common wisdom of your new market, you can create a plan that disrupts it. Survey your existing business model, skills, ideas, and experiences to find your own unique leverage points. Check your ego and allow yourself to see the connections between your existing tools and the new work that lies ahead. By relating new challenges back to the hunt your team knows, you’re better able to execute strongly and fluidly—even on unfamiliar turf.
Kim Brink, VP of Marketing for NASCAR and former director of advertising and sales promotion for Chevrolet and Cadillac, has been on the frontlines in the corporate fight to maintain the authenticity of a strong brand while taking it to a whole new market demographic. But before she could take on any of those targets, Kim had to claim some new territory of her own.
In 1990, Kim was working in the market research department at General Motors. When she tried to move into an open marketing position with Chevrolet, the general marketing manager told her that first she’d have to go to work in a field sales position. When Kim explained that field sales wouldn’t work for her, the manager replied, “Then you’re never gonna work in marketing at this company.”
Kim didn’t see that answer as an endpoint. Instead, she landed a job in product planning, work that gave her more face time with GM’s designers and engineers—and more opportunity to scout out the signature ideas and core design elements that shaped the company’s major brands. Two years later, Kim applied for an ad manager’s position in the truck division, where Mac Whisner was managing Chevy’s hugely successful “Like a Rock” campaign. Kim’s grounding in the company’s brand basics got her the job. She’d carved her own path into the territory she wanted to hunt.
The experience served her well. When executives at Chevrolet decided to target a “greener,” younger, more urban demographic, Kim’s job was to find a way to stake a claim in that new market without driving away the existing customers and advertisers. Knowing that “great brands start with the product and what makes it great,” Kim and her colleagues leveraged Chevrolet’s strongest crossover elements to create the American Revolution campaign, which succeeded in reaching the old and new areas of the company’s target demographic.
At Cadillac, Kim faced the same challenge, as the company scrambled to appeal to new blood, for the long-term health of a brand whose customer base, with an average age of seventy, was (literally) dying. “They were going to come out with a new look, a complete product overhaul,” Kim told me. “And they needed the marketing to be as bold as the product itself. That’s when we conceived of the Led Zeppelin campaign.”
Kim took that idea to her boss, Mark LaNeve, who was ready to shake things up. “We forged a partnership to say this is going to work—not being afraid of how senior GM management is going to worry about it, or how the marketplace is going to perceive it.” The campaign was launched with what became known as Cadillac’s Breakthrough commercial, and it helped bring one of America’s most traditional national brands into the focus of a whole new audience.
Kim’s experiences are perfect illustrations of the way True Hunters use real-time execution to enter into new territory without sacrificing any of the strengths that have helped them claim past trophies. Whether you’re getting ready to carve new space in your personal or professional life, the process is the same: Do your groundwork, leverage your strongest weapons, and have confidence in your vision; then you can move fearlessly toward your ultimate goals—no matter what new directions your path takes.
Part of being an experienced hunter is learning when to stick—with the hunt, the location, the technique, the tools—and when to call it quits and move on. I remember clearly one of the more painful lessons I’ve learned about making those calls. Many years ago, I spent an entire summer scoping out an area around one of my more productive tree stands, and I’d spotted a buck that I was determined to track that autumn. I called him Old Grey. He was monstrously large, easily four and a half years old, and incredibly smart. I’d seen him a few times through my binoculars, and I’d even caught a few trail-cam pics of him, but he never seemed to slip up. I knew that if I was ever going to take him, I’d have to be smarter than he was.
One day, well into the season, I’d been in the tree stand all day waiting for this dude to show up. The wind was howling, stirring up the woods, fiercely whipping the grass and trees. I had struggled just to climb up into my stand. At sunrise that morning, a wired-up, spooky doe had come by my stand, sending out an alert snort that lit up the swamp and shook me to my core. Few things are worse than getting caught on the hunt, and that doe had busted me big time.
But in spite of the bad weather and my bad luck, I stuck it out. I just couldn’t give up the hunt for that day. Hours passed, and as I clung to that swaying tree, I could feel the frustration and defeat building in my brain. By late afternoon, I cracked; I knew that I’d waited until the deer would be up and moving around after their midday rest, but I’d had enough and decided to bail. I hadn’t been back on solid ground for more than thirty seconds when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Old Grey approaching, walking down the very trail I’d expected him to take—a trail I’d positioned my stand perfectly to overlook. In just seconds, he winded me, snorted, and was off and running. I still remember the boiling shame I felt, standing in that cold, windy woods, realizing that Old Grey wouldn’t be back. That big-brained buck was gone for the season, because I hadn’t used my own brain in making the call to either bail before it got too late or stick to my plan and wait for the hunt to unfold.
Odds are you’ve been caught in a similar bind. You’re in a boardroom or giving a pitch, and you can feel the stakes rising. You’ve proposed a fee, but you’re getting big push-back from your customer. If you lower your current proposal, you might open up a whole new bidding war. But if you don’t, someone else might come in and take the business away. Do you stick it out or pivot?
There’s a difference between overcoming adversity by pushing through tough days and riding out a losing battle without changing strategies. But it’s rarely easy to know the difference. The ability to wait it out, to give your plan a chance to work, or to be still as you pull together a better strategy is the secret behind so many successful hunters. And as always, activity doesn’t guarantee progress or results. My uncle, Michael Towbes, an incredibly successful banker, real estate investor, and philanthropist, summed up his career success in one simple statement: “I have never been afraid to miss a great deal.” Those are profound words, worthy of following. But it takes real patience and practice to get good at knowing when to pivot and when to sit it out.
There isn’t any hard-and-fast formula for making the call to stay or bail. The outcome of that decision will be determined by the experience, knowledge, intuition, and courage you bring to that particular event. But every time you find yourself at one of those “stick or bail” crossroads, you can rely on two guiding truths:
In business, we always have to make decisions about how far we’re going to ride through a deal. There are times when it’s best to cut your losses quickly. At other times it makes sense to push all the way through, even when the odds are stacked against you.
Business deals, processes, strategies, and relationships follow the same pattern. The longer you stay the course, the more you allow conditions, relationships, and expectations to form along one path—and the harder it’s going to be for you to switch to a new path without causing major upheavals. If you pivot early, you aren’t ditching a mature initiative; people are more flexible, more willing to consider new developments or ideas. But that flexibility fades over time. Think of late-stage changeups as akin to pulling a weed; the longer you let the roots develop, the harder the job becomes.
This leads us to the second guide for sitting it out: if you do decide to jump, make sure you have an exit strategy that leaves minimal destruction in its wake. That piece of advice may seem to contradict the previous one, but it doesn’t. Let’s say, for example, you’ve put somebody in charge of a team, and after giving him plenty of time (maybe too much time) to get his legs under them, you realize that he’s simply not cut out for the job. You know you can’t just walk into his office and tell him he’s out, then call an immediate team meeting and announce that you’ve given their ex-leader the boot. If you do that, any plans or even minimal progress the group has been making will stop short.
Instead, you have to come up with a plan for systematically shifting the team’s leadership: working more closely with the current leader to see whether you can help him up his game, bringing other team members into the decision-making process, finding a new assignment for the underperforming leader, and announcing the move well in advance to allow for a more fluid transition. You may not be able to jump immediately, but you can begin working your way out. Whatever your plan involves, you can’t make the final exit until you’ve found a clean path out. Otherwise, you run the risk of compounding any trouble your pivot kicks up.
I’m perched high up in a big aspen alongside a small lake in Antrim County, Michigan, with my bow drawn on a beautiful nine-point who’s standing below me, thrashing his antlers against a nearby tree. He looks up the base of the tree I’m sitting in, and his eyes come all the way up to meet mine. But like all deer, this guy has really bad vision. He may sense that something’s there, without really knowing that it’s a predator. The shot angle is poor, and a solid hit doesn’t seem likely, but I don’t want any movement to give my position away. So I stand there, bow drawn. My heart is exploding in my chest, and the muscles in my back and shoulders are blazing in a blowtorch-hot burn. If there ever was an uncomfortable moment of silence, this is it; but I need to hold my position.
How many times have you been caught in that kind of face-off? You’re in a meeting or in a confrontation with a partner, and at the most critical moment in the exchange, a silent stare-down ensues. The other person is locked on you, looking for any sign of movement, weakness, or uncertainty. You know that you can win if you can maintain silence, hold your position, and not crack—but can you do it? Not everyone can. In fact, right when they need to hang tough for just a bit longer is the point when most people get nervous. They start talking too soon and lose the opportunity to control the outcome.
I’ve experienced this moment countless times throughout my career, in my personal relationships, and in a tree stand: the time when I’m staring my win in the face, knowing that the trophy I’ve been pursuing is now mine, and I just have to claim it. Michael Waddell calls this moment “closing the coffin,” and as blunt as that term is, it says it all for me. It’s accurate, whether the end of my hunt involves taking an animal, signing the papers on a new home, or wrapping up a business deal. Why am I so fond of such a brutal statement? Because, like my friend Michael, I understand that when you’re hunting, your Desired Outcome is to take the thing you’ve been hunting for. But to bring any hunt to a successful close, you have to be as strong at the finish as you are the first day you hit the trail. You have to close with command.
And, believe me, even experienced hunters have to practice and prepare for that final act. I’ve seen hardcore deer hunters fall victim to buck fever, a name we give to a condition in which you shake like a leaf when you finally draw down on your prey. And I’ve also seen many, many business people steer a deal through incredibly tough negotiations, only to go weak and lose focus when they hit the final stretch. Real-time execution demands that you bring it all home. That’s why closing with command is an important part of any True Hunter’s skill set.
When I worked in real estate, I knew a talented kid who had the potential to be great. He moved through deals with real skill—but the second he hit that 95 percent mark, he’d crumble. We’d be just about to close a major deal, and he would do something to sabotage it—not an intentional or even a conscious act, but something that broke our hold on the trophy. He’d knock off smaller deals every time. But when those “twelve-pointers” came around, he couldn’t handle the idea of landing something really big.
I’ve blown the last moments of a deal myself, at times. My nerves get frayed, and I begin babbling, and even as I do it, I know it’s a mistake—I know I’m turning myself from predator into prey, instead of holding my position, staying in command of my senses, and releasing my arrow at just the right time.
Those who can hold their command of the hunt through that uncomfortable moment of silence can close the coffin on whatever they’re tracking. Your ability to be comfortable with the uncomfortable will help you maintain a kind of Zen-like control when it comes time to finalize the win in your hunt. When you learn to love the tension of closing, you’ll have hit a breakthrough moment in your development as a True Hunter. Then you’re on the way to more achievement in your life.
Even the most experienced hunters have to practice and prepare for the end of the hunt. It’s like a muscle; when you stop working it, your strength fades. I keep my closing skills in shape with an exercise that involves two elements:
The how-to of that first step should be familiar territory by now. Real-time execution allows you to adjust your goals as your hunt progresses, the data changes, targets fall out of reach, or new opportunities arise. So when you’re heading into the final stages of any big pursuit, take time to revisit the outcome you’re getting ready to lock up. Get a very clear picture of that DO in your mind. Think about why you want it, what kind of change it’s going to represent.
Visualization is critical in this phase. As I draw down on a whitetail, for example, I’m in the consciousness zone, seeing a big-picture view of every step I’ve taken to reach this point—the ways the animal outsmarted me during the chase, the lessons this hunt has taught me about nature and survival and life, the ways I’ve grown as a hunter. I don’t think, “I hope I don’t blow this shot.” Instead, my thoughts are more along the lines of “This is what I’ve been working toward. In this contest, I’ve won. The lessons I’ve learned in this hunt will shape all of my future hunts in some way. Now, I’m going to take this win cleanly, to claim this animal in a way that honors both of us and the process we’ve just been through.”
Your thoughts shouldn’t be much different when you’re preparing to close a business deal. Instead of worrying “Will it work? Won’t it? What do I do if the person across the table comes up with last-minute demands that I can’t meet?” focus on your success at wrapping up the deal. Remind yourself of the goal you set out to achieve, and how you’ve made that DO yours. Think about what benefits the deal will bring to your business, about how pumped your team will be, what other doors this deal can open up for all of you. If you’re closing the coffin on a professional relationship, remember exactly why you need to end the alliance, what benefits this closure will bring to your business or the rest of your team, and what it’s going to mean—both good and bad—for the other party.
Whatever the DO, build a crystal-clear picture of the move you’re about to take, so that when you walk into the boardroom or office where the final moments will go down, you know exactly what you’re going in there to do—and what you’re going to walk out with. That way, you can stay fluid if last-minute negotiations get heated, and you can respond to new data without losing focus on the DO you’re shooting for. You may decide to settle for just part of the whole package, but you will know in advance precisely how much you’re willing to negotiate away.
With the DO burned into your “mental retina,” you’re ready for the second part of your prep work. Create a clear picture in your mind of every person, event, and element of those final moments. To help with this process, I use my shoelace—the visualization tool I talked about back in Chapter One. If you’ve developed a similar tool or place or practice to help spark your meditation and visualization, this is the perfect time to use it. Close your eyes and imagine what the final moments of this hunt will look like, feel like, smell like, be like.
When I’m hunting whitetails and really in my zone, I know when I’m moving in on the final moment of the hunt. The action in the woods is on fire, the rut is in full swing, and I’ve located an area that’s torn up, ripped apart, and stinking of deer. These are the breakthrough moments I live for. I begin checking the weather report last thing before I go to bed, so I can see which way the wind will be blowing at different times during the day. Then I begin to mentally walk through the coming day’s hunt, beginning with the early hour when I’ll be going in and the way the woods will feel and sound and smell before sunup. I have to start my visualization right at that point, because even though releasing the arrow will be the final event of the hunt, it’s visualizing the entire process leading up to that moment that ups the odds of success.
I think about which stand I’ll sit in and what angle I’ll have to take if the leaves are off the trees, so I have an adequate backdrop behind me. Then I see myself in the stand, as the animal makes his way toward me. I see the animal move into perfect range; I imagine at what point I’ll make my move, draw my bow, release the arrow. In essence, I’ve experienced all these critical moments of the hunt well before I actually walk into the woods.
You can benefit from the same kind of detailed visualization. Before the closing of any negotiation or business deal, ask yourself:
Small details, like the way you’re positioned around the negotiating table, can make a huge psychological difference for everyone involved in the deal. I prefer to have the opener sit to the left side of the table and the closer to the right, so the closer is positioned like the period at the end of a sentence. I build a visualization of the closing moments that takes in all this information and more. I imagine sitting down in the office or at the conference room table, drinking from a bottle of water, hearing the buzz of business going on outside the room, saying what I have to say, listening to the response, and shaking the hand of the person I’m doing business with. I go over the scenario multiple times, each time tweaking this moment or that, so that I’ve imagined my responses to a number of variables. This level of detail may seem obsessive, but it provides a True Hunter with the clarity and focus necessary to take a trophy.
Not everyone’s strong in every moment of closing a deal. Carefully choose the roles each member of your team will play, so that you’re leveraging everyone’s talents. Then talk through the closing together. You want your team to be as practiced in those final moments as you are, so that all of you will execute fluidly and flawlessly when your performance matters most. By embedding your vision of the final moments of the deal firmly in your consciousness, you create a template that you can rely on to guide you, even when totally unexpected events unfold. You’ll walk into the closing knowing exactly what you’re there to do.
Success is all about the journey—the excitement of the chase, the thrill of knowing you’re prepped for action and poised to win, the pure joy of being really challenged and tested in your element. But ultimately all great hunters have to be well practiced in doing what they set out to do. In business, it can be easy to lose your focus as you near the final moments of your project or pursuit. Or you can become queasy when it’s time to end a business relationship or cut away dying portions of the organization. That’s why it’s so important to train yourself to take those kinds of final, decisive actions: moving your prey into range, closing in on your target, and keeping your guard up as you draw closer to nailing your deal, negotiation, or other endpoint.
So use the two-part visualization described earlier to develop a True Hunter’s skill at wrapping up the hunt. You’ll be amazed at how much stronger and more effective your performance becomes when you learn to create and rehearse strong visualizations. Your plans will be better, and you will be focused and prepared when it comes time to release the arrow on your target.
The better you become at building the pillars of The Hunt into your daily life—seeing with consciousness, acting with authenticity, leveraging every opportunity—the better you’ll be at achieving the thrilling ride of real-time execution. But you don’t want to lose yourself in the momentum of progress. A full life doesn’t happen on autopilot, and you can’t sustain real-time execution if you don’t mark the significant milestones along the path toward your DOs. Those important markers can be made up of just about any kind of moment you can imagine—landing a job, getting a first date with someone you’ve been dying to spend time with, or finding the home you’ve been hunting for. But whatever their specific details, most milestones fall into one of two categories:
We create breakout moments through the care and feeding of breakthrough moments along the way. Both are woven into the fabric of real-time execution, and recognizing and celebrating all of them is essential to your progress as a True Hunter. These achievements help you learn, grow, and become both more skillful at taking the trophies you’re gunning for and more proud and grateful for the experience. By learning to honor the breakthrough and breakout moments in your hunt, you’ll be feeding better performance and more successful outcomes down the road—and that’s real-time execution at its finest.
Josh Linkner—CEO and managing partner of Detroit Venture Partners, five-time tech entrepreneur, and New York Times best-selling author—knows all about the value of honoring small moments of success. In his book Disciplined Dreaming, Linkner writes about the power of breakthrough creativity to fuel fast-paced, innovative execution in any organization.2 To promote a culture of innovation in any environment, he recommends that we not only celebrate the small wins from creative ideas, but also reward efforts that don’t necessarily hit the bull’s-eye. In fact, Linkner says that he considers many of the small setbacks that others might call “failures” to be experiments. Truly great trophies are rarely easy to take. We know by now that The Hunt isn’t an event; it’s a process, a series of steps that include some stumbles and some breakthrough moments that, together, keep moving you forward toward your targeted outcome.
If you don’t observe and embrace the small wins on your way to your hunt’s final moments, you can lose your focus on the big issues that made the pursuit worthwhile in the first place. It’s critical, when taking any trophy, to congratulate yourself, your team, and your family for grabbing the prizes you’ve all earned. And it’s perfectly okay to want some accolades. If you don’t keep some kind of score, you lose some of the power behind your will to win. So feel free to love the breakout moments—expect them, thrive in them, feel good that you’ve earned them. Just don’t forget to celebrate the breakthrough moments that get you there. Remember, all of these wins contribute to the state of real-time execution that will continue to move you forward toward your ultimate goals—and through a life full of satisfaction and achievement.
Here are the critical ideas to carry with you as you leave this chapter—ideas that will help make real-time execution part of your primal nature as you move through any hunt.