I recently had the chance to play a couple of famous golf courses in Scotland. All you golf nuts will know the courses I’m talking about, and you’ll understand what a once-in-a lifetime opportunity that is. The thing is, on both days, on both courses, we were dealing with fog so bad, we couldn’t even see forty yards ahead of us. Certainly not ideal for an opportunity like that, but we’d paid a good bit of money to get on those courses, and we were not going to miss the chance!
We had great service and awesome caddies at both courses. At the first course, at each hole, our caddie would point at the fog bank in front of us in the general direction of the fairway and tell us, “Hit in that direction, then we’ll walk down there and hopefully find your ball.” Imagine teeing up and trying to hit a two-hundred-yard drive into nothingness. It’s really, really difficult to swing a golf club as hard as you can when you have no freaking idea where the ball needs to go. Needless to say, it took a long time to play that course, and I wondered more than once how many cases of golf balls it’s possible to lose in one round.
The next course we played was Kingsbarns, and we had the exact same conditions—thick fog and an excellent caddie to guide us. But there was one incredibly simple, incredibly effective difference: At Kingsbarns, the staff placed stakes with flashing red battery-operated lights every fifty yards or so to mark the direction of the fairway. That one detail changed everything. We were still hitting into the nothingness of the fog, but the lights allowed us to see far enough ahead to know we were hitting in the right direction. That little bit of hope gave us the confidence and energy to play better, faster and have more fun. All because of those little red lights marking the way.
In the nearly forty years I’ve been in business, I’ve felt like I was staring straight into a fog bank more times than I can count. All I could see was the crisis in front of me. My perspective went no further than the end of my nose. I was just trying to do the next right thing. And the next right thing after that. And I never thought about doing it a different way. But if someone had told me there was a system for growing my business—an actual path with little blinking red markers to guide me—that may not have eliminated all the false starts and mistakes I made, but it would have limited them. And I would have been able to see past the current crisis of the day and have hope and confidence that my business was on the right path.
That’s my goal for business owners reading this book. Even though you’re often working in foggy conditions, the principles you’ll learn in this book will mark the path clearly enough to give you the hope and confidence you need to give it your all and keep your business moving forward. And on occasion, the sun will break through, and a breeze will blow the fog away, and you will know exactly what to do and when. You’ll avoid the false starts and the mistakes. And as a result, you’ll build your business faster, stronger, and better than I built my own.
Are you ready? Game on!