When it comes to billionaires most people just think they must be lucky, few stop to think that there might be some behavior that helps them build their wealth. In fact there is such a thing as billionaire behavior and it does not begin with a passion for getting rich. There are six core behaviors that are common to all of the many billionaires I have studied and they are remarkably easy to emulate.
The first of these is a passion for doing, or supplying, something that other people want to buy and being the best in the world at doing it. They are not all successful at being the best but they are usually the most passionate about being so. This is by far more likely to generate profits than a desire to make most money by selling the same product or service. Delighting customers is the number one billionaire behavior.
Having become passionate about delighting customers with some product or service the next key behavior, and it is obvious but so few entrepreneurs get it right, is creating a systematic approach to successful selling. You must be a sales person and be great at both generating leads and closing sales. A systematic approach to lead generation and selling makes success inevitable. Random efforts and the lack of a system of split testing for continuous improvement keeps small businesses, small and poor.
Generating new customers is expensive and, it is always easier to retain customers and sell more to them than to win new ones. A system for making customers feel wanted and for understanding what else they want to buy is a key to continuous growth. Understanding the lifetime value of a customer and how to make that value grow is vital to becoming wealthy.
The retention and management of data is essential to understanding the business and continuously improving methods and efficiency. Beyond the early stages of a business, delegation and outsourcing becomes the means of maintaining and accelerating profit growth. This is simply not possible without well organized management information providing key performance indicators in clear sharp focus.
We have all heard of the 80:20 principle and a few of us for a short time use it to organize our time. Billionaires focus on this to extreme applying a 98:2 approach to their time and effort. They spend all their own time in the 2% of effort generating 98% of the profits. They then look to replicate that 2% fifty times to use 100% of their time. If you do the maths, that is 4,800 times more effective than the typical small business owner who spends 100% of their time doing everything. Billionaires delegate and outsource everything other than the 2% of things that generate 98% of profits. They find people better, much better than themselves at doing everything except the final decision on strategy.
‘Would be billionaires’ are usually way too busy and, in their opinion, far too darned good to take advice and systematically improve themselves. Real billionaires are all humble and avid learners. Most billionaires always have a new book to read that will develop themselves and they read self-development every day. Continuous learning is just part of continuous improvement.
There you have it. Six simple things done systematically, sometimes intuitively, by all billionaires that could make you feel a bit more like thinking they might deserve their success.
