Getting Lucky Isn't Success

I was recently in an event, and I spent some time with a manufacturer of really high end beds. I'm talking beds that are over five figures each. That's right, a $10,000 bed. And we had a brief conversation about his product, about what he was doing, and I wanted to figure out what his channel was, what his process was, what his business was.

And what I found was there really wasn't anything repeatable, he was taking getting lucky as a sign of success and that will kill you in business.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is The Momentum podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution.

Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

The road to growing a business is not one for the faint of heart. In fact, there is so much involved with getting a business off the ground that you have to be completely and totally obsessively committed to make it work in most cases. Sure, there's people who've started a business, and you know, didn't have to go all in and maybe were successful, right place, right time, but those are the exceptions. The very, very small exceptions to the rule. Most of the time it takes a behemoth, massive, herculean, superhuman effort to actually get a business to survive. You ask any business owner what the hardest thing that they've ever done in their lives is, and most of them will tell you starting a business. And as you're going through the startup phase, you want to see success anywhere you can, and you should. When you get a lead who's interested, when you get a sale, when you, you know, sell more than one product, when you hit a record week. All of those things are things to celebrate and get excited about.

However, you don't want to take getting lucky as a sign of success. In fact, that will destroy your business. Here's what I found when I was at the show talking to the bed manufacturer is that when I said, "Tell me how you get your leads. Tell me what your conversion process is. What's your nurture process? You know, how do you find people to buy these beds over and over again?" And what he told me was a whole bunch of different things almost down to each bed, it felt like was sold in a very custom way. Now with the price points he was dealing with, you could do that. But the reality is that in any company, if you don't have a system that is serving up leads that want your product, and a nurturing process that gets those leads even more excited about your product and then a conversion system that converts those leads at a very high percentage, you do not have a successful business.

You might have a business that looks successful, but what you have is a business that is repeatedly getting lucky and that is dangerous, that is exposure, that is terrifying. And I have this conversation all the time. A really good friend of mine here in Austin is starting an online products company, and he's going through the same process so many of you have and I have. Going through the process of figuring out whose your market and what you're going to sell and what the product offering is going to be, and how you're going to attract them and all of those things. And as he was going through that process and testing things online, we went for a walk one morning, and he told me like, "Hey Alex, this is great. I actually had three sales yesterday. You know, I'm onto something here." And I said, "Great, tell me about the sales." And we started talking about him and what we found was all three where people who already knew him, they were from a previous business that he'd run, and they were really getting involved to support him in his new business.

And I said, "You know, you can't take that was getting lucky. You got lucky, you had some old clients that bought your product. You didn't really generate anything here, they're supporting you from before. How are you going to get new leads? How are you going to nurture those new leads? How are you going to convert those new leads? Those are, that's how this business is going to grow, right now all you've done so far is just get lucky." Here's how this works. Success must be predictable in a business, or you're just getting lucky. And let's be honest, most entrepreneurs, including me, are not that good at getting lucky, and the pun is intended. And the most fortunate things that ever happening was I married my wife, and I don't ever rely on luck in life because it doesn't work. And let's be honest, it feels great to get lucky.

It feels great to have that sale come in that you didn't expect. It feels great for somebody to just fallen off the street and buy something. It feels great when you make a deal, but don't confuse it with success, it will kill you. In fact a couple of years ago, I had a client in one of our classes who, or somebody who attended one of our courses who had spent over $150,000 trying to sell retreats and getaways for executives. And what had happened was he was really confident in the product because he had been at an event where a really well known speaker had set him up in front of an audience. The speaker had given him a massive endorsement, and he'd sold a bunch of retreats at that event. While since that time, he'd spent over $140,000 and his total sales were zero. He hadn't sold anything. Here's why, that $70,000 event was getting lucky. He got really encouraged by it. He thought like, "I'm onto something. I've got a tiger by the tail."

So he started writing checks left and right, a check for a website, a check for funnels, a check for copywriting, a check for people to work with him. He started building the team before he even had an actual successful business. And what happened was that 70,000, the sales that he made onstage, the sales that encouraged him to grow the business, that was just getting lucky. And again, when you start to scale around getting lucky it kills you. Go back to the podcast I just released yesterday called success drives scale. Not yesterday, I think it was Friday or Saturday. But that is so crucial when you're growing a business. So here's why this is important, too many people see luck, and they think it's success and then they struggle. Here's what happens. They start building something, and they have a few people buy, or they have a few leads come in and then they see it as success. It's like things are going to go great and then they struggle because they don't have a predictable process.

They can't predict they're going to get leads and nurture those leads, convert those leads. That's what you should be focusing on. When you scale around luck, things get really messy really fast. When you scale around an unproven process, when you scale around an unpredictable process, it's really hard to scale and continue to scale and do it in the right way. It's hard to make the decisions as to what you need because you don't have a real process, so there's no proper feedback in the business to tell you where you should hire, who you need on the team, what you need to do to shore up the five core functions of lead gen, nurture, conversion, retention, resell and upsell. Because if you're just getting lucky, those are not predictable. They're not repeatable, and you don't have processes in place. And here's one of the biggest things that I want you to understand. Luck, getting lucky can actually drive you to predictable success.

In fact, a lot of business, a lot of products that I've sold we got lucky early on, and I saw it as a sign of, "Hey, there's signs of life here." And then I use that, those signs of life to go out and find predictable leads, predictable nurture, predictable conversion, where we knew what we would be getting. And so luck can drive predictable success, but until it does, it's still just luck. And don't take it as a sign of success, you'll be disappointed and so will your team. So here's what you need to know, your business should be predictable over and over again. There should be a predictability to how many people are coming towards you, to how you're working with those people, to how you're converting them into clients. The five core functions of your business should not just be the five core functions you talk about. They should be documented processes that are clear, that are predictable and repeatable.

The five core functions, again, are lead generation, lead nurture, conversion, the act of sale, delivery, retention, resell and upsell. Retention, resell and upsell are the fifth one. Those aren't three separate ones. So those five core functions should be consistent, should be documented, should be processes, should be done the same way over and over again. That way you have a real business, not just getting lucky, and here's something else you need to know about this, getting lucky is emotional. It's emotional to make that first sale, it's emotional to get a few leads when you didn't expect them. It's emotional to see money coming on the stripe account or to have an order come in. It's emotional to get lucky to have those first few signs of life. Don't let that emotion confuse you and drive you in a direction that is not going to grow your business. Here's what will grow your business, consistent, predictable processes that create success.

You can declare you are no longer getting lucky in business when you have consistent, predictable successes that create, processes that create your success. And when you have consistent, predictable processes that create your success, your momentum is near assured, it's near guaranteed. You're going to go forward like crazy, but here's what way too many entrepreneurs are doing. They're taking those first few signs of life and treating them as actual success and then they don't drive predictability and process, and all five of the five core functions. I want you to do this because it will put you ahead of the other people around you. It will put you ahead of your competition, and it will help you treat your clients and serve your clients in a way that's going to grow your business, get referrals and put you into momentum for a long time. Don't take getting lucky as a sign of success, it's just getting lucky. When your business is predictable, it's real.

If you're ready to make your business predictable. In fact, if you want the systems, the processes, the frameworks that will help you create massive predictability in your business, where you can grow like crazy, give us a call. In fact, reach out to us and set up a call. Go to billionairecode.com answer a few questions for my team and you will be able to set up a call with a member of my team where we can help you understand what's going on in your business, get massive clarity and create momentum right now. If you want a predictable business that creates success in a way that you understand, that's predictable on a day to day basis, go to billionairecode.com, set up a call with my team. We look forward to helping you.