Sabri Suby is the founder of one of Australia’s fastest growing businesses and digital marketing agency, King Kong and author of international bestseller Sell Like Crazy.
Launched in 2014 out of Sabri’s home and completely bootstrapped, King Kong has grown to become a company of over 60 employees with major clients nationally and internationally.
His company has impacted 250,000 businesses in 42 different countries, and has generated in excess of $400 million in sales for him and his clients.
As a serial entrepreneur, we’ll leave him to tell you how you can propel your company to greatness in 2020 with his top 6 tips.
There is always enough time
Don’t use the ‘I don’t have enough time’ excuse. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. Ray Dalio, Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger are self-made billionaires, and they have the same 24 hours as other business owners. The most important thing is how you use that time.
Don’t make excuses about lack of time, lack of money, lack of resources. Often it’s simply lack of resourcefulness that’s holding you back. I have a baby and a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter. The easy thing would be to say: “I am so busy, I don’t have time”.
Instead, when I start to feel this way, I create time. To do this in your own life do an ‘King’s audit’ to understand where your time is being spent. Then, simply remove the things that are not taking you towards your goal.
Take risks
An effective risk taker is someone that can quickly weigh up the downside versus the upside, to make calculated risks. The reality is business moves quickly, so the notion that you need 100% of the facts to take a risk is a real fallacy. Great leaders should have the ability to make effective decisions with a mere 30-40% of the facts. If you can’t do that, your business will move slowly – and if you’re moving slowly, you’re already losing. Learn to be decisive and make decisions without all of the information on hand, so that you won’t lose opportunities and can stay ahead.
The importance of team
Without good people supporting you, it’s very difficult to scale and pursue every opportunity presented. Hire for attitude – a good CV might give you a candidate with the right skills but it’s only part of the equation. Don’t narrow down your talent pool based on skills that can be developed with further training or experience. Find someone with a can-do attitude who’s not afraid of hard work and you’re on to a winner.
And if your winning team is going to spend 40+ hours a week working for you, you’d better make it a good time. There’s a myth that business success comes from putting your customers first. That might work when you’re a startup, but if you want your business to grow, your team is the most important thing to get right. Hire good talent, treat them well and give them a reason to be happy when they step into the workplace and they will look after your clients for you.
Develop yourself
Self-awareness is key and you need to be comfortable enough to identify your strengths and weaknesses and skill-gaps. Don’t let these shortcomings hold you back – work on eliminating them.
80/20 when it comes to productivity
Using Pareto’s principle of the 80/20 rule, which demonstrates you can and should disregard 80 percent of your business activities – I identified which 20% of my activities accounted for 80% of the revenue. Then I apply the 80/20 rule to that 20%. From my experience, just 4% of the total inputs result in 64% of the outputs. You want to shut out all the noise and relentlessly focus on that 4%. These are highly leveraged activities that will have a massive effect on your business.
Guard your time
Every minute spent planning saves you time down the track. Break down your end goal into monthly, weekly and daily goals. This outlines what you need to do and allows you to attack them in an achievable way. Planning the night prior means you can hit the ground running each morning with a clear action plan.
Free up your ‘mental RAM’ and avoid decision fatigue, and you’ll find the quality of your attention improves along with your productivity.
You can also take control of your time by blocking out a couple hours a day for your team to meet with you. That way you’re accessible, but won’t be interrupted while you’re in a productive flow. Make use of gatekeepers like your executive assistant or open segments of your calendar for staff to request a chat, rather than (metaphorically) leaving the door open.
You can read more by Sabri on business growth here.
Sabri Suby is a serial entrepreneur, founder of digital marketing agency King Kong, and author of international bestseller Sell Like Crazy.
