Copyright forbes
The counterintuitive method that helps CEOs grow profits with less effort If your customers are not scrambling to buy your offer, something is off. If your work doesn’t feel good, you won’t keep going through the challenges. Consider this: there is a specific combination of your skills and passion that could be making you easy money. And the more you struggle through, the further away you get from finding it. Because not only is your calendar filled with things that don’t matter, but you’re missing the signs of what you’re actually here to do. The old business playbook is broken and there’s a new way in town. I call it the vibe method. Where you go with your flow, visualize success, and stop believing that great results have to cost your health, sleep and sanity. They don’t. The CEOs quietly tripling their profits are inverting everything you've been taught about success. The examples that follow show it’s working. Triple profits by inverting your approach to business Work backwards Working backwards from success beats working forward from problems. Start where you want to end up and reverse engineer. Transcend cause and effect by assuming the result. Joe Davy, cofounder and CEO of Banzai dreamed of IPOing long before Banzai went public. “I set my company up to be big from the start,” he said. “With the goal of an IPO in mind, the day-to-day was obvious. We had to secure investment, build out the team, and punch above our weight to secure enterprise contracts.” Ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange was proof that reserve-engineering the outcome had worked as planned. MORE FOR YOU Wandering aimlessly towards a vague goal is the practice of losers, not winners like you. Hit the pause button until you know where you’re going. Create your own version of success. Make your stop-doing list This matters more than your to-do list. Every unnecessary action is stealing energy from what matters. Every action that you should have outgrown is keeping you in the past and preventing your progress. Richard Harpin started HomeServe with £50,000 and 30 years later sold for £4.2 billion. In his bestselling book, How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps, step 8 is “create your not-to-do list.” Harpin advises to, “make a list of things that you won’t pursue because it would take you away from your core business, and pin it up so that everyone who works with you can see it, to avoid unnecessary complexity and distraction.” He said that by resolving to do less, he became better at the things that matter most.” This intentionality freed him for the tasks that would secure his ten-figure exit, “like opening in new international markets.” Just because you could do it, doesn’t mean you have to. Be proud to opt out of whatever doesn’t serve you. Leveraging your natural rhythms Stop forcing productivity. Work with your energy, not against it. If your best work happens at 10pm, fighting that 9-to-5 mould could be costing you millions. Jeremy Walker, CEO of Exercism, has always known he was a night owl. "Even at school, mornings felt like torture. It’s like my IQ doubles at 6pm. When I started a business, I tried to go into the office with my team like a ‘proper’ businessman." Now he follows his own rhythm instead of trying to fit in. “My team is distributed and asynchronous. We all work when’s best for us. I follow my own energy, no-one else's.” The time of day is arbitrary when you’re building your empire. Weekdays and weekends blur when you’re on a mission. And that’s okay. Let fires burn Practice strategic neglect and let some fires burn out on their own. Learning what to ignore will save your sanity and scale your business. Chris Do, founder and CEO of The Futur, doesn’t micromanage every decision. He hires great people and tells them the goal. Then he lets them do their thing. “You can control the input or the output,” he said. “But not both.” If something goes wrong, they will fix it. They know what’s required and you don’t have to get involved. As your business grows, promote yourself. Solve new problems, and empower your team to solve old ones with your proven processes. You’ve earned the right to do this. Make ease your edge Strain creates resistance but ease creates flow. The market rewards those who make success look effortless because it usually is. If you believe something is too good to be true, you’ll never get it. “On the surface I’m a swan,” said Sophie Devonshire, CEO of The Marketing Society and bestselling author of Superfast: lead at speed, “and underneath I’m often like that too.” If you’re stupidly busy and needlessly frantic, you don’t connect the dots required for making great decisions. “I fit a lot into my week but I reflect on my calendar every Friday. I postpone and reshuffle anything that can move down (or off!) the priority list,” she added. You don’t have to frantically paddle. You can follow your energy and focus on what feels right. Before long, you’re lapping every CEO trying to do it all. The counterintuitive path to profit Everything you learned about grinding is wrong and these CEOs take a different approach. Copy their methods to emulate their success. Work backwards from your desired outcome, create a stop-doing list bigger than your to-do list, leverage your natural rhythms, master strategic neglect, and make ease your competitive edge. Profits flow to those who stop pushing against the current. When you’re aligned with your powers, it’s supposed to feel easy. Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
