Andy Grove who was a Hungarian immigrant entrepreneur, one of the founders of Intel, the CEO of Intel,
he was known as the guy that drove the growth phase of Silicon Valley. I mean, this guy
was respected among all CEOs. Some people would have called him even bigger than Steve
Jobs. Let me tell you, that's who Andy Grove is. He wrote a book once called Only the Paranoid
Survive. God bless his soul, he passed away early this March, 2016, and those who knew
who he was and followed a lot of his content know the industry lost a great man. If you
haven't read his book Only the Paranoid Survive, even though it's an old book, I highly recommend
everybody read it. The stories may not be relevant, but the concepts will be relevant.
I wanted to produce a video because paranoia is a very interesting topic. A lot of people
say it's good or not good to be paranoid. I think there are 10 things to be paranoid
about as an entrepreneur, that are very critical. I think paranoia is absolutely necessary and
the ones who are the biggest thinkers are usually the most paranoid entrepreneurs. The
smallest thinkers are normally the least paranoid. Now remember, I'm not talking about negative
paranoia, that everybody is out to get you at the workplace and so you don't perform,
you don't talk, and you just kind of stay in a corner by yourself - that's small thinking.
I'm talking big thinking paranoia, like a general would to do say the enemy is going
to attack us from here, if they flanks us here, we're good and protected, that's what
I'm talking about the level of paranoia. So ten things, let's go through it.
#1: In my opinion, in no specific order these are ten things. #1: Speed of implementation.
Speed. To me, speed is probably at the top of my list of paranoia. What do I mean by
speed? One, how quickly do we implement an idea that we have that's very effective. I'm
paranoid on the speed of that.
Sometimes we're moving too quickly where it become abrupt and we need to take our time
to be more diligent so we don't lose $728,000 on a project we're working on. Right? But
speed regardless is by far at the top of my list of things to be paranoid about. Speed
of delivery for customers. Speed of delivery for partners, vendors. Speed on how quickly
we get back to a customer or anybody. Speed on emails. Speed on placement. Speed on purchases
made, how long does it take to make the purchase, how easy is it, right? How quickly does the
next step happen for the product to be sent to them? How quickly, if it's a loan, underwriting.
If it's anything -- everything comes back down to speed. The biggest companies in the
world that become way, way too thick became very, very thick because at one point speed
was very critical and they've been flat because speed is no longer a priority to them, okay?
You've got to keep that in mind. They forgot about the speed. They forgot about being paranoid
about the speed.
#2: is time. What is time? Time could be many different things, but I'll explain to you
what I mean by time. Time to me is one, we don't have as much time on getting this done
as we think we do. Let's go get it done, right? How much time will it take for this to be
done? So am I being diligent on the amount of time it takes for me to get this project
done? Or are we just winging it? We had a project that the technology guy told me is
going to take 90 days. Absolute lie to us and he got money, and everything that was
taking place, it's been nine months, no delivery of a product. I'm not happy about that. Why
did that take place? Front end, there wasn't proper preparation with this one developer
that we hired and we had to hire some other developer. And this developer sold himself
very well on what we did. I'd love to give his name away but I'm not going to give his
name away yet because if he delivers he's fine. But sometimes it's the development of
a product. Sometimes it's the time they say it's going to take and it doesn't come through.
Sometimes it's someone telling us, "We can only do it in 60 days," but they're lying.
Why? We didn't ask enough questions. We should have asked questions. So I can't sit and blame.
I should have taken responsibility and asked more questions and our team should have been
a little more diligent. What can we do to be better with this time part? Another one
with time could be how urgent we are. How urgent are we about getting the answer to
a question? Why do we take two weeks to get the answer to this question, why can't we
get that question answered within two hours? Why don't we contact the people to get that
question answered today? I want the answer to that question today. So why is it taking
such a long time to get the question answered? Even faster. We needed these three people
to hire, why are we taking so much time? We needed to hire this person over here, we needed
to get this vendor, how come we're taking so much time? That's the time part. I'm paranoid
about that part and I think entrepreneurs who are not generally, everything becomes
lackadaisical and everybody else follows that same exact culture.
#3: Kind of goes with number two is deadlines. I'm paranoid about deadlines. Are we going
to hit this deadline? Is this thing going to get done? It's similar, but it's kind of
not, because time can be so general. This is purely deadlines. Being paranoid about
deadlines being met. You make an announcement that somethings going to launch at this time,
how paranoid are you that this launch is going to take place? How does the team feel about
that deadline not being met? What are we doing about that part, right? Paranoid about deadlines.
#4: Internal systems. How efficient are your internal systems? What type of product are
your internal systems producing? Are your internal systems producing the best type of
product? Is the experience the best type of experience that it is producing? What needs
to be adjusted for it to be more efficient, faster, more streamlined? Is it duplicateable,
is it something that anybody can do? Is it a system that if you hire another person can
come immediately and do exactly what that person was doing for the last three and a
half years? Do we have a system like that? Is it a system in a way where we hire four
employees, read this manual, got it, a week from now I can do the same exact thing. Is
there a system for that? How efficient am I with the systems internally where everything's
going to be working good together and it's smooth, there are no glitches. How great is
that system? That's the system, right that you're paying attention to?
The next one is is innovation. There's a lot of paranoia in innovation because again, big
companies are not paranoid about innovation because they don't ever think they'll be passed
up. Big companies are typically extremely arrogant and cocky and we're the best and
we're gonna this, and they're just more from there and usually a younger company comes
and says we're not the best, we are not cocky, we're not there yet, you are bigger than us,
you are better than us, but man, we're hungry. And let's see who's going to win. Ready, let's
go fight. Let's see who's going to do it because innovation, speed, innovation, speed, improve,
innovation, innovation, innovation. How can we improve? A lot of this comes together and
you've got to be having a level of paranoia on whether innovation is still taking place
in your company, or is it business as usual?
#6:Energy, I've talked about this a lot lately. You know, studying all of the contentment,
how's your energy, do you still have the same enthusiasm and excitement, are you getting
too content because you've had way too many victories? It's being paranoid about your
own energy. Is your energy still at the highest level of energy where other people are wanting
to emulate and be around you?
Next, #7, paranoid about the most important numbers and measures to study. So a lot of
times you have, as an entrepreneur, you can measure hundreds of different numbers. There
are so many different things as an entrepreneur you can measure. So many of them. But what's
your number one? What's your number one thing you measure the most? Just think about that?
Some people say, "The most important thing to measure is profits?" Why? Because you're
taking profits home? You know, there's a guy that was working for an attorney was telling
me, "man, you know, working for this guy who owns this law firm, every month, profits come
in and he takes all the profits and leaves everything else behind." Well, if your profit
is the most important for you because you're only thinking about yourself? I don't know
how many people are excited about working for that company where the CEOs most important
thing is profits. Now this doesn't mean that profits aren't important because you're going
to go out of business. Not at all. Profits are important, but it's not number one. Is
it top-line revenue? Is it gross? Is it paying off debt? Is it being debt free? Is it how
much cash you have? What is the measure? Is it how many employees you have? Is it how
many vendors you have? Is it how many partners you have? How many products? What is it? To
me, the most important measuring stick is subscribership, to be paranoid about. I spoke
to a company that came and met with me, and they said all this stuff that is taking place
with our company. I said, "Tell me how is your subscription going higher? How many subscribers
have increased? How many? How many users have increased?" So, for instance, let's just say
I'm a company that was accustomed to having 1,000 sales per month. Hypothetically, I have
1,000 sales per month. And that 1,000 sales was doing a million dollars a month for me.
Let's just throw a number out there. Now I'm doing 300 sales per month, but I'm still doing
1.1 million dollars. I'm very worried. I am very paranoid. But if I take that 1,000 customers
that bought from me -- they could have bought seven different products -- but I want to
know how many customers bought from me. 1,000 users logged on and bought a product from
me and it's a million dollars? I don't care about the million dollars, I want to know
how I can get the thousand customers buying from me to 2,000 customers buying from me,
even if that million is 1.7 million and it's not two million, I'm not worried. I now have
2,000 customers. Because I can always improve this. But I can't improve subscribership.
This gives birth to everything else. So I'm very paranoid about subscribership. I am very
paranoid about this area, to measure. This gives birth to everything else. What is your
number one that you're most paranoid about, every day that keeps you up at night, that
you wake up with every single morning.
Next one, #8, competition. Competition really isn't at the top of my list, but you've got
to pay attention to your competition. You've got to pay attention to reading the paper
to see these people are coming out with this, they're launching this product. . . you've
got to know. Why? Is it because everything you do is a reaction based on what they do?
No, but you've got to kind of pay attention to see what they're doing because they're
definitely paying attention to you as well. How high is the level of paranoia on that?
Not that high, because if you're always - Napoleon always said, they asked him, "which strategies
do you follow when it comes down to warfare?" He said, "No one's. I use my own." Now that's
Napoleon. Everybody followed Napoleon's philosophy and Alexander's philosophies, right? Now secretly,
he's probably copying somebody's but Napoleon was about having certain philosophies and
action plans in place that maybe nobody thought about, and everyone wanted to emulate him,
right? But you've still got to pay attention to the enemy, they have no 73,000 soldiers.
This army has 186 tanks, they have 62 jets, and they have this much nuclear this, you
as a country have to know those things, in the same way you've got to know your enemies
have as well at their disposal as much numbers as you can get.
#9 - New laws and legislation - every industry, real estate, insurance, finance, technology,
what are some regulations that are taking place? What are some things that maybe a new
person that's going to take an office, how's that going to effect your business? If this
party takes over and that party takes over, if this person gets elected, if that person
gets elected, you kind of need to know a little bit about that. Yes, you do. You need to be
educated about that because if somebody's a front runner that's going to be elected
and they're telling you, "I'm going to do this, this, this," and for instance, imagine
if I'm in the health insurance business. And I know that Obamacare is coming up. I spoke
to a health-insurance guy yesterday , 1,000 agents they have, and their business has gone
lower and lower, health insurance has because it's just a complete different ballgame. So
I'm speaking to health insurance companies, those who were not prepared for Obamacare,
they took a very big hit. Because Obamacare minimized insurance, commissions, a lot of
different things, and they lost competition, they raised premiums 39%, I can't afford to
buy this and employees are dropping because they can't afford so they're going with short-term
medical. You've got to know that that legislation could possibly effect your business. If you
don't, and you think, "Oh, it's not going to happen," you've got to assume that it is
going to happen. How are you going to react to it? Every industry has laws and legislation
that you've got to be prepared for. The great ones already have a plan of action in case
that does take place.
And the last one, let me tell you what the last one is. The last one to be paranoid about
is your leadership team. The last one to be paranoid about is your leadership team. A
great coach is very paranoid about the energy in the locker room. A great coach is very
paranoid about the captain of the team that is leading everybody else. What are his habits?
What is he doing when he's taking players to his house or to dinners or parties, what
bad example is he teaching to them? Well, maybe he's not the captain. Maybe you've got
to change the captain. He could be the best player, but he's not the captain. Somebody
else needs to be the captain. The best player isn't necessarily the leader of the team.
Remember that. The best player is not necessarily the best leader on the team. It's very rarely
the best player is also the leader. Very rarely. So you've got to be paranoid about who you
put as the face of your company and who you put leading everybody else because who you
choose may be the person that will give birth to a lot of negative low standard type of
leaders, and you've got to be very, very, very diligent about paying attention to that.
If you don't, standards will drop. And typically, leaders who are not touching everything, who
are not on the road touching, shaking people's hands, you generally don't know everything
that's taking place. So those are 10 things that I have that I would be paranoid with
as an entrepreneur. You may have other ones that I would love to hear yours, you can comment
on the bottom. If you have any questions, about anything I covered with you, you can
also post a comment on the bottom. If you haven't read the book, Only the Paranoid Survive
by Andy Grove, I highly recommend you read that book. And if you're watching this video
on a complete different website, you can always come back to PatrickBetDavid.com and you can
have a ton of content about entrepreneurship on PatrickBetDavid.com, and last but not least,
please be sure to subscribe to this channel as well. Thanks for watching, everybody. Take
care. Bye bye.
