Rules of the Hunt: Real-World Advice for Entrepreneurial and Business Success

By Michael Dalton Johnson

Praise for Rules of the Hunt

"To say that Rules of the Hunt is one of the most unusual business books I’ve ever read or reviewed would be an understatement."
—Ivana Taylor, Editor, Small Business Trends

"I have never read a business book with so much wisdom--and so many useful ideas—on virtually every page. And all of it presented with no wasted words."
—Bob Bly, copywriter, consultant, and seminar leader

“An easy but powerful read that's guaranteed to give you fresh insights into entrepreneurial success.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies

“This is a great book, full of ideas, examples, stories and rules for increased business success and profitability.”
—Brian Tracy, author of Million Dollar Habits

"I love everything about this book . . . . If you are an entrepreneur or small-business owner, you can't make a better investment in your future success!"
—Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D., speaker and author of The Silent Language of Leaders

“Rules of the Hunt offers insights from the heart and mind of a man who has overcome the difficult challenges of attaining business and personal success.”
—Wendy Weiss, founder and CEO, Weiss Communications

Rules of the Hunt is unusual in that you won’t find any trendy advice, complex theories, or unrealistic promises. Rather, you’ll get the kind of friendly, honest and down-to-earth advice you would expect from a trusted mentor.

A successful entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience in the trenches, Michael Dalton Johnson knows what it takes to build and run a profitable business. In Rules of the Hunt, he provides invaluable insight into everything you need to know—from practical skills like negotiating, recruiting, and time management to “soft” skills like mental agility and personal growth.

His advice will accelerate your growth and profits—delivered in a friendly, often humorous way through brief business anecdotes, short tutorials, case histories, an occasional rant, and a few horror stories. And, in true mentor form, Johnson helps you preserve both your physical and mental health during your chase for business success.

In essence, Rules of the Hunt teaches you what business schools can’t. Learn everything you need to know about:

• LEADERSHIP—create loyalty, inspire trust, and motivate others
• RELATIONSHIPS—form strong bonds with customers, employees, suppliers, and investors
• SALES—engage and excite your buyers and close more sales
• MARKETING—identify, locate, and promote like the pros
• TECHNOLOGY—master today’s most important tool, the Internet
• OPERATIONS—get things done the right way to grow profits
• FORESIGHT—avoid pitfalls and plan for future challenges before they appear
• SURVIVAL—maintain your health and sanity while pursuing your business goals

Successful entrepreneurship is both an art and a science, and in order to succeed you must know the rules. You’ll get them here.

With Rules of the Hunt, you have everything you need to outfox the competition, maintain your integrity, and actually enjoy your hunt for business success. Straightforward, easy to understand, pragmatic, and devoid of subjective theories and ideologies, Rules of the Hunt simply tells it like it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: May 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9780071791397

Book preview

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INTRODUCTION

Let’s Cut to the Chase

THIS BOOK WON’T make you rich or successful. That’s your job.

If you are intelligent and ambitious, you have a good chance of reaching both your business goals and your life goals. But you’re going to need help.

Rules of the Hunt is not about miraculous transformation, instant stardom, or life-changing revelations. No book can open a wormhole that allows you to enter and emerge on the other side an entrepreneurial genius, a powerhouse salesperson, or an overnight business sensation. But what this book will do is make your path to business success easier and more enjoyable.

Whether your road to success is a smooth cruise on a four-lane highway or a harrowing ride on an unpaved mountain road has a lot to do with your ability to gain small advantages and avoid mistakes.

Much like winning a game of chess, succeeding in business rarely comes from one brilliant masterstroke. Both winning at chess and succeeding in business come as the result of avoiding errors and gaining an accumulation of small advantages. This book gives you some of those small advantages as well as points out pitfalls to be avoided.

I have strived to keep the writing honest and straightforward. I’ve written Rules of the Hunt for an intelligent yet uninformed friend. You won’t find much that’s formal or preachy here. You will, despite the occasional cynical comment, find the book to be remarkably optimistic. You’ll also find it friendly and easy to read.

Rules of the Hunt has no rigidly structured theme, and my observations, or rules, if you will, vary in density and detail from page to page. Each rule stands on its own and is valuable without reference to another.

This is not a book to be read straight through cover to cover as you might a novel. There is a lot of information on a broad range of subjects. My advice is to read a chapter or two and then take some time to absorb what they contain before going on to the next. You might find it useful to make a few notes as you proceed.

Because Rules of the Hunt is not a book of business theory, many of its lessons are valuable to people who are not entrepreneurs. Themes such as leadership, time management, negotiating, and motivating have applications in many different settings.

I don’t agree with those who have suggested that I’ve created a new genre of business book. Despite being markedly different in format and content from other business books, Rules of the Hunt, in the end, is simply a book of real-world business advice.

Throughout the book, you’ll find practical and sometimes counterintuitive advice along with brief business anecdotes, a few short tutorials, a bit of humor, old-school advice, case histories, an occasional rant, a few horror stories, and some practical suggestions for keeping business in perspective.

Rules of the Hunt covers a broad range of entrepreneurial subjects including leadership, negotiating, motivating people, time management, bartering, recruiting winners, avoiding attorneys, personal growth, sales, marketing, and much more.

You’ll find nothing trendy here. There is no theory and no business religion to join. Rules of the Hunt is simply an honest telling of business experiences and observations.

I acquired this knowledge slowly, and sometimes painfully, through more than three decades of entrepreneurial experience. Having begun my business life with very few advantages, Rules of the Hunt is, in some ways, written from the perspective of a business outsider.

I am not at all what you might imagine an entrepreneur to be. I live a modest life centered around my family and home. I have no pretensions of being a high-powered business genius. As a kid who dropped out of high school at age 15 to take a job, I’ve made a lot of money. But, rags-to-riches stories are common, and this book is not about me.

When I launched my entrepreneurial journey some 30 years ago I was unimaginably ill-prepared. I had no business experience, no money, and very little education. As you might imagine, it was a bumpy ride at first.

Much of what I’ve learned comes from in the trenches experience and is unlikely to ever be part of any business school curriculum. What you’ll learn turns conventional how to become a successful entrepreneur axioms on their heads.

To survive I became a keenly interested student of human nature, the subtleties of leadership, effective marketing, and the art of selling.

Yes, you’ll definitely learn things they won’t teach you in business school. I debunk widely held management beliefs, voice my distain for bureaucracies, and wonder aloud why otherwise smart business people hide from their customers.

Some of the ideas and insights in this book will stimulate your imagination, others may inspire you, and a few might make you scratch your head and wonder about my sanity.

I have learned that entrepreneurship is addictive. Like all addictions it can lead to a driven, unbalanced, and obsessive life. Because of this, business success sometimes comes at a terrible personal price. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I have devoted a chapter to keeping things in perspective and maintaining your health and sanity. This advice may resemble what you might read in a personal growth book, but what you’ll learn will serve you well in surviving your entrepreneurial trek. It’s advice I wish had been given to me years ago.

Today innovative computer and communications technology has made becoming your own boss almost unbelievably easy and affordable. Thanks to the Internet, mom-and-pop business operators and would-be kitchen-table tycoons have access to a new universe of minimal-cost-of-entry businesses and markets. With large corporations slashing payrolls, many highly trained and capable employees have been tossed into a dicey job market. The newly unemployed need to work, and many are starting their own businesses. For laid-off or worried workers, launching a business may seem like the best path to survival.

Even though starting a business is now a much more doable and attractive way of making a living than ever before, there is a substantial difference between simply becoming an entrepreneur and becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Even with all the high-tech business tools available to you, you still need a vision, a plan, leadership skills, a keen understanding of human behavior, the willingness to accept responsibility, a knowledge of marketing and sales, daring, and endurance. This book will help you.

When all is said and done, entrepreneurship requires certain personality traits that simply can’t be taught; among them are: a deep-seated need to prove your abilities, a high tolerance for risk, and a strong desire for adventure. These attributes are innate, and you won’t acquire them by reading this or any other book. However, if you have them, you’re halfway home.

To quote one of the best motivational thinkers of our time, Tim Ferriss, The question you should be asking isn’t ‘What do I want?’ or ‘What are my goals?’ but ‘What would excite me?’

Find what excites you, and you’ll be well on your way to success. When you have reached your goals, I hope you will look back at this book with an appreciation of those small advantages you gained from reading it.

GETTING THE MOST FROM THIS BOOK

Rules of the Hunt contains several hundred rules loosely organized in chapters. Each rule stands on its own without reference to another. The names of the rules do not always correspond to their content. Because of the volume of information and the wide range of subjects covered, you’ll find a Directory of Rules at the end of the book. This directory provides space for you to annotate the rules that are of interest to you for quick future reference.

1 THINGS THEY DIDN’T TEACH YOU IN BUSINESS SCHOOL

Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune.

—JIM ROHN, AMERICAN ENTREPRENEUR

IN BUSINESS, as in most other walks of life, a good, well-rounded education is a tremendous asset for acquiring success. While there’s little question that many business schools provide a very good education, they don’t—and can’t—deliver a well-rounded one.

Business schools are long, deep, and wide on theory, philosophy, economics, and other big picture subjects. This provides a solid foundation for a career in business. But it’s not possible for them to give you the experience you will need to deal with the many challenges and opportunities that you’ll encounter every day of your business life.

Day-to-day business is firmly rooted in the real world—a world in which one low-profile breakfast can be more productive than a dozen power lunches; a world in which it’s often easier to sell something than to give it away; a world in which not being needed can be a very good thing.

Business, especially entrepreneurship, is a brass tacks world that requires having small, but all-important insights, gained only by real-world experience. Here are just a few.

Take responsibility.

The first rule of entrepreneurial success is to take responsibility. Nothing transforms you into a trusted business leader faster than faithfully observing this rule. When you accept complete responsibility for what happens in both your business and your personal life, you transform yourself from participant to director. Once you fully understand and apply this rule, you have already succeeded.

Avoid meetings with more than two or three people.

Meetings are generally a waste of time. The more people in attendance and the longer the meeting lasts, the greater the waste of time. Research shows that many times a meeting’s primary purpose is to establish the pecking order within the group. If you must have a meeting, control it. Limit the number of attendees to those absolutely necessary. Have a well-defined agenda and stick to it. Ban cell phones. Start on time. Don’t repeat yourself for latecomers. Then get back to work.

There are exceptions to limiting the number of meeting attendees. For example, a brainstorming meeting shouldn’t be limited to just two or three people. Be sure to keep brainstorming meetings informal to encourage the free flow of ideas—and limit attendance to fewer than 10 people. The purpose of these meetings is to solve a problem. Once the problem is presented to the group, ideas, even silly ideas, are solicited from attendees and written on a blackboard or some such thing. The ideas are then discussed, and the better ones are adopted. These are by far the most successful and productive kinds of meetings I have attended.

Price can create value.

A friend called me one Saturday afternoon. I need to ask you a big favor, he began. He explained that he had a family emergency that would take him out of town for several weeks. He asked if I could take a litter of six puppies and give them away to good homes while he was away.

I do love dogs, but I started thinking about the level of care puppies need, and I was about to say no when I heard myself saying, Sure, why not? An hour later my friend was at my door with a large bag of Puppy Chow and six very cute and very excited puppies.

Monday morning I placed an ad on a classified advertising site which read: Cute Australian Shepherd mix puppies. Free. That week I got only four calls and placed just one puppy. Cute as they were, the prospect of continuing to care for five very needful puppies was not pleasant. Then I got an idea.

The following Monday, I posted the same ad with one change. The puppies were no longer free. The price was now $75. To my surprise, the remaining puppies were sold to five happy families within two days.

The lesson of this little story is that price can establish value in the mind of the buyer.

Steal good ideas.

When you see a really good marketing concept or packaging innovation, adapt it to your own use. This does not mean that you should plagiarize copy or design. Use concepts only. I used to go to the post office on Saturday mornings and load up on dozens of unopened direct mail pieces that I would steal from the waste bins. I would then take them home and analyze them. I got a treasure trove of brilliant ideas from America’s leading direct mail experts. You won’t find this real-world instruction in any book.

The immutable law of business gift giving.

Women like chocolates and flowers; men like food, gadgets, and toys. Quality trumps quantity. A small box of exquisite chocolate truffles is remembered long after a two-pound box of so-so candy. That’s all you need to know.

Don’t work more than eight hours a day.

The old entrepreneurial cliché, I worked fourteen-hour days, six days a week, for five years to build this business, is bunk. If you deduct long lunches, lengthy phone calls, marathon meetings, and bull sessions, this person probably only worked six or seven hours a day. Making the commitment to work an intense eight hours focuses you on priority items, and you’ll have more time for friends and family.

When you absolutely must work a few extra hours, do it before office hours. There will be far fewer distractions.

Don’t manage for the sake of management.

Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done. —PETER DRUCKER

Some business owners feel compelled to bring their authority to bear on virtually every project. If your input is necessary, then by all means, give it. If not, get out of the way of your effective and creative people. Your management may be slowing them down, and they’ll secretly resent it. Overmanagement is a surefire way to lose good people.

Plain English wins the day.

Big words don’t equal a bigger brain. Intelligent people who are confident in their message and passionate about what they do don’t need obscure language to communicate. —JOHN MCFERRAN, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE FIRST HR SERVICES

Studies show that business communications filled with jargon and corporate speak come across as rude, misleading, or obnoxious. Employees and colleagues view simple plain English as honest and friendly. It opens doors and closes deals. Despite this, the business world is awash in pretentious language, jargon, and euphemisms.

Corporate speak is the invention of small-minded people who want to avoid responsibility, sound erudite, and sugarcoat the truth. Apparently, it’s easier for these clowns to conduct an exit interview than to simply fire someone. It’s more palatable for them to deal with personnel displaced inventory than employee theft, or for equipment to have deferred maintenance rather than to simply be run down. My personal favorite is the use of the term human capital to describe personnel.

Here are a couple of other examples: Our platform is a synergistic best-of-breed solution for managing departmental and interpersonal relationships in order to identify and optimally utilize resources. And the head of a major international corporation described the company’s ongoing job chopping as, synergy-related headcount restructuring.

Because it’s so commonly used, it’s easy to unconsciously let stilted corporate speak creep into your business communications. Both customers and investors see a red flag if your language sugarcoats, obscures, misleads, or confuses.

Put simple, honest language to work for you. It’s been getting the job done for centuries.

Sometimes it pays to let go.

Take time for all things. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

I have a friend who, after working for 20 years in advertising, risked a good deal of his money and went into business for himself. His boutique ad agency was open for several months, but he had not landed a single client. He was working hard: each day he devoted hours to nonstop calling and mailing potential clients. His stress was turning to desperation, and he was a few weeks away from closing his business.

One day, instead of going to work, he stopped at a store and bought a large bag of popcorn. He drove to a park and spent the entire day feeding pigeons, quietly sitting in the sun and watching kids play. He bought a hot dog and lemonade for lunch.

When he got home, his wife asked, How was your day? He smiled and said, Great.

The next day he returned to work to find two inquiries about his services waiting for him. Within a week, both companies were signed. He went on to build a successful business.

Things changed dramatically after his day in the park. Was this the result of his easing his stranglehold on the problem and letting the law of attraction work, or did he just get lucky?

It’s your call on this one.

Words are powerful and magical things.

Words create impressions, images, and expectations. They build psychological connections. They influence how we think. Since thoughts determine actions, there’s a powerful connection between the words we use and the results we get. —NAN S. RUSSELL, FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF MOUNTAIN WORKS COMMUNICATIONS

Most successful entrepreneurs understand that they can engage and motivate others by using positive words or powerful imagery. Simply changing or adding a few words to a statement can make it far more compelling. You will get a full 30 percent discount, blows away, We are offering a 30 percent discount.

I had to smile when I read the creative imagery of a restaurant menu that offered, not simply bacon and eggs but, Two farm-fresh eggs with country bacon. One description sounds a lot more wholesome and appetizing than the other.

The practice of using positive words and strong imagery helps you achieve better results. This skill is developed simply by understanding and applying