Books Unwound

This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  This should not be considered a replacement for the actual book, which will usually have a lot more in depth information as well as stories, which are an important way to communicate the essentials.  If you find the information in these posts helpful, I recommend buying the book or borrowing it from your library.

Chapter 12: All Systems Go

Goals and Focus

In the last chapter of The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes drives home the point that you need to have determined focus on just a few areas to make your business hum. He says it is not about doing 4,000 things, but about doing just 12 things 4,000 times.

This is a great reminder that business is actually pretty simple. We often complicate it by adding layers on to layers. But if we could peel away the layers, we would see that we need a simple machine. A good business needs to put out a good product or service and have a strong plan for bringing in customers. And everything must run on systems.

When it comes to achieving goals for your business, it is important to note that it is not good enough to just write some goals down and refer back to them from time to time. You need to relentlessly focus on your goals until you achieve them.

Throughout The Ultimate Sales Machine, Holmes lays out different plans and systems for achieving business growth and building a thriving business. These are more than theories. If you apply some of these principles on a regular basis, you will really start to see some positive changes in your organization. I have personally seen great benefit in the areas of time management and meetings.

Engage Your Mind

Holmes spends some of the final chapter of this book talking about the power of the mind, and how you need to master yourself and your thinking before you can master your business. This is good personal development stuff, but I am not going to dig into it here.

Be Sure to Measure

In order for you to build a truly efficient machine, you need to focus hard on building the right systems and achieving the right goals. You also need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts at any given time. When you build the systems to run your business, build measurement right in there. While you will be able to have the business run without you, it is still your job to make sure everything is tuned up and bringing in results. You become the mechanic. If you don’t take the time to measure, your carefully crafted systems will decay.

Final Thoughts

My in depth review of this book ends here. Hopefully, you were able to pull out some useful nuggets. The Ultimate Sales Machine is the type of book that is packed full of actionable ideas. If you found yourself  inspired by my posts, I highly recommend that you get your hands on this book. Its the kind that you can refer back to as you build out certain aspects of your business.

This book is not about flashy theory, but about down and dirty tactics to help your business succeed. While a lot of it focuses on sales, it is just as much about operating and running your business, especially the early chapters. Some of the tips I got out of this book have really helped me in my business, and I continue to apply Chet Holmes’ principles.

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Coming next: The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog at www.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.