A $1,000,000.00 watch and other tales of Karate Schools Entrepreneurship.

Many years ago – I had the worst year of my business career.

The Denver economy collapsed, my marriage disintegrated, most of my staff quit – in mass, and I ended up broke and over $250,000.00 in debt and generally at wits end.

This followed international recognition for being the fastest growing school chain ever – I was in demand internationally for my sage advise – and, in the mean time my business – and, life conspired to implode all at once.

Following a year like that it is typical that your self esteem and confidence may be shattered. All of the beliefs that you held regarding your own competence disappear and in their place a kind of shell shocked groping for mediocrity. Following a proper mourning period, I decided that my reaction would not be as I described but that I would come back bigger and better than ever.

That's when I started to search for some personal reward – or, goal that I could reward myself with upon success. Something that would signify my return to the level of success that I had previously experienced and expected.

Now, don't let me fool you. When you are broke and in debt to the tune of $250,000.00 financial survival might be a huge goal. But, that was not what I was after – I was after a huge return.

So I started looking for something – and, after thinking about houses and cars – decided upon a relatively cheap but outrageously decadent incentive of a solid 18 carat Gold Rolex Presidential Day-Date. Now in the scheme of things a watch isn't that big of deal – but $10,000.00+ for a Gold Watch when your broke seems like shooting for the moon.

I went to the jewelry store and gave them $500 (that I didn't really have to spare) to put the most expensive watch in the store on layaway. At the same time I made a deal with myself that I could only have it if Mile High Karate did $1,000,000.00 or more that year. To call $1,000,000.00 a stretch goal is understating the situation but that was what I determined to achieve.

Now that I had the target ($1,000,000.00) and the deadline (by the end of that year) I had to get busy and figure out how to get there.

I spent several weeks putting together the “action plan.”

I reviewed our “stats” for the previous year in detail – and, boy was that depressing. I looked for strengths, problems, opportunities, and areas that needed minor tuning.

Then I figured out on a month to month basis what we needed to do in enrollments, new monthly payments, renewals, and cash to hit my objective by the end of the year.

My next step was to review the staff that I had in place spread out among six locations – size up their strengths and weaknesses then designed a training and motivation plan to create my target performance among those people.

The first step was to break the $1,000,000.00 down into bite size chunks for each school and to set monthly and quarterly targets through consultation with each school manager that they could really believe in. Next I reviewed incentive and bonus plans to give adequate incentive to each of my managers for their own performance.

Then it came time to do two things:

First, Train, Train, Train . I focused on dramatic improvements in the competencies of each of my staff members. We drilled and role played endlessly on Info calls – introductory classes – enrollment conferences – and, renewal conferences. I instituted new Black Belt and Teacher classes and pulled each staff member up to a new – higher level of competency.

Second, I created graphs and charts and tracked our targets and actual results every Monday with a clear focus on enrollments, renewals, retention, and cash growth.

What came next is aggressive, brutal, unflinching implementation. “Balls to the Wall” focused making it happen – unabashed chaos of activity.

Did everything go smoothly and as planned?

Of course not . I focused on a “whatever it takes” mentality and actually had several staff members quit because they “didn't want to have to do whatever it takes” –the 9 – 5 mentality strikes again. There we ups and downs and frankly we missed our target for three of the first four months of this “whatever it takes” plan.

However, by keeping the goal in mind – ignoring the obstacles – and, bulldog like tenacity we plowed through my $1,000,000.00 goals by November 12 th – and, I immediately went and picked up my $1,000,000 watch.

By the way – the next year we hit $1.3 million, and the next year $1.8 million – and, kept on rolling. And, I bought the house down the street from my beautiful mountain retreat sold in the middle of divorce and crisis – I really was back!