Experiment!

Another billionaire principle is experimentation.  Once you find a “formula” that works wouldn’t any sane person work to maximize that and “not mess with success”?

People who become extraordinarily successful are restless.  They are never satisfied.  They always want to do better what they are already doing well.  They cannot help but experiment.

We have a member of our organization, OAA, named Jimmy Eubanks.  Jimmy is “The Tulsa Insurance Guy” and embodies another billionaire principle “tremendous optimism”.  But he is also a relentless experimenter.  Jimmy is focused on how long it takes to quote insurance, issue endorsements and do other routine, mundane things for his customers.  He wants to be faster!  He knows if he is his operation will be better, his costs will be less and his value proposition unstoppable in his market.

Jimmy thinks like a billionaire!

Some keys to billionaire experimentation are that, in addition to doing it all the time, they create “metrics” to measure whether the experiment is successful or not.  They don’t want to just feel like an idea is a good one, they want to know it is.  Or not.

Another thing billionaires do is kill experiments as soon as they prove that they either don’t work, or don’t meet the standard that was set in advance.  They don’t persist with mediocre products, people or processes.

Billionaires start experiments small.  This doesn’t require a lot of money or time to scale up the test.  Then they kill it if it doesn’t work but if it does they scale it up as fast as possible.  What if you tried a marketing program that had really good success?  You’d keep doing it wouldn’t you?  But would you pour every nickel you could find into doing more of it?

Most don’t.  That’s why they aren’t as successful as they could be much less billionaires.

One more thing.  People who experiment are often times criticized or made fun of by others who don’t understand what they are doing.  Remember the “crazy professor” and the “mad scientist”?  A great idea is crazy until the day before it’s successful!  Billionaires are willing to be misunderstood.  They experiment to “the beat of their own drummer”.

Want to be successful in creating a really large, rapidly growing agency?  Experiment!