Tony Robbins' Business and Finance Blog

Attention, Gladiators! Tony’s Coming to Palm Beach for Business Mastery

If you didn’t make it to Las Vegas last month, you missed out — on life-changing strategies for dominating your market, for massively expanding your cash flow, and for realizing TRUE business growth.

But there’s another opportunity up ahead. Join Tony Robbins at Business Mastery this January 14-18, 2015, in Palm Beach, FL, and give your business the extreme competitive advantage it deserves.

Check out this video for just a small peek into what you’ve been missing:

Think you’re too busy to attend? That’s exactly why Tony wants you here. At Business Mastery, discover how to truly run your business — instead of letting your business run you.

Your business can’t afford another year of the same old results. Call 866-696-0679 or click the link below to start a new era of productivity and profit.

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See you in Florida!

To your continued success,

The Business Mastery Team

TRIGGER #3: A CHANGE IN CULTURE

Think back to the days of Napster. … And Limewire, and KaZaA, and Morpheus, and the likes. Don’t be confused; it was NOT technology that triggered this crisis. It was the cultural shift that led people to believe that stealing music does not actually qualify as unlawful stealing.

In fact, we didn’t even call it stealing, we called it “downloading.” Downloading entire albums, sometimes before an artist had even released them.

What else can trigger industry crisis besides #1 A Change in Competition and #2 A Change in Technology? A change in culture is trigger number three.

Most of us would never walk into a music store (if you’re old enough to remember those) and stick a CD up our shirt, and walk out without paying. But there were a few years when the culture essentially made it OK to do that online. A cultural shift where millions of people were stealing music, but they decided it wasn’t stealing because they believed they deserved it.

Why did they think they deserved it? Because of the culture that assumes information is free.

We forgot that this information—original music—was created by artists who spent lifetimes trying to come up with that one, or two, or five hits, so that they could make a living performing their heart out every night. The culture changed and an industry was decimated.

In 1999, the music business did $38.6 billion in sales. That same year Napster was founded. From the peak of about forty billion in 1999, the music industry plummeted 58% down to $16 billion the following year. Think about that. That’s nearly a 60% drop in revenue practically overnight. It was like the black plague and all it took was a shift in consumer culture.

But it’s not all bad news…

On the flip side, consider how Apple harnessed the culture of shrinking attention spans and downloading hysteria to create something wildly popular (not to mention profitable).

Steve Jobs, in his infinite wisdom, reasoned that since people were stealing entire libraries of music and no one was buying CDs anymore, why not sell single songs for a single price. Surely short attention spans would appreciate the simplicity of “99 cents per song.”

Traditional music sales reached their peak in 2000. At that time, Americans were buying 943 million compact discs annually while digital sales weren’t even on the cultural map. But by 2007, the sale of those cheap little digital singles overtook CDs in a landslide, generating 819 million sales (some 300 million MORE than the CD)!!

Apple used a shift in culture to popularize the cheap digital single. They said, OK, so our culture won’t pay $15 bucks for a new CD but people also don’t really want to poke around the internet for hours and steal entire libraries, either. They had a crazy idea. They believed that people would pay 99 cents for a high-quality song at the click of a button. (Another one of Apple’s related and intelligent moves was the establishment a database that now holds hundreds of millions of active accounts — most of which are attached to credit card information that allows us to make purchases in a split second, without ever having to enter payment information.)

When the culture demanded a cheap, easy, fast way to get music, Apple had the ingenuity to answer the call and is now the number one music retailer in the world. All because they monitored critical shifts in cultural behavior and added more value smarter and faster than anyone else who was trying to fulfill that want.

Less than 10 years after Apple deployed its iTunes Music Store, it surpassed 25 billion songs sold. They didn’t just trigger crisis in an industry, they changed the way the world consumes music, books, and in-pocket entertainment.

Business leaders must ask themselves: What behaviors are trending? What cultural shifts are afoot? What are the belief systems that can be ascribed to those trends and how can they affect the business of you and me? What cultural shifts can you use to your advantage today?

TRIGGER #4: A CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY

Next time you bump into a real estate agent, ask them if the economy is capable of changing an industry. Most of them can captivate you with real-life campfire thrillers that illustrate first-hand how economic recessions and interest rate swings have affected their business personally and painfully.

Can’t relate to real estate? How about government policy? Can that affect your business? You bet.

Need something even easier to wrap your hands around? Consider the modern-day cup of coffee. Think about those four dollars people donate every single day to Starbucks. Ask Starbucks chairman, president, and CEO Howard Schultz about how an economy that justifies paying $4 for a consistent cup-of-coffee has changed his life and the way he does business.

And while we usually think of Starbucks as flush with sales and profits, they stand as the sterling example of surviving and thriving in economic hardships.

At the end of the second quarter of 2008, Starbucks quarterly earnings tanked. Global operating income had sunk 26% and the company’s in-store sales figures were negative for the first time in the brand’s history. Meanwhile, consumers were tightening up and cutting their spending as the global recession took hold. In July of 2008, Starbucks lost money for the first time reporting a net loss of $6.7 million for the third quarter. In the fourth quarter, profits dove 97% and earnings for the year were down 53%. As the financial crisis sprawled across Europe and Asia, Starbucks sales figures were at negative 8%, effectively rendering Starbucks’ existing economic model completely inept.

If you’ve never read Howard Shultz’s book Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul, here’s the crux: after eight years away from the biz, Schultz returned as CEO while the financial walls were burning down at his beloved brainchild.

What would you do in that situation? Imagine you were steering the ship during the worst financial crisis in decades. Imagine being Schultz, opening your newspaper in the morning knowing your customers were sipping their morning joe over dismal headlines like this one from NPR on January 29, 2009: More Bad News Brewing At Starbucks.

But as we sit here five years later, we know what happened in this story. We’re coming off a 2013 that Schultz described as, “by far the best in Starbucks’ 42-year history,” and according to its financial report, Starbucks expects a revenue growth of 10 percent or greater in fiscal 2014.

So if you want to learn from one of the best leaders whose results speak for themselves, don’t just listen to Howard Schultz, hear what he is telling us. Hear the message encoded in the following statement from March of 2011, three years after resuscitating the brand from the brink:

“I returned to Starbucks as CEO in January 2008 because we had to navigate through our own issues and deal with the cataclysmic financial crisis. The past two years we’ve done our best work. We’re a much stronger brand because of the recession.”

When Schultz came back in the middle of the crisis, he ceased the company’s go-go expansion. He cut out nearly $600 million in costs, and for three hours on February 26, 2008, he orchestrated the closing of more than 7,000 American Starbucks stores for a retraining session for employees.

“This is not about training,” Schultz told his employees, “This is about the love and compassion and commitment that we all need to have for the customer.”

Can you hear the message? Schultz used the recession as the impetus to re-focus on his core business. He asked himself what business Starbucks was in, and then had a good long look at what business they needed to become.

“We’re doing work now on the store of the future,” Schultz told USA Today.

The CEO managed to rekindle love for his customers, meanwhile, he effectively checked the ego that will control ANY company that loves its product more than the people they want to enjoy it. And that is why Starbucks stands as a textbook example of how to come out on top—stronger even—not in spite but because of tough economic times.

One thing I know from my experiences helping with the turn-around of thousands of business of every size: CRISIS CREATES BREAKTHROUGHS.

Crisis takes us from thinking about the things we could or should do and it requires us make massive changes. Crisis brews innovation and revolution for those who use it to create, instead of letting it destroy them. [Click to Tweet this quote.] Those that fail to adapt to a new economic environment end up in the graveyard of business—the place 96% of all businesses end up even after 10 years growth.

Were you in business in 2008? If you still are today, congratulations. How did the global financial crisis change the way you do business today? What did you learn, and how did those lessons shape you into who you are now? Most importantly, do you think it’s likely another economic shake up could happen sometime in the next few years? Perhaps now is the time to anticipate what you would do to be more efficient and effective in order to get yourself out in front of the ever-ebbing and flowing economic tide.

Stay successful by learning how to change what you are “used to.”

You can have goals, but…
sometimes we achieve success, and then we do things to bring ourselves back down to our comfort zone. There’s a reason.

Learn How to Expand Your Business Identity and Stay Successful!
If your business is ready to grow (and stay there), apply now to attend Business Mastery with Tony Robbins in Las Vegas, August 13-17, 2014 !

Please send your application now as space is extremely limited.

TRIGGER #2: A CHANGE IN TECHNOLOGY 

How fast did the movie rental industry change? Just like that.

If you’re reading this, I challenge you as a business leader to examine how YOU are like Blockbuster? How are you stuck in your head and making yourself a potential target to emerging competition?

In business, the psychology of a leader who resists a coming trend in technology is capable of destroying a $4 billion company. Conversely, if you become the leader that can figure out how to use technology to fulfill needs and add value, you become the disruptor not the disrupted.

Consider a few of the most recent technology disruptors. Let’s start with Instagram, which Facebook purchased in April of 2012 for $1 billion. Imagine that. If you came up with the idea of a mobile app to share your photos through filters with friends, you’d have $1 billion dollars.(Hint: It takes 1,000 one millions to stack up to one billion dollars!) Get the idea?

Need more proof? Consider the mobile messaging service, WhatsApp that Facebook recently purchased for upwards of $16 billion (Mark Zuckerberg’s largest acquisition to date). WhatsApp was founded in 2009 and three years later it was processing 10 billion messages daily.

If you’re unsure about how significantly WhatsApp triggered crisis in the communication industry, just ask the parent of a teenager. Consider the billions of messages sent via WhatsApp technology FOR FREE, evading the per-text charges of cellular carriers and making it worth its weight in SMS-text-defying gold.

(Analysts’ estimate global SMS revenue at around $100 billion a year annually—money that was essentially all profit for veteran carriers like Verizon and AT&T that is now re-directed through WhatsApp.)

Participating in tech shifts—not just protecting yourself from them—can make way for your impact in the world and your fortune in business.

Ask yourself: What technology could change my business? What technology could we be the first in our industry to employ? How can I be the creator of change?

EDITOR’S NOTE: This post is part of Tony Robbins’ 7 Triggers of Business Crisis. In case you missed the first, you can go back and review it here: #1 A Change in Competition

When other businesses are shrinking, what is your business doing?

Watch the video to learn why you need to get a gladiator mentality and learn how to thrive in any “economic season.”

“In the worst moments of your business, that’s where you will have the greatest breakthroughs.”
— Tony Robbins

Businesses that chase a vision (and not the money) are the ones that truly change the world – and the market.

Zappos.com, Inc. is a company that focuses on customer service and company culture. We believe that if we get the culture right, then most of the other stuff, like delivering great customer service, or building a long term enduring brand, will happen naturally on its own.

In this video from Business Mastery in 2010, Tony Hsieh reveals how core values transformed Zappos into a business with over $1 billion in yearly gross sales. Hit play to discover how a powerful company culture can take your business to a new level.

See Tony Hsieh LIVE!

Want to go deeper? NEXT MONTH, see Tony Hsieh LIVE at Business Mastery, where he will lead a rare strategy session (and Q&A!) on how to create a passionate company culture, and how to translate it into exploded sales, boosted productivity and geometric growth for your business.

Only a few seats remain. Apply now to attend Business Mastery with Tony Robbins and Tony Hsieh in Las Vegas — August 13-17, 2014!

Your competitors are showing up — will you? We don’t know when Tony Hsieh will come to Business Mastery again; don’t miss this rare opportunity to give your business the raving fans it deserves.

All scheduled speakers are subject to change without notice.

If there’s any one lesson I’ve learned from owning more than a dozen companies, it’s this:

Leaders anticipate change while the losers are left reacting to it.

The ONLY constant is change. And the funny thing about you and I being alive right now is that technology is like a personal trainer pressing the UP arrow on our treadmill, speeding up the business process and causing change to happen faster than ever. We’ve got to keep up or we fall off!

Businesses today feel the pressure of the narrowing window BETWEEN seismic changes in any industry and across cultures. That’s because the life cycle of ideas and products has shrunk as the time span between the moment you