Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the next generation people earn profits podcast. I’m your host, Dan cotton. And today we are talking about why being the smartest doesn’t always mean you will be the best. This is a really unique episode where we’re going to talk about the difference between knowledge and execution. But first, if you have not gone over and liked ng cheer and gymnastics owners on Facebook, do that right now before you do anything else. If you want to get more information, make sure you head over to nextgenowners.com and subscribe to join our blog and get email updates and other great information on top of this podcast daily to you. All right, so let’s get to it. Why is being the smartest person doesn’t mean you will be the best? When it comes down to it, knowledge is not the same as execution. Remarkably, just like in cheerleading, execution is key to knowing something is very different than doing something. There are really three key topics we’re going to talk about. Number one is you have to start with knowledge, you cannot do what you don’t know. So that’s a really important thing to separate out that knowledge is not inconsequential. You have to start with that knowledge. You can’t just do things you have no idea how to do. So knowledge is important but it’s not the be all end all. Number two is you can learn through doing, but it only goes so far. So there’s definitely people who are good at learning things while doing them. But you’re only going to figure out so much on your own. Then number three is too much knowledge without guidance is going to lead you to what I call paralysis, and that’s kind of just that freezing action. So where did this really come from? I’m a big fan of Gary V. I listened to him a lot and Gary V stands for Gary Vaynerchuk. He is a brilliant businessman and I spent a lot of time listening to his podcast and listening to him speaking at different conferences. What’s interesting is Gary will oftentimes give his best business advice out and he gives it out willingly. He will tell you this is exactly what you need to do to market in 2022 and he will list it out for you. He doesn’t hold anything back. And I’m gonna do an entire episode on Gary V’s five biggest business tips for business owners. But he gives it all away for free and one of the things he always says is “I don’t have any problem giving this out for free because I know 99% of you aren’t going to go and do it. You can know it but you’re not going to go and execute it so I don’t mind giving it away for that 1% that’s going to go do it good.” I’m helping you be a better version of yourself and be a better business owner and change the world. But the reality is that most of you, even though you know this information and you hear it, you go “Yes, that makes sense.” You’re not going to go and do it. And that was just so poignant to me that I had this referenced by someone who is helping us and giving us business advice. And I realized that everything you could ever want to know is out there, right? There’s almost nothing out there that you can learn that you can’t find on Google or YouTube. Like “How do I do all of my home projects?” “How do I figure those things out?” “How do I figure out how to install a dishwasher?” I look it up on YouTube. How did I learn how to change the brakes on my pilot? I looked it up on YouTube. Right when I get stuck, I look it up on YouTube or Google it. So we literally live in an age where information is always at your fingertips. So knowledge is always out there. There is no limit to the amount of knowledge you can find. But there is a bridge that has to be crossed between knowing something and actually going out and doing it. So when I started as a business owner, the reality is, I knew nothing about owning a business. I went to school and got a degree in sociology. It was known as the athlete’s degree. It was a degree in sociology and basically a minor in military leadership when I was going through my ROTC program. Then I was hired as a full time police officer. I was married to my wife and my business partner who went to school for early childhood education. So neither of us knew anything about running a business. All we knew is we knew cheerleading, and we were really good at cheerleading. And we knew how to do that and we knew we loved it. We knew we loved kids and we knew we loved what we could accomplish through cheerleading, but we had no idea how to run a business effectively. So we had no idea what marketing was or how marketing worked. We had no idea what a good website was or how good websites worked. We had no email marketing system or email contacts system. We had no systems to speak of at all in our business. We just did things because that was the way we did them and it was just kind of like “hey, you were supposed to know what to do.” Really, the number one goal was just try not to mess up too bad and just put out all the fires as they come up. Right. Our goal was just not to goof up too badly, not to lose money and to just put out fires as they sprung up, which led to so many errors because we just didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what insurance we needed. We didn’t know what workers comp insurance we needed. We didn’t know everything we needed to know about taxes. We didn’t know everything we needed to know about how to hire and fire people. We just didn’t know anything. And we were just kind of muddling our way through it. My weakness at this point was a lack of knowledge. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. Now I moved on to learning through doing. I initially learned everything I knew about running a business through doing it. I knew I needed to do social media. So I started to research a little bit and started to dabble in it. I had an Instagram and I had a Facebook and I was just doing it but I wasn’t necessarily doing it. I knew I needed to make promotional items. So I started making flyers in Microsoft Word and pages. And I didn’t know what graphic design was or how to make things look good or about negative copy versus a black background versus a white background. I didn’t know about imaging. Some of the imagery that I knew looked amazing were beautiful skills but were not necessarily things that sold well to potential customers. So I just didn’t know anything. And I was just kind of doing it and sometimes things would work and sometimes things wouldn’t work. I had no idea how to train a staff. It was like “hey, do you know cheerleading? Okay, great. Here, coach that team or here coach that class. Okay, now shadow in a class. Hey, this is generally what we do.” I didn’t know how to train people. I didn’t know how to teach people in terms of a staff member. I just didn’t know how to do any of those things. But I was doing it right and I started learning through doing. I started learning oh, we need our policy and procedure manual to train staff. So that’s something we trained staff on. I know we need to do flyers and we need to do marketing materials. So I’m gonna just start doing it and I was learning through doing it. But I was hamstrung by the fact that my lack of knowledge and how to execute things really held me back from achieving my full potential. I just didn’t have the knowledge. I didn’t have the understanding of the thing. And I hadn’t spent enough time researching and learning about it to execute it correctly. I was just doing my best. I was that backyard tumbler who watched a video and then started throwing a back handspring. I wasn’t good at it. I could do something that resembled a back handspring, but it wasn’t a good one. It was due to a lack of knowledge and understanding of what the skill should be or what my business acumen should be. Then, I transitioned to starting to gather a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience. I started actually putting effort into learning and attending conferences, business owner conferences, and learning from people who could teach me how to be a better business owner. As my knowledge increased through education, my production increased and we started to really see an increase in revenue, increase in registrations, and increase in overall product within our business We started to become much better business owners as we got more knowledge. Then there was kind of this unique point where the scale tipped and I started to know more than I was doing. And I started to realize I had a whole bunch of knowledge on things but I wasn’t executing on that knowledge. I was overwhelmed and I started to have too much information. I couldn’t really arbitrage that out and sort through it and figure out what I needed to do first. So it led to me doing 92 different things and accomplishing zero and kind of a paralysis through overload. I would like to touch on this and be like :Oh, that’s too hard” and it would touch on this thing over here. Now that was too hard. This was back when I was like, oh, I need an email response system.
So I got MailChimp. Well, I didn’t know how to use MailChimp. And I was like, “Yeah, this is dumb. I don’t need it. I’m just gonna go back to Google.” And I was like, “Oh, I need to do Facebook ads.” So I did a little bit of them and I was like, “Oh, I hate ads manager. I don’t want to work with this. So I’m only going to do ads when I really have to.” Those are just two examples, right? I knew I needed a website. So I just was like, “Hey, hire this company to do my website.” But I didn’t stay on top of it. I didn’t manage it. I didn’t make sure that it was running really efficiently and doing the things that I needed it to do. So I had all this knowledge of these things I knew I needed to be doing and I was just dabbling in them and not mastering them and getting better at them. I wasn’t prioritizing things in the right way. Going back to a tumbler analysis, this is like that tumbler who learns her back handspring and is like, sweet, I’ve got my back handspring. Now I’m gonna work on my full. They’re loud and they’re talking and they’re running back handsprings and all the things simultaneously. There’s so much and they have the knowledge that they understand. They watch the videos. They understand how the skill works. They can talk you through it, and they’re trying to do all the things all at once. It was just too much information that I didn’t know how to arbitrage through. So knowledge is not always acknowledged as really, really, really important. But then there’s one key missing piece from those three things which is the execution and the understanding of how to execute, which comes from experience and coaching. So what I think is really, really important is that you have to have a coach. You have to have someone who can not only give you that knowledge but then guide you on the right steps to take with that knowledge. Who can tell you, “Okay, now you understand how email marketing works. Now let’s start here and gradually build.” They can tell you what things to prioritize. Because if you go in with the knowledge of, “I have knowledge about email marketing,” and start setting all that up, but you have a horrible website, that email marketing isn’t really going to do as much for you as it would if you had a really great website. So the coach is going to be able to help you prioritize which things you need to do first, and how to break those things down. So this is, in my opinion, why the academy is so beneficial for our clients. We can help them arbitrage and plan and execute on the knowledge that they gained from us, as opposed to just going out and getting that knowledge. Because you can buy books and you can watch YouTube tutorials and you can sign up for conferences and get a ton of information out of a conference, but now you may be able to execute on some of it. If you’ve ever been to a conference, you’ve actually probably felt that you’ve gone and gotten so much information and you took all the notes (like 72 pages), and you have the two things that you start to execute on right while you’re there or right as you leave, and you get those two things done. But now as you get further down the road, you’ve lost some of the information you had and the nuance of it. Now you’re really struggling to execute on those things that you learned and it’s overwhelming. You don’t know what to do. So, the reality is that knowing what to do is pretty simple. Actually doing it is the hard part. Think of the athlete who lands a skill and they do it wrong. You give them a critique and the athletes response is, “I know.” You as a coach are like, “If you do then why did you do it?” Well knowing is the easy part. What to do, how to do it and actually following through on that doing is the hard part. That is the challenge and that is where you need help. Now, my number one thing I would recommend you do as you leave this podcast, is if you are not already a member of the Academy, head over to the website and either join the Academy or at least opt-in to get more information. We can reach out to you and you can start getting more knowledge and more information and start acting on that stuff. However, if you’re not going to do that because you’re just not ready, which is possible. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to write down three things that you know you should be doing, but you’re not. Quite frankly, I could do this too. So you write down three things that you are not doing right now that you know you should be doing. I want you to do one of those things each week. Now why am I having you do one each week versus one over each day over the next three days? Because that would be far more productive, right? No. What I want you to do is one a week because I want you to take that thing and I want you to do it. Let’s say Sunday is your start day since you’re listening to this hopefully on a Friday, that’s when it releases. But let’s say Sunday is your start date. You’re going to do it on Sunday. Then again on Monday. And again on Tuesday and all the way so you’re going to do it seven times over the course of that week. We’re now building it into a habit and something we understand how to do. We are executing regularly before we add on the next thing. So we’re going to add on one thing each week, and we’re going to master that thing. And then we’re going to start doing it because the biggest difference between being smart and having all the knowledge and being the best, is the doing. You have to do the thing. Because all of that knowledge doesn’t mean anything if you don’t go out and do something with it. Alright everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it got you motivated and you have your things you’re gonna do. Remember, head on over to NG cheer and gymnastics owners on Facebook or nextgenowners.com Give us a like and subscribe if you’re looking for another path.
