How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It
By Mark Cuban
Charismatic business leader and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban does an amazing job sharing his story along with personal wisdom from his journey. Cuban takes readers from life as a recent college grad through the launch of his first business.
Below are my notes and key hi-lighted passages from How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It. (Italics = quotes from the book. Bold = my personal notes)
In every job, I would justify it in my mind, whether I loved it or hated it, that I was getting paid to learn and every experience would be of value when I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up.
We all want our dream job or to run our own companies. The truth? It’s a lot easier said than done. We need jobs that pay the bills, and we can’t wait out the search for the perfect situation. Which leads to the question: What kind of job should you settle for when you can’t or don’t have the job you want?
I was getting paid to learn about how computers work, how big companies work and how middle managers work—that was a whole lot better than paying tuition to get a business education.
I had no idea what the future would bring. I was unemployed and heading to Dallas with zero job prospects.
Decision time. It’s always the little decisions that have the biggest impact. We all have to make that “make or break” call to follow orders or do what you know is right. I followed my first instinct: Close the sale.
You never quite know in business if what you are doing is the right or wrong thing. Unfortunately, by the time you know the answer, someone has beaten you to it and you are out of business.
I would continually search for new ideas. I read every book and magazine I could. Heck, three bucks for a magazine, twenty bucks for a book. One good idea would lead to a customer or a solution, and those magazines and books paid for themselves many times over. Some of the ideas I read were good, some not. In doing all the reading I learned a valuable lesson.
Everything I read was public. Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didn’t want it.
I remember going into customer meetings or talking to people in the industry and tossing out tidbits about software or hardware. Features that worked, bugs in the software. All things I had read. I expected the ongoing response of: “Oh yeah, I read that too in such-and-such.” That’s not what happened. They hadn’t read it then, and they still haven’t started reading it.
Most people won’t put in the time to get a knowledge advantage.
I feel like if I put in enough time consuming all the information available, particularly with the Internet making it so readily accessible, I can get an advantage in any technology business.
Of course, my wife hates that I read more than three hours almost every day, but it gives me a level of comfort and confidence in my businesses.
A guy with minimal computer background could compete with far more experienced guys just because he put in the time to learn all he could.
Always run your business like you are going to be competing with biggest technology companies in your industry—Google, Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft, whomever.
Watching the best taught me how to run my businesses.
The edge is knowing that you can fail and learn from it, and just get back up and in the game.
The edge is knowing that you are getting to your goals and treating people right along the way, because as good as you can be, you are so focused that you need regular people around you to balance and help you.
Every single day someone has an idea. Every day someone talks about some business he wants to start. Every day someone is out there starting a business whose entire goal is to beat the hell out of yours. How cool is that?!
Every day some stranger somewhere in the world is trying to come up with a way to put you out of business.
In sports, the only thing a player can truly control is effort. The same applies to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any position can control is their effort.
I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making the effort to be as productive as I possibly could.
Effort is measured by setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get there?
The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or you don’t.
Are each of us really good at something, and it’s just a matter of discovering it?
Do we all have something that we would love to do every day, and do we inherently know it or do we have to find it?
Going to college should be about experiencing as much academically as you possibly can, but more importantly, it should be about learning how to learn and recognizing that learning is a lifelong endeavor. School isn’t the end of the learning process, it’s purely a training ground and beginning.
In my humble opinion, once you have learned how to learn, then you can try as many different things as you can, recognizing that you don’t have to find your destiny at any given age—you just have to be prepared to run with it when you do. Of course, there is always a caveat to destiny, and that’s obligation.
The greatest obstacle to destiny is debt, both personal and financial. The more people you are obligated to, the harder it is to focus on yourself and figure things out.
In business, to be a success, you only have to be right once.
With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure (not only mine, but also of those around me), I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those with whom I did business. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, an unlimited amount of hope and, more importantly, no limit on time or effort.
Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend countless hours reading software or Cisco Router manuals, or sitting in my house testing and comparing new technologies, but that’s a topic for another time.
The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All you have to do is learn from them and from those around you because … All that matters in bus iness is that you get it right once. Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are.
“Everyone has got the will to win; it’s only those with the will to prepare that do win.”
You do not have unlimited time and/ or attention. You may work 24 hours a day, but those 24 hours spent winning your core business will pay off far more.
As an entrepreneur you have to know what the core competencies of your business are and make sure that your company focuses on being the absolute best it can be at executing them.
“The worst evaluator of talent is a player trying to evaluate himself.”
The same applies to businesspeople and particularly to entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs. We tend to be less than honest with ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses.
Every entrepreneur faces comparable choices. Each of us has to face the reality of who we are and what we are.
The best businesses in recent entrepreneurial history are those that began with little or no money. Dell Computers, Microsoft, Compaq, Apple, HP and tens of thousands of others started in dorm rooms, tiny offices or garages.
Each inquiry cost me next to nothing to get great feedback. Each enabled me to check the foundation of my business idea to see if it was easy to shoot holes in, and most importantly, they all served as sales calls. Each company eventually became a customer of ours.
It’s as if the missing link for success in a business is cash to get started. It’s not.
Investors care about how they are going to get their money back and then some. Family cares about your dreams. Investors care about money.
There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs: your own pocket and your customers’ pockets.
You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders.
So what’s wrong with that? Nothing! It’s okay to start slow. It’s okay to grow slow.
“Treat your customers like they own you. Because they do.” “You have to re-earn your customers business every day.”
I personally think that the only way you can connect to your customers is to put yourself in their shoes. For me personally, if I can’t be a customer of my own product, then I probably am not going to do a good job running the company.
In this day and age, it’s a lot easier to proactively communicate than to react.
When I got a job selling software, I whined to the owner that he shouldn’t make me sweep the floor of our store and I should be able to go out and close sales.
There are certain things in life we all have to do. There are certain things in life we choose to do. Then there is everything else. The things we do to kill time.
In business, one of the challenges is making sure that your product is the easiest to experience and to sell.
Moral of the story: Make your product easier to buy than your competition, or you will find your customers buying from them, not you.
If you can sell, you can get a job—anywhere, anytime
I don’t remember who told me that selling was a job for a lifetime, but they were right.
The best salespeople are the ones who put themselves in their customer’s shoes and provide a solution that makes the customer happy.
The best salesperson is the one the customer trusts and never has to question.
If you don’t have a job, or don’t have the job you want, get a job in sales. Every single person on this planet can learn to be a great salesperson. All you have to do is put in the effort and care about your company, your prospects and customers. Once you excel at selling, getting a job in sports is easy. But then again, if you are good, I’m sure the company you work for is going to do everything they can to keep you.
If they still respond negatively to my efforts, so be it. At some point, and that point should come quickly, you have to move on. If you have a good product/ service/ idea, there will be someone who will understand the value and will want the product. If you keep on pushing with someone who obviously does not want the product for whatever reason, you are making multiple mistakes:
It doesn’t matter where you live. It doesn’t matter how you live. It doesn’t matter what kind of car you drive. It doesn’t matter what kind of clothes you wear. It doesn’t matter. Your biggest enemies are your bills. The more you owe, the more you stress. The more you stress over bills, the more difficult it is to focus on your goals. More importantly, if you set your monthly income requirements too high, you eliminate a significant number of opportunities. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that.
The one person whom you should never believe when it comes to evaluating your abilities? You. The very worst judge of your abilities is you. Self-evaluation is never successful. When you are the best at something, the demand for your services will grow. People want to hire the best.
The people who need you can and will find you. So rather than trying to convince people you are the best, let the quality of your work do the talking.
1. Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love. 2. If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession. 3. Hire people who you think will love working there. 4. Sales Cure All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales. 5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap.
1. Time is more valuable than money You have to learn how to use time wisely and be productive. How wisely you use your time will have far more impact on your life and success than any amount of money.
2. Commit random acts of kindness Being successful entails being able to not only get along with people, but also to give something back. No one gets to the top on their own, and I believe we all should be able to make those around us smile.
4. Work hard, play hard I went seven years without a vacation, but I sure managed to have fun. You have to find ways to blow off steam so you don’t blow a gasket.
8. Everyone gets down; the key is how soon you get back up I can’t count how many times I have gotten up in the morning dreading the day. I wasn’t motivated. I was tired. I just wanted to crawl back in bed. Other times, I had lost a deal, we had lost a game, something wasn’t working. I just wanted to crawl under a rock and disappear. EVERYONE goes through those moments. The key is how you fight through them.
The people who will be truly successful are those that fight through the quickest and come back stronger and smarter.
10. It’s not in the dreaming, it’s in the doing Everyone has it in them to be successful. EVERYONE. Most people only dream about what they do if they were successful, or how they might get there. Anyone can dream. Anyone and everyone has ideas about how they might be successful. It doesn’t matter if your definition of success is being a great parent, being an athlete, a business person, whatever.