No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits: No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take-No-Prisoners Guide to Really Getting Rich

by Dan S. Kennedy

We can’t do this because the vendor we use . . . the software program we use . . . the delivery service we use won’t or can’t. Bye-bye. Next.

Again, you have to very firmly decide what imperative is going to govern your business,

There can be only one number-one imperative. If you want maximum profits, that imperative had...

It won’t take much analysis to determine the number-one imperative governing profits. To save you the trouble of looking, it’s having the most effective marketing to attract new customers, to optimize...

Again, there can be only one master. Its name is Marketing. All others bow and say: “Yes, Master. H...

Lutz describes the disempowering of “the product guys” and transfer of power to the finance guys in painful detail.

When people who don’t love the product get control of a company or even get key positions in a company, trouble often follows.

CFOs love numbers, not products or businesses. They love rigid order, not entrepreneurial chaos or spirit.

Many of you reading this have not had easy paths. Like me, you started your climb without a ladder or a leg up.

Not everybody who booked showed up. In fact, less than half. My question had to do with those people whose good intentions faltered—what was done, in what order, at what speed after each meeting to get to those people and rebook them or otherwise sell to them?

The second person I ever fired in my life was a bean-counter, officially and pretentiously called a Chief Financial Officer.

He was the second of 41 to go.

This bean-counter, by the way, had two assistants. The sales manager had none.

You can actually choke the life out of a business. Bean-counter...

“We tried that...

Gradually, everybody with ideas just shuts up.

I could smell this as soon as I walked in. There

is a sense of death in buildings where bean-counters rule.

When power moves from the Iacocca guy to the bean-counter guy, look out.

but also where we sell membership level upgrades, coaching programs and mastermind groups, new and backlist courses and resources, and future events.

Gene Simmons created and fronted the rock band KISS, retained all rights, and has built an amazing licensing business around KISS,

The trouble is they don’t know how to do anything but cut. Their entire toolbox consists of knives. And if all you’ve got is a knife, everything looks like something to be cut.

But, when a dollar is saved at the expense of crippling the business’s growth, damaging its relationship with and hold on its customers, or killing its spirit, it is a dollar saved with a future cost of 10 or 100. Bean-counters don’t grasp these distinctions. To them, a penny saved is a penny earned, period.

If you put a bean-counter in charge, this is what you’ll get, and it’s what you deserve.

by entrepreneurs and salespeople and hustlers who much, much later bring in the bean-counters and bureaucrats.

“Any idiot can make soap. It takes a genius to sell it.”

bean-counters.

• They must be confined and controlled.

• They must be made to count beans in a way you—the creative leader and entrepreneur—want them counted

• They must NEVER be given power or authority—that has to pass through you.

This is a simple matter. Different creatures have different purposes.

You do not saddle a cow to race in the Kentucky Derby nor milk a racehorse.

Bean-counters are on this earth to count beans. Not to exercise control over how beans are brought in to be counted.

They talk to you;

you talk to everyb...

They do NOT talk to every...

nature of bean-counters to try and assert influence and authority rather than just provide information. Beware.

The rule should be: Don’t tell me about the labor pains, just birth the baby.

Production folk can’t grasp that five minutes of productivity from a great salesperson can provide everybody’s payroll for the week.

Mediocre salespeople, lousy managers, and utterly uncreative executives are all people who fear they can do no better and will suffer just about any indignity to keep their jobs—

On a terrible team losing every game, coached by a complete nincompoop, who never asks to be traded?

Top performers must be allowed to be and encouraged to be top performers.

Drones do their jobs at a consistently mediocre level regardless of motivation or demotivation.

They do enough for their paychecks no...

Anybody can manage mediocre people, even ...

with a five-state territory in disarray, I rose to number-one in the national sales force by my fourth month,

and even delivered higher net margin than anybody else.

They get nothing for their money, and I have zero regret about that outcome.

Doesn’t matter. Like 95% of the population, I make up my own ethics, situation by situation.

I don’t operate by your code. I operate by mine.