Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy

by Patrick Bet-David

1. I want to make the name Bet-David mean something, so much so that my parents will be proud of the decision they made to leave Iran. 2. I want to work with people who keep their commitments—especially leaders with whom I work and who impact my career path. 3. I want a clear formula for how to get to the top based purely on my results. I can’t stand surprises or the moving of goalposts. 4. I want to build a team that has bought into the same vision I have to see how far we can go collectively. This includes running mates whom I can trust 100 percent. 5. I want to make enough money that I’m no longer controlled by other people’s politics and agendas. 6. I want to get my hands on every single strategy book out there to see the game from a broader point of view so I can learn how to minimize corporate bullying.

Goals

clarity comes from making decisions that are aligned with your core beliefs and values.

Clarity

You must act like a great company (or a great entrepreneur/intrapreneur) long before you ever become one.

Live it

A visionary is somebody who is not living in the here and now. He or she has already seen at least five moves ahead and is living in that reality. Explaining your future truth to others, however, may come across as unrealistic, boastful, or even delusional.

Visionary

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself. —Thales of Miletus

Quote

There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self. —Benjamin Franklin

Quote

Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio said, “I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”

Maturity

if you feel envy, it’s an indicator that either you’re lying to yourself about what you want or you lack the discipline to accomplish it.

Envy

If someone is winning at a higher level than you are, either lower your expectations to match your work ethic or increase your work ethic to exceed your expectations.

Goals

Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.

Who you are

To do so, you must be processing issues constantly. 1. Processing is the ability to make effective decisions based on access to information at hand with the highest odds in your favor. 2. Processing is about subjecting every difficult choice, problem, or opportunity you face to a rigorous mental analysis. 3. Processing is playing out strategies, seeing the hidden consequences, and sequencing a series of moves to permanently solve problems.

Processing

The stronger the debate, the closer we get to the best decision. Listen instead of argue. Remain curious.

Listen

This is the key to entrepreneurial success. Make processing best practices part of your company culture, and this ability will seep into the heads of your people, who will get better and better at using it. It will improve the bottom line, sure, but it will also produce better leaders and better human beings. All the world’s problems are issues to be processed, and though you may not be in a position to solve world hunger, you can solve issues in the world in which you live and work.

Processing

My Business Principles Never compromise our nonnegotiables. Micromanage until there is trust. What brought us here won’t take us to the next level. No one has 100 percent job security, including the founder or CEO. Create positive peer pressure by challenging one another. Beat your prior best. Treat the company’s money like it’s your own. Be radically open-minded but not easily persuaded. Fight any temptation to lower expectations and standards. Create an environment where our team is taken care of financially and professionally.

Principles

Six Strategies for Replacement and Skill Transfer 1. List your tasks and skills. Make a list of all your tasks and skills and determine which ones you are the best at and which ones you are not. Focus on your strengths, and replace yourself on all the other tasks. 2. Identify who’s seasonal and who’s not. You can’t assume that everybody is going to work for you forever. You need to identify who is there to fill a six-year role and who a six-month role. If you determine that now, you won’t be surprised when someone needs to be replaced. 3. Know the different languages spoken by your sales, support, technical, and executive teams. Sales leaders generate revenue and build a company through their efforts. Employees are hired to support those efforts. You need to know the difference between them. Executives require empowering language that makes them feel autonomous and respected. 4. Know who can maintain the company culture. It is very important that whoever replaces you will fit the culture you established so that the business can keep growing after you leave. 5. Know your company’s practices and procedures. You need to put pen to paper and write down each department’s practices and procedures. Replacements will then have a manual to follow, regardless of their level, making the transfer of specific skills quick and painless. 6. Develop leaders to help spread the right mindset. Have one-on-one conversations with your future leaders to inject the company’s mindset into them no...

Leaders

If you don’t have measurable numbers you look at first thing in the morning when you wake up, you’re managing inefficiently. Leaders

Monitor

Creating systems and protocols limits the need for you to micromanage. Once you learn to track the key indicators of your business, you will know exactly where to direct your energy and expertise.

Create systwms