I want you to imagine something really strange…

I want you to imagine that you have taken leave of all your senses, and for some reason have decided that you want to travel to Rotherham. And you have no idea how to get there. You flick through your address book, and realise that you only know three people from Rotherham…Paul Shane (who was in Hi-De-Hi) Paul from The Chuckle Brothers… and me.

Paul isn’t returning your calls (he can be like that) Barrie is away doing a summer season in Rhyl, and so as a last resort you decide to contact me for directions. Despite being a little miffed at being your third choice behind two ‘C List’ celebrities, you catch me in a charitable mood, and so I send you step-by-step instructions on how to get here.

I think no more about it until the day of your journey, when I get an irate phone call from you…

“What have you done to me?…Have you any idea where I’ve ended up? Barnsley…bloody Barnsley! It’s worse than Rotherham.”

I’m amazed to receive your call ~ not because you say Barnsley is worse than Rotherham (it is) but because you got lost. I mean, I know my directions were spot on. “I don’t understand it,” I say, “you should have arrived in Rotherham without any problems. Did you follow the directions exactly?”

“Of course I did…” you say, somewhat irritated, before adding a little sheepishly, “…for most of the way. But then you directed me along the motorway. I don’t like driving on the motorway, and so I went along the A640 which looked as if it runs alongside it. And it did for a while, but then it veered off. Took me an hour to get back on track.

Anyway, I got back on your route eventually, and I came to a roundabout. You said take the third exit, but I didn’t like the look of that at all. It went straight through a scruffy steelworks. I’d have got my car filthy. So anyway, I took the second exit which looked to be going in roughly the same direction, but went through some nice countryside. Don’t know what happened after that, but the next thing I saw was a ‘Welcome To Barnsley’ sign. Last time I ask you for directions!”

I’ll come back to Barnsley in a moment, butI want to give you another scenario first…

I want you to imagine something almost as strange as the desire to visit Rotherham. I want you to imagine that you are having a second childhood moment, and have decided that you’d like to make an Airfix model of a Lancaster Bomber. So you go into your local model shop, mumble something about it being a present for your nephew, and take home a box of bits, some glue and some instructions.

The shop keeper thinks no more about it untilhe opens his doors the next Saturday morningto be faced by you – red-faced and angry, andbrandishing something in your hand.

“Look at this!” you say, shaking an object so close to the shopkeeper’s face that he can’t quite make out what it is. “This is supposed to be a Lancaster Bomber. It looks more like something spawned from a brief liaison between a wheelie bin and a Dalek! I can’t believe you sold me this piece of crap.“

“I don’t understand it,” says the shopkeeper, after removing what was supposed to be the Lancaster’s wing from his left nostril.
“It’s not meant to look like that. Did you follow the instructions?”

“Of course I followed the instructions.” you reply. “I mean, you can’t follow them word for word can you? The big bits looked easy to put together and so I did them first. I know the instructions said you had to do some small bits first, but I wanted to get going with the damned thing. Anyway, when I’d done the big bits, I was going to do the little bits later. But then I couldn’t get them to fit in ~ and you needed to have them in place to finish the model off. I couldn’t get the tail to go on at all. Last time I’ll buy a bloody model from you!”

For a number of years now,something has puzzled me…

I sell the same product to two different people, and one writes to say that it is literally the best thing since sliced bread, and the other writes to tell me that it is a steaming pile of horse poo, and I should be locked up for selling it.

Same product…two completely different reactions.

I should point out that these are not products purchased for the way they look, or what they do when you plug them in. They are products comprising information and instructions which you need to follow in order to do something…

Usually when I get this sort of diversereaction, it’s a product designed to helpthe recipient make some more money.

Now for quite some time, I’ve suspected that the divergent experience people have with these products correlates with the propensity of the recipients to follow the instructions. In other words (like the villains in my two stories about getting to Rotherham, and building an Airfix model) the people who failed were unsuccessful because they didn’t follow the instructions.

I mean look at it this way…

If you had to cross a minefield, it would make sense to follow exactly in the footsteps of someone who had already done it, would it not? Does that make sense? Taking a different route because it looked quicker or by-passed some nasty mud, wouldn’t be a sensible option. You would have absolutely no idea whether your deviation from the prescribed route would result in total disaster. In a minefield, the gap between total success and total destruction may be little more than a hair’s breadth, and the uninitiated have no way of knowing where the make-or-break borders are.

And it can be exactly the samein a business or money-making enterprise.

Now as I said, I suspected that the difference between success and failure ~ between sliced bread and horse poo ~ with these products, was in the application of the instructions, but I couldn’t really prove it. You see, when you set up and run a money- making project, the number of things you need to do (and the order in which they need to be done) necessitates a relatively complex process. And asking someone to recount the process they’ve gone through isn’t normally very productive…

They can’t remember ~ or don’t want to remember!

However, I recently had a breakthrough, because we launched a betting advisory service, and the process involved there is one of childlike simplicity. It goes as follows:

1.  Receive a recommended bet by email detailing the event, the outcome to be bet on, the acceptable odds and the size of the bet.

2.  Place the bet!

That’s it! Really!! There’s absolutely nothing further to do. No decisions to make, no further actions to take, no thinking to do. Nothing. It’s all done for you. Just follow the instructions.

By the end of the first month of this new service I was delighted. The results had come in just as we’d expected and hoped, and anyone following the advice in that first 30 days would find themselves over £600 in profit.

Perfect…

Or so I thought until I received an email from an irate customer: “You said this service would be profitable. I’ve been on it for a month now and I haven’t made a penny. In fact I’ve barely broken even. I’ve been conned…” etc, etc. You get the idea.

I emailed this gentleman back and expressed my surprise at his disappointment. I asked him to send me his betting records, so that I could see why they didn’t tally with mine. A couple of days later I received an email detailing a betting record for the month, which did indeed show a small loss. But his betting record had very little in common with the instructions he’d been sent.

There were five days’ bets which were missing altogether (“I was away on holiday that week.”) another three bets which weren’t placed (“I just didn’t fancy those.”) and some winning bets that were placed at a fraction of the recommended staking level (“I was a bit short of ‘readies’ that week and so I had to cut back.”) There was even one bet which we hadn’t sent him at all! (“That was one I picked out myself.”)

The guy had paid for information from someone who knew the betting equivalent of the road to Rotherham, the right way to build a Lancaster Bomber, and the way through a minefield – but had chosen to ignore or be selective with the advice…

With the result that he’d endedup in Barnsley, holding a piece ofcrap with half his leg blown off!

Now look, there’s an important caveat here. You have to choose your business advisors carefully in the first place. But once you’ve done that, there’s no sense in being selective, or trying to second-guess with respect to the information, instructions and route map you’re given. It’s not a menu from which you can choose the ‘dishes’ that seem the most palatable. You have to swallow the whole meal…

As children, we’ll almost always choose the ice cream over the spinach ~ given a free choice. And even as adults, when we know what’s good for us, the lure of the palatable, easy-to-swallow part of the meal is a strong one…

And so it is with business.

You have to swallow the whole meal exactly as it’s served up. Miss something out, or eat it in the wrong order, and you could very well find yourself nutritionally deficient or with indigestion…

Or skint-arsed as my bankmanager likes to call it!

So buckle down and eat your greens. They’re not just good for you, they’re essential. Just make sure your chef knows how to cook them first.

Kind Regards

John Harrison  

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John Goldsmith