THE 3000 RULE

When I first moved back to New Zealand and wanted to get this company off the ground, I had huge dreams and have plans for growing it into the largest consultancy in the world, taking on the likes of McKinsey & BCG.

However, I am in no way trying to just be another consultancy carving out my slice of the pie. Instead I am looking to create my own pies, enough for everyone to have their own. As part of our shareholders agreement we have set maximums any of the shareholders can earn and although that the number if reached puts us in the top 3% of income earners in New Zealand it is still relatively low and in comparison isn’t much more than I was earning as a General Manager of hotels.

What it does however, is give us the means to scale indefinitely. Growing the business perpetually until we compete on a global scale with other established consultancies. Our biggest asset is our youth. We have time on our hands, and we are patient.

However, what this article is about is what you need to do to get to your end goal and create a sustainable business model.

Since moving back to New Zealand I have been doing so much to get this company firing, I am at 4 or 5 networking events a week, I’m trying to have coffee and lunch with someone different every day, I am putting up as much content on LinkedIn as possible whilst also trying to grow this network and turn these digital connections in to real life connections, I joined Toastmasters to build my networks and improve my communication skills. The list goes on. There isn’t much time left in my day after all the actions I am committing to.

When people ask why I am doing so much, or if they comment on how busy I am, I started replying with the same thing. I kept telling people that there is an arbitrary number of actions I need to do, to ensure I reach my goals. This arbitrary number I kept saying was 3000, and so from that the 3000 Rule was born. It is completely arbitrary and what exactly constitutes an activity is up for debate.

However, the fact remains, there is only one way to increase the likelihood of your company succeeding and that is to work harder than everyone else and to work harder than you ever thought possible. Each time you do something such as going to a networking event or having coffee with someone that is an activity, the more of these actions you do, the more likely business is going to come from that. Of course, there is another factor at play here. You need to be good at what you do or at least provide value for the price point you are charging. But assuming that is a given, the more actions you do, the closer you will be to reaching your goals.

My number is 3000 and although I’m not counting, I know that these actions can either be done in 1 year or 5 years, but 3000 actions still need to be done to achieve my goals. So, I may as well try get as much done in the shortest time fame so I can set new goals. With this mindset, I quite often get to the end of the day and think to myself, ‘Have I done enough actions today to warrant going to sleep’.

If you take 3000 and divide it by 365 you get a bit over 8, lets call it 9. So, if I want to knock off my 3000 actions in a year, I need to average 9 actions a day. As you can already tell that is a lot.

A typical day might look like the following,

A networking event and meeting at least 5 new people,

Coffee with someone,

Lunch with someone,

XX number of new connections on LinkedIn,

Write an article or blog post,

Post a video on LinkedIn,

Have a phone call or Zoom Call with one of your LinkedIn contacts,

Boost a post on Instagram or Facebook,

Contact a past client who hasn’t done business with you in a while.

As you can see none of that includes the actual work you need to do with clients, or any actual sales calls where you are trying to close a deal. They are all actions to help with Marketing. Doing all of that once a week doesn’t seem too bad but start thinking about doing that 365 days a year and you start to realise that very few people are doing this much inside their business.

It’s easy to see who is though. The companies who are crushing it are highly active in their sales & marketing strategy. Some might be posting 50 bits of content a day to social media, some might be meeting with 20 different people a day, some might be mentoring 10 start-ups.

But no matter how you slice it, the companies succeeding are doing more, are more targeted with their efforts, and are continually evolving their actions to stay relevant.

There it is, The 3000 Rule.

You heard it here first.

Cheers,

Stanley Henry | Wallace & Henry House

MISFIT | DREAMER | CEO