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Editor's Notes

• #2: gazelle: A company that grows 20% a year for four years in a row.
• #5: # To identify and bring together the next generation of entrepreneurial giants— the next Bill Gates or Richard Branson. (Michael Dell also went through this program).# To provide the kind of intense blending of practice and theory that is necessary to excel in this era.
• #6: There are roughly 23 million firms in the US, of which only 4 percent get above $1M in revenue. Of those firms, only about 1 out of 10, or 0.4 percent of all companies, ever make it to $10 million in revenue and only 17,000 companies surpass $50 million.
• #9: Clarity around my own core values and aligning this with the companies core values. Every day I want to come to thinkspace be excited about where I’m working. Every day I want to enjoy who I’m working with. Every day I want to be moving towards my goals.Every time I get asked what is my biggest business challenge is I would have to say I always answer “hiring the right people”.
• #10: Why is this important?Business plan is way too long, outdated, great source of information, but, seriously, who sits and looks at it. Hire a consultant to write a business plan, strategic plan, spend a ton of money to get all the market analysis, details about this and that, pile of manuals, and then you great put it pile on your desk and then look around and say what are we going to do today.For me, it’s the tool that I’m building my annual goals off of, which then makes it easy to break things down into quarterly goals, which then can be broken down into 13 great weeks instead.. Want to have a great year, well you need to have four great quarters, which means you’ve got a three months, or 13 great weeks.
• #11: Can’t have a great weekly meeting without a great quarterly planning meeting.Plan your quarterPurpose: 100% alignment with a clear sense of mission, resources are deployed on the right things.
• #12: 2 days of planning each quarter and then 90 days of doing.Discipline to execute your plan.
• #13: So many times, it seems like I’m focusing on the wrong things. The problem is not about whether or not you’re using one ply instead of two ply toilet paper. I’d be lying if I didn’t at one time look at the cost of using powdered non-dairy creamer instead of real half and half. But seriously, the amount of time that I spend even thinking about that instead of going out to find a new customer is silly. I know what the life time value of a customer is and I can tell you it’s more than switching from liquid to powdered.One of core services of thinkspace is to allow your business to focus on what it does best. My team takes on the stuff like making sure that your clients are greeted with the best possible customer service, they make sure that the phone systems, the Internet access is up and running. They keep the place clean and professional, why? So you can focus on getting new customers, focus on writing great software…
• #14: unclear, unfocused BHAG = Not inspiring.  Clear, number-driven BHAG connected to Core Purpose = Right on the money. 
• #15: You don’t create core values, you discover them. These are the values that have been there since you were 8 years old. Core values are who you are and not what you aspire.Some of the thinkspace values used to be things like: passion, integrity, excellence, team work, innovation, commitment, responsibility, customer satisfaction. Got to get rid of the table steaks! Also if you list things like integrity, you’d better be doing this at a level that is absolutely amazing level.The surest path to ruin is to disconnect from core values and core purpose.
• #16: Who cares if somebody has a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that just about anybody could accomplish? You don’t want to be good. You want to be great.
• #17: Examples of how culture beats out process.The great companies all have amazing cultures. They all have purpose that people latch onto and want to work there. When someone tells me that they just want a job, that tells me that they aren’t fit to work here. Zappos is the king of culture right now. My company culture means a lot to me and honestly, if someone is not a good cultural fit, then I don’t want to work with them.World’s best companies have culture built on vision.Vision is these three things: 1) Core values (how you do what you do, it’s your how). 2) Core purpose (it’s your why). 3) Painted picture – vision board/road map of where. 99% of all companies fail on this. If you do your culture right, you can feel it when you walk through the door.
• #18: B- Good performance, bad culture, this is the area that creates the most problems for people. The best thing to do is “free up this person’s future”.
• #19: Leaders create their own space to grow, your #2 needs someone to create that for them. When you hire your #2 you need to invest in them so they grow too. Learning needs to happen in advance, you can’t raise your leadership IQ by 10 points over night.
• #20: This is one oIf possible think of a way to improve your process or product in a way that would get a 7-10 times advantage over your competitors. Solve that and you will win in your business.Think about your biggest bottleneck – solve it – and if possible think of a way to improve your process or product in a way that would get a 10 times advantage over your competitors. Solve that and you will win in your business.I had a two million dollar lawn care company that seemed to be stuck; I could not grow at more than 5 – 10 percent per year. The problem, the bottleneck was the cost of customer acquisition due to a long and complicated sales process. While brainstorming with fellow classmates on my bottleneck I came up with my “X” factor a way to reduce customer acquisition costs by a factor of 7 while decreasing the sales cycle from 3 weeks to 3 minutes.