Listen To Your Mentors

Key Questions:

Q: How do I grow my business?
A: The single most important factor in your life is who you hang around with. Successful people know this and successful business owners seek out people who are ahead of them in the game. Kim, Ken and Gunars have had each other for decades but they have also had the same core group of mentors since the late 80s.

Q: What did the mentor advise?
A: They told the Biosite founders that they were sitting on an idea that was powerful enough to be duplicated. The mentors pushed the team to take the company public so there would be enough cash to invest in the research and development that produced today’s number one selling product.

Q: How do I keep on growing?
A: Keep thinking.

This is easy to say but hard for most people to do. In fact, some psychologists argue that most people don’t think most of the time. We run on automatic pilot. Each person’s automatic pilot is following the paths set in place by early childhood development. You’ve heard it say, “first we make our habits then our habits make us.”

With a stoic expression on his face, Ken told us that when he has a problem, he thinks. We have the conversation on tape and we looked at it over and over. It sounds too simple. Here is a man who has worked on a big problem for nearly three decades and in working on it, he has encountered thousands of new problems.

He has two partners. That seems impossible too. Most founders can’t get along with one partner, much less two.

Q: What do most people do when they are confronted with a problem?
A: If we just step back and look at the lives people live, we guess that they don’t face up to most problems. They accept the status quo, run from the difficult and if they do try to solve a problem, they often quit before they arrive at a solution.

Here’s what we leaned from Ken.

First, face the problem and acknowledge it.
Second, stay calm, cool and collected.
Third, take time to think.

You probably know the famous story of the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson. He must have believed in people more than they believed in themselves because when he noticed that his employees were not being as productive as he had hoped, he printed up signs for everyone. The sign simply said, THINK.

When faced with a problem then, try sitting and thinking. You may not need to call people or sign up for a class or read ten books or hire new people. You may be surprised what happens when you just think.