The 2 Questions That Will Change Your Business and Your Competition

"The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions" - Tony Robbins

There was a small change that I made a few years back that changed everything in my personal life and in my business. And it has been a fun ride.

Our school system is built around having the right answers. The way success is measured in the academic world is by choosing the right answer from a set of multiple choices that somebody has already curated for us. We are either rewarded or penalized based on those answers. 

Unfortunately real life is not like that. The majority of the time, there is no way for us to know until way later what the correct answer is, let alone having a set of multiple answers. A more realistic scenario is actually not knowing what questions even is. It is up to the individual to figure it out. 

What if trying to find the answers was not the correct way to start?

What if I started with the assumption that I do not know and instead of achieving goals and finding answers, to switch that around and try to find the correct question for the situation?

So I decided to ask more questions. 

Asking the right questions for my business...

Asking the right questions for my clients...

After going and experimenting through some 100 questions, two of those questions seem to have the most effect on my clients business. The purpose of a question is two-old in my line of work. 

1. To shed light in some area where you might not think to look, an area where maybe you are too busy to look. 
2. To help you to change your paradigm of thinking, shift it to a different level. 

Question 1 - What would it look like if this was easy?

I actually "borrowed" this question from Tim Ferriss. And it is my favorite question to ask my clients. It requires a different level of thinking, often a level of thinking that forces you to think outside of your current process and frame. 

Sam has been my client for less than one year. In one of his processes he needs to generate a complex payroll for his contractors, around 2,000 of them. The current process takes almost a full day worth of running macros, sorting data and creating payroll emails.

Sam asked for some help to develop an application to make the whole process more seamless, take less time and be more accurate.

I asked him, "What would you want the process to look like?"

He went on to explain the issues. The data accuracy issues, the complexity and time consuming tasks that took hours off his week, hours which he could use to run and grow his business. And the inaccurate data was hurting his business and his customers. 

He then asked on how we could improve his process, improve the macros to account for bad data.

"What would this look like if this was easy?" - I asked. 

"I need a better system to run this". Pause.

"Maybe the system can run a bit faster"...

"Maybe the system can help me with the bank payments as well." Warmer

"Maybe I needen't even have a need to run it, the system will run automatically and my contractors can receive a notification and be able to login and see their payments online" That's more like it!

We didn't end up improving his current process. Instead we removed his current process completely and replaced it with a system that ran independent of him. 

What can you improve by 10x in either efficiency or quality?

When I work with a client, I state it upfront that I aim to to improve his processes, business and consequently life by 10x. The number 10X is not just a sound good, round number. In a lot of literature the 10x number keep coming up over and over again. 

Andy Grove, the charismatic CEO of Intel talks about the 10X as an "Strategic Inflection Point". It is a point where the whole landscape of the business changes and thats where the magic happens. In this zone, past that inflection point the normal rules of competition seem to not apply. (Six Forces of Competition Model). It is in this area, past that inflection point where magic happens. 

The 10X improvement comes up again in Peter Thiel's "Zero to One", one of the original founders of Paypal and Founder and Chairman of Palantir Technologies. Thiel argues successfully that a business needs to strive for monopoly (although that word might have a negative connotation) 

“If you’re the founder…entrepreneur starting a company, you always want to aim for monopoly and you always want to avoid competition” - Peter Thiel. 

Why monopoly? Because, again that is the area where the magic happens. In a perfect competition, the average net profit of the companies is zero. When you have the monopoly, he argues, is when you have the ability and the capital to innovate and provide value. And the only way to get to monopoly, is to have a product that is 10X better than the next product.

In my consultation with clients, I try to strive to the 10X rule. Is there something we can improve, some technology we can introduce that will make a current process 10 times better in either efficiency or quality? And it always starts by asking:

What area of my business can I improve 10X?

Ervin Dhima

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