I’m not a gamer. I haven’t got an Xbox or a Playstation (although the kids have): I prefer to participate in “The game of life” rather than waste my time in virtual worlds, on virtual football pitches or in virtual war zones.
The only exception to that is if I’m travelling. I have been known to wile away a couple of hours on a long haul flight crushing candy or deciphering word soup.
And so it was that just a few days before our Easter holiday that I paid attention when my 18 year old son, Elliott told me about, “This number game that’s really, really hard”.
It’s an app (of course!) that consists, quite simply, of a 16 square grid that fills up with numbered tiles.
The only thing you can actually do in the game is swipe the tiles either up, down, left or right and, as you swipe, everything moves in that direction.
When two numbers the same are swiped together, they merge as a new tile that is twice the value of the two it replaced. Try and see – it’s dead easy to grasp.
When the grid gets full and you can’t swipe any two numbers the same together then it’s “Game Over” and you have to start again.
You score points every time you merge tiles and the aim of the game is to get to the 2048 tile, i.e. swipe two 1024 tiles together (which can only happen when you’ve swiped four 512 tiles together, which only happens when you’ve swiped eight 256 tiles, which requires sixteen 128 tiles, etc, etc). I downloaded it and had a go.
My first attempt saw me get a score of a couple of thousand.
Not very good.
On the flight out on our holiday, I got a bit better and my high score went up to just over 7000. I didn’t play much whilst we were away but, on the way back we had a bit of a delay at the airport and I found myself, once again, engrossed in the game. Like all good games, it is a little bit addictive once you get into it.
But that’s where my approach changed.
You see, I figured that there had to be a system to win at this game.
It’s like I talk about Master Plan – everyone teaches you how to play the game, but that’s not the same as being taught how to win at the game and, that’s the same as in business.
nyone can set up a Google Ad Words account – but what it takes to build an Ad Words account that generates stellar returns, day in and day out, is so much more.
There had to be a system to win at 2048.
So, in an airport lounge, I set about finding it. I had no internet access, so I was on my own but I asked the right questions, kept testing and trialling and, after about ninety minutes, I worked it out.
Well, when I say, “I”, my eldest son Cameron embarked on the challenge with me so we collaborated, both working on separate iPads, pooling our results, sharing our knowledge and, between us… we cracked it.
It became a piece of cake to sail through the 2048 tile and, before our flight landed back in the UK several hours later, we had even got to the 4096 tile.
My high score was now more than 50,000…
We’d worked out how to win.
There is a system.
And so it is with almost everything in business: The problem is that most entrepreneurs just dick about. They dip in to everything around their marketing, doing a bit of this and a bit of that – exactly the same approach that got me to a 7000 high score without ever bothering to work out what the system really is.
I’ve spoken many times of the truism that your lifestyle is defined by the questions you ask and, in its own little microcosm, Cameron and I proved that once again, that night in Sharm El Sheikh.
And it’s true for you in your business.
This is not an article about a game app on an iPad. It’s so much more profound than that.
It’s about how you utilise Facebook ads, direct mail, door to door flyers, email marketing, referral programmes, reward cards and telesales.
For all of the above – and every other mode of customer acquisition and retention…there’s a system. There’s a better way of doing it for your business and your industry and it’s your responsibility to find and work out what that system is.
It’s why so many members have recognised, immediately, the wisdom in allowing Phil Wintermantle and his burgeoning team of genuinely world class marketers to do their marketing for them as part of our Premier Service.
Those members recognise that employing someone else to crack the system and deploy it in their business is a really clever thing to do – especially when they’re going to get reports every month, telling them which tile they’re now on, what the high score has been that month, how it compares to previous months AND to other people in their sector AND other industries across the country.
This isn’t a promo for Premier (although it could be because Premier is all about finding and deploying the right marketing system for your business).
It’s about ensuring that you understand that luck, chance, capital, industry, sector, employees and all the other factors do not come into determining the ultimate success of your business, especially with regards to getting and keeping customers.
Oh no, that bit’s all about a system and, it’s yours for the taking when you ask the right questions and put the right effort in.
I hope my analogy has worked and my narrative is clear enough because, arguably this is the biggest of big lessons we’ve ever covered in over four years of the Circular.
