A funny thing happened last week.

I sent out an invitation to an introductory seminar to my list of readers. I received two calls about an hour apart from readers. One business owner was in Toronto the other in Melbourne, Australia. They were both resistant to my offer for what appeared to be different reasons. Neither wanted to waste time, however it turns out, both had the same underlying issue.

The first caller Melanie Roscoe said, “I love your stuff and want to come to the workshop. My problem is that I live on the opposite side of the city and don’t want to fight the traffic if all I get when I get there, is a load of ideas but no way of implementing them.”

The second caller Brett Abrahams told me, “I’m going to be in Toronto on business at the same time as your seminar and would like to register but I don’t want to come to it unless it contains something new.”

I know that a lot of my readers feel the same way and both questions deserve more than a simple answer. If you have these questions, then pay close attention.

Melanie is right in her assumption about lots of ideas and that there will be no support to ensure that what she learns gets implemented. Business seminars simply don’t work that way.

The interesting thing is that self motivated individuals follow through on their own without help. It happens all the time and I get letters from people who have taken the ideas and run with them and created successful business.

In all of my workshops, I try to explain things as simply and as clearly as I can and I never hold anything back. All of the ideas I provide are as a result of what’s worked for me as I built my 5 businesses or as a result of what I’ve learned working with 100s of customers to build their businesses.

Some people never follow up even when they know the ideas are great and could change their lives. I talk about the importance of taking action but I can’t force you or anyone else to learn anything or do any of the things I suggest.

Some people seem to be information junkies. Always looking for the “silver bullet,” they like to learn about many ways of doing things but follow through with few things.

When I was younger, I used to think it was because they were lazy or perhaps foolish, but now I think differently.

I think for some people they just need that extra shove, that extra bit of accountability. When they get that they get moving. Others are paralyzed by the lack of a clear path and a step by step process.

For those that are committed to learning and implementing profitable growth with minimal effort and risk, I have developed my Rapid Growth Mentoring Program, which comes with seven different support mechanisms to keep participants focused and motivated. They run the gamut from group seminars with other business owners, one on one coaching, peer to peer feedback, one hour consulting certificates for use with the specialists on my team and individual implementation guides.

So, what about our friend Brett from Australia? Well it turns out that many people are looking for some new simple truth. For some reason they seem to believe their future success depends on learning something they have not heard before.

If you think about this perspective for a moment you’ll see it’s badly flawed.

When you hear something completely new, it can sound like pearls of wisdom. But the real reason you keep hearing similar suggestions from a variety of people is because they know what works and they are repeating proven ideas and concepts. What all of us have discovered is not the Holy Grail, but the fact that success comes from doing a few things really well over and over again. In fact I’m more convinced than ever that successful marketing is more about implementing a process than using creativity to create a killer marketing idea.

For this reason we spend a lot of time in the Rapid Growth Mentoring Program covering how to implement everything we teach. Many of the participants discover lots of new ideas and ways of doing marketing, but the real test is the results people produce when they start to implement what they learn.

Here are some thoughts about the challenge of implementing what you already know:

  1. I’m no different than the rest of you. There are many areas in my life where I know I need to take more action, but somehow find it difficult. If I was on top of that, I’d probably making cold calls instead of writing this article.
  2. If you can’t take action on your own, it is unlikely that you’ll become a successful entrepreneur. You need to succeed on your own, to fuel your confidence for doing more. Again this is where coaching, mentoring and good process can help you.
  3. One of the reasons programs like Weight Watchers work so well, is that people pay good money to attend. Nobody watches over what they eat, but each week when you “Weigh-in” there’s an audience listening in to see what you’ve achieved or not. Most people succeed in these programs because they don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of the group by not shedding the weight.

So the bottom line for both Melanie and Brett; business success is not dependent on just one idea but by a combination of ideas and by taking action on those ideas. I can give you the ideas, I can give you the process, but at the end of the day, only you can take the action.