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Business Rule #49:
Stake Your Turf
April 24, 2006
(PAGE 2 of 2)
Being able to turn around a troubled company is what makes a business legend. Would Donald Trump himself have the cache that he does, if he hadn’t lost much of his fortune and regained it? Failures and missteps happen to everyone. What you do to get back into the game is what matters.
Lee broke the Gold Rush losing streak by having a vision of what he wanted to do. When setting goals, start with the desired end result—and then work backwards to figure out what steps to take to get there and when to take them. Only then is it time to dig in and get it done.
Lee’s goal was to win the task and hopefully receive a reward that would allow him to spend some casual time with Trump in a relaxed setting. Lee employed a two-pronged approach: bulk and retail sales. Lee and Charmaine got a jump on making cold calls to sell large lots of the booklet. They might have done better if they had considered a wider variety of businesses that could use the brochure as a promotional item. The two of them were stuck on the idea of local hotels, yet it was a real estate broker who eventually bought a lot of 100 brochures for $85. Obviously, there’s always room for improvement with any performance. To their credit, their plan made for a good start and they executed it.
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To execute the second prong of their strategy, Gold Rush claimed control of sales in Battery Park and maintained it. Lee got his team up and out early and then stood his ground when Synergy arrived. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Lee led his team to victory in spite of a string of four straight defeats.
Lee even got his wish of having casual time with Trump. Not every plan works quite this well, and not every goal is reached—but if you shoot for the stars, chances are you’ll at least hit the moon.
After getting off to a bad start, Synergy never could catch up on this task. They stumbled at every step: from leaving a crucial notebook on the Island and their PM deciding to tag along to retrieve it—to arriving at Battery Park after Gold Rush had already covered the waterfront with brochures. “Not losing,” is never a good goal. Who wants to survive, when one can thrive?
Even so, Allie’s irritation with Andrea was understandable. Andrea challenged Allie’s approach to the task early on, misrepresented her expertise in graphic design, and didn’t offer her expertise at bulk sales until the very end of the second day when it was too late to do anything about it. So Trump fired her.
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Failures and missteps happen to everyone. What you
