Page 77 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

CHAPTER 9
have paid somebody, and I should have. But at the time when you’ve got three children still in school, and you’ve got all this stuff that’s happening around with paying mortgages and paying school fees and managing all that, you often can’t see the forest for the trees. I suspect there was a bit of that going on.
But I did enjoy that time that I worked for myself. I really loved it. We had lots of good ideas. We had a lot of success with our clients, so much so that we started getting more people who just wanted to lose weight, not just for health reasons. We were doing it specifically with doctors because people had to do it to have surgery or manage a chronic illness. But as they succeeded, their friends asked how they’d done it. The diet industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. If diets worked, why do we have a multi-billion dollar diet industry? So my friend and I took the approach that this would be about something other than diets. This would be about teaching people about nutrition and what works for them and experimenting, which is one of the biggest strengths of a Quick Start 10. We’re happy to keep trying different things until we find what works. I took that approach and tore up the diet books. We wanted to see a way that worked for each person.
You improvise and innovate, and your intuition guides you powerfully to what’s suitable for someone, just from conversations with them and building a relationship with them. At least, that’s what I discovered.
I’ve always said that a company’s assets are not the buildings, they’re not the computers, they’re not the desks. They are the people who walk out the door at five o’clock every night and go home. Your company’s value is inside the heads of the people who work there. Yet most businesses behave as if it’s the buildings and the stuff that matters, not the people. That’s why a lot of big companies fail.
Here in Australia, small and medium enterprises have been the backbone of our economy. Tragically, they’re being systematically destroyed by the politi- cal class and internally themselves by simply having so much interference. Things like regulatory interference and compliance. This is the reason my husband retired from running his own finance practice. He had to do a lot of
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