Chapter 1
Before you can apply the Seven Keys Formula to your business, you need to get into the right mind set.
You must be able to see your business as you want it to be in five or ten years and believe that it’s possible to achieve ambitious targets. You need to view success as no more than the inevitable result of having the right plan, the right systems and the right people, bound together with a good dose of hard work and persistence.
The story of how the British Cycling team went from being an under-funded, minor player in the sport, to near-total world domination, is an excellent case study in study in success, and the principles can be applied to task of scaling up your business.
In 1996, when a young Chris Hoy travelled to Moscow to compete in the European under-23 Championships, the British Cycling Federation couldn’t afford to send officials with the team. Chris and his teammates used their own bikes and they had to borrow their team tracksuits from the Federation – and give them back after the event.
And yet, when Peter Keen was appointed as Performance Director the very next year, his aim was to make Britain the world’s top Olympic cycling nation.
(Do you see what I mean about having ambitious goals?)
Keen recognised that in order to achieve his aims, the first thing they needed to do was to create the systems and culture that would support success. You see, although the Federation had some talented cyclists, they weren’t leaving a legacy for newer athletes to build on. Results were sporadic and each success was a one-off.
So Keen set up what he called the World Class Performance Programme. Funded by the National Lottery, this team of elite cyclists would focus almost exclusively on track racing, where there were many more medals and prizes to be won. The first rider to sign up was a 17-year old Bradley Wiggins.
This strategy started to bear fruit in 2000 at the Sydney Games, where the Team won a gold, a silver, and two bronze medals.
In three short years Keen had managed to lay the foundations for future success. In 2001 he took it a step further, streamlining the team by, in his words, “clearing out riders and coaches who weren't obsessed with winning.”
Can you imagine doing that in your business? It sounds brutal, but what it really means is that everyone needs to be signed up to your growth targets and committed to playing their part in achieving success.
But it’s Peter Keen’s successor, Sir David Brailsford, whom I want to focus on. Or, more specifically, I’ll focus on the philosophy that he implemented.
Brailsford took over in 2003 and the following year the British won two gold medals in Athens. Four years later in Beijing that became eight gold medals. In 2012, at their home Olympics in London, they repeated this feat with another eight gold medals in the Olympic Games, and 17 gold in the Paralympics.
Their impressive performance in 2012, for the second Games in a row, lead to accusations of cheating. A headline in a French paper even suggested that the British had magic wheels!
Nonsense, of course, but you can see why other nations were frustrated. The British had excellent facilities, strong training programmes and very talented athletes, to be sure. But so did the other top nations. So what made the difference?
Well, what the British had that no one else did was a top-secret programme to eke out small improvements in performance wherever possible.
It was based on the philosophy of “Marginal Gains”. The idea was that if they took all the things that made their cyclists go fast and improved each one, even by a tiny amount, the overall impact would be significant.
Some of the measures the team implemented were simple, such as avoiding the courtesy buses to protect against infection, or taking their favourite pillow to competitions to ensure a good night’s sleep.
Other strategies had a more direct impact on performance. For example, tyres were sprayed with alcohol to remove dust and thus increase friction for the start of the race.
Then there was Project Golden Hour, a scheme to maximise athletes’ recovery during the hour between the semi-final and the final, which lead to the development of heated shorts to keep their muscles warm in between heats. As a result, several members of the team went faster in the final than they’d gone in the semi-final just an hour earlier.
And the young man who took his own bike to Moscow all those years ago – now Sir Chris Hoy – became one of the most successful Olympic cyclists in history.
The British took a seemingly impossible goal – to take Britain from an “also-ran” nation to top dog – and made it a reality. And they did this by having a clear vision of success and by breaking this mammoth task down into a series of small steps.
And from this we can learn an important lesson.
Do you think you could climb Mount Everest?
Hundreds of people do it every year, so it’s definitely within the realms of possibility. Yet hundreds more try but don’t make it to the top. I find it difficult to picture myself at the summit, knowing what a massive undertaking is required to get there.
Perhaps running a marathon is a bit more your speed. Yes, it’s a long way, but thousands of people do it every year, many dressed in a variety of wild and wacky costumes.
Personally, I enjoy the physical and mental challenges of Triathlons. I like the fact that it’s multi-disciplinary and completing each discipline takes me a stage closer to the finish. But I look in awe at those athletes who compete in Ironman triathlons – the running section alone is an entire marathon.
You see, as human beings, we view success as the destination – the summit of Mount Everest, the finishing line in the marathon, or tripling the size of your business. And from where we are sitting that destination can look quite far away…and difficult to picture.
But what if we viewed success not as a destination, but as a journey? A journey consisting of many goals — some simple, others ambitious — but all within the limits of our own capabilities.
A journey in which each goal we achieve, each “marginal gain”, is a success. And each small success motivates us to continue on our journey. Because each minor victory makes the end goal seem a little bit more inevitable. All we have to do is continue along the journey.
The British Cycling Federation had the right plan, the right systems and the right people. If your goal is to scale up your business, then the Seven Keys Formula will help you to develop the plan you need to achieve this.
I am confident that if you apply the principles and strategies that I discuss in this book, along with a good dose of hard work and persistence, you can achieve whatever business goals you set.
Success is a journey, not a destination. And just like the proverbial journey of 1,000 miles, your journey to business success begins with a single step — reading this book. Let’s get started.