Have you ever envisioned the perfect exit from your business, only to be bogged down by the daunting unknowns? Turn that dream into a plan with the red, gold, and green thinking method. In this episode, Mike takes you through the transformative power of this simple, 30-minute strategy that could revolutionize your entrepreneurial journey. Through a candid reality check (red), a visionary future check (gold), and a decisive action check (green), you’ll learn to conduct a thorough self-evaluation of your company’s present state and set actionable goals towards a fulfilling exit strategy. Say goodbye to the ‘focusing illusion’ and hello to a path that charts towards your business aspirations with clarity and purpose.
Check out the video version of this episode below:
Write a Podcast Review:
Podcast reviews are important to iTunes, and the more reviews we receive, the more likely we’ll be able to get this podcast and message in front of more people (something about iTunes algorithms?). I’d be extremely grateful if you took less than 30 seconds and 5 clicks to rate the podcast and leave a quick review. Here’s how to do it in less than 30 seconds:
Click on This Link – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/howd-it-happen-podcast/id1441722417
Click on the “Listen on Apple Podcast” Box
Click on “Open iTunes” – You will go directly to the iTunes page for the Podcast
Click on “Ratings and Reviews”
Click on the 5thStar (or whatever one makes the most sense to you 🙂
Episode transcript below:
00:00 – Mike Malatesta:
On today’s episode we are talking about red, gold, green thinking and how a simple exercise, a 30 minute exercise, can help entrepreneurs and successful business owners get prepared to take the journey to creating a playbook for the dream exit they deserve. Welcome back to this free Thinking Friday episode of the how to Happen podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about the power of red, gold, green thinking for entrepreneurs and business owners when it comes to the planning that they should, in my opinion, be doing right now for the eventual exit and what I call the dream exit that they have earned and deserve and, unfortunately, too frequently achieve. The rainbow that we call happily ever after is, more often than not, a focusing illusion. That is a quote. That’s according to my friend and business transition expert, dr Rick Eigenbrot, a clinical psychologist turned organizational psychologist, an author of what happens when you get what you want success and the challenges of choice. I had Rick on my podcast and it was just a great conversation, so you can look that up and listen to that if you’d like, but I can hear you saying already tell me more about that. What do you mean? Happily ever after? That is, more often than not, a focusing illusion. Well, the focusing illusion is a psychological concept that refers to the tendency of people to place too much importance on one aspect of an event, leading to an overestimation of its impact on their lives.
01:58
When it comes to exiting a business, I see the focusing illusion in play with business owners way too often. It’ll work out great, I just know it. That’s what you hear them saying and unfortunately the chances are it won’t, at least not without some deep thinking and planning to level up that focusing illusion. It’s funny because no one believes that a professional athlete can skip training, practice, team meetings and even the game and still end up with the championship ring, because they’d like that to happen. And yet successful business owners and entrepreneurs do this all the time. When they decide to sell their business without having done any of the training, they put on their focusing illusion glasses and they put their faith blindly into the belief that they can wing it, figure it out on the fly, talk their way into it or otherwise imagine it into existence. On the other hand, forward thinking entrepreneurs and business owners, they focus on reality, not illusion when it comes to their exit planning strategy. They don’t subscribe to the illusion of chasing the happily ever after rainbow dream. Instead, they spend the time and the resources developing a plan that has the dream chasing them. It has the dream chasing them. So how do they do it? Well, they do it with this concept I call red gold green.
03:36
It’s a simple thinking exercise red gold green that you can accomplish alone or with someone who cares about you, in less than 30 minutes. So red starts with red. What is red? Red is the reality check. This is what I call the plus one exercise. So step one is a quick gut check, one through five rating, where one is bloundering or underperforming and five is phenomenal. And I put you through this with seven key value creation components in your business, leadership, operations, administration, sales, marketing, technology and management. And those apply to almost every business. So that’s red. Step two is the plus one. What is the first thing you can do? To improve every rating that is less than five and maintain every rating that is out of five. So that’s step two. Then you get into gold.
04:40
Gold is the future check. It makes you answer a simple question that too few business owners ever ask themselves, and that question is this what do I want by a specific future date? You can insert the date, any date you want. The question is, what do I want by that date? And the power of that question comes from taking you out of the present today and into a specific date in the future that you’ve chosen as your. I wanna be ready for a transition date, and it helps you get clear about where you want your business value and your personal meaning to be on the day you sell or transition away from your business which, keep in mind, is inevitable. If you choose not to think about it as if it’s never going to happen, you’re diluting yourself. It is going to happen, in one form fashion, it’s going to happen. So what do you want? That’s a very important question to answer. And then green Green is the action check. So it starts with another simple question what is the first action that I need to take to bridge the gap between my red and my gold? Is it the plus one that you identified with your red when you were looking at your reality check, or has your time, the time you spent in the gold of your future, getting clear about what you want by a specific future date? Has that caused you to rethink your plus one?
06:20
What I find most valuable about the red gold green exercise is not its simplicity and speed, although those are important. But what’s most valuable, though, is the powerful focusing and action insights. It transforms your thinking process around the complex topic of exits, transitions and preparation into the start of a simple and clear playbook for identifying and mining your future value and meaning gold. By making the complex simple, red gold green does two additional things. First, it makes getting started super easy. I mean, look what business owner or entrepreneur doesn’t have 30 minutes 30 minutes to invest in focusing on the most valuable personal and professional event of their life? The answer is none. Second, it disrupts focusing illusion.
07:19
While others continue to kick that thinking can down the road, business owners using the red gold green thinking pick up that can and they deal with it. They abandon focusing illusions and instead they just focus. They know that few things in life just happen and that the best results aren’t achieved by wishing and hoping, but by knowing and doing. There’s nothing more rewarding than watching business owners take the red gold green thinking journey. While their peers are mistakenly fixated on the illusion of what chasing their dream will be like. These savvy owners are on the road to creating a playbook that has their dream chasing them, and that’s where you wanna be. You wanna be in a place where your dream is chasing you, not you chasing the dream.
08:20
So I hope you found value from this today. If you did, please subscribe, follow the podcast. If you want more information about how you can start your planning for a dream exit, how you can start going through the red gold, green thinking process, which is very simple starting point, you can reach out to me, mike, at dreamexitcom, or you can go to dreamexitcom and find out more about how I can help you there. Until next time, please maximize the greatness that is inside of you today and every day. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to this show and before you go, I just have three requests for you. One if you like what I’m doing, please consider subscribing or following the podcast on whatever podcast platform you prefer, if you’re really into it, leave me a review, write something nice about me, give me five stars or whatever you feel is most appropriate.
09:16
Number two I’ve got a book. It’s called Owner Shift how Getting Selfish Got Me Unstuck. It’s an Amazon bestseller and I’d love for you to read it or listen to it on Audible or wherever else Barnes, noble, amazon you can get it everywhere. If you’re looking for inspiration that will help you unlock your greatness and potential, order, or download it today so that you can have your very own copy, and, if you get it, please let me know what you think. Number three my newsletter. I do a newsletter every Thursday and I talk about things that are interesting to me and or I give more information about the podcast and the podcast guests that I’ve had and the experiences that I’ve had with them. You can sign up for the podcast today at my website, which is my name, mikemalatesta.com. You do that right now. Put in your email address and you’ll get the very next issue. The newsletter is short, thoughtful and designed to inspire, activate and maximize the greatness in you.
