Execution: The Key That Turns Strategy into Success

In this episode of 10 Keys to Thrive in Business and Life, international business strategist Jim Krigbaum reveals the most important step in success: execution. 

After exploring the full CHARM DANCE framework—communication, honesty, appropriate quality, risk, markets, details, advantages, networks, and customers—Jim explains why none of these principles matter unless you consistently apply them in the real world. 

If you’ve ever felt stuck with great ideas but limited results, this episode shows how discipline, clarity, and execution turn knowledge into momentum, growth, and lasting success. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Today on 10 Keys to Thriving Business and Life, we have made our way to E for in the Charm Dance mnemonic, and the E stands for execution. And execution not in the using of the guillotine, but in the execution and the deployment of all the concepts that we've learned. Stay tuned and we'll cover that topic next.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Are you sick and tired of spinning wheels and wasting time and money in your business but getting nowhere fast? With the 10 Keys to Thrive podcast. It's your masterclass in momentum by International Business Strategist. And your host, Jim Krigbaum.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Welcome back to 10 Keys to Thrive in Business and Life. I'm your host and mentor, Jim Krigbaum. Congratulations, we've now made it to the letter E, the final letter in the mnemonic charm dance. It's a fun one because E doesn't stand for execution in the form of the guillotine of the firing squad, but execution and how we apply all the things that we've learned in the other new letters in the mnemonic. None of them do any good unless we execute them. None of them do any good unless we make it part of our DNA, part of our character, and part of what people think of us when they think of us as an individual and they think of us as a business person. Join us, we'll walk through the letters as a reminder on the charm dance, but we'll think about it as you're walking through these. Think about how you can execute them. Think about how you can apply those. And think about how you can do it consistently. Yeah, again, we talk about in the book and we talk about it at different things where everybody knows these. They're not secrets, they're keys. Secrets, nobody knows. People keep them tight. But these are things that everybody knows. We know that communication, honesty, appropriate quality, all those factors are important. And everybody who's in business and everybody in life understands what they are. The challenge is how consistently do we make them part of our character? How consistently do we make them who we are? And how do people view us based on those characteristics? The first letter in Charmed Ants is C for communications. And we learn early on that communications are where everything begins. You can't buy anything, you can't sell anything, you can't communicate an idea, you can't develop a relationship without some form of communication. And a lot of times it's not just a single form. It's the voice, it's the language as you're speaking, it's the tone that you use. We gave some examples of how I don't always understand tone appropriately. It's how you talk, it's how you wait, and it's how you listen. Listening is a part of communication that people often don't understand. I've worked with executives around the world where they love to hear the sound of their own voice and they don't bother taking the time to listen to the customer and listen to what they have. So communications are not just speaking, not just your body language, but it's also your ability to listen. That's the letter C. H for honesty, and honesty goes without saying, in all that we say and do, we will speak what is true. The best policy is honesty. It's easier to remember the truth than it is to remember lies, and you don't get anywhere with lies. Sometimes lies will come back to haunt you, and if you lose credibility, if you lose the confidence and faith or trust of other people, that takes forever to regain. You may be able to regain it, but they'll never feel as comfortable with you as if they would if they knew you from the beginning as a straight and honest person. So honesty is important. I do talk about times when honesty is not the best policy, when the harm that can be done by being honest is greater than the harm that can be done by telling a lie or being prevented, presenting a dismissed truth. There are times in a personal situation where you kind of have to let things pass. You know, uh I had to I've given an example of how I said things that came to mind that were honest and they've hurt people, and I shouldn't have said them at all. Uh for the example that comes to mind first is the lady who worked with me and came into the office with a dress that was the same pattern design as the bathroom wallpaper in my house when I was growing up. And I told her, wow, your dress looks just like my bathroom wallpaper. It was honest, but it did a lot of harm. So it's not always the best thing to do and speak fully honestly. One of the things you have to remember is you have to think all that you say and not say that what all that you think. The next letter is A for appropriate quality, and appropriate and consistent quality. You have to have the quality that the market demands. Doesn't matter what you like, your opinion is of very little concern when you're looking to sell a product. And keep in mind you are also a product. What matters is what the customer wants, what is appropriate for the market. We've seen examples of appropriate technology which are kind of fun. And you know, US engineers will go into a country and they'll design a technology and they'll design a state-of-the-arts factory, and it'll be expensive, and they are designing it with equipment that requires a consistent power supply. And the power in that particular location or that particular uh production area goes out consistently. So the quality and the appropriateness of the technology that provided isn't there. Or they'll provide technology that is labor-saving. But if they're paying a very low wage for labor, are they actually applying the appropriate technology? We talked about Georgian wine. Georgian winemakers love their wine. It was fine wine, it was fantastic wine for the Georgians. It wasn't the fantastic wine for the markets that they were trying to develop. So making sure you have the quality that the market demands. You need to produce product that you can sell, not sell product that you produce. You need to understand the market. So that's appropriate quality. The next letter in charm is risks. You need to understand the risks. Everything we do has risks, and you need to understand them. You need to be able to communicate those effectively and be honest with yourself in that situation, and you need to balance the risks. When our risk changes every day, our risk changes as we go get older, our risk changes as our business grows, our risk changes as our bank accounts change, as our relationships change, as the politics changes, the weather changes, risk is constantly changing. You can't say, okay, we looked at our risk and three years later go, but we looked at our risk. That doesn't count. You have to constantly look at risk. I've had companies where I've failed to constantly review and consider the risk, and I've taken on too much risk. Taking on risk is great. The bigger the risk, the bigger the return in most cases. That's the objective is that if it was not risky, everybody would be doing it, and if everybody did it, the return on investment would be low. So by taking the risk, you're exposing yourself to a greater return. But you have to be able to absorb the loss if you take the risk and the risk fails. The M in charm stands for markets. It all begins with the market. It is a demand chain, not a supply chain. What is the market? What are your customers? What do they want? How do you please them? How do you develop a product or a service or yourself that meets that market demand? You identify who they are. I don't like shotgunning and hoping that you'll find a customer. Hope is not a strategy. A strategy is saying, I have this product, I know the market, and therefore I know that this product should be bought by this company. How do I get in front of the company? We talk about how to get in front of them utilizing some tools like LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and smiling and dialing. You know, the old-fashioned smiling and dialing. It's tougher these days because a lot of times you can't reach people because they're working off of cell phones or they're not in the office. But smiling and dialing, and you can do that both on the phone, but you can also do it through other means of communications. Again, going back to communications. We've completed charm. We're on now to details and dance, D D and dance is details. Details are important. You need to understand the details. You need to give each detail the right amount of weight because some things are important and other things are not. If your mind tried to absorb all the details that are out there, you would not be able to do it. You would go crazy. A detail of what was the weather like five days ago, it's not important. I don't need to know it. Now there are some people that can tell you what the weather was like five years ago on a specific date, but that's a specific skill. And is it of value? So when you look at details, as I say, I need to remember my daughter's name. I don't need to remember her phone number because I can ask my phone to call her. I don't need to remember her address because I can tell my car to give me directions on how to get there. So I don't need to worry about those details. I need to worry about certain details, and I prioritize the details that I remember. And I make sure that I put the emphasis on the details that I need to remember and forget about the rest. You don't need to be know every detail about everything. Some people do and they get paralysis by analysis. They spend too much time digging into a situation and getting too deep, and the decision has to be made. So they have to make a decision based on the details they have, based on the market that they have, based on the risk they have, based on their assessments. So that's the D in dance is for details. The next A is for advantages. You need to understand your advantages. What are the advantages of your product? What are the advantages of your service? You need to be able to answer before you face the customer, even before you develop the product, you need to answer the question: why in the world would anybody buy your product or pay for your service or become your friend or whatever it is you're trying to sell? So you need to know your advantages. To know your advantages, you also need to know your disadvantages. A good way to do that is to do a SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. There's lots of examples out there on how to do that. I recommend that you do it off-site and you include every department within your company or within your family or whatever it is you're doing it with, because if you work in silos, you may find a bottleneck that you didn't know about. You also need to understand what people's perspectives are. Again, everybody has a different view of things. So having everybody together off-site and openly talking freely and not judging them based on what they say and who they are, but based on the content of what they say and the ideas that they present. So that's being able to develop the appropriate quality and the quality that meets the market demand. And networks. And networks have changed drastically since I started back in the 1980s. And they're continuing to change. And AI is making things easier and more difficult. Social media is making things easier and more difficult. You need to be able to play the social media. You need to be able to get the snowball rolling downhill and be getting the numbers that, depending on if that's an objective that you have. And I used an example of how we got a lot of followers to our stainless steel business, but not one of them had an interest in our business. So we had great numbers, but we didn't get any sales resulting from that. So you need to make sure that your network's of value to you and how you develop the network to be of value to others. You need to make sure that it's a two-way street. You can't just expect others to service you. You also need to service them. You have to realize that you should be reaching above your grasp and trying to reach people at a higher level, and that keeps you moving up in the chain of relationships and the chain of dialogue and the chain of decision making. You have to utilize friends to open doors, but you also don't want to abuse that. We use an example of how a friend of mine abused that and we're really no longer friends. He did it too many times. So that is the end for networks and understanding the network and understanding how your network is of value to you and of value to others and how to build it and make sure that you're spending the time building the network that makes the most sense for you. Sometimes you have different objectives, sometimes it is just to have the numbers, just to have a number of people following, because again, in social media, that kind of gets the algorithms coming your way and the snowball moving downhill. In sales, I having a huge audience of people that are of no value to me was in fact of no value. So that is the networks. The next is C customers, customer communications, customer is always right, understanding what the customers' needs are, understanding the market. You need to do a graphic in your mind or on paper what your customer is, what is their level of education, what drives them to make the decision, why are they giving up their hard-earned money or whatever it is they're trading for your product? What is their trigger? What's going to make them make that decision to bypass what they're getting, the joy and the utility that they're giving from the money that they have to purchase your product? You need to understand that the cost of attaining a customer is greater than the cost of retaining a customer. So you need to, you know, you'll invest in getting a customer. Replacing that customer is very difficult. It costs money, you're reinventing it. Same thing with employees. We'll talk about that in another session. It's harder and more expensive to train a new employee a lot of times than it is to give the current employee a raise. Because when you employ a new person, you not only have to advertise, you're lacking productivity while they're out, but while you're reviewing and interviewing people, but then you have to train them. And if you have somebody that's already trained, that is of value. So you have to understand that the customer is always right, the value of attaining a customer. Yeah, same thing with employees, the value of retaining employees. Those are all factors you need to consider. And the last letter is execution. As I said, none of these letters do any good unless you make them part of who you are, unless you make them part of your personality, part of your DNA. So when people look at you, when they talk to you, when they hear your name, they think that you are an honest person that can communicate effectively, that understands risks, that knows the markets, that takes attention, pays attention to the details, that knows the advantages of the product and advantages and disadvantages. It's important to know the disadvantages. We talked about ways and how to understand what your disadvantages are and what you do when you have them and how to correct them or how to downplay them. And you need to understand the network. You need to understand where you put your time in developing a network, who you talk to and who you support, and how you build that network and how you grow in the relationships you have. And the last letter in Charm Dance is E for execution. Originally I had it as excellent visibility because unseen is unsold, and if you don't people don't know you have it, they're not going to buy it. So you need to advertise and promote it and educate people that way. But I realized that more important than unseen and unsold and excellent visibility is execution. None of these skills are of any good just for you to listen to me talking about them. They're here for you to learn from them and apply them in your own situation. And we have many value, many networks and many venues for you to come back to us and communicate and develop a dialogue and how you've applied them. Share with others and join the community and join the dialogue and how you grow your business, how you've taken these skills and applied them into your personal life and your business life. In the next section, we will talk about how to apply the dance to your personal life, how these characteristics and the skills based on the mnemonic and dance can be applied to your personal life to help you achieve your greatest potential and achieve your greatest success. Stay tuned, we'll look for you next time.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

So that's it for today's episode of Ten Keys to Thrive. Head on over to Apple Podcast or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. Be sure to head on over to tenkeys to thrive.com to pick up a free copy of the show together. And join us on the next episode.