The day when vehicles will electronically communicateto one another to avoid collision is closer than you think. For followers of my blog; you know this isn’t a new story for me – I’ve reported on it before.  Sources are now saying though that this technology is just a mere five-years away. By that time, nine years would have passed from my first report to the first vehicle manufacturer integrated product offerings.  Considering the historical trend of military technology taking up to a decade to carry out (from conception to in-action service), this projection seems right on target (Did you make the military connection? If you did, you clearly read one of the above links!).

While all this wiz-bang-techno will surely benefit everyone who motors around the world, my business largely services the auto body collision repair industry that this technology will surely steer around, so as impressed as I am with this gadgetry, I can’t stop wondering how this will affect body shop repair businesses.

There are three short stories linked in the passage above (each highlighted &underlined) – take a look at those first then consider the following:

1.   Clients from “The Greatest Generation”, also called Traditionalists (born 1925-1945 | 75-Million) are disappearing.
2.   Baby boomers (born 1946-1964 | 80-Million) are turning 65 this year – prime retiring age.  As Traditionalist’s have done; it is likely that the Boomer’s will start to drive less and will hold onto their vehicles longer when they do retire; thus increasing total losses.  Now living on a fixed-income, they will also have to make difficult repair/not-repair decisions when the inevitable accident does happen.
3.   Insurance companies are overwhelmingly reporting 30% less auto accident claim volume.
4.  Motoring clubs (like AAA) are reporting less vehicle accidents.  They are also reporting that people are driving fewer miles for both business and leisure.   To make the matter worse, as the price of fuel continues to increase – Americans will drive even less.
5.  The U.S. economy is still in the tank, so for many people; this means using their collision claim reimbursement funds to pay personal debt and basic living expenses like utilities, fuel, and food instead of repairing their car.
6.  More crash avoidance technology will be integrated into vehicles every year, so not only will cars be engineered to avoid accidents but they will literally be steering clear of your body shop business too.

One thing is for sure – this technology will certainly be a game-changer that will for many; mean fewer cars to their collision repair center. That said, there are two ways to view this inevitable and indelible change that’s heading our way – either as an opportunity or an obstacle.  Personally, I see this as a significant opportunity – and suggest the following actions to pro-actively meet this quickly approaching challenge.  In doing so, your business will not only survive this contest but thrive because of it!

• MARKET locally
• MARKET online (online strategy should include: Website, Blog, Social Media, Search Engine Optimization, + Goal of high search engine ranking)
• MARKET generationally (Generation X – born 1965-1976 | 46-Million <> Generation Y – born 1977-1997 | 76-Million)
• Build a marketing plan to DOMINATE your market and give it time to grow (the best time to plant a tree – yesterday | Chinese proverb)
• Qualify customer expectations and at the very least – meet them 100%.  Sounds simple – but it’s not, and from my experience – more businesses either fail at qualifying what their customers truly expect; or they try so hard to exceed-expectations that they ultimately miss the mark on what was truly important to the customer – even thought they did all that extra stuff the customer didn’t ask for or expect.
• Increase productivity through greater process efficiencies, not just through pushing more cars through the shop.  Running a body shop from “the estimate” only builds top-line-revenue, process efficiencies that translate into greater productivity (throughput) builds wealth.  Making money is not the same as building wealth.
• Reduce your fixed expenses

Focus on these key goals, and you will have a solid strategy to turn this seemingly business-braking challenge into a business-success story!

By: Chris Sheehy – Auto Body Consultant at Autobody Consulting Group LLC www.AutobodyConsultingGroup.com

One of my mantras in business is to Let it Shine. Simply put, to shine is to be yourself. It’s to celebrate those unique and localized traits that make you stand out from the competition. What preexisting aspects of your business make you….you? And how do you tell that story?

As a business we see collision repair from one perspective but our customers and clients see us totally differently. Perspective is KEY when developing your social brand presence and honing in on those unique touch points that make you SHINE!

Much like a Rubik’s cube that from one perspective looks like a solid blue object but from another looks like a multi-colored, multi-layered puzzle, it is vital that you recognize varying perspectives and provide a variety of content on multiple platforms to meet your customers where they are.

This is why our company believes so strongly in the “do it yourself ” model of social engagement and development. No one knows your story or your customers like you do so how can they be expected to take on that puzzle of perspectives and meet those needs?So how do we support and learn more about varying perspectives? Here are some tips for making sure you’re seeing and supporting all sides of the puzzle.

As you think about your monthly social strategy:

1) Think outside the box. When we think about content development we tend to focus on what we want to know about a topic as opposed to what our audience might, so start thinking about that other side of the cube.

2) Design your content to be both consumer AND partner driven. Leverage your social presence for more than just B2C goals in order to incorporate your business partners and community leaders.

3) Diversify your placement. Differing social media platforms offer new audiences who want to engage in new ways. For example: People connecting with your team on LinkedIn are looking for different content and opportunities than those seeing your videos on YouTube.

4) Use new media. Some people connect through text and others through pictures or videos. By providing more than just one type of content you engage a wider and more diverse audience.

5) Listen to the conversation. Social media allows us to be a fly on the wall and generally our users will engage with us and give feedback on the information that speaks to them. Pay attention to your social metrics (using each platform’s administrative resources) and shift your content accordingly.

6) Bring it home. Social media strategies are only effective when paired with in-person engagement opportunities so make sure to host both consumer and business-specific events at your shop to get people through your doors when the DON’T need you. That way they’ll know how to find you when they do!

Overall, being yourself doesn’t mean doing nothing. In order to shine you have to find new ways and new places to tell your unique story so that customers engage more deeply and advocate for YOUR business!

Thanks Kristen!  I really enjoy her stuff and encourage you to check out her Blog or follow her on Collision hub.  She is a great writer and captures what is going on in our industry!  Have a great Week!

Enjoy!

Imparting enthusiasm for the job onto employees is a crucial part of maintaining a productive workforce.

Many shops are in the process of incorporating new procedures, practices, and technologies. Lean procedures call for changes in how technicians do body repairs. Waterborne paints require changes in how technicians refinish vehicles. Even office and estimating practices are being revised to arrive at greater efficiencies. All of this demands a significant amount of tolerance for change on the part of shop personnel, but I’ve spoken with a few shop owners who have had difficulty getting a buy-in from employees.

Many employees are stuck in their old ways and reluctant to change. To some degree, shop owners and managers are responsible for this reluctance. They may have allowed employees to slip into a fixed state of mind over the years. Many employees are simply no longer really interested in their work, so they just go through the motions. The owner or manager is now trying to break up a very solidified, concrete frame of mind.

If “interest” could be described as a commodity, it would be one of the most sought after commodities in the world. A young woman seeking a husband wonders, “Is he interested in me?” He also wonders, “Is she interested in me?” The shopkeeper hopes the young woman will be interested in the clothing he sells. The film producer hopes the public will be interested in his film. And the manager of a collision repair shop expects his or her personnel to actually be interested in doing the best job they can. The amount of attention given to something is generally proportionate to the degree of interest in it.

It’s easy to study “interest” in a baby. The baby sees something bright and shiny and is curious. The object has captured the baby’s interest. But now we can see the complete “interest spectrum.” Next the baby desires to touch, play with, or eat the object. If no one responds to the baby’s interest by giving her the object to touch, play with, or eat, she may demand it by crying, screaming, or otherwise trying to get her desire fulfilled. Assuming the child is given the (inedible) object to play with, eventually the child will lose interest and reject (throw on the floor) the object.

We now have the complete “interest-to-no-interest” attention spectrum, beginning with curiosity, interest, desire, demand, lost interest, and ending with rejection. The duration of the spectrum may be only a few minutes with the baby, or many years from the time a girl is interested in a guy, marries him, has children, cohabits for years, loses interest and finally rejects (divorces) him. Of course not every set of circumstances that begins with curiosity and interest eventually declines to no interest and rejection. But in a society obsessed with entertainment, excitement and celebrity, the full spectrum is experienced by many people in a wide variety of situations from school to jobs to relationships to hobbies. In a production facility, when interest and attention are gone, productivity growth goes along with it.

So what is needed to get jaded employees back to a state of curiosity and renewed interest in their job? Challenging them to take on the new lean procedures will only work if somehow these are tied into the individual’s personal realm of interests. Many technicians, estimators and even office personnel may at one time have been attracted to the collision industry because of a love of cars, mechanical and vehicle technology or simply the aesthetics of vehicles. Assuming that an entire shop crew shares the same underlying interests will not provide a way to stimulate curiosity or interest. It’s necessary to approach each person individually to find out what aspect of the business attracted him or her, and what new approach might now be interesting.

Of course there’s always the possibility that a person is simply interested in making more money. Unless some kind of increased compensation or bonus system is included in a new responsibilities program, personnel with this narrow line of interest may never really care about the program. But then that may be a way to weed out those people who have no real interest in participating to begin with. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy to replace someone simply because they don’t share our own personal enthusiasm. There’s always the hope that more in-depth training will strike a chord of interest and capture that employee’s interest in some of the remarkably intricate measures that make up lean technology. It can be worth an employer’s investment to send people like this for more training.

For those of us who truly enjoy the game of creating or working on more efficient, more durable and/or more aesthetic vehicles, curiosity and interest comes naturally. For those of us who enjoy the increased profitability of improved productivity, lean procedures are automatically very interesting. Now all we need to do is somehow pass on our own enthusiasm and interest to those who have to put these new tools into practice.

Tom Franklin, author of Strategies for Greater Body Shop Growth, has been a sales and marketing consultant for more than 40 years. Read more Taking Care of Business articles in our archive of his columns.

Shop performance is increasingly important in collision repair, driving more shops to look for ways to cut cycle time, such as value stream mapping, to stay ahead of competitors.

Staff Illustration

Performance is everything in today’s collision repair industry.

Customers want their cars back quicker so they can hit the road, insurance companies want to please those customers and save as much as possible in the process, and shops want to partner with those insurance companies to bring in more customers. It all comes down to cycle time.

“Maybe a few DRPs are made with a handshake, but not so much anymore,” says Tony Adams, owner of Weaver’s Auto Center in Kansas City. “These days, the emphasis is more and more on how well you perform.”

To stay afloat in this competitive market, Adams’ shop did what many others have done in recent years—it took a good, hard look at its cycle time through a process called value stream mapping. It’s not a new strategy, but the demand for it has grown, says Mark Mueller, senior manager of business solutions for PPG.

Mueller says PPG has created value stream maps, which identify wasted and necessary time in each step of the repair process, for more than 100 shops during the last three years. PPG is one of several companies that offer the service; most of the major paint companies provide it in some form.

Adams says the process uncovered numerous inefficiencies at his shop. During estimates, for example, estimators would take notes on a notepad and later transfer those notes to a computer. Adams eliminated that step by providing estimators with laptops.

He says insurers in his area are more concerned about increasing touch time, which is the amount of time repairers actually spend working on a vehicle while it’s at the shop. He says lower cycle time actually leads to higher touch time, because the time a vehicle sits idle is reduced. His shop’s touch time has increased from 2.4 hours per vehicle per day to 2.7 hours per vehicle since developing a value stream map a year ago. His goal is to get touch time up to 3.5 hours per vehicle.

The improved efficiency should please customers and insurers, increase capacity and help to strengthen or add DRP relationships, Adams says.

George Avery, a claims consultant for State Farm, says cycle time factors into his company’s three-tiered performance report card for shops, which evaluates quality, efficiency and competitive price.

As with most insurance companies, State Farm doesn’t have a set requirement for cycle time, but it recognizes its importance, he says.
The company recently estimated that if all of its partner shops cut cycle time by one day, it could save more than $40 million in rental fees alone. It’s a lot of money, Avery says, but the goal is simply to increase efficiency, which is in the customer’s best interest.

“There is proof that not only is State Farm interested in cycle time going down, but we’re trying to take steps to help,” Avery says.

The company recently announced plans to develop a new electronic parts ordering solution to speed the repair process. It plans to work with repairers, parts suppliers and tech vendors on the program.

“We know a well-designed parts ordering solution will help reduce the amount of time needed to search for, source and order all part types,” said Greg McDonald, a claims estimating consultant for State Farm, in a video about the ordering solution sent to repairers.

The need for reduced cycle time is probably only going to intensify in coming years and tools such as value stream mapping will continue to gain momentum as a result, says Mueller. Not every shop needs to develop a detailed map of its process, he says, but each facility should be thinking about how it can perform better.

“Some customers would be out of business today if they hadn’t done this,” he says.

Recently I was reading an article by Kristen Felder, one of my favorite Bloggers,  on Collision Hub where she was talking about Social Media and her approach, a hands-on organic process that captures the many elements of technology available to us in the Social sphere.  She talks about being “who you are”, in  the realm of Social media and that your unique qualities are what make you and your company Shine!   See, we love shine in our industry!

This brought to mind a conversation I recently had where I was asked what my personal work philosophy was and what that looks like.  At first my response was off the cuff and maybe not that memorable.  But as I have walked around with this, it can be best summed up in the Acrostic SHINE.  This is not an original idea for me but one that came from the Book SHINE by Kris DenBesten the  President/CEO of Vermeer Southeast, an equipment company located in the Orlando area.  Several of my business associates read it with me and it really sums up my phoilosophy.  Here it is:

• Serve Others
• Honor God
• Improve Continually
• Navigate by Values
• Excel in Relationships

I seek to serve our customers, employees, family, community as I honor God in all I do and say.  Continuous Improvement is a way of life and one of my Core Values.  Our values guide our decisions, business plans, and goal setting.  Finally, we are nothing without the relationships we foster.  The acid test (Flashback to my old accounting days) of our philosophy is evidenced in our relationships.  Do we have people who hold us accountable to our word and deeds?  I know our customers will!  Am I a good steward of the resources I have been entrusted with?  This should  be my testimony!

Want to learn more about SHINE?  Check out Dan’s Book – I highly recommend it.  Go see him speak – I had this opportunity and what a story he has to tell.  Inspiring and evidence we serve an Awesome God!

Happy Easter, He is Risen!

For the second year we at Auto Body Express have been involved with the Plant City Planes, Trains and Automobile Show at the Plant City Airport.  In years gone by, Plant City Hosted the Plant City Strawberry Air Festival at the Airport.  But, like many things post 9-11 it was grounded.  Then along came Jason Jones, owner of Advantage Restoration here in Plant city and member of the Plant City Chamber.  Jason, an Eagle scout endeavored to create an event like he had in his old home, Kentucky.  An Airshow that offered the Aviation Merit Badge to Boy Scouts.

2011 was the first year and I was asked to help out on the Scouting side of things as I am a Scoutmaster here in Plant city.  We weren’t sure we could pull it off but we went for it with no budget and only grass roots word of mouth networking.  Well, over 3,000 people showed up, we were featured on Good Day Tampa Bay with Charlie Belcher, and a good time was had by all.  Kudos to the Plant City Chamber and all the volunteers at the Plant City Airport, the Tampa International Airport, Breezer Aircraft of Plant City  and a cast of many more!

Planes Trains and Automobiles 2012

This year’s event is going to be huge!  Following an excellent first year, we have attracted Sponsors, more volunteers, and the the pinnacle, the Ford Tri-Motor airplane owned by the EAA and based out of Michigan State.  They have come all the way for our little show here in Plant city and we could not be more excited!  I had the privilege of going for a test flight today – they say I was ballast but I was thrilled none the less.

This year we are offering the Railroading Merit Badge for Scouts in addition to the Aviation Merit Badge.  We recommend Delfleet for all your aviation painting requirements by the way!

Never Fly in an airplane older than your Grand Father

Sage advice from Paul Phillips – operations manager for Tampa Airports – All of them!  Made me think before I got on a plane built in 1929 but Grandpa was born in 1917 and is still kicking!  So am I, I am happy to report.  What an exhilarating experience!  You really appreciate how air travel has matured.  The 737 I flew on last week did not seem like we were doing anything but driving across town.  In contrast, in the Tri-motor you KNOW you are flying!  In the Ford, we did not have to turn off phones because there were no electronics to interfere with!  So I got some great pictures.  See our Facebook at www.facebook.com/autobodyexpress for a look.

For more information check out http://www2.tbo.com/news/community-news/2012/mar/21/pcnewso11-ford-tri-motor-part-of-planes-trains-amp-ar-382726/

Come out and have a great day – Oh yes there are cars of every kind and trains too!  Yes Trains!  Don’t forget the RC Airplanes and K-9 Demonstrations by Plant City’s Finest! Come see us at our booth and say hi to Dennis Mason.  He’ll be there with his custom PPG Vibrance Painted Harley Deuce and one of our  customer’s hot rods!

God Bless!

Planes Trains and Automobiles

Charlie Belcher – Good Day Tampa Bay!

Here is a basic over view of what Lean is from their Website:

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.
To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.  Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate.

Lean for Production and Services

A popular misconception is that lean is suited only for manufacturing. Not true. Lean applies in every business and every process. It is not a tactic or a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organization.  Businesses in all industries and services, including healthcare and governments, are using lean principles as the way they think and do. Many organizations choose not to use the word lean, but to label what they do as their own system, such as the Toyota Production System or the Danaher Business System. Why? To drive home the point that lean is not a program or short term cost reduction program, but the way the company operates. The word transformation or lean transformation is often used to characterize a company moving from an old way of thinking to lean thinking. It requires a complete transformation on how a company conducts business. This takes a long-term perspective and perseverance.
The term “lean” was coined to describe Toyota’s business during the late 1980s by a research team headed by Jim Womack, Ph.D., at MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program.  The characteristics of a lean organization and supply chain are described in Lean Thinking, by Womack and Dan Jones, founders of the Lean Enterprise Institute and the Lean Enterprise Academy (UK), respectively. While there are many very good books about lean techniques, Lean Thinking remains one of the best resources for understanding “what is lean” because it describes the thought process, the overarching key principles that must guide your actions when applying lean techniques and tools.

Lean Thinking

Womack and Jones recommend that managers and executives embarked on lean transformations think about three fundamental business issues that should guide the transformation of the entire organization:
- Purpose: What customer problems will the enterprise solve to achieve its own purpose of prospering?
- Process: How will the organization assess each major value stream to make sure each step is valuable, capable, available, adequate, flexible, and that all the steps are linked by flow, pull, and leveling?
- People: How can the organization insure that every important process has someone responsible for continually evaluating that value stream in terms of business purpose and lean process? How can everyone touching the value stream be actively engaged in operating it correctly and continually improving it?  ”Just as a carpenter needs a vision of what to build in order to get the full benefit of a hammer, Lean Thinkers need a vision before picking up our lean tools,” said Womack. “Thinking deeply about purpose, process, people is the key to doing this.”

If you are interested in seeing how Lean can work at your organization, I would love to talk with you!  We can get the MVP team to show you and me how we can transform our businesses and grow in the future!

PPG Bringing Innovation to the Surface™

“Given this highly-competitive environment, today’s collision center can no longer totally depend on traditional ways of reaching and selling to their customer base,” said Norm Angrove, senior manager of value programs for PPG. “The objective of this course is to provide attendees with a hands-on look at innovative, results-driven strategies and tools for modernizing their marketing and sales efforts.”

Beginning with an overview of industry trends, the workshop provides real-world instruction for developing an effective marketing and sales plan using new tools and methodology. Another training component provides insight into today’s multi-generations and how their unique preferences must guide the collision shop’s marketing approach. Attendees also are schooled on how to compose a concise, carefully-planned positioning statement of the business, and the “ins and outs” of leveraging customer testimonials to market the business.

“In this ‘brave new world’ of communications, this workshop devotes considerable attention to social media, such as Blogger, Facebook, Yelp and other social media opportunities,” said Angrove. “The aim is to give shops new skills and methods for influencing prospects and driving traffic to their door utilizing these new communication tools.”

The MVP marketing course was extensively tested and refined by MVP experts before being incorporated into the Business Development training series. According to PPG, response to a pilot seminar was overwhelmingly positive.

“We have been propelled as a team to the next level of marketing,” said David Mulder, president of Collision Centers of America, and one of the pilot course participants. “The content of the seminar was delivered in a very digestible way with a challenge to use all our employees as marketers and penetrating the markets in our communities with the expanded knowledge.”

The workshop is available to PPG collision center customers in a two-day course or a one-day condensed format that allows participants to customize the course and select the topics most important to them.

As one of 15 courses in the MVP Business Development Series, Accelerated Sales and Marketing Systems is the first of three new courses to be introduced this year by PPG. The other two classes are “Evolution of Selling” which will provide a practical, professional consultative selling process, and “Fundamentals of Estimating,” which will cover contemporary estimating trends, techniques and practices for entry-level estimators.

PPG’s MVP Business Solutions offers the industry’s most widely-attended training programs for helping collision centers learn practical, proven ways to improve their process improvement and succeed in a highly-competitive marketplace.

For more information about PPG MVP Business Solutions, contact your PPG territory manager, email MVPmailbox@ppg.com or visit www.ppgmvp.com.

Even better, contact us at Auto Body Express and we will get you connected with the right people!  www.ABEpaints.com 

Thanks PPG!

This week’s post is taken from the Blog section of Collision hub.  John Shoemaker has a great blog and worth your time to check out and follow!

• Posted by John Shoemaker on February 1, 2012 at 6:27am

Positive Thinking, Tim Tebow, and Your Business

Are you a football fan? For those of you that aren’t, let me explain what is happening with Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos and why you should care.

Tim Tebow was one of the most celebrated college quarterbacks in history. He played for the University of Florida and won two national championships. He is, perhaps, the most dynamic, positive leader to ever wear a college uniform. His competitive fire and his positive energy were legendary. His epic speech after a rare loss became enshrined in college football lore: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sGv2Zw-WQw&feature=related But, his skills are perfectly tailored to the college game and ill-suited for the NFL.

There was simply no way his style of play would succeed in the pros, they said. Tebow has the ability to run around and avoid getting tackled. He’s a big guy so he can run over defenders. But, he struggles to throw the ball effectively (or at all) in the NFL. His throwing motion takes too long, allowing defenders to easily determine where the ball is going. He doesn’t have a strong arm. He is not the stereotypical NFL quarterback.

But, then he was drafted into the NFL by the Denver Broncos.

But still, the message from the so-called football experts was nearly universal: Tebow cannot win in the NFL. He cannot succeed. Period.

Even within the Broncos organization many felt that he could not play quarterback in the NFL. He simply wasn’t good enough.

But after the team started the 2011 season 1-4, and after a groundswell of Tebow support from the Denver fans (they were chanting his name at games), the coach decided to play Tebow. What’s happened since?

• 1) The Broncos are 7-1 since Tebow started playing. They went from last place in their division to first place.
• 2) Tebow plays terribly for 3 quarters of nearly every game and then suddenly, inexplicably, begins playing at a very high level in the 4th quarter.
• 3) The Broncos have won all of their games in almost inexplicable, miraculous ways. Things happen at the end of Broncos games that simply defy football logic.

But they keep happening.

“You can’t explain what is happening in Denver right now,” one former NFL coach said. “Every game we say that Tebow can’t continue to win, and yet, somehow he continues to win. There is something unexplainable happening in Denver and around that kid (Tebow). I don’t know what else to tell you.”

The Tim Tebow story is the biggest sports story of the year and the most positive sports story in recent memory.

Why is all this happening?

John Elway, the Broncos GM summed it up best: “Everyone on the team believes that something good is going to happen. And, obviously, Tim’s been the guy that’s led that thinking. He’s just such a strong believer. He’s really got everyone else believing if you stay strong, stay positive, something good’s going to happen. When guys are thinking that way — and it’s been led by Timmy with that positive attitude — all boats have been rising with that”

He’s a winner. And winner’s, despite the odds against them, win.

Why this matters to you

Books, of course, have been written about the power of positive thinking. Everyone knows it’s important, but few people actually have the mental toughness, the positive energy and the absolute faith to believe in positivity and practice positive thinking 100% of the time.

Tim Tebow’s positive thinking has overcome his talent deficiencies, his lack of throwing ability and the Broncos’ opponents, repeatedly.

One of his Bronco’s teammates, when asked about Tebow shrugged and said simply: “He has us believing that we’re always going to win. Once you believe that crazy things happen.”

So here’s my question for you: do you have the power to think positively about your business even in challenging times? When you make a cold call or a follow-up call to a prospect, are you thinking positively? Are you thinking that there is no way you could possibly fail?

This much is clear: the more you believe something will happen, the more likely it is to happen.

Don’t believe me? Just ask the Denver Broncos.

Still don’t believe me? Just ask the Denver Broncos’ opponents.