The key to successfully growing business success over the years has always been hidden in plain sight. It’s called marketing your franchise, but marketing is really more of a concept than anything else. There are four important ingredients to any successful business model. Those ingredients are:
The CEO Formula. The CEO Formula is a powerful way to ensure that your franchise will be successful. The CEO Formula combines personal character, leadership, and the formula that made Rolls Royce famous. The formula includes four pillars: integrity, effectiveness, vision, and passion. When each of these pillars are strong and united, your business will run smoothly. That’s what Tom Rollins’ Total Gym CEO Formula does.
The CEO Formula is not covered in this book. The reason it’s not covered is that the core concept of it–the fact that Tom Rollins can get others to see the vision for your business performance–has not been revealed. In fact, the book describes only one actual example of how Rollins could use this strategy in the early 1990s, and it related that story to how he got others to see his vision. But the idea of using the CEO Formula as a general framework for business performance is well worth considering
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The CEO Formula also does not discuss where Tom Rollins was an editor of a magazine that he founded in the late 1980s. The Magazine contributed articles to a variety of different business magazines. The key to understanding why Tom Rollings got founding that magazine in the first place is knowing where he was an editor. Tom Rollins obviously did not attend business school, so I would look for statements about where Tom Rollins graduated from if I were looking for a business school degree that would give me an indication of where Tom Rollins has a strategic professional development education.
In the case of business people becoming national champions debaters, though, the The CEO Formula principle that is being described is very different. Most national champions debaters are highly educated in business or leadership. And in my case, a champion debater is a business person who has leadership skills. The idea of applying the CEO Formula to the work world to become an effective leader makes no sense to me.
One reason I think the CEO Formula doesn’t apply in the world of business is because most business people do not want to be viewed as “careers” or “careless,” because of what they say about themselves in interviews and in their biographies. Most of the CEOs and CFOs that you read about in the press have amazing, even legendary, executive qualities. These executives routinely perform beyond what is considered to be “careless” behavior. But to most business people, they are careless – and to them, Tom Rollins seems awfully careless.
The logic of the CEO Formula, I suggest, simply doesn’t apply to most business people. Tom Rollins is a great CEO. He’s a national champion debater. I can tell you that as a former CFO he was always focused on reducing cost, eliminating waste, increasing productivity, reducing risk. If Tom were a CEO, would you really consider him one? Probably not.
So the bottom line is, I don’t understand the book descriptions of how to apply the formula to the business world, at least in the way it applies to Tom Rollins. As someone who has applied the formula myself and who knows first-hand how it can be extremely useful (especially when combined with a deeply informed approach that takes into account the unique characteristics of all human beings and their individual needs), I can only respond that it can be used by anyone – as long as they truly believe that it can be used to achieve their goals. And it can. It is, in fact, the most powerful means of personal enrichment that human beings have ever discovered. That is why we call it, and I’ll repeat: It is an extraordinary, uniquely powerful way to restructure a company to create more value, more profits, more job security, and more genuinely motivated employees, and owners