Not much to be honest, but as Zig Ziglar used to say, there is one thing I do know.
“If referee calls foul against Slovakia, he’s wrong!” 🙂

Seriously, I believe I know 3 things that are fundamental for winning the game.
Be it ice hockey, football, basketball, handball and many other sports.

Rule Nr. 1: No goal was ever scored without taking a shot
You can’t score if you don’t shoot. It sounds simple but many times if you watch the game, players tend to forget about it. Having space and time the only thing left for you to do is shoot.
Wayne Gretzky once said “You miss 100% of shots you don’t take”.

Rule Nr. 2: Goals are scored by players, not ball itself
Defence should always keep this one in mind. Don’t focus on ball but the player, as ball will not score by itself. Also players are much bigger and thus much easier to catch and guard, while chasing ball or puck might get tricky.

Rule Nr. 3: Don’t go where ball is, go where it will be
All players should know this. Other variation is “pass and run”. Just be where ball should go. Be in the space where it makes sense to get the ball. This is where goals are born. This is where you will get “that” pass.

And what do I know about business?
Same thing as for sports.

Rule Nr. 1: No goal was ever scored without taking a shot
Not everything you do will be success. But keep on trying for you don’t try you’ll never know. Don’t spend too much time on preparation, shoot. With some of the shots you will score. Even best players don’t score all shots they take. Not single business was started knowing for sure it will succeed. All of them started as “let’s give it a shot” enterprise. And some worked. Some big time.

Rule Nr. 2: Goals are scored by players, not ball itself
People who work for you are the players in your team. They play and they score. Your people are your company. Your people are success or failure of your company. It’s not you, not your product, not your marketing or sales effort. Ultimately, it’s your people. Your team. Players score the goals, so you better make sure you have best team and best players available. You train them properly, you take care of them and you make sure they know what strategy is and are motivated to win the game.

Rule Nr. 3: Don’t go where ball is, go where it will be
Best thing to do is to find your playing field, your niche, your new territory. Place which is not crowded. Place where nobody is now doing business but where trends will go (or not, but doing business there will be great). It is tempting to go where everybody is. Everybody is making money there, it seems so easy, why not join and get your share. Very likely you don’t score if you go where everybody is.

For both business and sport I am convinced the thrill of playing the game is and should be key motivation. Wining the game in fair way and enjoying it all the way.

Many people wished me happy birthday yesterday. 37th birthday.
The truth is, though, yesterday I celebrated 1st year of my life.

Exactly a year ago I was rushed to hospital after occurrence of SDS (sudden death syndrome). I woke up and survived only thanks to defibrillator I have implanted since 2012 as prevention. I was reborn and it’s been a great year since then.

There were three main themes for that year:
i) slowing down ii) family iii) sharing / teaching

One week after my release from hospital my son was born.
One of the greatest blessings in my life.

I managed to slow down and carve out 16 weeks of vacation during the year (Germany, Italy, Slovakia,  Czech rep, US and Australia). All quality time spent with my family. All time off and new member of our family, really made us bond more and moved our life to whole new level. I can’t be grateful enough to my wife for her support, love and tolerance.
She’s great mum and a best partner I could ever wish for.

Ironically, all companies where I am involved as founder / co-founder were performing at their best. All growing (some doubled revenue year on year) and most of them profitable. Very solid results given I was away for so much time and slowed down by my health situation. This is no doubt thanks to people working with me. All credit for those results goes to them. I am truly blessed to have all these great people around me. With years spent together, it really feels like my second family.

On “sharing / teaching” front I was privileged to be a guest speaker at Creative mornings; Pioneers Unplugged; 3D experience conference; My Way conference.  All great events with inspiring people and I am grateful for opportunity and trust.
Google featured me in their initiative on SME’s using on-line advertising for building business.

My story was featured in couple interviews and I published series on marketing focused on SME in leading Czech business newspaper. 

My passion for sharing what I learned materialised in my blog. At the beginning, Jonh Vanhara gave me an opportunity to guest blog as well as Ondrej Bartos from Credo Ventures. This gave me good feedback on my writing and motivation to continue. By today there were over 26 thousand visitors on my blog.

I also started to mentor at every opportunity I can get (my wife can confirm :)).
Node5, StartupYard, CzechInvest in Prague let me share what I learned with their start-ups. Will Dayble took a risk and let me fly over to Melbourne to be a mentor at his “academy for getting shit done“. I hope I added some value and I appreciate the chance to be there, teach and inspire, learn and be inspired.

For the small things, during this year I managed to take 6cm off of my waist just by improving my eating habits and my diet. Also my reading picked up again going through 20+ books this year.

My health situation slowed me down, but it was a blessing in disguise.
Looking back, it was not such a bad year after all.
Looking forward, I see another great year ahead.

Wish me luck and stay in touch for you all make it all worth it.

There is a huge movement in past couple years for work life balance.
As you might guess from title of this blog, I don’t buy it.

Most of people who talk about work life balance are talking about working long hours not being good and are dreaming about 9-4 days with free weekends, when you can do stuff you actually like. My view on work life balance is very simple.
If you do what you love, long hours don’t matter.
I believe the key is to have all things that are important for you. And those can’t be at the mercy of things less important (camouflaged as urgent most of the time).

It is still wise not to fall into “work only” mode. No matter how much you love your work. How do you know then if your life is balanced enough? Here’s simple exercise to help you.

Write down list of 10 things you like doing.
And the list of 5 people you like meeting.

Next to all items on both lists write down when was the last time you did it or when was the last time you met that person.
One look at those lists should tell you if you have a balance or not.

What to do next?

Take items from both lists that you haven’t done in a while and schedule it.
Dinner with friend you didn’t see for a while? Put it in your calendar.

The real magic is not to cancel it because something “urgent” came up. Block out this time in your calendar and don’t cancel no matter what will happen. You can actually do it for longer period, like book every thursday evening for “night out with a friends” and then make sure you use this evening to meet your friends.

Use this also for things that are important for your development but you don’t seem to find time for them.
Like, schedule one hour every friday afternoon to review your week and get ready with plans for next one.

Once you have all things and people that are important to you scheduled in your calendar, put all other activities and people only to the spots remaining. Not instead. Not only this week. Not only this one time. Like this you are not trying for some kind of balance, you are keeping important things in your life with maybe for other stuff.

Related posts: Who Do You Spend Your Time With?;

While mentoring young entrepreneurs and people in general, many of them tell me: I don’t know what to do.
They don’t really know what direction should they go, what should they start doing, what should they stop doing.
And I more or less understand. With so many options, so much information and so much pressure, it is not easy to make that choice.

Many people don’t know what to do, but most of them know what they want to have or who they want to be. And this is where I would start. With the end in mind as would Stephen Covey say.

Think about who you want to be or what you want to have (or both) 10 years from now.
Imagine it to the very detail, the more details the better. Create that picture of you and what you have in your mind.
Now, put it down to paper. Write it all down.
Once you have it all written down, ask yourself for every single item this question:
What do I need to do to get there?
What do I need to do today, tomorrow, next week, next month… to get there?

This should tell you what to do.

So the only thing left to do is make a plan and do it.
Have fun.

Related posts: Just Do It; To Do List

EVERYTHING

Starting fee for Ironman race which I paid back in 2011 was like 500 Euro.
Day before race we made jokes that the longer we stay on track the better return on starting fee we would get.
More kilometers you will cover – cheaper it would get per km.

We had fun before, during and even after race.
But this idea stayed with me in everything I do in life and in business.
Once you do it. Once you go there. Once you’re in.
Get the most out of it.

How did you get this job?
This was question I was receiving all the time while working at our university copy center. I didn’t get it – I created it. Together with two other classmates we set up a company and worked there earning bit of money and loads of experience.

How did it happen?
You – not a trained chef with corporate background – running a cooking school?
It did not happen. I am lucky it is something that combines many of my passions but it did not happen.
I had to plan for it, prepare for it and then make it happen.

How did they found you? How did you get to know about it?
They didn’t. I found them. Last year, I decided, this is what I want to do.
Mentoring, teaching, sharing my experience around the world. So I searched, I studied and I pushed.
And now (Feb 2014) I am doing just this – in a great city of Melbourne in Australia at a course for young entrepreneurs.

Good things come to those who wait or so they say.
I would argue that. My experince is that good things happen to those who go for it.
And life will be what you will make it.
Go and get it.

Related posts: Just Do It; Break the rules

Food! would be an answer of most people when they get to know you’re running a cooking school. Not true. Experience. We sell experience, not food.
Food is only a part of the whole experience we sell.

If you try to break Chefparade experience into pieces you will see that apart from food (fresh quality ingredients, good recipes) there are other important elements to it.

For example – the place. Not only how does it look, but also where it is located and how it is equipped.
Surprisingly, music is important part of the experience at the cooking school. We have special mood music we play in the background.
If you ask people after the cooking course if there was a music playing they would say “yes” but they wouldn’t be able to say what music was playing. This is the feature of great background music – creates atmosphere but is not distracting you from the experience itself.
Music, together with many other elements adds to whole experience people have at Chefparade.
And this is what we’re selling.

You should think about what you’re selling in broader terms.
View what you are selling as whole customer experience. Many times it starts with your website, with somebody replying to email or phone call. Already this is part of customer experience and becomes inseparable to what you are selling. It can add good or bad points to the overall result.

This all has to be taken into consideration in the process of designing your product and your business from the very moment potential customer comes to touch with it to the very end of his / her experience. And throughout all points in between.

So, what are you really selling?

We had business review at Chefparade last week which brought lots of learnings and ideas. Clearly, we can’t pursue all of them. So how do we know which idea to pursue and which to forget?

With every idea we go through 3 filters:
i) strategy
We need to know who we are as company, where we go and what we do.
Then all that doesn’t fit this we will not do.
Sometimes it is very tempting, but it always proved to be good decision not to do something. We have many ideas from within and outside our company for new project and new businesses.
Most of the time we don’t do it because when we really think about it, the only reason why we would do it would be money. And that is not good enough.

ii) difficulty vs impact
All ideas you have you can put into four categories based on their difficulty to execute and the impact they have. You can have ideas with little or big impact that are easy or difficult to execute.
We always start with ideas that are easy to execute and have big impact.
Then we go for easy execution little impact.
Only after that we start with more complex ideas with big reward.
As you might guess, we don’t go for difficult to execute ideas with little impact.

iii) capacity
Once we identified what to do, the hard part comes – who will do it.
I like my people to be stretched, but only to the point that brings best out of them, not further. That means, sometimes we have great idea but we don’t go for it as we don’t have nobody to work on it and it’s not big enough to hire new person.

Related posts: To Do or Not To Do; Use What You Already Have

Be likeable.

Most of the any success in my life I am attributing to great relationships I have with many people. I don’t like networking, don’t go to parties where I don’t know nobody. Never went to any networking event.

Still, I believe that good relationships are one of the key things for your success in life.
Both working and family.

How to build them? Be likeable.
Be the one, people want to spend time with.
Be genuine, generous, listen more than speak.
Don’t talk about yourself or other people, talk about something interesting.
Be optimistic and try to bring good mood. Don’t gossip.

I always remember what Zig Ziglar had to say about that:
“If you go out in life to look for friends they will be scarce.
But if you go out in life to be a friend you’ll find plenty.”

Related posts: Who Do You Spend Your Time With?;