Experience means nothing. Do you really have 10 years experience, or do you have one year experience repeated 10 times? Because there’s a huge difference between those two. Oftentimes, we look at these people that are in business. They’ve been in business three, four, five years, 10 years, and I’m working with them. They just have this general assumption somehow that because they’ve been in business so many years, they should be successful. Or just because they’ve been in business so many years, that people should know about them. The awareness should be there and people should be beating down their door. And I said this to one guy, and I shouldn’t have. I looked at him and I said, “That’s funny, you don’t look that stupid.” I mean, it just came to me. How retarded for us to think that just because time means something? It does when we look at evaluated time. If what you’re doing has actually been evaluated, it comes back to the conversation we had earlier about intention. If you’re actually moving forward with intention and everything that you’re doing is proactive and productive and profitable. You should be able to evaluate every single thing you do. If you’re learning and you’re actually making changes based on your evaluation, great. But if you’re not, you’re just putting in time. And that’s when we see these businesses say. “Oh I’ve been in business for 30 years, oh I’ve been here for 20 years.” But yet they’re really not professionals and they’re really not providing a great product or service, and they’re struggling. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in business or how short. It’s how are you delivering what the marketplace wants? Are you delivering it the way they want it to be delivered? Are you delivering where they need it to be delivered? That’s it. Who gives a rat’s ass about what I want. It’s about what you want.

– Alan Goff