January 20, 2022

Reverse Engineering Success with Ron Friedman

31 minutes

Mandi Ellefson’s guest is Ron Friedman, the founder of ignite80, an organization dedicated to teaching leaders practical, evidence-based techniques for working smarter and elevating their team's performance through keynotes, workshops, and consulting. He is also CEO at Friedman Strategy Group, where he fuses psychological insight with cutting-edge research to deliver actionable marketing recommendations.

You’ll hear Mandi and Ron Friedman talk about:

“Throughout our lives, we’ve only been taught two major stories of how people achieve greatness,” Ron claims. “Greatness comes from talent, or greatness comes from hard work.” He talks about the less famous third path to greatness: reverse engineering. [3:16]

Successful entrepreneurs aren’t harder workers, more creative, or more intelligent; what they excel at is pattern recognition. They observe the market, see what’s working, and identify where it’s going to go next. Mandi and Ron explore this. [5:10]

Many of the stories we love are simply the same story with different characters. Similarly, people who have achieved greatness share commonalities that we can adapt to our own lives and use to our benefit if we take the time to observe them and find the patterns. Ron shares how. [13:07]

“The key is to take a few samples to reverse engineer and templatize, and combine the different elements that you find powerful; now you’re not just copying someone else’s formula, you’re making your own creative approach,” Ron explains. [20:42]

“Sell first, build later.” Ron shares the story of Zappos, founded by Nick Swinmurn, who took the ‘sell first, build later’ approach when he created the company. He started off just posting pictures of shoes from his local shoe store online, buying them when someone placed an order and reselling them to the customer. Zappos scaled significantly before being bought by Amazon for $1.2 billion. [26:40]

Resources

Ron Friedman on LinkedIn | Twitter

FriedmanStrategy.com

Mandi Ellefson on LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

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