James Parr explains the simple advice that his mentor once shared with him, that continues to shape his decisions.
“I was really lucky as I had a classic mentor in the quintessential way – and he even had a fantastic mentor name! – his name was Lamborghini Lars (and he had five Lamborghinis!).
Lamborghini Lars is the guy who taught me everything, and that everything was just three things. I can share Lars’ learning with you now – his three lessons were very simple.
The first one was: People love talking about their own business, so don’t try to sell them what you’ve got, just go in with an idea and say, ‘Listen, I think this would be something that you should be thinking about.’ Start the conversation.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t get a sale in that moment but you’ll have created a relationship and that relationship will pay dividends in three months, 12 months, 36 months. Just don’t be afraid to go and start a conversation.
The second lesson was build your network using that process. Really build a network as deep as you can and as far as you can, because when you have an idea, you’ll need that network to help execute it.
And then the third lesson was the power of a prototype. People say a picture’s worth a 1,000 words. Well, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures and Lars would always go into meetings with a ‘thing’. He wouldn’t have a PowerPoint, he wouldn’t have a document, he’d have the actual thing and he’d use it to inform that relationship and move forward from there.
So really that was it, and I’ve applied those principles to everything I’ve done since then. So I owe Lars all my adventures.”
This is an abridged transcript of the video lesson – watch the video for the full story!
