This month Jay Emery writes while in Nepal on his way to achieving a goal of a life time and reaching Everest base camp

A formula to getting predictable successes can be defined as D+R+S=PS

I’m sitting here in Namche Bazar on the 4 seasons -24deg sleeping bag that I purchased for a small fortune. It hasn’t been necessary as it’s been hot as hell but I’m told it will get colder the higher we climb.

I’ve got a long way to climb!

Currently I sit at 3400m my goal 5400m and Everest Base Camp.

This trip to Everest Base Camp has and will be a revelation for me and a life changing adventure. The goal is in sight, just 5 days away this morning and we climbed an extra 400m to see a tantalising glimpse of Everest which was shrouded in clouds in the distance.

Twice a day I pop the required amount of Diamox to prevent my brain from swelling and giving me a potential life threatening cerebral adenoma. More than 2000 people a year are air lifted to safety and this got me thinking about success and failure and it occurred to me that it boils down to just one word, DISCIPLINE.

Yesterday, I could have just stayed under my sleeping bag, rolled over and gone back to sleep. The day before had been tough, but with the sun rising over mountains and my brain was active and I was rearing to go. I’m up for this challenge and am driven to succeed.

It’s the discipline of striving for success that drove me to get up. Even though its warmer in my bag and my body screamed NO! Achieving the goal is more important than being comfortable.

However, discipline on its own is not enough to succeed, you also need routine. Discipline without routine is hopeless.

It’s the structure of routine that empowers you to be effective, and then the systems that you have in place which will, in turn create the unstoppable you from achieving your true potential. As I sit here and write these words, I realise that my whole life to this point has been a bit mis-matched. I have known what’s needed but never really put 2 and 2 together.

You would think that 2 years in the army on National Service in South Africa, 30 years ago, would have cemented this in my brain, but it has not. It’s taken this event to help realise this.

After all, these three things; DISCIPLINE, ROUTINE and SYSTEMS are what makes an army an unstoppable force. Regimented discipline with un-questionable routine followed by centuries of proven systems.

How does this relate to us mere mortals and business renegades I hear you ask? Good Question!

You need self-discipline to get up in the morning and do all the things that you need to do. Unless you have a routine, then it does not matter how disciplined you are, your time will be wasted in fitting from one thing to another. In order to assist you in setting up the routine you therefore need to put in place a system. It’s impossible to think that anything could run properly without a system. That system could be a list of steps, a video of procedure or detailed instruction but it’s still a system.

Once you have the system in place you can set up the routine to follow and implement it, but then it’s the discipline of following it that will determine your success or failure. Without a system, you will not be able to determine true success or failure.

Of course, there is a slight and obvious paradox here. In order to set up the system, you need to have an understanding of what it is you need to achieve. A system is only as hard and as fast as it is accurate. By this I mean that you can, when it’s proven that some part of the system does not work, change the system. It’s a lot easier to change one small thing at a time than re-write the whole system. You will, also at this point, need to alter your routine to compensate and then as always have the discipline to follow through.

Let’s put this analogy to the test in the form of an example.

It may seem simple and obvious, but I hope the example may help you analyse how you could adapt your own business.

Take the example of making fresh baked bread to be on the table at 8am.

Let’s say that you have the recipe from a book – this would be the SYSTEM.

The routine is the time you start each morning if you want to get the same result.

If the system says that the dough needs to rest for 45 minutes before kneading or balling, you know that in order to get it out and ready you need to start at 4am every day – this is the ROUTINE

You need to turn on the oven at the same time to get it up to temperature in time to put the bread into the oven at the same time every day.

That ROUTINE is the sequence that allows the system to run flawlessly.

If you change anything in the routine and the system will fail.

Having the DISCIPLINE to ensure that the system and the routine run seamlessly or in fact having the discipline to put the system into place in the first place is what can be predetermined as the route to success.

While I was discussing this revelation with the Dragon (my long-suffering wife!) she added one further attribute; TENACITY.

While tenacity is not a requirement, it will help in growing the business. Especially if you are going it alone. Realising the true potential of any opportunity is down to tenacity.

It’s important to monitor the results of any opportunity to ensure that you don’t make the same mistake twice. That’s just stupid in the true definition.

To loosely quote Einstein: “Stupidity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.”

Within your business model, look at the systems that you will need in running the business. The documentation of these systems will help set up the routines and the discipline to follow them will help find ways to improve the system and to make it more effective.

Remember, when and if you ever come to sell your business,

it’s the systems that you have in place that will de ne the value of the business, not the hardware which you use to operate the business. These systems will also make your business more resilient to upheaval, such as staff changes.

Looking at it, the reason why Bushman Wood Fired Pizza Oven owners tend to have a greater chance of success than any other oven manufacturer, it’s not down to the fact that they are buying the best oven on the market, but rather because when they buy one of my ovens I give them a detailed operations manual of how to run the business from day 1. The all-important system.

If they have the discipline to run the system, then success is almost guaranteed.

All they need to do is put the routine in place to get the results.

As I write this I know that due to changes in the way I run my business, it’s only the systems that I put in place that will get me through. The fact that I had staff that were not prepared to follow the systems meant that they were dismissed. Ouch!!! That was a steep learning curve and one I’ll cover at another time. Sharing that story will help some of you save thousands, while others of you will say how stupid I was.

This brings us back to my formula for predictable success:

DISCIPLINE + ROUTINE + SYSTEMS = PREDICTABLE SUCCESS