In this Best of Series episode, we replay a chat we had in 2019 with Perry Marshall, Author and Sales & Marketing Guru, on Redefining the 80/20 Rule, buying time for superhuman productivity, and solving tough problems.

Perry is endorsed in FORBES and INC Magazine, and is one of the most expensive business consultants in the world. His reinvention of the Pareto Principle is published in Harvard Business Review; in fact, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs at the California Institute of Technology uses his 80/20 Curve as a productivity tool.

He founded the $5 million Evolution 2.0 Prize, with judges from Harvard, Oxford and MIT, where the object is to solve the biggest mystery in biology.

His Google AdWords book laid the foundations for the $100 billion Pay Per Click industry and his other book, Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, is the world’s best-selling book on internet advertising. He’s consulted in over 300 industries and served as an expert witness for marketing and Google AdWords litigation.

In this Best of Series Masterclass, we talk about: 

✅ What the 80/20 rule actually is and how he redefined it

✅ How to buy back time by saying no and what to remove from your life

✅ His secrets to running more efficient meetings

✅ The 80/20 productivity curve and its application in business efficiency, and

✅ Solving tough problems and appearing superhuman.

Connecting with Perry Marshall

You can reach Perry on X and via his website.

Books and Resources

• 80/20 Sales and Marketing – by Perry Marshall
• Evolution 2.0 – by Perry Marshall
• Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords – by Perry Marshall

Similar Episodes on productivity

• John Lee Dumas, Founder of Entrepreneurs on Fire, on Being insanely valuable, thinking outside the box and unlocking discipline to win
• Kath Blackham, CEO of The VERSA Group, on Extracting huge value from diversity and inclusion, mental health in the workplace and using tech for good
• Joe DeMaria, Founder of Teach To Scale, on The art of learning, career excellence and value creators

“Step one, write down 25 things that you really, really want to do in your life. Step two, order the list in importance to you. Step three, put a circle around the top five and cross off the bottom 20. That's how you succeed.”

On saying no to things

• If you're at capacity and your boss asks you to do something else “important”, you need to hold your ground. You should invoke 80/20 and say, “If this new project is really so important that it's five times better than these other projects, it is necessarily true that one of these other projects gets crossed off for 3 weeks.”
• One of Warren Buffett's airline pilots asked him what the secret to success was. Buffett says, “Step 1, I want you to write down 25 things that you really, really want to do in your life. Big bucket list or career accomplishments. Step 2, I want you to separate the top 5 from the bottom 20. Step 3, put a big circle around the top five and cross off the bottom 20, and that's how you succeed.”

On making meetings efficient

• What would happen if everybody who calls a meeting was charged for the meeting? What would happen if a department manager has a meeting and the average pay of the person in the meeting was $35 an hour and there's 10 people, so they have to pay $350 an hour out of their department fund in order to get those people in the room. How many meetings would you not have?!
• The worst time to have a meeting is Monday morning. When people come in from the weekend, the truth is they're usually rested, they're refreshed, they're sharper on Monday morning than they are on Friday afternoon. So here's what happens in most companies. You come to work at 07:30, there's a meeting at 09:30. So by 8:00 you finally get yourself together and you start working on something really important and now you've got an hour and a half. Now it's 09:30 and you have to stop it. The meeting was supposed to go to 10:30, but it actually goes to 11:10 because of all this nonsense. Now it's 11:10. At about 11:45, you finally get back into your project and then at noon you're taking lunch, and you don't get anything done. And so on.
• So, to counter this, I said no meetings before late Monday afternoon, ever. I made Monday my productivity day. I actually look forward to Monday because I like the stuff I'm doing. Like it's important stuff, it's creative stuff, it's forward thinking stuff and it's not meetings. We have meetings on Thursday afternoon.

On the Bell Curve and the 80/20 Curve

• Everybody's seen a bell curve. You take a history test in school and the lowest score was a 58 and the highest score was a 99, and they had 15 people who got a C+ and 18 people got a B-. So, the Bell Curve always tells you what most people did, while 80/20 says the majority is never the most productive.
• In my book, 80/20 Sales and Marketing, I introduced something called the 80/20 curve. If I've got 60 kids that took a history class, how much horsepower does each person in this class have? How much time do they spend on history? How interested are they in history? And I'm gonna rank them from top to bottom. Well, that rank looks like a steep exponential curve because as you get towards the number one kid in the class, it just goes super sky-high.
• You could do the same with shoes. On a Bell Curve, it will show that most people have about 7 pairs of shoes. But that doesn't tell you who's buying the shoes. The 80/20 curve says, “Hey, 5% of these people are buying two-thirds of the shoes.” That's who you sell to.

On company bonus structures

• An 80/20 way of doing bonuses would mean you would say that 20% of the people brought 80% of the mojo in this company, which is true. And 4% of the people brought 64% of the Mojo. If everybody had the same salary, 4% of the people should get two-thirds of the bonus money pot.
• Now if you distribute money that way, you will get the top performers in the top positions. If you distribute money equally, the performers will leave and the losers will take over.

On high performers and low performers

• My friend has this thing he calls the 20/120 rule. It applies to everything. It says that the top 20% of employees produce 120% of the results, while the bottom 20% undo 20% of the good that the winners do, and they bring us down to 100%. So what it means is at a minimum, you should fire 5%, if not 10%, of everybody.
• At GE, Jack Welch said every year that they are getting rid of 10% of everybody. So all department managers have to figure out which people they had to get rid of because they're going.
• A bad employee costs a company 4 to 14 times their salary.

On solving tough problems

• One of the things that I have always done is head straight into the wind. I actually go for the hardest, most fundamental problems that I know how to tackle, and often I get myself in over my head.
• You do that for 20 years, your friends will start to think you're superhuman, but I'm just in the habit of doing the hardest thing I can find.
• So if you can sit at your desk and go, “So what is really actually the hardest problem this company has right now? What is the biggest problem? What is the elephant in the room? What has nobody had the courage to deal with?” 
• People don't realise how easy it is to get a job. You know how? You find a person who has the authority to write a check and you go, “So what's your biggest frustration right now?” And they tell you and you go, “Okay, I can do that.”  If a CEO has a bunch of headaches and problems, you can say, “Okay, I cost $90,000 a year, and I will make that problem go away. Hire me for a six-week temporary trial and see if I'm telling you the truth.”  You'll get the job.
• One of the biggest mistakes you can make is when you're trying to get somebody to make a decision or buy something, but that person can say no, but not yes. For example, if you're applying for a job and you're going through the HR department, you are talking to somebody who can say no, but cannot say yes. So you bypass that. If that's the engineering department, you call the Engineering Manager and you talk to them.

Final message of wisdom and hope for future leaders

• You should read something written before Gutenberg every day. If something was written before the printing press was invented, then the way we got it was people with pens and scrolls, made copies of copies of copies of copies, and hid them in urns and caves so that when Rome gets burned to the ground, that civilization is not lost. It's wisdom literature. Wisdom literature is not what toothpaste should I use; it's the deepest stuff of culture. What does a father really want to pass down to his son?
• If you read something written before Gutenberg every day, and delete social media from your phone, in two months, your brain will be in a totally different space.

Stay epic,

Greg