Dr John Demartini is a leading authority on human behaviour and personal development.
He is also a dynamic entrepreneur, who was fortunate enough to learn many of the fundamentals of business at a young age. By the age of nine, to be precise.
He allows us a closer look into the experiences that have shaped his thinking over the years.
Fulfill a need
When John Demartini was nine, he went to his father and asked him if there was anything he could do to earn some money around the house. His father asked him if he’d mowed the lawn. He replied that he had. He had also cleaned the gutters, raked the yard, trimmed the bushes and tidied the garage. “Well son,” his father said, “I don’t have anything left that I need done, so there’s no service that I need you to provide for me.” He suggested that Demartini approach their neighbours.
That’s exactly what Demartini did. Within weeks he’d secured jobs pulling weeds and trimming hedges, and was bringing home new sports gear bought with his profits. Demartini’s dad then came to him to ask whose equipment he was using to run his business. It was time for Demartini to learn about depreciation, and start paying for the use of his dad’s tools.
Demartini remembers being highly demotivated as his profits were eroded. Then one day he saw a younger boy ride by on his bike and had the idea of offering him some work. He’d soon enlisted a mower, a hedge-trimmer, raker and sweeper. “My salaries amounted to $2. I had to pay my dad a bit so I ended up netting about $2.40 from each lot. In total I netted $45 a day, which was a lot of money back in 1963.”
Free yourself financially
It was at this point that Demartini’s father came back to him (after seeing the new bike and other stuff that his son had recently purchased) and shared the next lesson in entrepreneurship with him.
He told me that he wanted me to know what it was like to be completely free, and that from then on I was going to pay for my own food, my own rent and my own clothes.
To symbolise the fact that he didn’t owe his father anything, he was allowed to ride anywhere he liked on his bike, so long as he was home by 9pm. Financial freedom is about never having to worry about money, because you know that if you are willing to serve people’s needs, you’ll find you’re never short of an income.
Delegate effectively
Demartini took these business basics with him through his studies, and, shortly after qualifying as a chiropractor set up his own health practice. With one assistant working for him, he was ready to learn his next vital lesson: delegation. He realised he was holding himself back, because he wanted things done his way and thought that only he could do it. This only got worse as his staff count rose to 12. He says he had to learn to train people and delegate so that he could focus on higher priority things.
The Time Trap by Alec MacKenzie was a real door-opener for me. I felt like it had been written for me because it mentioned all the frustrations and pitfalls I was facing in the delegation process, he says.
After that he put all the structures and paperwork in place to prioritise and delegate properly. This involved a little micro-managing initially, with daily delegation and checklists. “As employees proved to be accountable, I would give them bigger projects,” Demartini explains. “Every quarter I’d make a list of everything I was doing and prioritise it according to what was most productive and profitable. I would then find someone to delegate the lower priorities to.”
Evaluate objectively
Not only did effective delegation free up Demartini’s time to grow his business, but the formal structures allowed him to gain insight into how his staff worked, and evaluate them objectively. After a while they could look at what they were not doing, and find out the reason behind this – a fear, that could perhaps be resolved with training, or something that didn’t coincide with their values – either way they could narrow down the issue and try to solve it, Demartini says.
Employees’ checklists would go into their files for quarterly evaluations and would form the basis of their performance review. “Otherwise you manage by emotions. Before that I would just get emotional and upset if they were not doing things, but with this method I had a way of tangibly monitoring performance,” Demartini explains.
It was probably around this point that Demartini recognised his passion for human behaviour and began to build his career offering education on these kinds of topics firstly to other health professionals, and then to other professionals across the board.
Follow Demartini’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that work fills the time allocated. Demartini’s Law says that any space and time that is not filled with high-priority activities will be consumed by low-priority activities.
Demartini realised that money works in the same way – if he didn’t pay high-priority things first, he would run out of money for them. “So what I did was prioritise all my expenditures and whatever would penalise me the most, I paid first,” he says.
Another realisation was that he was the most important person in his business; because if he wasn’t inspired and loving what he was doing, he would get burned out and cut the whole thing down, he says. “So I paid myself first (savings, investments), my taxes second, my lifestyle third and then all the business bills by priority.”
Build a cash cushion
Demartini advocates having savings to build a cushion for your company. If you don’t have a cushion, the quality of your clients goes down, you have volatility, you’re constantly under stress and you can’t make wise decisions. He says that the reverse is true when you do have cash in your business – you have new opportunities, new associations, better clients, less volatility and you attract growth.
“I’ve had hundreds of companies re-structured in this way and the difference is like day and night,” Demartini sums up.
Speak to your values
Perhaps at the heart of Dr Demartini’s philosophy is the idea of values. Everybody has a set of values and priorities that are most important to them in life, and any time that they have goals or actions or daily intentions that are congruent and aligned with these, they increase their chance of achievement, perseverance and commitment to that action, he explains. So the bottom line is that business owners need to know the values of their staff.
I’m not talking about morals and ethics here, I’m talking about what matters most to people.
“Take for example a woman who works for you doing your filing. Her baby is the most important thing in her life, and this job is simply to earn extra money. If you talk to her about promotions it doesn’t mean anything to her; if you talk to her about what will help her family, she will be motivated.” Demartini says that incentives should be based on individuals’ values, not just money. Money is a more universal value than most, and can solve a lot of needs, but you need of combination of money and other benefits that speak directly to where your employees are at.
Nobody’s going to be driven from within to do something that’s not inspiring to them.
“They’re going to need motivation, and the more motivation they need from the company the higher your overheads. When people are inspired from within, you don’t need all the outside incentive stuff to get things moving. So that’s why it’s so important for this congruency to exist.”
It’s been an epic journey of discovery that’s led Dr Demartini from his neighbourhood yard business to where he’s at today. And the journey is far from over – he was recently in Mexico setting up a programme with prisoners to aid their rehabilitation into society, there are ongoing initiatives with the South African Police Service, divorce programmes in Canada, and the list goes on.
Human behaviour extends beyond business and as every human has a deep desire to understand what makes them tick, Dr Demartini’s services look like they’ll always been in demand. Just as well he learnt that first all-important lesson at such a young age.
Published in Your Business Magazine
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