Today's Dose of Smile-Therapy

(thanks to Bits and Pieces)
 
In 1969 brothers Gary and Bill Munyon started a rubber stamp business in their father’s garage. Gary was responsible for sales while Bill manufactured the inventory. In no time at all the small business outgrew the garage and the brothers moved the business into a larger leased space. After a few years Gary realized  that he devoted more time and energy to the venture than his brother. He complained again and again to their father Gerald, who finally told his son ”Don’t tell me how many hours you worked-show me what  you got accomplished.”
 
These words struck a chord with Gary. He evaluated how he spent his time and realized that he focused too much of it on details. He was a perfectionist and it was getting in his way. With a new philosophy of ‘very good is good enough’ he started making some changes. 1) He remapped his sales route to conserve travel time. 2)He wrote shorter letters and didn’t rewrite them over and over. 3)He kept business calls and sales presentations brief and to the point, which his customers appreciated. 4)He learned that some responsibilities were better off delegated to someone else.
 
These few changes had a tremendous impact on Gary’s productivity and enthusiasm, which in turn, helped grow the business even more. However Gary still put in more hours than his brother did so he bought him out and hired him back as an employee. In 2004 Gary Munyon retired a happy man after he sold off the last division of a company he built from the ground up.
 
If you were to ask him the secret of his success, he wouldn’t tell you it was the long hours he worked. He would say it was those 14 words spoken to him by his dad. “Don’t  tell me how many hours you worked—show me  what you got accomplished.”