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Welcome to the Billboard Mastery Podcast, where you will learn the correct way to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform diligence on, select the construction type, build, rent the ad space and operate billboard signs. And now here is your host – the guy that built from scratch the largest privately-owned billboard company in Dallas/Ft. Worth – Frank Rolfe.
I've been an avid reader of military books for a long time. Every time I go to an estate sale, garage sale, used bookstore, I'm always coming through two items: Stories about different businesses, business biographies, and military history books. Now, why am I interested in military history? I'm not really interested in the military part of the military history. What I'm looking for is interesting concepts I can learn from, people's lessons learned from the battlefield. Because let's be honest, when you're trying to start a business or running a small business, it's a lot like being on a battlefield. It's a life or death matter. You don't have a big backup behind you. It's basically just you trying to get from point A to point B successfully. And I love underdog business stories, but I also love military stories, often, again, underdog. The smaller force defeating the larger force. There's lots of lessons to be learned from those military books. And so I thought in honor of Veterans Day, I would review some of the top lessons learned I've had from a lifetime of reading books on military history. So the first one comes from a book that was published back in the '80s.
I think it was the '80s. And it was a book that was based on the military officer's handbook for the US Army. And there was one item in it I found interesting. It was called the 70% solution. Now, the 70% solution means that if you're in combat and you're pinned down in one location, if you don't move, you're going to die. And they found in war games that if you move, the simple act of moving, trying something new, gave you a 70% better chance of survival than staying where you are. If you were on the beach in the Normandy invasion in World War II and you were hiding behind some kind of metal obstacle and they haven't hit you yet, they ultimately will. They'll keep firing and firing at that spot till they ultimately get you. So instead, if you just ran over to a different spot, you had a much better chance of survival because staying in one spot doesn't work. And where I see that applying to the billboard industry is that if things aren't working, whatever you're attempting to do, working in some certain market, whatever it is, go on to something different.
If one spot, if you keep beating and beating and beating it and it's not getting anywhere, it's probably not going to get any better. So you need to then move to something else. I found that building billboards around Dallas, I was very not properly equipped financially to do a lot of billboards on the most expensive spots of Dallas, North Dallas Tollway, places like that. So I fell back into the lesser expensive parts and there I was able to thrive. But the key is if things aren't working, change. Don't keep going off thinking that somehow or other it's going to work out better. Also, there's in one of the books on the Navy, there's a story of a guy who defeated a gigantic battleship during World War II with a little tiny boat. Not like a fishing boat, but the smallest military boats. I'm not a big Navy book reader. I haven't read a lot of Navy stuff, but this little boat had no ability to ever sink that battleship. Its guns were not possible to pierce the thick armor of this giant vessel. So the guy had a different plan. And back then during World War II, if you were in the Navy, the way naval engagements would work is the ship that was losing, typically the smaller ship, would fire off all this stuff that created a whole bunch of smoke on the water, and then they would run away from the big ship as far as they could, knowing the big ship could not see through the smoke where to shoot them.
It would go kind of in a back and forth and back and forth method. And the ship doesn't have unlimited ammo, so they really didn't want to waste it. So the big ship would then try and speed up and get through the smoke so they could fire a few more times on the little ship that was trying to run away into the horizon. So what this captain did is knowing that was the standard logic of most naval commanders, he laid down the smoke. And then the big ship thought, well, this is going to be fun, a little target practice on that little boat. So they floored it right into the smoke, not realizing what he had done is he had gone out, had everyone abandon ship, turn the boat back around, and did full speed towards the giant battleship, which it could see through the smoke because it was so big, it could see the light and the dark, the outline of the big battleship. So as the big battleship went right through the smoke at full speed, it hit the other boat going full speed, which then sunk it. The cause appears is just literally sheer determination.
I've never seen anyone with raw, hard-nosed determination to not succeed in the billboard industry. There may be other setbacks you can have in life, but one of the strongest traits, if you want to succeed, is never giving up, and that's what the captain of that ship did. He had a plan and he stuck with it. Another thing from World War II that many people don't know was Churchill's plan if the Germans were successful in attempting to come across the English Channel to invade England. Now, it never happened because the RAF, the British Air Force, kept the Germans from ever attaining air superiority, and they decided they should not try and invade England and go across the English Channel without air superiority because the British planes would drop bombs on them the entire time. But if they had lost the Battle of Britain in the air, Churchill's plan was to move all of the oil in England to the coast and then to dump it all into the ocean, the entire oil supply of England. And then what he would do is as the Germans approached the shore, he would ignite it and basically burn everyone to death.
Now, he didn't have to go there, and that's good. That would be a violation of the Geneva Convention if he'd done it. But what was critical is he had a plan B. Everyone in life has to have a plan B and a plan C. Every time you build or buy a billboard, you have to have a plan B in case a tree grows and obstructs it. You have to have a plan B in case the property owner does not renew your lease and you have to take it down. You've got to have plan Bs on everything in life. You can never take the gamble of not having the plan B, because if you have a plan B, two things will happen. Number one, you'll never have any big failures in life. But number two, and perhaps equally important, you can sleep well at night knowing that you have a backup plan. Another book that I've read and really enjoyed had a chapter in there on how the Allies defeated the U-boats during World War II. These were the German submarines that sank a huge amount of freight crossing the Atlantic. And initially it looked impossible because there did not seem to be sany way to stop these German submarines.
So they were in there just sinking things constantly. But then they realized that part of the reason these U-boats were getting away with all this is because all these ships did not communicate with each other. So as a result, every ship was its own little defenseless thing. But they realized if they had all the ships communicating as groups, they could watch for U-boats and report them. And then that would allow them to do the one thing the U-boats could not defend against, and that was attacks from the air. So they simply made bombs to blow up submarines, called depth charges, and they would equip them on these planes. And any time any of these ships at sea saw a U-boat, top of the U-boat, maybe the bubbles from the U-boat, they would call it in, and the Air Force would come out and blow these things up. By the end of the war, U-boats were an endangered species. They could hardly even exist for brief moments in the ocean because they would be hunted down and destroyed. And it's amazing how they were able to turn what appeared to be a hopeless situation around and do a successful one in such a short period of time using creative thinking.
And the lesson learned there is creative thinking is a really important thing. All around you every day are the opportunities to do new things. And recently I thought it was interesting that Jeff Bezos said the only jobs that will survive AI are ones that use creativity and original thought, because apparently AI doesn't have any. AI is great at regurgitating facts, it can fill out contracts, it can fill out forms, it can research things in a book, but what it can't do is it can't come up with original ideas. So even though you're out there looking to put a billboard in this market, you may see things along the highway that change your idea. You may say, oh, I think better yet, I'll just buy that old abandoned billboard over there. Or you might say, hmm, I don't know, I'm seeing these cars going by with these ads on the roof of the cars, I think I want to emulate that. But you always want to keep your eyes open for those creative opportunities. Finally, also again in World War II in a book, you had George Patton, which once said a good plan today is better than a great plan tomorrow.
And what Patton meant is there's always a sense of time urgency in life. So you've got to take action now, you can't keep putting it off. He would get very mad when other generals or people who worked with him would say, well, I'm still thinking about it. You don't have the luxury of thinking. He didn't in combat in World War II, obviously. But even in all of life, we all time out, we all get older. Life does not have an endless time clock or no time clock. So, if you've got a good idea today to do something, you want to go out there and do it. You cannot have the luxury to keep pondering it. There's an old saying you want to think like a person of action and act like a person of thought. But in both of those, you have the word action. You have to take action on your thoughts. This is Frank Rolfe with the Billboard Mastery Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.