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Foreword

PERRY MARSHALL

This is not just a “great” book. Nor is it merely an important book, or a “good read.” SIMPLIFY is one of the ten most valuable business books you will read in your lifetime. I charged $7000 a head for a three day seminar with Richard in Chicago. The event culminated in five hours of Richard delivering his SIMPLIFY material. This audience included entrepreneurs with $10 million+ businesses, with potential to reach into the billions. They were ecstatic.

SIMPLIFY is a shortcut to the exact business that will game-change any industry. Business people and investors talk about “unicorns,” “disruptive business models,” and all the rest. Those superstars are hard to predict, but we know them when we see them — usually after the big money has already been made. This book leaps you past years of meandering to the exact product or service that will tip the playing field solidly in your favor. If you pull this off, your competitors will find it impossible to follow you. And you will make life-changing money.

The real title of this book could very well be, SIMPLIFY: If you don’t, they will. That’s because it is inevitable that sooner or later, someone will come along and revolutionize your industry. It will typically be an outsider — like Larry Page and Sergey Brin upsetting the search engine industry with Google. The good ol’ boys club rarely sees the outsiders coming until it’s too late.

It will happen. The question is, who is going to do it? It can be you. Even if you’re insider. If you know the formula.

This is not just a book to read and enjoy. (Though it is a very enjoyable read.) This is a book to memorize, to internalize, whose ideas should permeate your thinking, your planning, and the language you share with your investors and key team members.

Richard worked harder on this book than any other. It was a massive undertaking. Simplification always is.

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” What he means by this is, our initial conceptions of a product or a project are often clear and simple … then in the middle of the project things get almost hopelessly complex. Most people never get out of the woods.

But on rare occasions, a visionary like Steve Jobs has a clear vision for achieving simplicity and elegance and doggedly pursues this to the end. That vision is what Richard defines in this book. We’ve heard all the stories about Jobs’ obsession with simplicity, but here Richard lays it all out in a succinct formula that mere mortals can achieve. He has embodied simplicity even in his teaching of it.

Richard sent me several drafts and we spent months discussing it. His final product is genius. I don’t know if it will outsell his famous book The 80/20 Principle; it may not, as this material is highly advanced.

But it doesn’t matter. Because this is Richard Koch’s Magnum Opus.