I was thinking about our plans for 2026, and one of the ideas that I think will be central to our outreach for building referral partnerships will hinge on the old Zig Ziglar quote.
Zig Ziglar’s famous quote about helping others is: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
I think if you consider this as part of your framework for getting what you want out of your business (and life!), you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how well it works and how rewarding it can be beyond just getting you the results you are hoping to get for yourself.
Here’s one example of how it works in our business currently. One of the groups we do a lot of work with are business brokers. Brokers help business owners sell their businesses, and the first step in the process is always to review the financials.
You will probably be shocked to hear this, but very often this seemingly simple step is where things already start to go wrong. Frequently, these business owners have books that leave much to be desired in terms of accuracy, completeness, currency, or even actually existing.
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Now that is certainly a problem for the business owners, because unless they fix the books, they aren’t going to be able to sell for a good price, or maybe at all. But it’s also a problem for the broker because they only get paid on commission when a business sells. If they can’t sell a business because it has lousy books, or the deal will fall apart, or it will be much harder to sell because of this situation, then it hurts them as well.
Here, they were hoping they had a good, qualified prospect to work with, and it turns out they have to walk away or at least wait and hope the seller fixes this situation on their own and in a way that is sufficient for a sale before they can do anything.
Luckily, I understand this problem, and when I reach out to business brokers and offer to help them, they are very interested in hearing what I have to say. I understand not only that these sellers need their books fixed, but also that it’s usually urgent and more so that it has to be done a certain way to not just be complete but satisfy brokers, banks, and due diligence review, and done at a price that makes sense for the sale price of the business.
When I commiserate with the brokers on the challenges they are facing and offer them a solution they can approach their sellers with they are very happy to work with someone who is looking to solve their problems and turn an unsellable business into a five or six-figure commission for them.
I could, of course, just let them know we do bookkeeping and figure they will make the connection. But by directly showing them how I can help them get what they want (a business they can sell), then they are much more likely to, in turn, give me what I want (a new accounting client) and will work hard to find as many of these for me as they can.
I am actively helping them solve their problem, and in turn, they are then helping me with mine. They get something out of it, and frankly, their benefit is a lot bigger than ours, but because I’m helping them then they are happy to help me.
As a new example for 2026, I am considering reaching out to business coaches. They face similar challenges as business brokers- it’s hard to coach a business owner on how to improve if they can’t reliably see how well the business is doing in the first place. So they may lose clients, or not be able to help clients in the first place, who are interested in the service but can’t provide any meaningful data to use.
Beyond that, suppose I could build on the bookkeeping and financial work we could do with their clients and provide the coaches a comprehensive report every month they could share with their coaching clients that they could charge for?
Now not only am I helping them work more effectively with their coaching clients, I am giving them an additional revenue opportunity, a unique differentiator, and more value they can add for their clients. I would imagine they’d be pretty happy to get that and would be motivated to introduce as many people as they could find to our services! Win for them first, win for us second!
If you can look at your customers, vendors, referral partners, and staff through the framework of “how can I help them get what they want” faster, easier, more cheaply, with better quality, or whatever metric they care about most, then if you set things up right, that should, in turn, get you what you want as well.
Lots of people think of life as a win/lose scenario, and that when they win, it must be at the expense of someone else. But I think, like Zig said, if you focus on what things you can do for other people first to help them get what they want, then you are much more likely to ultimately win more yourself.
And this isn’t just something to think about in a mercenary way of helping people, just to be rewarded in turn- actually, really helping people makes them genuinely happy and appreciative, and you can feel as good about that as you can about what you may get in return.
My suggestion for the new year is not to think about how to get more of what you want (or at least not to only think about this!) but who you can help get more of what they want. This may open your eyes to all kinds of ideas and approaches you hadn’t considered yet, but which would work great with your business and ultimately in getting you to your own goals.