Going Back Into Growth Mode Again

One year ago I wrote an article about growing your business that essentially laid out the exact plan of what I was doing to scale my own business. One year later, the result was that over the first 6 months of 2020 I had already experienced over 90% growth over the first 6 months of 2019.

And then this strange virus came along in mid March.

Over the last few months since, with all of those sudden, unexpected kicks into my teeth, my growth I had stalled. The plan was to first survive and then to thrive, but with my confidence a bit bruised up, I still hadn’t pushed down the gas pedal on that “thrive” step as far as it could go.

That was until I got on a Zoom call with my good friend and business partner Brad Sugars last night. Holy crap. He gave me the (slightly brutal) kick in the ass I was needing and it reminded me of all of the kinds of things I had started doing back a year earlier pre-Covid.

He wouldn’t let me use Covid as an excuse to not be massively growing right now. Not even slightly.

I went and dug up that exact same article I wrote one year prior that laid out the plan I had executed on that resulted in my own 90% growth. I have already spent hours going through these steps below and rebuilding the new plan for growth again - with or without Coronavirus in the picture.

Below is that same article for you. I hope it does for you what it did for me. I am officially pushing my gas pedal back down to the floor again right now, and below is exactly how I’m going to do it.

As hard working entrepreneurs and CEOs, our companies are either growing or they are shrinking. There is nothing in between.

This complete guide to scaling is based on my countless conversations with Inc 500 CEOs, observing what’s working right now for the CEOs in our 12 Mavens community of CEOs and having scaled a few companies very quickly myself over the years.

This guide to scaling fast covers:

? Getting customer feedback

? Making your offering a must

? Turbo charging your people with purpose

? Clarifying your objectives

? Building a solid infrastructure

? Knowing what you don’t know

? Becoming world class

? Knowing your numbers

? Thinking exponentially

? Differentiating from everyone else

? Leveraging other CEOs

? Building on your momentum

At 12 Mavens, we don’t share generic theories and concepts with business owners. We observe what’s actually working right now, pick the brains of those CEOs in the trenches, dig deep, research, experiment, observe and optimize it all. We share what’s working and what’s not for other CEOs and also for ourselves as a quickly growing organization.

We practice what we preach and we’re in the trenches ourselves every day, and scaling quickly. 

Getting customer feedback

Forbes’ research found that 96% of dissatisfied customers won’t complain directly to the company. (Then they will tell 15 of their friends about their experience) 

Nobody on the planet knows what your customers want as accurately as your customers do.

Reach out to them ask them what problems they want solved. Ask them what they would love for you guys to do for them in a perfect scenario.

Don’t over think it. You can use a survey tool or hire a 3rd party to collect the responses. You could call each customer one by one or mail them a couple of questions to answer. Just ask them what THEY want.

Making your offering a must

While gathering feedback from your buyers, ask them “if you could wave a magic wand and make what we do 10 times better for you, what would that look like?”

What could you do differently that would make your product or service go from something that would be nice to have to something your buyers couldn’t imagine living without?

Brainstorm ideas and start writing out a list of ‘must have’ ideas. You absolutely must make your offering a ‘must have’ BEFORE putting another dollar into your marketing budget. Before looking outward, look inward and find a way to make your product or service a ‘must have’ for your buyers.

Turbo charging your people with purpose

Gallup research found that only 15% of employees are actually engaged. Meaning creates motivation without the extra effort. It leads to more perseverance and determination.

People sell more when they feel they’re genuinely helping other people and don’t feel like they’re even selling at all. Make it clear to your people how your products or services help other people. Be clear who and what you fight for and what you fight against. It will be the driving force that powers all of these things.

Clarifying your objectives

98% of business owners and CEOs do NOT know what their top 3 objectives are. I know because I ask them all of the time. When I do, they start thinking about it instead of telling me what they are.

Your people don’t know what your top 3 objectives are because you don’t know your top 3 objectives are. Write them down, commit them to memory and repeat them to your people until you are sick of hearing yourself say them. That’s around the point that they are starting to stick.

In addition, you must know your #1 goal for the next 12 months. Your top 3 objectives should be in alignment with your #1 goal. Get those down on paper and then commit to laser focus on every day.

Building a solid infrastructure

Most visionaries are lousy operators. 

Strategic thinkers typically SUCK at the execution of their strategies. 

List out all of your weak spots and shortcomings and fill those gaps with others.

Continuously be working on adding more organizational structure, systems and processes.

If you’re a visionary, the ideas kind of person, you most likely need a great implementor working with you. If everyone in your organization knows how to do what you do, you must extract those processes out of their heads and down into usable procedures, systems and processes. The old fashioned SOP binder is dead. Tools like process.st are more in tune with what works in today’s world.

Knowing what you don’t know

If we already knew everything we needed to know we’d already all have 12 billion dollar companies. All of the endless things we don’t know yet must be figured out to 

continue reaching our next levels. 

Never be lazy in your learning. Continue to learn in all ways possible. Books, audiobooks, podcasts, conversations with other CEOs, articles like this and on and on. The wisest person still has something yet to learn. Figure out what kinds of things you’d need more knowledge about to level up and go out and obtain that knowledge.

Becoming world class

Championship Teams Have Championship Caliber Players

If your people were the equivalent to a sports team, would you say you have a World Championship level team? Would they win the Super Bowl? One way to get there is to only give yourself 2 choices when interviewing job candidates. It’s either a hell yeah or it’s a hell no.

Never settle for less than the standard you set for your business. Have world class onboarding, with world class training, tools and resources for them.

Hiring is always a best guess, but firing is certainty. Fail forward but don’t let it take long to move forward.

Knowing your numbers

What are your most important metrics? Do you measure them monthly? Weekly? Daily? Hourly? By the amount of phone rings?

Do you have enough metrics? Too many?

Is everyone (or anyone) relentlessly held accountable to hitting their metrics? 

World Championship players want to know exactly how much weight they lifted, exactly how many seconds their run took and exactly how many carbs they ate. They don’t just go and play ball for a few hours. There are most likely at least a few different things you could start measuring more closely tomorrow. What are they? Measure, monitor and optimize again and again and again.

Thinking exponentially

I remember being excited that our 12 Mavens groups were expanding into a new city every month. One day my partner Brad Sugars asked me if I thought we were ready to scale. I said “Brad, we’re entering a new market every month for the rest of this year. His response was “that’s nice, but we should be entering a new market every week.” I smiled and started thinking what we needed to do to be built for entering a new market each and every week instead of only once a month. That shift forced me to think differently about what roles we’d need, what people we’d need, what technology we’d need, what infrastructure we’d need, what vendors we’d need, what processes we’d need, what capital we’d need, what marketing… 

And I became obsessed with figuring out what would make that more possible instead of how I was thinking before I asked myself those questions. That thinking is a doable goal in the shorter term of a few years. Thinking a bit farther out, take your current average monthly revenue per month and draw in a “0” on the far right. Do the same thing, asking yourself those same questions about what you’d need to do differently.

I’ve personally watched CEOs in our 12 Mavens groups scale from:

$2M to $20M in 3 years

7 people to 50 in a year and a half

75 people to 150 in 2 years

Pre revenue to the #2 Fastest Growing Company

$6M to $60M in 3 years 

(and then doubling that and then doubling again)

From tiny businesses to Inc 500 companies

And on and on. Again and again.

Differentiating from everyone else

If your company is just like everyone else, customers will go to everyone else.

When you think out and design a much different option you don’t compete, you dominate in your own category. What companies can you model in other industries and apply to YOUR industry? You can transplant ideas from those other industries and innovate by being the first company ever in YOUR industry to do things that way.

Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow is a great book on standing out from the pack. If you don’t stand out, you become invisible. Blue Ocean Strategy is another great book for getting ideas on how to do things differently from anyone else.

Leveraging other CEOs

A single battery provides a set, limited amount of energy.

A dozen batteries all combined together, puts out a MUCH GREATER amount of energy. A dozen CEO’s brains all combined together, puts out a much greater amount of THOUGHT ENERGY.

As smart as you are, you are not as smart as a dozen driven, successful, fast growth CEOs combining their brainpower together, all solving YOUR biggest challenges and frustrations with you / for you.

Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin…

All smart dudes.

They were ALL in roundtable groups that they met with privately and confidentially.

Unless you are smarter and more successful than all of those guys, you’re insane to not leverage a confidential think tank and sounding board made up of like-minded CEOs.

Building on your momentum

Movement creates MOMENTUM and inaction creates stagnation.

Your ideas won’t make you rich, but their outcomes will.

Taking action and implementing these things you’ve just read can absolutely change your life. Instead of wasting time missing out on a higher income and delaying your growth trying to reinvent solutions in a bubble, get the exact recipes that are already working for the other CEOs in our community.  As race car legend Mario Andretti once said, “If you wait, all that happens is that you get older.”

Schedule a call with us today and find out how being part of a support community made up of fellow entrepreneurs and CEOs can help you get what YOU’RE wanting over these next 6 months. Let’s talk.

www.12mavens.com