OK.
Well, I think we'll go ahead and get started.
We have most of us on here.
All right, so you guys remember last week
we talked about upgrading your meeting culture
and knowing that there were three modes of meeting.
There's one-to-one, that's a work meeting,
and that's highly efficient if both parties know
how to do deep work, and so that involves focused thinking.
There's one-to-many, and that's training,
much like we're doing here in the Edge,
and the webinar style is the most effective.
And then there is the many-to-many meeting.
That is the least effective and the least respectful
way of meeting, and it's also the default in most teams.
But last week, we learned what the answer
to too many meetings are, and that's
called having fire meetings.
So that's focused, informative, respectful, and effective.
So just to recap, focused is using the right mode,
and so that would look like saying
to the people who are meeting,
this meeting will be successful if,
and you state the goal that you want
to accomplish in your time.
Informative is what do they need to know?
What is the key point?
And it's giving folks enough time
to be able to join the meeting.
Respectful is giving people enough warning,
jumping on two minutes early so that you build that culture,
and you respect one another's time.
It communicates hugely to respecting one another's time.
And I loved the five-star permission.
Do you guys remember what that meant?
That if you were on, and within 10 minutes,
you realized that that meeting did not apply to you,
that you didn't have anything to contribute,
you were free to raise your hand
and to politely remove yourself from the meeting.
And then we have effective, and what that looks like
is halfway through the meeting,
if you are not, you notice you haven't accomplished
your goal, that you can stop and say,
we're halfway through, and we need to meet
our objective of X, Y, and Z.
And then of course, at the end of the meeting,
you're gonna state if the objective was met,
and then have clear goals for moving forward
or clear next steps.
So fire meetings, and those ensure that you and your team
will no longer have meetings that are just distractions
from getting your work done.
So I think we're all in favor of fire meetings.
It's a new way of meeting.
Today, we're gonna talk about three types
of growth strategies to grow a business
and to scale to a much larger market share.
So three types of growth strategies to grow a business
and scale to a much larger market share.
And before I hand it over to Dion,
today's pro tip, I just wanna remind you guys
to find a light in your work.
And if you remember, in week 12,
we talked about the joy table.
And that was listing on a scale, a square scale graph,
what was high joy and high effectiveness or reach
and charting that out.
And whatever was in the number four box,
you ask the three questions, can I delete?
Can I delegate?
Can I automate?
And for most of those things, I'm sure it's one of the three
but if you cannot put a task
into one of those three categories, you get to invert it,
which means that you pair it with something
that brings you joy or delight
and you reframe the way that you look at that,
create a different expectation
for that task that you have to do.
All right, with that, is everyone ready to dive in?
Okay, as we're going through,
please feel free to post questions or comments in the chat.
We wanna hear from you.
And Dion, I'm gonna hand it over to you.
Thank you, Jenny.
I know that you implemented
some of the new meeting culture stuff,
even though I think the team gave you the feedback
that they feel we have the right amount of meetings
and some, but what was your adjustment?
Yes, I think definitely the five-star permission,
we immediately implemented that with the team.
Just a reminder, you guys,
because our team is so supportive
that a lot of people will stay on the calls
even if it's not something that they're contributing to.
And then also what you said
about trying to end two minutes early
with clear goals and moving forward.
Because again, I think what can happen
is with a team that really likes one another,
you spend a lot more time on the meeting,
chatting and conversing about the day
and not realizing, oh, you know what?
That's not really respectful to everyone's time,
especially those who have to jump to next meetings
or have tasks to complete for the day.
So those are the two immediate things that we implemented.
So for that reason, given the five-star thing,
I'm gonna jump off right now.
No, no.
No.
I just want to check if you guys are listening.
You really are.
It's lovely.
Okay.
So what we want to, so you might be wondering architecturally, why do we go from like meetings
last week to growth strategies this week?
Shouldn't we stick on growth strategy for a couple of weeks and so on?
And the reason is we actually are cycling like a spiral staircase.
We're going up and we keep touching the same subject each time at a higher level.
So today we're going to use some of the tools we've learned in the past and we're going
to talk a lot about how we contribute.
You know, one of the big goals for a good leader is that everyone in the organization
understands how they contribute to the bottom line.
And I may have told the story again.
So it's told the story before, but I want to tell it again about this fascinating scenario
of where 50 CEOs, have I shared that story before 50 CEOs that visited Vietnam?
I'll tell that story.
Okay.
So 50 CEOs went on, actually it was Malaysia and they were traveling to Malaysia and they
were 50 CEOs from very large companies throughout Europe and the United States.
And it was a special, you know, CEO development program.
And they pitched up at this pewter factory and this pewter factory was a Malay and a
Brit who had figured out how to extract, I think, lead out of pewter or some clever thing,
but they manufactured various pewter products.
So anyway, they had 3000 workers in the factory.
And when it came time for the presentation, in walked five people in their overalls, in
their blue overalls.
And the CEOs were looking at each other going, so where are the executives?
You know, we came here to find out all your secrets and what you do and what's so magical
and the level of productivity of this company is off the charts, world renowned.
And they were picked as one of the companies to visit with these 50 CEOs that were visiting
all these high performance companies.
And these five people walked in and then they realized these were factory workers.
And these five factory workers presented the company's financials, their marketing position
and market share they were taking, what their best practices were on the manufacturing and
so on and presented the entire company.
And so finally, one of the CEOs raised his hand, he said, OK, come on, guys, how long
did it take for them to groom you to say all that, you know?
And the worker was genuinely confused.
And he said, no, no.
He said, what happened was we heard that these 50 CEOs were coming, you were real VIPs.
And so they asked, they put on the bulletin board in the factory who would like to present
these, this information must cover these things.
And the problem was all 3000 people put their names down.
We were the five lucky ones chosen to present.
So the CEO says, are you telling me that all 3000 people can make this presentation?
He said, mostly, yep, mostly we could do.
So you said the person on the factory line knows what your market positioning is?
How do you guys do that?
And it was this discovery when I was doing my PhD thesis, and I was literally connecting
with these companies from around the world.
And I was fascinated by, you know, it's like different cultures are good at different things,
you know.
And for the most part, the US has led a lot of leadership development, you know, collaboration
and so forth.
But I was fascinated by this idea.
And then I found out that there are several companies throughout the United States that
operate in this mode, where everybody in the company could tell you what the company does,
and what they do and how it contributes.
And that, you know, is the same story that I shared with you before about, you know,
the Packer, who is packaging telephone equipment, that was going to go and be installed in Walmart.
And so this visiting speaker wants to do, you know, visiting guests or trainers sort
of doing what I do, wanted to see what kind of corporate culture.
So he didn't go to the, you know, to the reception area, where all guests arrive, he went down
the back to the loading dock, and he met the loading dock guy, and he said, what do you
do?
How does you know, and what you do, how's that contribute?
And that, that guy told him exactly what he did is while I used to go, I've gone out,
you know, and we told that story before, when we said, you know, work backwards with that
helps the client.
And he knew exactly how what he packed, how he packed, and how they contributed to the
bottom line.
So the question is, if I were to come and visit your company,
and I didn't come to the reception area
and I just did a walk around
and I walked to every single person in your team,
in your organization and I asked the question,
how is what you do contributing financially to the business?
Would I get a five or 20 minute explanation
or would I get a very concise answer?
It's a great question, right?
In other words, not you because you know them
and you know what they're supposed to say,
but me, I don't know them
or somebody who doesn't know them
comes in and asks that question.
And this set the standard for me of this idea
of everybody knowing everything except salaries,
that's where I learned this,
that's how I came across this idea.
And so then as I started to think about it,
I said, okay, we've laid that foundation,
how do we build on that now?
So if every team member understands how we make money,
how they fit in and they starting to act like owners,
then the question is,
how do you take those group of owners now
and get them to take the business to the next level?
How do you scale the business up to take it,
you know, upscale it to take greater market share?
So, you know, one of the things we encourage,
especially when we do dashboard design and all that,
one of the key things is we talk through this idea
of finding your keystone number.
There is one number that drives your business
more than any other.
And, you know, I know what it is at Brilliant,
you know, we know exactly what that number is.
There's lots of things that contribute to profit,
but there's one big number that if we turn that dial,
all the other dials work, right?
If you can find the one number,
and I'm not talking about, you know,
I'm not talking about theoretical stuff.
Well, we need more sales, sure, of course.
You know, we should more sales and less expenses.
Yeah, I'm not talking about simplistic
lack of insight comments.
I'm looking for deep insight
that you've really pressed, pressed.
I remember speaking to DST Systems,
which you may not know,
they acquired, you know, a portion of our company
some years back.
They, about a $12 billion public company back then,
and they host and manage 85% of all the mutual funds
in the United States.
And there are two big hubs in the country.
There's the one you know in New York
that manages, you know, DTCC in New York,
the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation
that does all 3,500 bank transactions.
And then there's DST Systems in Kansas City,
which is a massive hub.
Not many people realize Kansas City
is an enormous financial hub.
Now, I asked their CEO what was his keystone number,
because I was on a board with them.
And he said, we're in the pennies business.
I said, what do you mean?
He says, well, our financial access network,
the FAN, allows everybody to access
and see their mutual funds.
So when you get onto your Vanguard
or whatever mutual funds you might own,
you're not actually on those companies.
You're actually on DST's backend system.
You just don't know you are.
And every time you access it,
it costs a few pennies for that transaction.
And so they realized they were in the pennies business.
And when they realized, yeah,
somebody looked it up, 2.8 billion in revenue,
but 2.8 billion out of pennies.
And when they could increase it by half a penny,
like, you know, so this won't just cost one cent,
this will cost, you know, 0.15 cents.
So, and you say, what does that do?
Well, that can drive massive amounts
because of just the sheer volume of transactions.
Knowing that one keystone number
in your business is everything.
So that's the first goal
that if everybody understands what that one is,
that's the first step in the right direction.
Now let's talk about three ways you can grow your business.
There are three ways you can grow your business,
depending on the level of growth that you want.
So I'm gonna just, to make it simple,
I'm gonna assume you wanna grow your business
by 10% or 100% or 10X, i.e. add a zero.
So if you're a $15 million business
and you wanna add a zero, that'd take you to 150 million.
So that's what I mean by 10X.
So 10%, 100%, 10X, just to keep it simple.
Now, of course, the percentage will vary a little bit.
So for the 10X, if I want a 10 to 15% type growth,
my focus needs to be on processes.
Process will get me there, right?
How can we cut steps out?
How can we look at how we manage,
how can we make our sales cycle a little shorter,
a little less expensive,
the acquisition cost of customers a little less?
How can we make our tracking of our...
CRM system better? How can we invoice faster, etc. I'm looking
at processes in the organization, and I'm asking the
team as the CEO, help me innovate at every process. So
instead of having to wait 30 days for payment, can we get
them in 15? All these little things will add up and get you
your 10-20% growth. Now, most big corporations live in that
world. But if you want 100% growth, if you literally were a
$15 million company last year, and you want to be a $30
million company in 12 months, the only way to do that is to
focus on product, you have to create a new product, or a new
service of some kind, something brand new, you've never offered
before, you have to expand your product. And the best one to do
is to look at your, your core customers. And I'm going to show
you that little analysis in a second how to do that. But you
look at your core customers, and you say, which of these
core customers would, they love us, they're raving fans, and
they would buy whatever else we offered them. Right? So at
Brilliant, you know, we used to have a development program, many
of you know, is Brilliant TV, and then we invented Brilliant
Premium. But we went from 20, back then $20 a month, to an
$800 product. Now, that's a jump for us, right? We've never sold
an $800 product to a community who expected to be free. So it
was fun. You know, it's fun to happen to be our marketplace
doesn't have a frame for investing $800 in your personal
growth and development. So in the space, so we had to come up
with a new product. And that has been a very successful product
for us. Now, if you want to go 10x, and we're going to get into
later stuff about how to take your contribution as a team
member to 10x it. That's why I'm introducing the topic today.
Then instead of process or product, process gives us the
10%. Product gives us the 100%. Pivoting gives us 10x. You
rethink your business. Let me give you an example. Perhaps,
you know, you've been providing, maybe you run a series of
restaurants, and you've been providing, you know, in-store
service, in-store dining. And then you decide, you know what
we're going to do, we're going to start with delivery. And then
you discover there's a whole different mindset. So when I
learned, for instance, when we were providing finance to pizza
houses, I learned so much about the pizza business. Oh, my
goodness, I had no idea, for instance, that the difference
between in-store dining in a pizza store, and actual pizza
delivery are two vastly different businesses. I thought
it's just pizza. What difference does it make if you eat it there
or here? Turns out a whole lot. You need a completely different
staff, infrastructure, completely different systems.
So when the company that we were working with, wanted to become
number four, we had to get them to 2000 stores. And at that
time, they only had 200 stores, they've just got close to
hitting 2000 now. So when we were helping them, and I was
working with a CEO, and in Ohio, and what we were doing is
helping them, they had to first educate me on understanding
because, you know, we were the ones providing the finance. So
we said, Okay, we'll give you the finance for 1000 stores. So
that was about a $400 million, you know, chunk of investment
that we were bringing in through a, you know, some special
insurance and various other things we've done to make that
financing possible for them. So because they couldn't access it,
they were too small to access it. And that's the point, when
you want to 10x your business, you need a different access to
capital, you need different systems, you need maybe even
different employees, or you do as an add on business, and the
amount of people, it's like the banks, you know, used to go into
the bank, and you put a deposit used to draw money, remember all
that. Now you've got an app on your phone. But when the app on
the phone started, how many of you know that the bank had to
rethink their processes, rethink their business, rethink
how that experience is going to be rethink their banking
security, everything changed, when you want to pivot to that
next level, that 10x level, you can't just keep turning the
dials on the ones you have, sometimes you have to literally
rethink your business. And now there's a lot behind all of
that. And there's a lot of more like CEO level strategy stuff,
which I'll bring up on the CEO call. But then the idea of the
core idea is when Hewlett Packard, who at that point owned
laser printers, wanted to get into the into the desk jet
business. So desk jet printers had just come out back
then, and they were trying to figure it out. And so they went
to Harvard Business School, and they spoke to Christensen, the
guy who wrote the innovators dilemma, we draw on some of the
materials here. And that book, you know, they asked him, what
do we do? How do we 10x this business? How do we own both
spaces? And the answer was, you'd create a new company in a
new state. And you put new employees and you have the two
companies compete for market share. So what do you mean to
come and they both said, that's right, the holding company can
own them both. But they have to have a different culture, and a
different approach and a different so sometimes to get
that new 10x growth, you almost have to have like a little
startup inside your own company to tackle that. Okay, see if
you can create an app, see if you can make that go. And that's
really highly innovative. So don't try to make the whole
company go and do that you might want to pioneer that on the
Okay, a lot of stuff behind all that. But let's talk for a
second about how do we think about our existing customers. So
we need to start with a baseline. So I'm going to so we
got a little whiteboard here that I'm just going to share
with you quickly. And then we're going to go and I'm just sharing
with you how do you create that bet that baseline. So we're
going to use something we know very well, which is Jenny talked
about it earlier as well. We're going to just start with our
foursquare, our usual foursquare idea. And the
foursquare idea is so cool, because you can do anything with
this, you know. So let's talk about the first thing we're
going to talk about here is the let me just get a thinner
pencil. So let's, let's talk, let's start with with customers,
right. So on our customers, on our customers, we're going to
look at our customers. Now, with all foursquares, you have to
always decide what are the two things that we're putting
against each other. So obviously, in this particular
case, we're looking at dollars versus effort. Okay, so it's
dollars versus effort. And what we're going to do now is we're
going to figure out what's the, you know, the next step, and you
know, this technique, but just to remind you, the next step is
to figure out which is the most valuable, which is the least
most valuable square, and then what are the ones in between. So
the most valuable square is high dollars and low effort, right?
So high dollars, low effort is going to be our number one
space. Right? And then high dollars, what's the worst
scenario, we go for best, then we go to worst, what's the worst
scenario, high effort, low dollar. So this is the one we
don't want to be involved in. Then what's number two, well, we
want the dollars, we don't mind the well, we do mind the effort.
And then the last one is obviously what's left over. So
now the question always is, now what we do is we put all our
companies, we put all our customers, and we put their
names in this whole system. And we say, okay, here we are. And
we as well. And here's all our customers, and we'll put their
names in this drawing. Now that we know the names in the
drawing, our analysis with all four square stuff always starts
with the same basic strategy. The first one is kill number
four, get on the phone and thank them for being customers and
end it. I have literally done this on a board more call, I
said, when I used to do CEO consulting, we do this exercise,
and then I'd get their list. And they think about it the next day
we confirm and then we'd literally get to get them on the
phone. And we thank them, figure out how to wrap it up
next 30 days, because you can't just drop customers. But we've
figured out how to get out of these customers. They were high
effort, low dollar customers, and they were sucking resources
we couldn't afford. So that's the first thing. So it's always
this with this analysis, no matter whether you're just doing
the best vacation you've ever been on, where it was fun versus
cost, whatever you're doing, you always kill number four, you
always kill group number four. Then the next question is,
obviously, we like group number one. So we know those are our
primary customers. The question is, what do we have to do to a
two to get it to go to a one? We have to do what what scale is
being affected? The x axis, right? So what does that mean?
Is there a way in which we can look at the effort here? And is
there a way to automate or delegate or bring in a partner?
Is there a way to reduce effort to force the customer out of
two and into one? Now you won't get all your customers into
group one, but the continual push in this direction will help
you. How do we get threes into ones? Does anybody tell me what
what axis am I fixing? Dollars, right? So can we charge more?
Can we add
extra services, can we add extra things to those customers
to push them up from the bottom square into the top square?
Once we've done that exercise,
what we now do is now we focus our marketing on this group.
This is called our right fit client.
The one is your right fit client.
Now that doesn't mean you won't take twos,
it doesn't mean you won't take threes,
but you are definitely never taking fours.
And when a company you thought was gonna be a three
turned into a four,
you have to have methods and processes and so on.
Now we're looking at our customers and now we're asking,
of these customers, of these top customers over here,
over here, this top group here, of these,
which of these can we bring in a new product?
I hope you can see the yellow.
Can you guys see the yellow?
It's all right, yeah.
Okay, so which of these can we add new product?
Because here we're trying to look for the 100% growth.
The 100% growth is gonna come from quadrant one clients.
It's unlikely to come from the others,
unless what we're doing is we're trying to raise the dollars
so group three, funny enough, will help you
because it's a way to raise dollars.
What if we added additional service or an additional thing?
What if we package some of the services together
to push them from three into a one?
Now, by the way, I have done this.
We used to own a hardware manufacturing company
in North Carolina, just outside of Edenton,
and we used to manufacture a device
that today is called an iPad, but we started in 2003
and iPads I think came out, was it 2012, whenever.
So when we were manufacturing these devices,
they used to go into retail stores with a little scanner
and you could go there and you get a little price check
and you scanned it and it told you the price,
but it also sometimes told you recipes
or whatever else you wanted.
So we provided, we built the scanners and the screens
and all that, and we installed them by the thousands
in retail stores, that's what we did.
We took this four square process
and we did it for our production costs.
Where is the high cost of production?
Where are we efficient and inefficient?
And we found ways to delegate, bring customers in
or even just hand off customers.
Like for instance, what can we do with this group too?
What we can do with them is bring in a partner
because there is enough money, it's high dollar,
so we can bring in a partner here who can help us.
And so yes, it does drop to a lower dollar for us
because we're now profit sharing, but our effort drops.
So what happens is we move that from a two to a three,
but that may be worth it to free up the resources
of your team.
Can you see how we're moving people around
while we have to do?
Does that make sense?
Yeah?
So you'll have to nod or thumbs up or something
since I've got very small screen here.
Most of mine's on the screen share.
So let me know that you're tracking.
All right, let's do this exercise one more time.
And I'm gonna do it one more time.
I know we're running a little slow here,
so I'm gonna try to speed this up.
So we'll do it again.
This time, let's talk about our products or services.
And let's, we know the routine now, right?
We have to identify the number one.
So again, what are we pitting against what?
We're gonna go dollars versus effort again.
You know, effort to sell it, effort to support it,
energy, resources, effort or resources.
You can choose the, whatever you think.
Okay, so we've decided what we're pitting
against each other.
Now we have to identify what's our number one,
what's the best one?
Is low resources, high dollars.
So once again, here's where the number one is.
And then we always look at the opposite, number four.
What's the worst one?
Low dollars, high resources.
So number four is here.
And then number two is probably over there and three.
So it happened to be that the numbers,
by the way, these numbers will move
depending on what you're doing.
Sometimes it'll be the top right is number one.
Sometimes the bottom left is number one.
It doesn't matter as long as you've identified them.
And we now know the story.
We're gonna take each of our products
and we're going to write in what we're doing.
So we're gonna put all our product names.
Here's A, here's B, here's C and D and E and F and G.
There's all our products and we know what to do, don't we?
First thing, kill force.
Do what you have to do.
Get out of that business, stop it immediately.
It's sucking resources, it's not worth your effort.
Let it die.
Have the little funeral, feel bad, all that, then move on.
Because at this point here,
what's happening is you can't.
Continue to grow the business without freeing up the resources to create the new products or to pivot.
If you continually just try to do the 10% growth on a fall, what's going to happen is you're optimizing stuff that shouldn't exist.
There are products and customers in your business that should
not
exist.
This should not exist in your business.
So get rid of those because that frees you up to now start to look at what other products and we go through the same exercise all over again. So we say, okay, we love this group.
We know that A's we can try to reduce the effort, see if we can move them over.
And we all we got to find ways to improve the dollars on this product.
Or maybe we combined A and B and we package them up as a package. So you get very creative because what the four square tells you immediately
is exactly what you need to do. Because to get an A to move left, what do I have to change? I have to change this. I have to move. That's what that means. If I'm trying to get a B to go up, what does that mean? I have to increase the dollars.
Does that make sense?
This simple little toy, this little exercise will change everything that you do, because what it will do for you is it will show you exactly
how you can, let me stop sharing. Was that helpful? Yeah. Okay. How many of you have done that exercise before in your organization? Yep. Some of you have done it. Yep. And every time I do this exercise, here's the cool thing. You should do it once a year.
I can't say I did it three years ago. Yeah, yeah, that's not good. And by the way, don't get married to the fours.
Don't get all defensive. Oh, we got to keep the four. We started the business. Don't emotionally charge up why we have to keep the fours. The fours are what's sucking your resources and locking you down.
Locking you down. Well, what about all the people? And I think I've shared with you before about
and I think this is a story that Henry Cloud tells about a friend of his who bought a company that had five divisions, every single division in the company was profitable. And so he called the executives together. And he says, I want a plan on how to shut down
four of them in the next 90 days. I don't care if we sell it, give it away, shut it down. I don't care. This is what we're going to do. Because he worked it out that in their case, there was only one in the quadrant one and all these others were quadrant fours. They were profitable with massive effort.
So guess what happened? Overhead dropped dramatically. And they went from I think he said they went from a $50 million business to a $350 million business in like two years. Because what did he do? He got rid of the fours. The fours are eating your business alive.
Good to go.
It sounds mercenary because it is.
Because you have to think about you are not serving those are not your customers anymore. Maybe you started there, but they're not your customers anymore. You found your right fit client. Now you found, you know, your core group who you should belong to. All right, let's take
let's take any quick questions. How are we doing on questions chat? Jenny, give me an update quick.
Yeah, Deb has a question in there.
Yeah.
Do you see that?
Yes.
Okay, I do what I'm gonna do. I will answer that question when we come back from the break. So I want to get it everybody get as much time as possible. They are worksheets. So here's the worksheet quickly.
Quick overview on the worksheet is this worksheet is going to take time. This, this is something you may want to put more effort into as a team because the potential financial reward of this worksheet is off the charts huge.
So the question number one is, what is your contribution? Do you know what it is right now? Do you help? Where do you help with revenue or lowering the cost of sales or expenses or whatever it is?
How could you improve that? Exercise number two is, are you feeling like you're acting like an owner? In which ways are you? And which ways do you think you could act more like an owner? If this were your business, how would you act? If you did the same job, but it was your business? So if we took your job and turned it into an internal little business, an LLC, we registered a new little LLC for the, for the design of your business, what would you do?
department. And now you are charging the company back and forth. How would you operate the
business differently? And then the last exercise through is the biggie. What process improvements
do you could you recommend? What product ideas do you have? What pivot ideas do you have?
There's the 10% 100% 10x. I'm going to let you guys jump into your groups and Jenny take
from here.
Sure. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and open up the groups. And we'll call you back here
at 1055. If you have questions, please drop them into the chat as soon as you come back
from the breakout room. So we can answer those in Dionne. We'll talk about devs. Yeah. All
right.
The co host and I will do. Thank you, Debbie. If you want to hang out, I'll answer your
question. Okay. Okay. So why don't you tell me your question directly? And I was going
to read it, but I'd rather hear from you.
Okay, yeah, it was just if the if the y axis is dollars, which the way you're defining
it is like, we make the most if, if number one is up at the top, we make the most money
have the most. And it was just a question about the always question whether we talk
about revenue or profit, you know, you can have a whole lot of revenue, but your internal
costs, the cost to create the product, for example, part of the x axis, the, the, the
effort line, I mean, that's where I put costs, and the cost to do it. And so I was just asking,
does it make a difference if the vertical axis is profit or revenue? I would have it
always be profit, because that shows the difference. I mean, is that, is that correct? Am I?
Yeah, you're correct. Think of as the driver and owner of the business, what's the outcome?
You can't spend revenue, you can only spend profit. So, so my point is, if you Yeah, I
would definitely make Thank you. I it was a lot of text, and I hadn't had a chance to
read it. And I didn't want everyone to wait. No worries. It was a great question, actually.
And I will address it when everyone comes back. Yes. Look, at the end of the day, it's
like a black box. You put effort in cash comes out, you know, how hard is it to crank the
handle? The only cash that comes out is not revenue. So I agree. Yeah. I do that. Yeah.
Because I managed space director, we built the command of data handling systems for satellites.
And, and I was cleaning out an old file. And I found a chart that I drew that went from
95 to 99. And it was when we were developing the next generation of the product. And it's
my hand drawn, color coded program manager, you know, I was executive director at that
time, but chart, and at the bottom of, of each year, I had like 3 million 1.7 and 1.3,
meaning the material, the labor and the material costs, you know, to do the research. And,
and it was just so funny to see a hand drawn, you know, a Gantt chart, or, you know, the
program management, interdependencies, and, and typical, Deb, everything was color coded
and going back and forth. But, but that, that product took us from 250 million to 650 million
revenue for my division. So
yeah, I would, one of the ways to do it is so let's just let me clarify a little more
given what the sophistication of what you just said, and that is I would then focus
on gross problem. So in other words, take the revenue minus the cost of sales. That's
the number. Because you have to, you have to think, you don't control expenses, and
expenses can throw off what you're doing. So you have to just stick to the variable
cost, not the fixed cost. So the overhead and, you know, salaries. Yeah, yes. You can't
bring that in. So you can't bring expenses in, but you do want to deal with the variable
cost. So you buy the widget, you know, for a dollar, you're selling it for $3. So that's
the $2 we're talking about.
Right, right. So thank you. No, I just have to, as you've been going through all of this,
you know, now I'm kind of an independent on my own consultant trying to get back into
the space market and sell my, my process to them. But it's just absolutely, it's so much
fun to listen to your wisdom and going, Yeah, I should have done that. Or, oh, Dionne, I
did that. Yes.
Yes.
And sometimes it just gives language to what we intuitively knew to be correct.
There's necessarily always, you know, breakthrough ideas as much as a simplification or giving
the language or packaging it up.
I think leadership is a lot about packaging up a framework everyone can understand quickly.
You know, like when I draw that, we literally did that on our vacations, right?
What was cost versus fun, right?
With the four years in, what was high cost and low fun?
That's a four.
Never do those again.
Kill them now.
Don't repeat that vacation.
And you can do that with the clothes you buy, the car you want to purchase, anything.
It's just a powerful way to get you to focus on what's important to you.
I think as a consultant, these tools are very, very powerful because they're simple.
Hey, welcome back.
Did you guys have a too short a conversation?
Such a big topic.
Go Ben.
We are going to have a meeting Monday morning, man, after they've had some time to reflect,
but we did have an opportunity to have a rather robust discussion around new products our
course customers want, and also ways that we can pivot as a business.
So that was, it was, it was quite, it was good, good participation and some good ideas.
Excellent.
It feels a little bit like you've got 20 minutes, redefine the universe, go, you know, I get
it.
I get it.
Hey, appreciate it.
And the idea is to really get you to think and to give you simple tools to get us out
of the emotion of my idea is better than your idea and get it down onto a map that
we can see where it fits and then everybody can see, but that's a four.
We don't want a four.
And so, you know, this idea that sometimes products slide, you know, when I presented
it, I made it sound like they're always static.
They don't, they move, you know, things get more expensive, supplies get expensive, costs
go up.
And so sometimes what was a one ends up as a four.
Dave's question that, that triggered up in the beginning of the conversation was what
does that, what are the dollars mean?
Is that revenue?
Is that profit?
Obviously we're talking about gross profit.
In other words, take out the variable cost, right?
So if, if, if, if you're selling widgets for $3 and they cost you a dollar, then the dollars
we're talking about is the $2 profit.
So where's one person said, you know, when he's, when his friend met him after 20 years,
they hadn't seen each other and they decided to meet up after school and everywhere.
And his friend arrives in a Rolls Royce chauffeur driven and he gets out and he's just stunned.
He says to his friend, what are you doing?
He said, you were the worst guy in math ever.
He said, how did you end up with this massive Rolls Royce?
But it's not a fantastic business.
He said, well, tell me about it.
He said, well, it's easy.
I buy, you know, these pencils for a dollar and I sell them for $3 and then I just live
off the 2%.
So there you go.
So you, if you can kind of wait to do that, you know, 2%, there you go.
So math wasn't his thing clearly, but he knew how to make money.
So what we want to do is make sure that the profits on the, on the dollar side are the
ones that are driving your business because you can't spend revenue.
You can only spend gross profit, right?
So that's, you know, there's no value to, to revenue other than if it helps you scale.
So then, yeah, Tyler, get me in on that plan.
I love your new company.
There you go.
So yeah, I'm actually, I'm interested in having anybody interested in doing that.
So we're talking, finally, this topic comes up because we're trying to scale.
It's just exactly what we're doing.
We're thinking about ways to do that.
I've engaged Barry from Sage to help me with this, and I have a group in New York that
even though, you know, the stuff yourself, sometimes you need somebody from the outside
to look at your business and ask all the dumb questions that you should have asked, you
know, had you thought about it.
So what we're trying to be is that for you, we're trying to force you to rethink that
business and get every, all, everybody thinking any questions, where is, I've been looking
for Jenny and all this way.
Are you there?
You are Jenny.
Oh, I'm here.
There you go.
I sort of just took over, but there you go.
That's great.
We're having fun.
Well, yeah, it's a fun conversation to have.
It's a very fun conversation to have.
We look forward to, if you guys have questions or thoughts throughout the week as you're
talking about this, post it in on the app in the community section.
We'd love to hear from you there.
This has been a really fun call.
Way to wrap up week 30, and we'll look forward to seeing everybody.
study next week. Bye.