All right, so last week we talked about three strategies
to grow and scale a business.
We talked about 10% growth, improving your process,
100% growth, creating a new product,
and 10x growth, which is rethinking your business,
pivoting.
So today we're talking about shaping up your business,
and we're gonna be using three expert strategies
for pruning.
So just like gardening, we wanna intentionally focus
on where the life of the company exists
so that we can redirect our energy to all the right places.
And just before we dive in,
I do have a pro tip for you all today.
I love this one.
It's to continually challenge your assumptions.
And it's important for us to keep in mind
the core reason we exist as a business.
So it's always a good practice to question your constraints
because all constraints can be wrong to some degree.
And remember that great ideas have no rank.
So you don't have to spend time optimizing something
that shouldn't exist in the first place.
And there's always a healthy destructiveness
to challenging old assumptions,
and we all have full permission to exercise it.
All right, and as a friendly reminder,
don't forget to add your questions, your comments,
and reactions to the chat
as Dion's going through the material.
And it looks like we're all ready to dive in.
So Dion, I'll go ahead and hand it over to you.
Thank you, Jalen.
I really appreciate it.
Hey, how are you all doing?
I hope you're having a wonderful day.
This topic is one of the more challenging topics,
although the concept is really simple.
So I have, and I've always been amazed
at how difficult it is to get leaders and CEOs to simplify.
We'll talk about why that is in a second.
If you're one of those leaders who struggles
to get rid of stuff,
if you're a bit of a hoarder personally
and maybe a bit of a hoarder in your leadership,
hey, that's okay.
We certainly get that.
But here's a couple of things.
We all know that clarity drives simplicity.
Can you finish the sentence?
And simplicity drives speed.
Remember that?
So simplicity, clarity drives simplicity,
simplicity drives speed.
But we've never talked about how do you get
that simplicity in your business?
And it is one of the hardest things for leaders
to do to simplify,
especially as we get attached to our products,
we get attached to our markets,
we get attached to what we're doing.
And one of the most difficult things
is a thing called creative destruction,
where you deliberately blow up one of your own products
before the market does.
And so we're gonna talk about
how do you know when to do that?
How do you look at your business?
And if you've got a range of price,
last week, we gave you a tool for mapping your customers
and your products in the four square analysis,
and then what to do to get rid of all the fours
and how to move everything as close to one as you can.
If not one, then certainly a two or a three.
And we talked a good deal.
Now, today, we're gonna talk about that process
in a little more depth
and a little more practical aspects of that.
So here's what it is.
Most leaders are saying, man, if we had the right plan,
let's do a three-day offsite,
let's come up with the right plan.
And really, it's about the right team implementing a plan.
It's not about the right plan.
And the reason why some leaders are incredibly successful
at what they do is they come up with a simple plan
that everybody can follow.
Sometimes plans are too complicated
or they change too often.
Now we've got like theme of the month.
I worked with one CEO.
He literally came up with a new strategy every month.
It was like strategy of the month.
So after the fourth or fifth one,
guess what happened when he said,
hey, new strategy, everyone just yawned and like,
well, I think I'm a bit busy.
Can I go to the bathroom now?
It was like bored, right?
Because you couldn't follow that.
What's important?
If everything's important.
So it was like, well, we're doing this,
then we're doing that, then we're doing this.
And I understand that in a small business,
when you're still trying to find your space,
you're trying to find your niche,
you will pivot a lot, that's normal.
But at some point you have to focus in on what you're doing.
At some point you have to lock and load.
And then the next challenge comes is that we lock and load
and then things get a life.
It's like, I don't know any of you have moved recently
into a new home or whatever, or into a new office.
And you move and then you have those pile of boxes
that you never quite get around to.
And after about two months, they get a life.
And then they just like part of the view.
You don't even see them anymore.
And sometimes that happens to our product.
Sometimes components in the business get their own life.
But the leader's job is to simplify.
In fact, when you're in the middle of complexity,
the worst thing you can do as a leader.
is have hope. Because what hope does is keeps the complexity
going, oh, we'll just try it. Well, one more, you know, just
another month. And at some point, the best thing you can
do is simplify. So let's talk about that. We've talked a lot
about your brain cannot multitask, you know, it's, you
create cognitive stress and fatigue, when you try to
multitask, multitasking makes you dumb and all that stuff. But
in the same way, that can be same for a business to that kind
of multitasking. There's a great story of when Steve Jobs came
back to Apple, we may have used the analogy before, I think. And
you know, he walked in and they had like, I don't know, 18 or
27 different products in computers. And he, you know, he
shouted down the way, this is insane. This is crazy. And he
got a whiteboard nearby, cleaned it off, and drew four squares,
just like we do on the four square analysis. And at the top,
he wrote consumer, professional, so each of the columns, consumer,
professional, for the two rows, he wrote, desktop, laptop, those
are the four products we're going to create. You know,
consumer is going to get a desktop and a laptop and
professionals are going to get a desktop and a laptop. That's it.
Those are the four computers we're going to make. Now, what
do you imagine the pushback was? Oh, my goodness, off the charts
pushback, right? People having meltdowns about, oh, you know,
we've got this, and we've got the special thing on this
educational thing, and blah, blah, blah. And they all had
pretty good reasons as to why we had to keep the complexity. So
as a leader, when you try to simplify its work, it takes
actual leadership to take people through the simplification
process, because we're getting rid of something we fell in love
with along the way. So the real important thing is once he
simplified those, he inhibited everything else. It's like deep
work, when you focus on something, you inhibit
distractions, you inhibit all the other things that are going
to take your attention. Same for a business. So one of the best
ways to think of this is, think of pruning. Now, those who of
you, you know, who have ever been to, are there any gardeners
among us who are actual gardeners? Okay, good. Okay, so
Bev, you probably, I don't know if you have any rosebushes. But
you know, many of you who have ever pruned a rosebush knows, a
rose produces way more buds than it can actually sustain. And
part of what you have to do is yet, you know, it's what the
horticulture is telling me. So, you know, you have to prune that
thing down. And so, you know, last week, I alluded to a story.
So I went and got the full story again, of the guy who bought a
$25 million company that had five main areas of business,
and he grew it from 25 to $500 million. And when they
interviewed him, I mean, that didn't just add a zero, right? I
mean, he added a zero and double that. So an incredible growth,
and he did it in like two or three years. So people were so
impressed that they interviewed him. And when they interviewed
him, they asked him the question. And he said, he said,
I realized that the life of the company was in 20% of the
business. The life of the company is in 20% of the
business. So my job was how do we get rid of the 80%? We had
five divisions. And so so the interviewer says, Oh, so you
just got rid of the unprofitable ones? He says, No, no, no, no,
they were all profitable. He says, Well, why did you get rid
of them? Is it because we needed all the nutrients, all the
resources, when you prune a bush, all the nutrients go to
the very best buds. So we're going to go through the three
types of pruning that we would do. And that's exactly what he
did. And he said, Look, I want us to sell giveaway, whatever
these four divisions, they were profitable. And it had huge
pushback, people were obviously worried about their jobs, people
were worried about, you know, the customers impact on the
market, you know, positioning, marketing, branding, you get it
has a lot of implications. This is hard work. It takes real,
courageous leadership to simplify. It's one of the
hardest things you may ever do in your business is to focus and
simplify down to that one thing. So which buds are the best, and
we got to prune the rest, find the best prune the rest. It took
real courage. Anyway, he pruned it down to 20% of the
business, and they grew like wildfire. Because he has an
interesting thing, he didn't actually fire anyone. He
literally took all those resources from all five
divisions and stuck them in the one division, it exploded with
growth. And so and also the market got very clear about what
they did. They didn't do five things. Now they did one thing.
And this was one of the most powerful
full ways. And I often see this, I see businesses growing, and
then they hit a cap. You know, I don't know how many of you got
25 or 50 employees. But when you start hitting that cap, a lot of
the simplification becomes critical. But sometimes, I've
seen business with five employees hit this because they
just everywhere, they're all over the map. So that the three
areas we want to look at is number one is let's, let's we
have to prune the roses, because we know we're going to generate
more buds, and then we can actually sustain, we are going
to generate more ideas, more products, more meetings, more
employees, more everything, just in the process of growth. And
with growth comes complexity. So as part of the simplification
process to take the business to the next level, takes courageous
leadership. So, you know, we have to look at and say, the
three types of pruning is number one, is what is sick, and
not going to get well, what is sick and not going to get well,
think about your own business, even if you're a one person
business, what is sick and not going to get well, there's a
point, you know, there's a point with every leader, I think that
there's a product or a strategy or even a person that you get
attached to. And they're not going to change, and it's sick,
and it's not going to get well, you've tried, you put the
person, especially, it's really hard when it's a person, we've
talked quite a bit about that. But sometimes it's just a
product, hey, man, we started the business with this product.
So this pruning process is, takes tremendous courage. And
here's the thing, because as leaders, we get attached to
things, man, that was the product that launched us, that's
the product that got us going. And so we got to keep it going.
No, you don't. Because part of it, sometimes the markets move
on, sometimes it's season has just passed. Sometimes that
person season has just passed in your own company. So, you know,
leaders get very, very vested in products get very vested in
markets, you know, you spoke at that conference, and I can't
just now get out of that whole business. Yeah, yes, you can.
And, you know, you have to at some point, we got we get to a
point, Warren Buffett has a great name for this. He calls it
the institutional imperative, the institutional barrier, what
he means by this is that we get put so much money, and so much
time into something, it has to go because we put so much money,
and so much time in it. Do you see the circular logic? No, no,
no, no. Why are you doing this, man, we have got so much time,
and so much money. So what are you gonna do about it, we're
going to put more time, more money in it. I'm glad I'm glad
you spot the mistake, right. But it's funny to laugh at when
we're sitting in a training time like this, it's not so easy to
do when you're staring at that thing. And you go, Oh, my, you
know, there's a history here. We have strategic relationships in
that market. This is a big deal. Yes. And so obviously, we don't
do this lightly. But there comes a time, you have to stop sending
good money after bad money. This time, you have to stop
spending more time on the thing that's consuming your time. Now,
the four square exercise of last week was designed to highlight
that for you. And maybe you did that as a team. Or if you know,
if you're a solopreneur, you did this for yourself. And you
looked at where your customers, your products were. But now we
have to talk about now that you've seen this, how do you do
the actual pruning? So this was the first question, what is sick
and not going to get well, this takes a brutal honesty, as a
leader and as a team to lead your team there to give them
permission to say that, because it takes a lot of courage to
raise your hand in a meeting, if you're not the leader and say, I
think product B is sick and not going to get well. And it turns
out that product B is the CEO's favorite toy. So you got to be
really careful. So we have to as leaders give permission for
this. And I'm going to share some of our own things. The next
thing is what's dead, it just needs to go. Seriously, it's
time to call it somebody called the call the match already, you
know, if it's knocked out and lying in the arena out cold,
they stop pretending it's still fighting. But we do this in
business, right? So it's time to just a brutal reality check.
Look, yesterday is gone. Yes, it was a great product in its day,
its season has passed. It's dead. Here's number three,
number three is the hardest of them all. What's good, but not
great. What's good, but not great. Because the good as we
know, is the enemy of their bed of the best. But how do we trim
the products, the service?
is what we offer down into that fine space. Now for some of you, you don't have to necessarily
kill. If you've got, let's say you have two business lines going, you may be able to sell
one off to a competitor and generate some capital, maybe even keep some of the key people you want.
There are, when I say prune, I don't mean kill it necessarily, I mean get it out of your
organization. And there may be a way in which some employees want to buy a piece of that business.
I've done that before. I've sold pieces of business to employees. So there's a lot of
very creative things you can do. And if you're interested in all that more complicated stuff,
management buyouts and all those things and earnouts and all those good things,
there are ways to prune, but the pruning has to happen nonetheless. So we've gone through the
three, what's sick, not going to get well, what's dead and needs to go and what's good but not great.
So we put together an exercise around those things, but we actually made it five questions
we found a little more useful, which is going to be in the worksheet for you to go through here
in a second. And so at Brilliant, we went through this exercise and we asked this question, we've
done it several times. Where is the life of our company? If the life of the company is in 20%
of what you do, we know from Pareto principle, that's probably true. Where is that life? And it's
interesting, you know, a lot of people get into the technicalities, what does life mean?
What life means is that it's profitable and it's energizing. That's what life means. It's energizing
to you, it's energizing to your team, to your customers. So at Brilliant, we realized that the
life of the company was in coaching. Now, you know, we have many other products and we have,
you know, we have an online bookstore with over 100 products on it. We have, you know, a lot of
other elements we do, conferences and whatever else. And we realized that coaching was the life
of what we did. And then we realized that community, coaching a community, because they're so tied,
closely tied, is really the life of what we do. So we started then and we launched a new product,
which we call Premium. And some of you may know it or used it. And in that process, when we
launched the Premium product, it was designed after this analysis. We did this analysis and
we launched a new program and we simplified and put the resources into that. The next question,
is there something we're attached to that needs to go? So we rephrase the question to this,
is there something attached that we've become attached to? Oh, we've always had whatever.
And what we were doing is running multiple live events a month, and we kind of became hooked on
them. You know, at one state, I think we've done 38 challenges, 38 three-day challenges as a company.
I mean, that's insane amount of challenges. But then we realized that, you know, these multiple
events weren't, there wasn't life and we just became attached to them. And so we also realized
we became attached to the idea that Graham was the primary producer of content. And so we realized,
man, we have got to broaden out, we've got to bring in new voices, we've got to train a team.
And so we had to transition from Graham to a team. So that was a big transition for us to
think about that, because we realized we became attached to the idea of what, you know, we all
love Graham, we love what he teaches. And, you know, he's traveled in wherever many countries
around the world, 140 countries, whatever the number is. And he's been around and he's done
all this stuff. And he's been involved in all these things and written all these books.
And we all love the content, but we realized we became attached to it in a way that wasn't helpful
and healthy. And you need to prune this idea. And so that meant expanding. So notice that the
pruning here was pruning an idea or a mindset than more than was pruning a product. Number three was,
is there something dead that is taking up space? So I've got to just be vulnerable for a minute,
I know we're being recorded, but that's what it is. Right. So one of the things when we first,
when I first came to Britain, there were two companies, there was a publishing house, and
there was a brand perspectives. And you know, what was dead and taking up space,
the publishing house, doing the publishing, the shipping, the fulfillment, the orders,
pack having a warehouse and packaging stuff and printing stuff and shipping them to our warehouse.
And so we found a group in Pennsylvania called Stone Rooster, wonderful company, they became
our outsourced warehouse, and we found an external publisher, and we got out of the publishing
business. So brilliant, brilliant book house was the publisher. And we still use that brand for
publishing. But it was just something that was dead and needed to go, it's time was over. And
we needed to get out of the publishing business. And we needed to be into a different business.
This was not an easy conversation. Why? Because that's where the business
started. So there we were deeply emotionally attached to this. Oh,
but you know, we published 23 books with Graham, and we got all
this stuff. And we got all this and we've got this and this and
this. And I said, Look, we can find a way. But we're not in the
publishing business anymore. We have to get out of that
business. So we got somebody else to publish for us somebody
else to do shipping and fulfillment. And it just changed
our lives. We literally print books that go to the shipping
house, somebody gets us Shopify orders it, the printing house
gets the order, ships it and we get notified within a few
minutes. It's all electronically wired together. And we don't
touch or see the book. And my rule was no touching books.
We're out of the touching books business, stop touching books.
So we stopped touching books. What we also noticed is that
some of the books, our thinking and training had moved on, and
some of them still had older thought processes that have
been a little outdated. So we took them off the bookstore,
another emotional process. We noticed that our email list,
our engagement was too low, and our list wasn't growing. So
there was something that was just dead taking up space. So
what we do is we cleansed our list. So it didn't look so
happy afterwards, because we had a much smaller list. But we
knew that list were engaged with us. This is before the new
compliance rules came out in California, we have to have the
double opt in and you can't just send somebody an email just
because they once responded to you, you're not allowed to do
that. Under Californian law, lots of rules. But we became
compliant, we cleaned it up. But that was just dead and taking
up space. There was just those 10s of 1000s of emails that
were just sitting in it. And it was sounded cool to so many
emails we had, but it wasn't actually true. Number four, are
there areas or things where we need to stop being a resource?
Internally, we refer to this as the savior complex, where
you're saving it all the time. If it wasn't for you jumping in
and saving that thing, it would die. It wasn't for you jumping
and saving that person every time they touch something, they
would fail. So are we are the areas in people products where
we're jumping in, and we have to be the source, otherwise it
dies. If you are still the primary source of something,
either it's time to turn that out, or it's time to rethink
how that product because it cannot, it's not sustainable
with you as the primary source. And I'm talking about you being
the main leader. So on the CEO calls, that's one of the
questions I like to ask, you know, CEOs, particularly areas
where you're still the primary source is a problem. Okay,
number five, what is good, not best? This is the hardest
question of all. Because these are good things in your
company, they're making money even, you know that but they're
taking nutrients, resources from the organization, they're good,
but they're not your best thing. So if we could take them
out, what would it make room for that's a little more, more
positive way of thinking about it, I think, if we took this
item out, if we took this product out, if we offer if we
didn't offer the service, and you know, most of this
complexity comes because we want to please the customer, we get
attached, you know, and the customers will, can you do this?
Oh, yeah, we can do this. The quickest way to see that I saw
was in the software business. In the software business, a
customer calls, yeah, you know, I know it's not part of the
scope, but do you think you guys can do this? And so the
programmers are thinking, man, honestly, I can do it in 10
minutes. Sure, we'll do that. And then it's Can you do this?
Can you do this? Now the next what the customer what the yes,
what the engineer is not thinking about? I don't know.
Any of you been in the software business? Yeah. Anybody? Yeah.
Okay. So then you know, writing code, debugging it, getting it
stable and shipping it is 20% of the cost of that product. The
other 80% comes in servicing it and supporting it. It's
massively expensive. So yeah, I can just quickly write that
special piece of code for customer A into the source code.
Customers B and C don't need it. Then customer C comes and
asks for another piece, but I got to give it to C. So when
they hit that button, it goes to C, but not A and B. When you
start all that complexity, which came from a place of I
want to be great to my customers, what you're doing is
you're killing your business. So it's either saying no to the
customer or thinking, can I thin slice this in a way that
gets the customer what they actually need? This exercise
that we want to give you right now, which we'll
here in the chat, is designed to really get you to think deeply about your business. Because if
you're willing to go down this road and you're willing to have the courage to answer these
questions, you could literally, like I told the story how somebody goes from a $25 million
business to a $500 million business comes from this type of thinking. It's not because you're
brutal. It's not because, you know, there was a guy who became very well known in the space I was
in. And he was known as Chainsaw Al. His name was Al, somebody or another, I've forgotten. But he
was known as Chainsaw Al because he just came and just cut stuff in businesses, cut them up,
sold them off for parts, and he got known as Chainsaw Al. I'm not talking about being Chainsaw Al.
I'm talking about thinking deeply about what's the best way to grow and expand your business.
You only have that many resources, you only have that much capital, that many people, and you're
putting a lot of time into training, educating, and focusing them. So when you did your four
square analysis, maybe one of the things you can look at is, you know, what is just
sick and not going to get well? What's dead and somebody just has to call it already and put the
poor thing in the grave? Just stop it already. And the hard one, what's good but not best?
Okay, questions? Any questions, comments? Anybody been through this process?
Ben, you look like you're about to say something there.
I mean, we've done SWOT analysis in the past, you know, that's been fruitful and really led to
a lot of growth in our company. But I'm anxious and interested to see
kind of what's popped up in our team's minds, so.
Yeah, yeah. You know, what's great about the style of leadership we've developed,
or part of the culture of creating a team of leaders over these, what, 31 weeks,
as we've done this, is we've given permission for that feedback to now happen,
without there being consequences. And I think this is one of the healthiest,
you cannot, you can see why this is well down the bottom end of the course,
because you have to have a culture to sustain this. You cannot, I've tried to go in in the
wrong culture, everyone just stares at your nose. Everyone's thinking, I'm not raising my hand.
I'm not saying that. I'm not telling the CEO that the division his son is running is terrible.
I'm not telling the CEO that the product his wife created, you know,
sucks. I'm not that guy. So it does take courage. But a culture which is really about
all of us pulling together can do that. All right, let's go through the question. You'll
see the questions are laid out. They are, as you would expect, five exercises, each one going
through, trying to find each of the elements we just discussed. So we want to give you an
opportunity, jump into your breakout sessions, discuss the questions, and let's circle back
five minutes to the top of the hour. All right. Thanks, Dion. Well, we will go ahead and separate
out into our breakout rooms now. You'll have an opportunity to discuss the material with your team
and the worksheet has been dropped into the chat. If you have any issues accessing it, let me know.
Solo leaders, you can go ahead and join the room called general, and that's where you can interact
together or engage on your own as well. And I will go ahead and open up those rooms and have fun
together. Let me know if you need any assistance getting into those rooms. All right. So we are
going to go ahead and open up time for questions. So if you have a question or have any thoughts
that came out of your discussion that you want to share with the team or with Dion, feel free to do
so. You can raise your hand. You can post in the chat. Dion, I know you mentioned if anyone had
something to share, they could do that. So I could kick us off with just a little thought.
I'll see if anyone else wants to go. Any hands? Okay. Well, while you're thinking, getting your
chats going, Dion, something that Cindy and I talked about was in the first question, just kind
of understanding the difference of where's the life in our team, kind of like the shiny eyes versus
where's the life in terms of measurable success and in what the company's putting out. So maybe
could you talk a little bit about the difference between the two, what's going well with the team
and the shiny eyes versus what the customers or the consumers are identifying with?
Yeah, I've noticed that those, so you're talking about what's the difference between,
hey, we find this life-giving, but it's
isn't that profitable versus this is really profitable. We don't find that life giving.
So it's like when I do my AC thing, I've got a low profit and my CC thing is high profit.
What I've found over time is that those things do merge because where you're, you know, if your,
if your core passion isn't financially viable, then it, you know, it might be that that has to
be a separate thing. So what I found is that you have to, it's not just about optimizing profits,
although that's part of it, but it's what are the core competencies of the, of the team itself?
You know, what is it? You remember how we work backwards? We say, what does our customer need?
And then let's work backwards, not what do we have and what can we sell them? We don't work it
forward. We, we start with a customer in mind, we work backwards and that often in those discussions
with the customers, the four square stuff and the stuff we did together, these go together.
And usually a very clear pattern emerges. So I don't think it's just an isolated.
It's why we give different tools because they highlight different things.
So I know that wasn't a direct answer, but generally at some point, you've got to get your
passions and profits to align at some point, right? It's got to align. Otherwise it's going to be
short-lived. Either you'll run out of energy because it's not your passion or it will run out
of money one way or another, you'll run out of one of them. So it's what a lot of businesses do that.
Any other questions? So as you go through this exercise, it's also useful, you know, with a team
to take a second and match it to last week's exercise. Last week we identified all those
quadrant four things. And a lot of times the quadrant four things are the things that are
dead or sucking up energy or taking up resources that need to go. All right. Yep. Any other
questions? Pretty easy today. Going once. Okay. Back to you, Jaylen.
All right. Well, if there are no other questions, we'll go ahead and wrap up for today. The time
always goes so quickly. And don't forget when you hop off of this call, you will have the
end of call survey. If you could fill that out, let us know what was fascinating with you,
what's going to be helpful for your business. And you can also let us know if you have any
additional questions there. So with that, we will give you all the last two minutes of the hour,
and we'll see you next time. Bye, everyone.