Okay, so let's talk about three ways in which you can grow your business.
And this is a whole new module.
And you know, what we're after here is the idea that everybody understands the economics
of the business.
And what I've learned is that there really are only three major ways you can grow a business.
And if everybody understands what you're doing, and you don't have to just implement one of
them, but when everyone understands how you make money and how they fit in, that empowers
them to act like owners.
If you keep that kind of information away from your team, what happens?
It's much more difficult to buy in, to share, to lead their own contribution.
So let's talk about, you know, the key thing that is driving the sense of ownership for
a lot of people is feeling like they're part of it, feeling like they belong.
Even if they don't, quote, have shares in the business, they still feel a sense of
ownership in the business.
So we're going to talk about, you can grow your business by 10%, 100%, or 10x.
So I made them all 10s.
Now, obviously, when I mean 10%, I'm talking 10 to 20%.
And the way you get a 10 to 20% lift is process.
Focus on the process.
Improve your processes, cut out steps, outsource things, you know, cut costs.
But that's why you can never cut costs or cut your way or budget your way to success.
And at some point, you have to have revenue.
And so an easy way to get 10x is just to make it better.
Improve your customer service, refine your sales processes, whatever your different parts
of the business are, there's a 10 to 20% lying there for you.
Pretty easy.
In most cases, that's pretty low-hanging fruit for most companies.
The next idea of 100% growth, so how are you going to double your revenue?
And the key way there is to add a new product or a new service.
So you can't just milk the existing business to get where you need to be.
If it took you 100 transactions to pull in what you're doing, you can improve those transactions
and get your 10 to 20% process growth.
But if you really want to double the business, you need something new, something fresh.
It's amazing to me how oftentimes we're chasing new customers when people who are our raving
fans are willing to give us more money.
They love what we do, they're all in, they're like, what else have you got?
And we're too busy selling the small ticket item because we're not focused on the bigger
ticket items.
And when we say new product, often if you think of the Pyramid of Fandom, and someone's
going to remind me in a second who called it that, but the Pyramid of Fandom is you've
got your lower ticket items at the bottom and you're slowly building up.
And as people are being introduced to your community and slowly becoming up to raving
fans, your big ticket items sit at the top.
And one of the big mistakes we make as a business is we don't start at the top, we try and start
at the bottom and work up.
And so this is one of the easy growth points for us.
Our next thing is to look at 10x growth.
And here's where we're going to spend most of our time.
So here's where we need to pivot.
We need to reimagine the business.
We need to step into a new possibility.
And I want to talk about why 10x actually is much kinder to your mind than the other
two.
And it may sound a contradiction.
And if you love this sort of thing, one of the guys that I love to follow is Dan Sullivan.
He has a great book called 10x is easier than 2x and some of the materials there if you
want further reference.
But today I'm just going to focus on the core ideas of 10x.
So yeah, we can process, get 10%, we can add new product, 500%, or we can pivot to look
for that 10x growth.
Now the reason is, and why 10x is, you know, when most people hear 10x it's like, no, no,
I can't do that.
And there's a reason you have that response.
Basically, we go to the first two options, you know, process and adding new product.
But for the most part, you know, they're healthy, but they're not that inspiring.
You know, if a new product could be inspiring, but fixing processes, I don't know about you,
but I don't find that particularly inspiring.
And here's why.
Because if you're looking at 2x, let's double our business, you're thinking along the lines
of, well, let's go back to it took 100 transactions to pull this off.
Now you're saying I have to do 200 transactions?
Oh my goodness, do you have any idea how hard it was to do the 100?
And now you want me to double that?
I'm exhausted right now.
I'm discouraged already.
You know, I don't even want to get into that.
And so, because here's the reason why.
Dan Sullivan does a great job of explaining the psychology of why we feel discouraged
and exhausted. It's because 2X makes you look to your past. Right now I just said I looked
to last year and said we did 100 transactions. Now you're asking me to do 200 transactions.
What's happening here is my past is negotiating with me about my future. And that's why there's
no excitement in this. It's like I'm trying to say okay well how would I take that 100
and what would I do to my team. And so the 2X and the process stuff is largely uninspiring
because it feels exhausting. Because it feels like I'm thinking about the direct correlation.
The effort it took me to produce that 100, those 100 transactions and now I have to double
that effort. And here's the interesting thing, you don't have to double that effort. And
why 10X inspires us so much is, well firstly we're not talking about necessarily in 12
months. But think for a second, just take a minute here. If you added a zero, you found
the missing zero, you 10X'd your business. Let's start with the easy one, revenue. If
you had 10X the revenue and you knew that you knew that you knew this was going to happen
this year, in the next 12 months, how would you lead? How would you think? What kind of
customers would you take on? You see immediately it becomes exciting, right? Because it creates
energy and it engages our imagination. We start dreaming again. Oh my goodness we could.
And you start to think about your purpose and is this what I want to spend my time doing?
And again it's not just about the money but what 10X does for us is it opens up a new
territory. Why? Because now our future is presenting us with an entirely new possibility
that our past can't comment on. You've just freed yourself from your past. And what you've
done is you've also freed your present from the past. Because there's nothing that you
can look back on and say oh we can leverage this, we can tweak that. You don't have anything.
So you have to re-imagine. So now suddenly we're re-engaging our dream machine. And then
we start asking our team what if we could actually do 10X? We did this exercise in our
company last December and it was amazing how people stepped into it. And you would think well
people would be upset by that. They're not. People love the idea that we could actually
pull this off. It really does release energy and creativity. Look here's the bottom line. As a
leader, as an executive specifically, but as a leader and we're talking about being a team of
leaders, so that means this applies to everybody in the team listening to this, you can only be
great at a few things. Three at best. So Dan talks about it as your circle of excellence
or your circle of competence. And he says stay in your circle. What is your circle of competence?
And then shrink your circle to three things. Because the more stuff that's in that circle,
the more competence dilution that you have. What does that mean? It means that you are not as
effective as you think you are over a large broad thing. So that means you have to find stuff that
is actually 2X to you and find team members who find that as a 10X. Maybe accounting isn't your
thing but you can do it. But now you're finding someone that's their 10X. That's the thing. That's
in their circle of competence. That circle, those three things, it fits for them but not for you.
And then your job is eliminate everything else. And this sounds like a great talk until you
actually start to do this. So here's you know 10X is inspiring, 10X is full of purpose, 2X is just
stuff. So how do we delete stuff? So finding your 10X, here are a couple of key questions.
Ask yourself what would permanently fascinate and motivate you? Permanently. Not once or twice or
you're intrigued. Not being intrigued a bit but what would captivate you? What would permanently
fascinate and motivate you? Several of you might be in a transition as a business. This is a great
question not just to ask as the main leader but everyone in the organization. And here's what it is.
Because there's more to life than simply making money, getting stuff done. And the reason is that
10x engages your heart and your mind. 2x generally engages your mind. And your heart's very good at
making space for your mind. It's where your creativity is, it's where your strategy is,
where your imagination is, where you're thinking at a higher level, at a higher order. So let's
talk about a couple of practical things quickly and land the plane here. So here are some practical
things that I've learned that have really, really helped me. And so you'd have to decide
this competence thing. What is your fight? Think of it as a fight, right? You're bringing some
contribution to the world. Let's call that your fight or your focus if you like, if you don't
like the aggressive nature of the word fight. But it's helpful to me to think about a fight because
having spent time in the military, you can't fight wars on every single front.
You would just lose. So you have to decide, where is my fight? And then as a leader,
you have to craft a positive, hopeful narrative about that fight in that area,
in your area of excellence. So whatever it is you're doing, whatever your business is,
you're projecting into your industry, to your customers, to your clients, to your team,
a positive, hopeful narrative full of future possibilities. It can't be we just fix problems.
We fix this issue. It has to be something, a narrative of hope. And so the second thing is,
as an individual, you need to decide what does 10x mean? You know, what does the word x mean? What
are you 10x-ing? It could be as simple as you want to 10x your confidence. You know, you want to
10x the number of customers you're reaching. You want to 10x your revenue or 10x your time.
You know, Dan tells a story of a guy who heard all this training, an executive, and he decided,
well, he wanted to 10x his time. So he said, all right, well, that instead of taking, you know,
I want to have the same revenue but for two months in a year. I want to make exactly the
same money, but I want to 10x my time. Now I want to do it in two months. Now, theoretically, it's
not quite 10x. I get the math. But the concept is clear. It took him a couple of years because,
again, it doesn't actually have to happen in a 12-month period. But when he hit that 10x,
then, you know, they asked him, what do you want to do now? He says, now I want to do it in three
days. So he's making the same money he was in three days because, for him, 10x meant not just
his time but to be able to spend time traveling, be with his family, and do the things that he
loves. You know, and so if you've got a nonprofit passion or something else, that would free up your
time to go and do that idea. You know, over the years, as we've worked with leaders, there are a
couple of things that I have found. They're so simple, and I'm not sure why they're not the most
obvious things. And the first one is, if you're going to focus on one thing, you need to put
aside all other fights. You know, Marcus Aurelius once said, exercise your right not to have an
opinion on things you don't control. And I love that because what that is saying is, we all want
opinions about politics and about this and what's going on there and social issues and this issue
and that issue, and that drains energy. It's just stuff. Now, if that's your fight, if that is really
your fight, if you're focused on that, then go and do that. But honestly, jumping on spending hours on
social media and spending time, it's just stuff. Look, your 9 to 5 job is not what's holding you
back. It's all the wasted social media, focusing on fights, trying to develop an opinion. Well, I just
want to stay informed. You know, I had to come to that conclusion. I just want to be a news junkie.
I want to stay informed. It's not a reason to keep 2x activities alive. And that's about as practical
as I can be for a leader. Get rid of the stuff. Well, how do you know it's stuff? Well, it drains energy.
Someone else can do it better. Maybe even relationships that are going nowhere.
So, here's a quick exercise for you. Why don't you write down 3 stuff things that you need to
shed? What 3 things could you shed straight away? These are things that drain energy,
someone else can do them better, and relationships that are going nowhere. So, activities that you
shouldn't be involved in. Now, here's an interesting exercise. You could do the opposite.
What activates or creates energy in you when you do that thing?
We've talked in previous trainings about this,
that when you do the thing,
you come alive because you're energized.
You have more energy after the event than before you started.
So what creates movement for you?
What makes you feel you're making progress in your life?
What do you find inspiring?
So in an interesting exercise,
my wife, Bridget, and I sat down
and we did this exercise together.
Now, we've all done previous training about the hats.
You remember about switching hats?
Right, so we both took off our husband-wife hats,
respectively, and we put on our coach hat.
And so in that hat, remember that that means
we're not related, we're not married,
we're not in business together, we're just being the coach.
And then, you know, Bridget shared with me
all the 2X stuff that in the next 90 days I need to shed.
And what I need to, one thing I need to 10X.
So we picked three things, you know,
bits of stuff that we had to get rid of.
And the rule was, you weren't allowed to respond
or argue or defend yourself or anything.
You were just allowed to take notes.
And then we switched roles.
And what was really interesting about this
is this idea of shedding works best
if you do it in a 90-day cycle.
In other words, every 90 days, shed three things.
Every 90 days, shed three things.
So guess what's gonna happen?
A year from now, you're gonna have 12 things
that are out of your life, 12 bits of stuff you don't need.
And you would have improved four 10X elements in your life.
So I wanna make some just real practical things
you may consider shedding.
Negative narratives.
Just stop agreeing with negativity.
Negativity doesn't build anything.
It takes absolutely no talent whatsoever
to be negative about something.
To find the problem is not a talent, you know, at all.
Coming up with a possibility to fix the problem,
now that takes talent.
Judgments of other businesses or competitors.
And I love the story of, you know,
Apple, when Apple had their, launched their iPod,
Microsoft had also introduced Zune.
And I remember one late night comedian saying,
you know, he was talking about Apple
just sold a million iPods.
And in other news, somebody bought a Zune.
You know, so when you think about that,
it was hilarious at the time.
And, you know, I just think that when we,
here's the interesting thing.
Apple did not care that their iPod
had far less features than Zune.
Zune was a superior product at one point.
And it was very obvious because they weren't looking at that.
They weren't making judgments.
They weren't playing the game against Microsoft.
Apple was playing a game against themselves.
Have you ever listened to their product announcements?
This is the best iPhone we've ever had.
Maybe a terrible iPhone,
but it's the best one they've ever had.
In other words, what are they doing?
Is they're using themselves as the reference.
Can we be better?
Can we do it better?
They are themselves.
They're not like, oh, we're gonna be number one.
We're gonna do, there is no, in this structure,
it's about you stepping in and 10Xing yourself.
You know, I really caution again,
unhealthy political engagement.
Unless again, that's your, you feel that's your thing.
Sure, be informed, make your decisions,
vote, do your civil duty, and then focus on your fight.
Focus on your thing.
And, you know, excessive media consumption,
just drop the news junkie thing.
I've seen so many people, so I don't have time for that.
But when you look at their day,
they're spending eight to 10 hours a week on nothing.
And so I wanted to share that with you
and, you know, go through the basic thing.
You can do 10X because 10X frees your present
to think about your future.
And I hope you found this inspiring as I did.
Thanks.