30 Year Journey: Fractional CMO | 366

Dan Kuschell is a husband, dad, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. He runs Breakthrough3X, a company that gives you instant access to a Fractional CMO Team. Breakthrough3X helps founders and CEOs grow their businesses 3 to 10x and generate more clients daily with a simple system that gets them free from the day-to-day. Dan has owned 12 companies since 1992, building multiple businesses with revenues exceeding eight figures before selling. He is also the Host of the Growth to Freedom podcast, where he interviews industry leaders and experts in a variety of fields.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Dan Kuschell’s inspiration for helping CEOs grow their businesses
• What is the small business toolkit and how does it help CEOs simplify their processes?
• Why Dan created Breakthrough3X
• Breakthrough3X’s five-step method for success
• The importance of developing a growth plan
• How Dan utilized the five-step method to help a client achieve his goals
• Dan’s ideal clients
• How to make an impact with your business

In this episode…

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the substantial amount of responsibilities you’re taking on? Are you struggling to find the time to effectively grow your business?

As a fractional CMO, Dan Kuschell suggests creating and implementing a five-step selling system to generate new clients. This includes establishing a vision and growth plan, developing connection campaigns, initiating leads to deepen relationships, hosting education-based events, and optimizing your business processes. Executing this system relieves you from your day-to-day operations and gives you more time to focus on driving growth.

Join business advisor Dan Kuschell in today’s episode of Growth to Freedom as he sits down to discuss Breakthrough3X’s strategic framework for growth. Dan shares his inspiration for helping CEOs scale their businesses, Breakthrough3X’s five-step system for success, and how his small business toolkit helps CEOs simplify their business processes.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Dan Kuschell on LinkedIn
• Breakthrough3x
• Schedule Your Breakthrough Call
• Business Growth Toolkit
• Growth to Freedom

Sponsor for this episode

Thanks for listening to this episode of growthtofreedom.com.

Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall in growing your business? Well, let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. You can do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com. That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com.

In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free small business toolkit. You can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com. That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com.

If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to Growth to Freedom.com, the show that brings you inspiration, transformation. And leadership, we’re helping you connect the dots, see the blind spots, and get unstuck. So you can go out and generate more leads more sales, more profits. More importantly, so you can go out and have a bigger reach a bigger impact and make a bigger contribution.

Dan Kuschell 0:27

My name is Dan Kuschell. And I’m the founder of a company called Breakthrough3x. But, you know, I think what I am most prideful of being a husband of being a dad, I’ve been fortunate to start and build 13 of my own companies. I’m an angel investor, I also coach football, you because I love building young men. And what we do really, as a company, is you know, how a lot of people, you know, they just seem to struggle with being able to generate a steady flow of leads, or sales or revenue or profits on a daily basis. Well, what we do is we work with founders and CEOs to give them a marketing system that helps them get leads and sales, revenue and profits every day. And more importantly, so they can get free from the day to day, you know, of the business. And, you know, it’s a lot of fun. Now, the truth is, I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I got started all the way back in the late 1980s, early 90s. And I didn’t always have success, you know, I knock on wood every day. Because, you know, the truth is, is in my early years, I really struggled. Right? I started my very first company when I was 22. And although we had a, you know, massive success curve out of the gate and did a couple million dollars in business pretty quickly, in a few months, just as fast. As we grew, I, I realized I didn’t know how to run a business as a CEO and founder. And so there was a lot of learning, it left me on the verge of bankruptcy, it left me you know, questioning myself doubting, you know, whether I really had what it took. And then fast forward. You know, a few years later, I’ve been fortunate to build and grow to companies that were eight figures that I was able to sell, exit get free. And today, we get to help a lot of founders and CEOs create that, you know, ability to get out of the day to day or exit the day to day, or even build and sell and exit their business or even build, sell and take their companies public. We’ve been able to help over 5000 founders and CEOs, you know, through the years, with our innovative methods to help people grow with a lot less stress. I’m often asked, you know, Dan, why do you do what you do? And you know, the truth is, as a kid, you know, I grew up in the inner city of Detroit, and our family had a life that was a roller coaster, a lot of ups and downs financially, especially. And although there was a lot of love from my mom and dad, it was very unstable. It was not, you know, what I would call the dream life. You know, being in the inner city as a kid, you know, my dad worked for a big giant automaker, probably the largest in the world at the time. And he got laid off, like 910 different times. And there were times we were on welfare as a family. And I remember being a young kid going to the grocery store, to the grocery store at the corner of our house called farmer jacks. And I remember being in farmer Jack’s having to pay for our food with food stamps, and I got laughed at and you know, some different things. And it was humiliating, it was embarrassing. And for me, part of that, you know, experience is what drove me to look at doing things different. You know, in addition to that, my mom also suffered from a lot of health issues, mental and physical. And I started studying personal development at a young age. My dad, thankfully, was a catalyst, and he got me introduced through sports, to being able to, you know, work on the mind. And I remember I attended my very first seminar when I was 10 years old at Eastern Michigan University as a baseball clinic. And I was the only kid in the room as I recall. It was for coaches, mostly high school, college coaches, and so on. And I’m sitting next to my dad, but I was just like scratching notes. And I’ll never forget, I still have the manual from all those years ago, back in the early 80s. And one of the pages said, Success in life in in baseball, and life is 90% mental, the rest is physical. And in order to do that, you have to have a positive mental attitude and that, you know, that little spark that little igniter is what opened the door to so many different possibilities and my dad then continued to fuel my fire for learning and the mindset and the mental fitness, in sports and in life. And, you know, he got me biographies. And I read biographies of people like Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, and Pete Rose, and all these very successful athletes. And I started noticing some of the things that they did to be successful. And, you know, it’s so interesting, you know, but again, you know, through the course of my childhood, I also experienced, you know, my dad started a business. And it was a little bar restaurant. And, you know, actually, he was forced to shut that business down, because a motorcycle gang in the inner city of Detroit threatened to blow our house up. Because my dad wouldn’t let them come in and harass the waitress and the staff. And I’ll never forget that experience. Being on my front porch, and the motorcycle gang being out front, there were four guys revving their engines really loud, and essentially threatening. And here I was 10 years old, or so. And I’m going through this experience, and I was like, This is not what I want. This is not what I want to do. Fast forward to when I was 14 years old, my dad started another business, it was a printing company. And again, because of my dad’s toughness, his persistence, his resilience, you know, I think I had one of the greatest role models in the world similar with my mom dealing with her physical and mental health issues. And getting through that, and I’m so grateful for that foundation, because it’s really allowed me to apply a lot of these things in building businesses over the last 30 years. So we put together this small business growth toolkit that’s really geared to help founders and CEOs simplify some of the processes of running a business, you know, again, one of the things we do with our company is we help, you know, founders and CEOs get a steady flow of new clients every day. But like, what happens if you double your business or triple your business? Like, what are the common questions we ask our clients? You know, if we help you double or triple? Can you handle it? And the answer the truth is for a lot of founders and CEOs, the answer is no. So we need a foundation. So in addition to the marketing systems, that we help install, and implement with the clients we work with, in partner with clients, we also have learned there’s a lot that needs to be done, building the foundation. And so this small business toolkit is really to help you give the foundation because have you ever struggled maybe, you know, as a founder or CEO, you’re like maybe the visionary, you’re the leader, you’re the driver, you’re a creative type personality. That’s pretty common. However, were you trained to be a CEO? Probably not. You know, on the other hand, you know, if you’re going to build a growing, especially a fast growing company, where you trained on how to hire, right, hiring is an art, it’s a science, it’s a skill, right? Another factor is, you know, we have surveyed 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of founders and CEOs. And we go, Hey, do you have a marketing growth plan for your business for the next one to three years, and shockingly, over 95% of founders and CEOs don’t have a marketing growth plan put together not only for themselves, a lot of it is in their head, but not really formalized to then get their teams on the same page, in alignment with the right type of plan. And then last but not least, are related to product productivity secrets, as far as influence or selling, right? Maybe you’re like I was, as a kid, I considered myself shy and introverted and quiet. I didn’t see myself as like, you know, a great salesperson. And so through the years, we’ve, you know, adopted and created a lot of systems that essentially take customer service people and turn them into high performers. And it’s actually a process that we call how to sell more, how to sell more, by actually selling less, it’s more conversational, it’s how to turn conversations into conversion. So what we did is we put all of those tools, a CEO checklist, we put the hiring checklist, we put the how to sell more by selling less checklist. And we also put the productivity secrets together in one package, and you can go somewhere on the page, there’ll be a link here where you can go on the page and get access to that toolkit. 100% free to help you simplify to get clarity, to give you more confidence and to give you direction when it comes to being a stronger, more effective CEO, whether it’s hiring, you know, whether it’s virtual team members or full time team members, whether it’s selling maybe you’re a superstar already, or maybe you consider yourself more like I was more shy or quiet or introverted, right. And or, you know, the ability to go out and be more productive. So go get the toolkit right now though, there’s a link somewhere here on the page. You can go download and 100% free, and start building and growing your business so that when you work with someone like us that can help you double or triple that your business, you can handle it and your business doesn’t implode, you know, I often get asked Dan, you know, why did you create Breakthrough3x. And, you know, it’s been a journey for sure, you know, I’ve had three over three decades, over 30 years of running my own companies, you know, 13 businesses later. And the truth is, in the early years, you know, I crashed, a few companies, you know, left me on the verge of bankruptcy and having to regroup financially, and debt and all these sorts of things. And even if I go back even further, part of the reason that I wanted to start a business is watching my dad’s struggle with two companies or two businesses that he started, you know, we struggled with getting clients, having cashflow, having the right marketing and selling systems in place to get him free, as an owner of that business. So all of my journey for these last 30 years have been related to some version of that. Fast forward, I was fortunate that, you know, I built a large coaching business that you know, grew out of my den with one volunteer and that ultimately grew to over 175 employees, we were able to grow that business to over $25 million a year, right? And help a lot of people with that business, I was able to then sell that business and exit and get free from the day to day, I also built a publishing business. And at our peak with that publishing business, we were able to grow that business to over 10,000 new leads every single day. And over 1500 clients that were buying our our education products, every week, 1500 clients, we’ve created over 150 different programs, courses, books, education products and services that were into our business, I was able to sell an exit that business. And after selling those two companies, and a lot of people start coming to me after a period of time off essentially, call it semi retirement or enjoying lifestyle, whatever you want to call this craziness. When you exit a business say Dan, could you help me do what you did. And so Breakthrough3x grew out of number one, my dad what you know, seeing someone like my dad struggling to get cashflow in order, struggling to get clients and then being able to put a marketing system in place. And essentially, that’s what helped grow the couple companies that I was fortunate to build, grow and sell now since then, you know, it’s now been over a decade, we’ve helped you know, so many different clients from so many different industries solve their biggest problems around getting leads and getting sales daily, helping them get a marketing system in place to help them grow with a lot less stress and also get free from the day to day, it’s been a lot of fun. And, you know, the beauty of it is, we in many ways we don’t even feel like we’ve scratched the surface. Our mission is to help another 1000 founders and CEOs grow their business collectively through that 1000 New founders and CEOs impact over a billion people through their products and serve. In other words, we’re working with impact makers, you can call it future leaders, right, or what we would call result leaders, right. So if you’re looking for a way to be able to simplify to be able to grow with less stress and get free from the day to day, make sure to check us out. So what makes Breakthrough3x so different from the competition is our unique method. In our experience, you know, having helped over 5000 founders and CEOs either exit, exit the day to day exit and sell or exit to be able to go fund and become a public company brings a certain level of experience that off the shoulders of us being able to build and grow to have our own companies of our own and my experience of 13 companies I’ve run of my own for the last 30 plus year. So there’s a body of work that most people really just can’t compete with. That’s first, the most important thing above and beyond that is our system. Right? You know, Michael Gerber said it best in the book, the E Myth. He said, you know, systems, run your business, find good people to run those systems, right. And while a lot of people focus on like their, their fulfillment system or customer service, what we’ve chosen to focus on for the better part of 30 years, is helping companies founder CEOs, maybe like you get a marketing and selling system in place to free you up to bring you a steady flow of leads sales and profits. And real quickly, let me just share our unique five step method. Right, that is so shockingly simple yet, no one really focuses on all five and in fact, why did we create the five step process in this five step method? Well, in reviewing over 4000 companies over the last few years, we found that the most successful company we’re going also talking about companies we’ve reviewed in research like Apple, Starbucks, height, Amazon, and a whole lot more some of the biggest companies in the world, as well as every day, mom and pop businesses, brick and mortar businesses and everything in between. And what we found is these five criteria, these five steps exist in the most successful companies. And if you’re missing any one of these, especially now, your chance of success decreases exponentially. So we’re going to help you avoid that. So the first step in our unique method here at Breakthrough3x, number one is you want to establish what is called your vision and growth plan. You know, why is this important? Like if you ever found yourself number one struggling to get talent on your team, or maybe finding a team member, but they’re not in alignment with you your values, and so on. So your vision and growth plan helps bring people get them on the same page, get them on the same sheet of music, so everybody’s operating like an eight cylinder engine, you know, that’s running effectively and efficiently. So vision and growth plan. And here’s the funny part. We’ve surveyed 1000s and 1000s of founder CEOs maybe like you, and what we found is over 95% don’t have a true written vision and growth plan for the next one to three years. So we help eliminate that we help give you the tools to do that. So second step in your marketing and selling system is building out connection campaigns. Now, there’s dozens of tactics that you can do for connection campaign, but what is what are connection campaigns, which is part of our unique method, connection campaigns are really geared to build trust and respect with your potential as well as your current clients on an ongoing basis. In other words, it never stops. Right? There’s an old lie that says, you know, to get people to buy from you, they must, you know, know, like and trust you. And the reality is, we don’t believe that to be true. It’s a half truth. You know, it’s like baking a cake, but one of the ingredients you leave out of the cake, right? See, we’ve also surveyed and found a lot of founders and CEOs are people pleasers.

There’s an old lie that says to get people to buy from you, they must know, like, and trust you. And the reality is, we don’t believe that to be true. It’s a half-truth. It’s like baking a cake, but you leave one of the ingredients out of the… Click To Tweet

And if you build a business model on the fact that people must like you like you like you, well, the reality is, if you bought some from somebody you didn’t know well enough to like it. The answer to that is yes. You’ve probably bought from somebody this week from someone you didn’t know well enough to like, but what did you have to have in order to buy from them comfortably trust and respect, trust and respect. So these connection campaigns are geared to build trust and respect, which also what it means for you usually is it the byproducts of that is it builds authority for you. It builds credibility, it does build likability, right, but it’s not the main focus. It’s about build trust and respect. Now, there’s dozens and dozens of tactics that we help you implement and install with connection campaigns. But imagine being able to build trust and respect with a potential client, before you ever ask them to buy from you in advance. In other words, think of it like planting seeds. Before you ever ask for something, you’re building up a lot of good karma. And then even when they come into your world, right, maybe they’re a prospect and they’re engaged with you, but they haven’t bought yet. Now you have a different set of trust, respect or connection campaigns. And then when they buy from you, you know, you don’t treat them transactionally. Because you realize relationships are key, you keep the relationship going by continuing to add and create value for them with connection campaigns. So we help companies implement consistent systems for those connection campaigns. That’s step two, first step vision and growth plan. Second step connection campaigns. The third step is build your own lead machine. Right? We talked to so many founders and CEOs, and they go, Oh, I’ve got 50,000 followers on XYZ platform, and another 10,000 on that platform. And then we go, Well, how big is your like, database? In other words, the list of people that you can truly reach out to either by phone or email or both, and get into a dialogue. And they go, Oh, I’ve got nine people on my list. I got 400 People, I’m I got 1000 people. Well, compared to the 10s of 1000s, out there on those platforms, see if they’re on someone else’s platform, you don’t have an engaged relationship. So you want to build up what we call the lead machine model for you to be able to deepen the relationship with people to connect with them at a more deeply deep level. Ideally, if you’re doing this, right, you’re integrating three things. Number one are multiple things. Number one, is the ability to interact with them by email. But have you noticed that your email open rates are very low? See, if you’re just relying on email, you’re dead to write. What else do you want to interact with them you want to interact with them by phone? Like actually talking to people like connection now in In a cool way, a non hyping non salesy way, you can do this with voice broadcasts, you can do this with text messaging, the ability to text message, a potential client in a cool, again, non salesy, not overwhelming, but in a relationship based way, leads to so many opportunities. So the Lean machines are geared to move people from out here to in here so that you can interact, you can engage, and you can connect with them in a more deep level, again, building and adding value along the way, that leads to the fourth part of the model. And the fourth part of our unique method, which are education based events. In fact, your entire business becomes an education based event, and all kinds of ways because again, there’s dozens and dozens of tactics around this. But the big overarching thing is think of your business as a publishing business. And your publishing business is all about education based communication, right? Or education based events. Now, what are education based events? It could be a report, it could be, you could be a podcast, it could be I mean, there’s you could be a webinar, it could be a challenge. We’re agnostic to, like any kind of magic buttons, right? Because things come and go. But education based events done correctly. Could be a video could be a video sales, like could be I mean, so many different mechanisms. What does it do? It compresses the sales cycle, it compresses time, it’s almost like if you think of dating, let’s simplify all of this down to some basic stuff. If you think of your business, like dating, right, and you know, let’s say as a guy, right, I go into a restaurant and I’m sitting there waiting for my table by myself. When I see someone and we strike up a common we have a good conversation go, Hey, can I get your digits? Can I get your number? That would be normal practice, when it that’d be normal? But could you imagine in that same scenario, that suddenly after that young lady gives me her her phone number, that I go, Oh, by the way, can I get your physical address too? And can I you know, follow you home and can and and and it’s too overwhelming, right? Yet people get in business or marketing and selling and they start trying so hard to make sales so fast? No, you’ve got to, that’s why the five steps work. So well, the greatest companies in the world, they don’t have a selling system, they have a buyer system. So what we’re showing you these five steps, part of our unique method is really helping you implement a buyers system, a buyers culture, so people buy from you, but it’s very strategic. So education based events, for example, client we’re working with right now, you know, they’ve been doing things but they kind of hit a plateau, they hit a flatline in recent months. So they brought us in to help. We help them host an education based event through one mechanism of dozens and dozens we do like a webinar, we brought that into the fold. And what ended up happening was, they ended up generating 100 new clients for their coaching academy in 30 days, I’m sorry, 19 days, 90 days, and they had never done that before. Right. And I know people say, Well, you know, this is outdated, this doesn’t work anymore paid ads, this paid ads. When you use all five of these steps, you can compress timeframes, and you can do it in a cool way. And you can provide an add value in your marketplace. So again, step one, vision and growth plan. Step two, is building connection campaigns, step three, your build your lead machine, number four, education based events. And then lastly, the fifth step is all about optimize it, and implement even more, right, optimize it and implement even more. So what does this mean? You take what’s working, eliminate the stuff that isn’t. And then you set it in a system so that it’s more on an evergreen basis, more of a robotic basis, you know, it almost becomes robotic based business, right, where you’re not having to be as involved. Now, here’s the downside. We see so many people that get fascinated by technology get fascinated by automation. And what do they do? They make the big mistake. They automate themselves right out of business, they automate themselves right out of business. Because at the end of the day, you’re in a people, two people business, you’re in a relationship business, your business should be built on relationship capital, not just on trying to turn it into an AI where you don’t get involved with anything. It’s a process. It’s a system. So all five steps help give you the competitive advantage. Why? Because your competition is too lazy, likely too cheap, to realize what five steps really need to be there for success. And when you put these five steps, it can give you freedom, it can give you a steady flow of leads daily, a steady flow of clients, as well as the ability to impact and help way more people. So if people have often said to me, they said Dan, you know, I’ve heard you say openly that you feel that traditional consulting is dead and Yes, that’s the truth traditional consulting is dead. Because here, think about this, do you really need more ideas? As a founder, CEO or creative visionary? The answer to that is No, right? You got enough ideas, you have more ideas by seven o’clock in the morning than most people do in like 90 days, right? Especially if you’re the creative, visionary type. So you need a new idea. Like you need a hole in your head, which is what most traditional consulting provides, they give you more ideas, they give you more things to think about, what do you really want, right? You want, you don’t want an idea, you want elegant ideas, which a good friend of mine, Joe Polish says one elegant idea is better than 1000. Semi good ideas. Right? So what do you want, instead, you want to work with someone that not just brings ideas and insights. But they’re elegant ideas, along with what implementation, right, what makes us so unique and so different is not only do we bring the strategy to you, or call it ideas, but we also bring you the team that can help implement, you know, our company is really like a fractional cmo team, or a fractional CEO, team, or both, that not only brings strategy, but then brings you a team that can implement in a rapid way. So you can get rapid growth, you know, it’s not uncommon for our clients to 2x 3x 5x 10x the growth, and simplify because they’ve got a marketing system that wasn’t just an idea, or wasn’t somebody go and go do this, do this do this, it was strategy, and then the team was able to implement it in a simple way. So if you’re looking for a way, if you want a consultant, by all means you want more ideas, go get a consultant. But if you want the combination of strategy, as well as implementation, especially as it relates to your marketing and selling systems, so you can grow exponentially with a lot less stress, and escape the day to day, or exit, or exit and sell or build asset value in your business so that you can go public, then make sure to take the time to really focus on finding someone who can bring you both. So I often have people who say, Dan, you know, I’ve heard you say openly, like on interviews and all these different things, that, you know, hiring an agency is dead. And, you know, the truth is, you know, when you think about that, like, do you really just need it a team running around, doing a bunch of tasks for you with no real direction, right? See, here’s the big problem with most agency work, is a founder or CEO wants to free themselves up, which is great. And what they do is they get an agent, here’s why we know this, in working with 1000s of CEOs and founders over the last, you know, 30 years. In essence, we talked to a lot of founders that have brought in an agency and what like, for example, in a marketing space or selling space, we ask them well, hey, when you worked with XYZ agency, did you collaborate to come up with your marketing growth blueprint for your business custom to you? And almost 100% of the time, the founder or the CEO says, No, we just work with this agency to fill in the blank run ads for us on XYZ platform to do this task for us to do this, the first step is the most important that, you know, it’s It’s like that old adage, you know, sharpen, twice, cut once, right, sharpen twice, cut once. So the first step in building and growing and working with any team member, or an agency is to have the right plan going in. But the problem is, you’re busy, you probably haven’t taken the time, you’re so busy running that many times we don’t have the plan and what ends up happening when we bring in other agency work or we bring in other team members sometimes, you know, we bring them in for their expertise. We bring them in for their specific skill set. But we don’t have the plan. And then what happens is they’re running off with no direction. So the very first step, which is also what we do with our program, because we found time and time again, it just wasn’t happening is we focus on step one in the beginning before we actually kick off together with the vision and growth plan. We’ve had many of our clients tell us that that step was worth more than a year two years worth of coaching 123 years worth of being in a mastermind 123 years working with anybody they’ve ever worked with before because what does it bring you when you have the vision and growth plan? Right? No longer are you a victim of circumstance to what an agency or an outside group may bring to you? What happens is you’re truly able to get your plan in alignment that you want customed to You and your situation.

No longer are you a victim of circumstance to what an agency or outside group may bring to you. What happens is, you’re truly able to get your plan in alignment, custom to you. - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

And then you can truly delegate as a partnership collaborate as a partnership, versus it being abrogated meaning you just kind of hand it off, go, Hey, you’re the expert, why don’t you show me tell me what to do. Now, it’s a partnership. But it starts with your custom vision, your custom plan. And when you’re working with the right partner, right, they can help you put that plan together. But time and time again, we just don’t see that. I mean, over 95%, closer to 99% of the companies we’ve surveyed say, No, we didn’t have any kind of plan going in, we just brought them in to do X work, we help you avoid that mistake. Why? Because the number one, focus the foundation, just like a house, think about this, you know, if if we go build a house on sand, you get a strong thunderstorm that comes in what’s going to happen, it’s going to be knocked over, right. So we got to build the foundation. So that first step is the most important step. And working with B 3x. Breakthrough3x, we give you the vision and growth plan. In fact, we require it to get going, and then everything becomes much easier working forward. Right. So whether you work with us, or you work with somebody, make sure you take the time to put the right vision and growth plan in place for the expectation to be met. And now move away from abdicating to somebody focus on your ability to lead and delegate with your custom plan in place. You know, people regularly say Dan, you know, like, Man, I hear about a lot of the clients you’ve worked with, and how you help them transform their business to get success, you know, like what, like, what’s your secret sauce? Well, the truth is, the secret sauce is the focus on our unique method. Right. And our unique method allows a business and a founder and a CEO to get free, right, from the day to day of their business to get free from wearing nine hats. You know, for example, one of the clients, you know, we’re working with right now we hear this time and time again. You know, number one, we go in our first step in our models, the vision and growth plan. So we asked the founder, like what is your vision and growth plan of your business for the next one to three years, and we’ve got a whole process that we take people through, it’s architected, not only for us to work with them as partners, but also to be able to help their team get on the same page, get in alignment to help them carry it forward. Right. And I learned a lot of this from sports, you know, the truth is, right. In sports, you know, as a high school football coach, you know, we don’t show up on game day. And that’s it. Now we go through training camp and in training camp, what do we do we cover our expectations, we cover our goals, we talk about what we expect from the kids, etc. Same thing holds true in your business. But sometimes we get too busy or so busy, you know, just working to build grow, we don’t have the time to get that foundation in place. So the first step is, what is your vision and growth plan? So this client I’m referring to, you know, we met with him, we said, hey, what do you want to accomplish? He said, Well, my goal is so I can get out of the day to day, my wife and I are doing too many too much in sales every day. Right, which we hear all the time, I’d love to be doing less of that because I want to focus on my vision. And I also have a couple other things I want to add to that. But new divisions, I want to create new research I want to do for growing and expanding our reach and our impact. Awesome. So knowing that getting clear on that makes a big difference when we go in, right. So step one is that vision and growth plan. Second is then we start building connection campaigns in advance. And these work all the time, like you never turn them off. They’re just constantly working. And there’s dozens and dozens and dozens of different tactics that you can implement. Just depending on where you’re at. We have clients who get started with like, a couple dollars a day literally getting started with their connection gets to you. Because you might ask, Well, is it expensive to do these sorts of things? Well, it’s relative, you know, even working with us, we should be free to you. Working together, like our highest value client has paid us over $10 million, I’m sorry, over a million dollars to our company, right? Because we’re performance based, and we help them grow by over 10 million. So to that company where we help them grow by 10 million, they paid us are in our company at close to a million dollars, we’re free to them, we’re not a cost, we’re not an expense, we’re an investment. Right. And we feel that we should be free, right, which is why we’re we come in as a fractional cmo and CEO team to help you get a marketing system and a selling system in place to help you grow and expand and get the system in place. So you’re freed up so for example, this client I’m talking about, and his wife, we got connection campaigns and, you know, literally we’ve gotten them, you know, campaigns online in different platforms that have gotten millions and millions of use with their very specific targeted, perfect clients, right, very strategically for pennies like couple cents of you at a time and then again, there’s a lot of other ways you can do this. To step three, he helped build a lead machine. Now they’re in a tight niche. They work with doctors, essentially, and medical practitioners. So people in the health space. So we help them move people from all these exterior platforms to ultimately move into their platform for creating relationships, deepening relationships, not being out here superficial, on some fanpage of some guy, but rather being in here that they can communicate, get a dialogue by email, that’s more intimate by phone, by text, and other other ways, right or even buy physical mail. Right. So when you get those in place, now you have the ability to use education based events to compress sales cycles, right? It’s like hyper dating, right? It’s like getting four or five dates, in an hour or two, especially done correctly, the way we show you. And, you know, this particular client, you know, we helped them get these things in place. And they hosted the largest event in the medical profession in their niche. You know, they had like, 8000 registrations for this, this event. Right. And by the way, you don’t need 8000 registrations to build successful campaigns and models and things that are going to work and help you be profitable. But it just happened to be their example. They were so excited. And and then they did, you know, seven figures in less than 90 days. Now, this is a highly above average example, I’ll even say for legal purposes, you’ll never likely do anything like that that quickly. Right, which is the same thing I said to them. But the bottom line is, is when you put these all five of these steps in place. So the fifth step optimize, we were generating so many leads, he was like we can’t my wife and I can’t handle these. So guess what we did we help them do, we help them get a sales team in place to handle the leads, and then ultimately replace them permanently. So the sales team now they’ve got, I don’t know, five or six total people assigned to their, to their, to the leads coming in every day to follow up and their business has grown exponentially. You know, we talked to the founder a little while ago, in one of our weekly huddles, and he said, Hey, Dan, I don’t know what to do with myself, I have so much extra free time. Right. And he was kind of kidding, of course. But now he’s able to put more time working on the business division of his business, he’s got these two other divisions he wants to create. So if you’re looking for a way to get free from the day to day, if you’re looking for a way to exit, if you’re looking for a way to potentially set your business up for a higher asset valuation, so you can sell it or go public, having a marketing system and selling system in place. And our unique method helps get that in place, and create something that also in and of itself becomes an asset that buyers want in their business, why we could call it in some ways the freedom model, but we call it the Breakthrough3x unique method. So apply it, use it. And you know, watch what happens whether you work with us or work with someone else, I encourage you make sure to get clear on your vision and growth plan, focus on connection campaigns to build trust, respect, build your own lead machine so that you’re deepening relationships and intimacy and connection with your potential clients create and host education based events regularly, right?

I encourage you to make sure to get clear on your vision and growth plan, focus on connection campaigns to build trust and respect, build your own lead machine so that you’re deepening relationships, intimacy, and connection with your potential… Click To Tweet

Education based events help compress sales cycles. And again, there’s dozens and dozens of different ways to do that. And number five, is optimize it, optimize it. So you can even get more freedom, right. And if you want more information about how we can help you I imagine somewhere here on the page, you can find details of how to do that. But whether you work with us or work with someone, make sure you use all five steps in growing, scaling and making a difference making a bigger impact. So people sometimes come to us and they go down. I don’t even understand what you do, like what do you what do you do for me? At the end of the day, you know the short answer, we have a whole suite of different programs or services, we custom tailor it to you. So our model is not a one size fits all. We’re a boutique business. It’s a very intimate relationship, we work as partners. Together, our model is also built on revenue share, which means the better you do, the better we do. Our highest value client, for example, has grown by over $10 million. And they’ve paid us as a company about a million dollars, right? We’re free to them. We want to be free to you. So without knowing your business today or where you want to go or all those sorts of things. It’d be hard for me to project for you which of our suite of services or products would be best for you. But here’s what you can know what do we deliver you at the end of the day number one is we will help you if we have a fit and we’re in alignment together and we move forward we’re going to help you as a fractional cmo and CEO team. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to help you get a marketing and selling system in place to bring you a steady flow of new leads new clients It’s on a daily basis, so that ultimately your system that we set up for you, right frees you up so that you can focus more on what you want to focus on whether that’s get more involved in your business or build out new divisions. Or maybe you have a dream, like some of our clients where you want to sell your business one day, right? A marketing and selling system builds the asset valuation, or maybe you want to go public, having a system in place where you’re freed up gives you the ability to set the stage to go public, right. So just depending on your situation, we customize it, what I recommend, if you really want to understand how we might be able to help you somewhere on here on the page, you can click a link, that will give you the ability to take advantage of a consultation with one of our advisors on the team. And what we’ll do is we’ll identify where you’re at where you want to go, we’ll talk about some of the ways that we can help support you. And again, if there’s a fit, we’ll actually share a custom blueprint with you to show you how we can help you and the different programs and suite of offerings that we have available that can so click that link below, somewhere on the page here. And we’ll look forward to finding out more about you and how we can help. You know sometimes people ask me, they go Dan, like, who is the perfect client for Breakthrough3x? What I would say is a couple factors. Number one, we got to be aligned in our values. That’s the most important piece, and I’ll get to that in a second. Number two, is that you really have a desire to go beyond the money of your business. And that’s to focus on, you know, the impact you’re making. Right? And or what we call it the ripple effect, what’s the ripple effect of what it is that you do in the world? So the ripple effect, is really critical. So with that being said, here’s what we look for. Number one is you’re a founder and CEO of a business. And our three core values as a company, number one, hyper growth minded, right? What does this mean, at minimum, you want to grow by 2x. Most of the time, the types of visionary creators, founders we work with are like, they’re almost crazy, that they want to grow by 1020 30, they know a lot of the languaging they use, they go I want to dominate my industry. Now you don’t have to be that extreme. But it’s a hyper growth minded mindset of growth and stretching boundaries and looking at things differently, right. Where we don’t work well is company who just kind of want to test the waters and want to grow a little bit, you know, that sort of thing. That’s not a good fit for us. So if you’re an emerging company, that really is hungry to grow to x minimum, right? And or you’re that extreme business owner and founder that wants to grow 1020 30 or dominate your industry. That’s a that’s likely a good start. The second core value of our company is is collaborative and teamwork oriented. Now, what does this mean? None of us have all the answers. And as we work together, which we do, we come on board and work as your growth team every single week. Right? And so we have a lot of conversation, it’s very high touch, it’s very personal, in our relationship, so we have to enjoy the collaboration. Now, here’s what we do know, is friction, creates diamonds, doesn’t it? Irritated oysters, creates pearls, doesn’t it? So collaboration doesn’t mean there won’t be some level of friction or conflict. But we have to be teamwork oriented, we have to be back to back in our relationship. Right. And you know, when we work with a client, we actually put everyone on probation for the first 90 days to verify that our values are in alignment. So the first one, again, is hyper growth. Number two is collaborative and teamwork oriented, right. And when mistakes happen, which they will from both sides, how we deal with it, usually we can learn more about someone’s true spirit of collaboration, and also whether they’re growth minded or hyper growth minded in about five minutes of adversity versus when things are great. Right. So that being said, you know, if you’re a team working in collaborative, you, this could be a great place to work together. Number three, is contribution based, right contribution based again, it’s more than about money. So we call this the ripple effect. So what is your ripple effect? We want to know what your ripple effect is, the impact you’re making, the difference that you’re looking to make in the world, right? We want to work over the next few years with 1000 founders and CEOs, who through those 1000 want to impact over a billion people that make the world a better place to help transform lives, with their products, with their services, with their tech with their applications, etc. their resources, their education and a whole lot more. So. If you are a founder, that’s hyper growth minded, if you are a founder who really values teamwork and collaboration, and if you’re a founder CEO that really wants to have that ripple effect to make a bigger contribution. Let’s see if we’re a good fit. Let’s have a conversation. So let’s have a chat, you can speak to one of our advisors and, you know, we’ll sit down with you identify where you are, look at where you want to go. If we’re a fit, we’ll let you know, if we’re not a fit, we’ll look to get you connected to a resource that is a fit for you, versus us. It’s all about alignment. At the end of the day. We’re we only work with a handful of companies at a given time, because this is a hybrid performance based business model. So we want to make sure that we’re good fit. And if we’re not, we’ll look to get you connected somewhere. So take advantage, schedule a conversation, let’s have a chat. Let’s see if we’re a good fit and go from there. One of my favorite client examples is someone who is a good good friend today. And I, you know, think when you help people transform their businesses, they become even better friends, or we like to think so. And so he’s the head of a mastermind, a company that runs a mastermind, which has become one of the greatest masterminds in the world for entrepreneurs, in fact, and so when when I sat down with him over lunch one day next to his office in Tempe, Arizona, I remember sitting down and saying, you know, like, what do you want to accomplish? And he said, Well, Dan, right now we have about 67 members in this, you know, $25,000 program. And I said, Well, what’s your goal with that? And he said, Well, I’d love to get to 100. I love to get to 100 new members, and what else would you like? And you know, he started going into more detail about how he wanted to build out something he called his annual event. And he wanted to also start a community that was a smaller community, but it was a higher value on in a range of about 100,000 a year. And then he also had a bigger vision about, you know, wanting to change the conversation about something that’s so critical and impacts all of us, which is around addiction. I was like, wow, this is an after we assessed his business and where he was and where he wanted to go. And what we do, said, Hey, we can help you, we can help you would you like our help? Would you like our help. And in fact, I’ll never forget it. I gave him two envelopes. In our, in our custom blueprint, I said, one envelope here. And this, this framework comes from a friend of mine named Joe Polish, he says you can have an elf business easy, lucrative and fun. Or you can have a half business. And so this particular client, I gave him two envelopes. One envelope was a green envelope and said, If you want an elf business, easy, lucrative and fun, open this envelope, if you want to continue to run a half business hard, annoying, lame and frustrated over in this envelope. So that particular client chose the green envelope, and we started working together. And what ended up happening is, you know, wasn’t easy. In the beginning, you know, there was a lot of learning curve, but this client had so many amazing assets to work with. And you know, that a podcast, they were running, you know, they had, they had a great reputation, they had a great bed, they were already a very successful company and so many different ways. We just looked at it and said, we can make it even better. Long. In the short, we worked together for a couple years. And we didn’t hit our goals, though, we didn’t hit our goals. We didn’t hit the goal of going from 67 to 100. We actually helped him get to 250. His annual event, the year before we started working together had like seven paid attendees. Let’s just double it and say it was 2020 paid attendees. We help grow that event, to it’s selling out every single year with hundreds of people, and an overflow area and a waiting list and all these different sorts of things. He ultimately started that higher level community for $100,000 a year. And when he launched it, he had over 20 Some people join it just like that. He’s now gone on and been able to have an impact and creating a platform for addictive addiction. And he’s changing the conversation and just watching him be able to, you know, live in this place. And this spirit is such a joy. His his goal was never to like sell his business. His goal was to use his business as a vehicle to make a bigger impact. that ripple effect we talk about his ripple effect is huge. The indirect byproducts of how many people he’ll make a difference for in the with addiction in their families is priceless. Right? And it’s such a joy to be able to offer a system for marketing and selling that helps get founders freedom. Many times people say Well, Dan, like can you help like my new business? Right? And you know the answer again, it really depends on your situation. But one of my favorite stories of a client we worked with here not too long ago, I’m going to call him Bruce, the artist. And Bruce, the artists came to us like a lot of clients and they were you know, and he was like, Dan, I’m overwhelmed. I’m confused. I’ve been following all these different groups and people and like, I’m trying to put all of this in place and it’s just not working. I’m stuck. I’m stuck in a big way. And we say and I said Hey Bruce Ty Whoa, timeout, if we can help show you a way where you can not worry about any of the tech that you’re working with, and we can help you have the impact and the ripple effect that you really want. And he said yes. And we got working together. And you know, so we shared with Bruce how to do an education based event pretty quickly, because it’s something love because I said, you know, Bruce, what do you really love doing right? Because he’s an artist. And this is a great metaphor, because whatever it is, you do the passion, you have his his art, he was trying to shoehorn squeeze a round peg in a square hold to be a good marketer to be good at building a marketing and selling system. So well, Bruce, what if we could free you up and you could just focus on what you do. And we can help build and implement a system long in the short we got working and his very first education based event he hosted with no fancy pants tech, right? No funnels, no this no that no other none of these fancy pants integrations that everybody says you have to have in place, or you need to have in place. We simplified it all for him. He took it off his plate. He also did his first education based event. He did that he loves to teach. In his very first event, he enrolled five new clients into his coaching business, which was amazing. And when we regrouped and said, Bruce, what did you like most about that? He said, Well, I love teaching. I said, Well, what would you like to do, because I’d love to do this every week, for the next couple months, said, Bruce, let’s help you get that system to do it. And that’s what he did long and the short of it is after 30 days, he was doing a weekly education based event with no fancy pants tag, none of the integrating week handled everything for him his first 30 days in his business in this in this following our processes, he had over 39 new coaching clients. In his business. After 90 days, he had over 117 new coaching clients in his coaching business. And he had also built a recurring revenue model of over $4,000 a month, which for him as an artist was life changing. Since that time, we’ve also helped implement more tech stuff and more simplicity and more automation. But see, the bottom line is you don’t need all of that stuff. But what you need is the right marketing and selling system. And even more importantly, you don’t need to be the one doing it. You can bring in a partner that can help support you to get those things done to free you up to get a marketing system and selling system in place to help you get more leads more sales, more revenue, more growth, more profits, and most importantly, so you can have a bigger ripple effect impact ripple effect in your business.

You can bring in a partner that can help support you to get those things done, to free you up, to get a marketing system and selling system in place, to help you get more leads more sales, more revenue, more growth, more profits, and most… Click To Tweet

Outro 52:44

Thanks for listening to this episode of Growth to Freedom.com. Are you struggling to get a steady flow of new clients every day? Or maybe hit a plateau or hit a wall and growing your business? Let’s help you solve this problem today. Let’s review your business and have a conversation. Do that for free today at breakthroughstrategycall.com That’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. In addition, if you’re looking for a simple way to implement some of what we’ve been talking about in today’s episode, I want to encourage you to get our free Small Business toolkit. You can get that at activate.breakthrough3x.com That’s activate.breakthrough3x.com. If you’d like access to the special resources and all the show notes for this special episode, make sure to visit growthtofreedom.com