7 Tools To Maximize Momentum and Get Your Team Taking Ownership in Your Business | 343

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Dan Kuschell

January 24, 2022

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:

  • How Dan Kuschell’s growth sessions have helped business leaders achieve amazing breakthroughs
  • Dan’s tool for getting clear on your vision, purpose, values, and mission
  • The #1 reason small businesses fail in the first five years — and how to avoid it
  • Why it’s so crucial for entrepreneurs and owners to identify their big wins and significant lessons
  • How to conduct a SWOT analysis for your business
  • Dan explains why implementation can be more critical than new ideas

In this episode…

What is the key to creating a high-growth company — without handling the minutiae of day-to-day operations?

According to Dan Kuschell, you can achieve more freedom by gaining clarity about your business and developing a team that knows how to lead. And, he has the formula to help you get started. With the seven tools that make up his growth blueprint, you can streamline your growth and generate maximum momentum for your team and business. So, what are the first steps to greater freedom, impact, and success?

In this episode of Growth to Freedom, Dan Kuschell outlines the seven tools for gaining more growth and momentum in your business. He shares his secret sauce for achieving freedom as a business leader, training your team to lead, and developing a growth blueprint that takes your company to the next level. Tune in for this and so much more!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

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

Dan Kuschell 0:03

Welcome to growthtofreedom.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. Wow, this time of year is exciting. On top of that, we’re one of the most exciting times in history for Small Business Owners. You know, these last few weeks, we’ve been working with a lot of our private clients, to help them through our unique process of what we would refer to as a growth strategy, which essentially a half day or a day, depending on the type of client we have, where we take them, and their team through our unique process on how to be able to go out and you know, create amazing momentum, right, essentially, to lead to a high performing team that runs the business without the founder, right. And so one of my clients said to me, Dan, like you really should share your outline your outline, would provide a ton of clarity, it would create a lot of confidence, it would create a lot of certainty. And it’s one of the most unique things I’ve ever said. And then a quick story. It reminds me of a good friend, maybe you know, Ms. Denise Goswell, now, she is one of the top IP attorneys in the country and just has a fascinating business and does a lot of fascinating work with her programs and such. And I had taken a group called Genius Network and their team through a quarterly session like this a growth session. And she said, Wow, that was the most powerful meeting that I think I’ve ever sat through, to do planning for a business that I’ve ever seen. So I want to share with you the seven tools, this isn’t all of them. But this will give you, you know, a good snapshot, if you’re looking if you’re at a place where maybe you’re struggling to come up with a way to get you and your team on the same page, you’re looking for a way to create massive momentum, you’re the founder and creator and you’re wearing a lot of hats or whatever, and you want to free yourself up to get your team to run with you. Right. And in some cases with the right team run ahead of you. That’s what this is designed to do. So this segment is titled seven tools for maximum momentum and to lead to a high performance quarterly team growth session. Right. And why this is important, is it is really geared to give you amazing clarity in your business, right? Is that what you want, not just for you, but also your team to get people on the same page, right to create team unity and collaboration. To get a team, maybe your team to help you implement faster, easier, better, right? So you can move from a technician in your business maybe wearing so many hats, like a lot of our clients when before they start working with us are doing where they’re in the business so often right to where they become the real owner of the business, not like the job creator for themselves, but they’re the owner of the business, right? They have the freedom to delegate, they have the freedom to work on their business a whole lot more, in some cases get free entirely from the day to day, right. And why this works is you know, this will go I’m I can’t remember who said it, it might have been Joe Polish I think I first heard this from but I don’t know that it’s his quote. But, you know, if they plan the fight, they won’t fight the plan and how true that really is.

So when I want to introduce you to the seven tools you can use today to streamline your growth, right. And so I’m going to go through these relatively quickly. And I’m also going to show you some examples, because we’ve been doing this for a while. So I pulled some old, old things here from some of our past clients and our stuff from you know, three, four years ago, maybe even longer, in some cases, to just show you right to give you and we’re not going to go through all of these. But ideally, you get the seven tools and the concept for yourself. And oh, by the way, if you want help implementing some of these things, we make it real simple. Let’s talk about your business. We can help do this for you, as well as work with you to help get a steady flow of clients every day gets you free from the day to day, right. And we become like a co pilot for you and your company where we act as like I guess an outsourced see mo team chief marketing officer as well as a CEO team, right so that you can get a system in place that brings you clients daily without you right and it gets you freed so you can focus on more of the things you really love. If you’d like to talk about that how we might be able to help you as part of our work together. Many times we’ll help our companies help our clients set this up so that they can get a rhythm get momentum get in full momentum and it’s fun when you know it really works. It’s almost like a great. I think you may know if you’ve been following me for any length I coach high school football and you know it’s like a huddle. It’s like a meet a daily meeting. These things work in business too. So a lot of sports stuff works in business, we found so I want to introduce you to the seven tools. So you’re gonna want to grab a pen, you might want to come back to this. So the first part of this step is getting clear on your vision, your values, your purpose and your mission.

The first part of this step is getting clear on your vision, your values, your purpose, and your mission. - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

Now one of my favorite tools, because you can go into a lot more detail on this Cameron Herold has a process he calls vision, Vivid Vision, he wrote a great book and pick it up on Amazon. He’s got one of the smartest people around who’s an amazing copywriter helps build companies brands and copy. They have a process for their company, Jennifer Hudye and her company actually take people and develop the vivid vision and then expand on it and you know, add images, graphics, and a whole lot more really bring it to life, which is amazing, right. And I recommend that when you’re ready, in the meantime, you might want to work with something now in a previous session or previous episode, you can go find where we talk about the business playbook. And this was actually all the way back in 2017, when we had done this, right, where it’s filled out, but essentially what it is you’ve got values. So we’ve got our three core values, which our values have not changed, because, you know, it’s it’s just been, it’s an alignment, right? So we know it’s an alignment. It’s hyper growth oriented, collaborative teamwork, as well as contribution and impact driven, right, then it’s our focus, like, what is our focus, right, as a company, right. And this is where you get into your mission, your purpose and your focus, and then your future focus, what are you building towards as a business. And then there are some marketing plans. So again, when we work with our clients, we actually give you this in a previous segment, you can go find in our in our episodes business playbook. And we will if you send us an email at [email protected] will actually give you access to this tool, right as a starting point, which is a great place to go.

The step second step working in this process is marketing plan blueprint, right. As the old saying goes, most people don’t plan to fail, they just fail the plan. Right? The Small Business Administration some years ago, I don’t want to get the dates wrong, but it was a handful of years ago did a study and they found that like over 90% of businesses fail in their first five years. And the number Do you know the number one reason? The number one reason do you know the number one reason they found that most businesses fail is because most of them don’t have a marketing plan blueprint. Or they have an outdated marketing plan blueprint. So we work with our clients to help install this. So this is an example from a couple of our clients that I pulled, I think one of these was 2019. And this one was 2000. At the end of 2018. Right, but it’s a marketing plan. But this is our old logo, by the way. But essentially, there’s 20 questions. Now, literally, you can go into a lot more depth and 20 questions, but I’ve been doing this for 30 years. So we found the 20 questions to really bring clarity to the founder to their team, you know, around products, the problems they solve and a whole lot more. So there’s 20 questions. Now, again, we have this tool that we will give you called the marketing plan blueprint that it’s great to fill this out ahead of time and then go into the meeting, which is really, really powerful, right. And don’t be one of those businesses like the small business. Like, ideally, you update this every single year, it’s just a great, great thing to be able to do. So that’s number two, the marketing plan blueprint. Number three, we have a tool called the focus multiplier. And this is an example of the focus multiplier, right? And this is a tool we created a few years ago, like what are your wins this past quarter? What are you most excited about next quarter? Why are these important to you and what it has to happen to achieve it. And then there’s, you do ratings on these cycles of business development, right, which is really, really powerful. So you know, and again, whether you use a tool like this, you create your own, but these are the keys, the wins? What are you excited about why and what has to happen? Right? Those are just four amazing questions to be asking yourself to be able to work with. And ideally, you really want to tune into your wins, you know, and part of the reason of this, here’s a damaging confession. I don’t know if you know anybody like me, but as a driven type person, I’ve had a tendency to be a perfectionist, which you know, is a gift and it can be a big curse, right? It’s not easy for me to give a pat on my back. Also, because I can find, usually can find a lot of fault in things no matter how great things I can find something wrong. And so I’ve had to build better habits, better rituals, and I’ve been working on this for a long, long time, like 30 years. And so this process doing this process quarterly at minimum, sometimes even monthly, this one particular tool will focus on identify your wins. It’s so refreshing to look back, you know, there’s a quote from Bill Gates. He says, you know, we underestimate or we overestimate what we can do in a year and underestimate what we can do in 10. And it’s so true and the same thing goes with wins. So many times we underestimate the wins we really collected and given like, a given month, given week, a given year. So I encourage you to tune in, like, what are the if there was one question that you could ask right now, it would be what are your What are your wins? What are your wins? And as a result of this focus multiplier, ideally, it helps you get brain clarity. What are some of the key focuses that you’ve got as well.

That leads to number four? Right, where, essentially, it’s two questions, you know, what did we accomplish? Right? So this relates to those wins, like, what did we accomplish? And then as an important question to add on to this is like, what have we learned? What did we learn from this? Right? Today, when we were working with one of our private clients for, you know, a good part of the day, you know, we were going through their data, we were going through their campaigns, and we were looking like, you know, that a campaign that, you know, generated a couple million dollars in revenue this year. Right. And they had this other hidden campaign, that was a certain type of model, where on the front end of it, it was almost two to one profit, low risk, high reward. And essentially, they have an ability to generate 1000s and 1000s of leads a month for free, because it’s profitable on the front end. And they weren’t and hadn’t been leveraging it. So we helped expose that by looking at what did we accomplish breaking it down? What did we learn, we learned? Well, we need to exploit this particular campaign a whole lot more, which has been underleveraged up to this point, right? So these tools give us an ability to bring clarity and optics to be able to do just that. So what did you accomplish? Right? What have you learned? Ideally, you’re you’re going through this with me as we go through this. Step five is what is called a SWOT analysis combined with you know, an assessment, I want to give you a couple of questions to be thinking about in your assessment. So SWOT what does it stand for? It stands for believe Vern Harnish created this years ago, but I could be wrong. So this is strengths, right? strengths? What are your strengths as a business? What are your strengths? You can isolate this in a division, what are the strengths of our finance, department operations, fulfillment, coaching, if you have coaching, what are our strengths and fulfillment? Shipping, and the list goes marketing, sales, and as a team, as leaders, etc. So there are a lot of layers to this, depending on how myopic you want to get, what are our weaknesses? Again, you can go per category per division, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities. Great question is, what are our greatest opportunities to leverage especially as you look at this from a marketing point of view, or a growth point of view, the growth team so to speak, your What are your greatest opportunities that you can be focused again, when, you know, going back to the example of the client we met with earlier, you know, again, breaking it all down, breaking out, the campaign’s we knew like how much they spent, how much revenue they generate, how much profitability, so they’re like, oh, my gosh, look at these opportunities that are here that we can leverage even better. Right. That’s what this this type of exercise gives us the ability to do. So you got strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and then threats. You know, sometimes, as a founder, I found myself in my early years of business, having my head in the sand, you know, trying to be the eternal optimist. Oh, it’s gonna work. It’s gonna work next week. It’ll be better next week, next week, next week. And next thing, you know, next week turns in three years from now. And we’re behind the eight ball, right? In my business, career damaging confession, you know, I crashed a couple companies, I’ve been through bankruptcy. That’s no fun. Why did that happen? Because of not getting real. The first progress starts by telling the truth. So one of the things to do is to anticipate the threats that you might have in your business and be real about it get real about what those threats could be, could it be algorithm change? Could it be a shift in the economy, which are two big things going on? are coming very soon? Are you prepared for that? Are you anticipating that like what pivots can you make? What things can you leverage what strengths weaknesses opportunities to offset some of those threats? Competition is another threat? Someone coming into your marketplace that’s better funded? What are those threats? So how do you look at overcoming it? So it also brings a level of calm, it brings a level of peace, it brings a level of certainty and confidence and a whole lot more when you can get real about what those threats really are, versus having high anxiety. Right? So SWOT Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities.

So again, we have a tool with this when we take clients through it, this was there’s no date except 2018. So this was an example of strengths, weaknesses, which is part of the exercise, and then leading to the opportunities and threats with this particular client that we walk through this right. And what are those for you? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses, what are your opportunities, what are your threats, and that leads to the back end of this particular exercise, which is the assessment part of it. Right now with the assessment? There are a few key questions. I just want to write these down because these are really powerful to be thinking of what’s working right now. Right, what’s working what’s not working? Right? And again, the first progress starts by telling the truth. Right?

What's working right now? What's not working? The first progress starts by telling the truth. - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

So once you go through those, actually, and there is a flow to this, there is a rhyme and a reason that the flow of doing these piece by piece, the way we unfolds, really create some magic from what people tell us, what’s not working? What are our strengths, right? What are our weaknesses? What are our opportunities to leverage? What are our greatest threats and risks in the business? And that leads to these next two questions, right? If you were the CEO of the business, what would be the top three to five things that you would do? And you would implement? And so you get those listed out? Right, you get those listed out? And then lastly, is what do you think are the top five focuses that we should have? And again, this can be per division, like if it’s sales, if it’s marketing, those are two separate divisions. If it’s finance, if it’s operations, again, you can go division by division, you know, one of our clients back part of this was stimulated because one of our clients, Mike had reached out and he said, Hey, you have this, you know, a fascinating, awesome process that you’ve taken our team through, Could you outline it’s for my wife’s company. And so I sent them the outline. And, you know, this person is not someone who gives a lot of wows, you know, to people, because he’s one of the top experts in the world. He’s built two companies over 30 million years, like one of the smartest people in the world. He’s got processes upon processes, which is why he’s been able to sell to businesses very successfully. But when he got him, he’s like, Wow, thank you. Right. So this process can work. It can work for you. So anticipating, like, what do you think the five focuses could be?

And here’s the reality, where does the rubber meet the road? So you don’t need new ideas? Like, you need a new idea? Like you need a hole in your head? Is that true? In all likelihood, it’s true, right? You know, ideas are a dime a dozen. But what do we need, we need implementation, which is where this last or second from last tool kicks in, which is what we call the implementation blueprint.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. But what do we need? We need implementation. - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

Now, this is from 2018. So like three and a half or whatever, years ago, when we did this? Yeah, over three years, three, oh, coming up on four years ago. So what you identify are your top five needle mover, right, you identify your top five needle movers to work on now this can be categorized by year it can be categorized by quarter. Usually, those are the two frames that we encourage our clients to work with. Because it just more easy to eat an elephant one bite at a time, what’s first, what’s next, what’s first, what’s next, really powerful. And then what am I committed to implement in the next 30 days, seven days, one to three days. And a little bit more. So that tool is a really powerful tool to work with. And that leads to this last thing is reverse engineering your plan. Right reverse engineering, your plan is really, really important and critical. And being able to, you know, roll with that plan is even better. And so basically, what you do is you take each of your five key steps, and I wish I had printed it out here. And I actually forgot to be able to do that. And I want to give you the questions that go with it. So when you identify like your number one, number two, number three, number four, or five focuses, now what you do is you have your team break this down. So by the way, this is a formula to train your team on how to scope and run projects, how to lead for you so that you can get out of the day to day.

This is a formula to train your team on how to scope and run projects — how to lead for you so that you can get out of the day-to-day. - Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

So the first thing is is identifying what is it? So what is the focus? Number two is what’s the purpose of this? Like, why do we want to do this? What is the due date? This is so incredibly important. What’s the due date? What’s the deadline for this? That leaves them the next couple pieces to lay out in your in your map project tool? What is the ideal outcome we want from this? Like, you know, best case scenario? What’s the ideal outcome next? What’s the difference? This makes versus not? Right? What’s the worst result? From this? What’s the worst result from this? Right? What’s the best result? And then what are the what is the success criterion some milestones now one of the things I like to add in these success criterion milestones is this. What do we anticipate the ROI and the revenue to be from this either directly or indirectly, right? Because not all things are revenue generators, but we can you know, retention can save money. So it can be a revenue saver, you can also give it like an arbitrary revenue value, if there was a revenue value on it, like what’s peace of mind worth, what’s freedom worth, etc, right? So you can kind of, you know, start to put some numbers in categories to this, that, you know, makes sense where, you know, the rubber meets the road coming down to revenue in your business, right? So I encourage you to be thinking and the other way to think about it also so it’s not just what is it game, but all Also, what’s it cost us if we don’t put this in place? What’s it cost us if we don’t put this in place and be thinking of those couple items to?

Then last but not least, which is also one, the in project development project, you know, project work, project management, project coordinating, that seems to get missed a lot, which is why we’ve got a built into this tool, which is what are the anticipated resources, you will need to get this done? Like in our conversation today with this client I had been referring to who was a big part of the instigator of creating this, look, this overview. We were, you know, running down the road. And we asked the question, well, what resources do you need to get this done? And they really hadn’t thought about it? Well, what’s on your wish list that you would make this easier? So you could get it done and get it done on time? Avoid any delays? And as we scale this, because we’re always thinking of things, you know, like what happens when we grow this by 10 to 20? times? What will we need? Right? So it’s different layers of thinking on that. So when you put all these seven tools together, you walk out of this with your custom growth blueprint at the end of the day? And what does that give you? What does that mean for you, you get freedom as the founder, CEO and owner of your business, instead of you being a technician, it gives you clarity and get you out of the day to day, right. And, again, this is just a snapshot. But I will encourage you either create versions of your own tools, or if you want to connect with us to see how we can help you through this process. And or, if you’re working with us, we do this with you, as well as just part of the process. In fact, our kickoff session that we do has almost all of this built into it. When we kick off literally this is part of our kickoff. This is part of our secret sauce. You know, McDonald’s has their secret sauce. This is part of our secret sauce, you know, our clients who asked, you know, why do you have such a track record of helping some high profile experts, some of the biggest names in the world get results in success. A big part of this is we put the work in upfront, right makes it easier moving down the road, right. And, again, most people don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan. So this is a great growth blueprint. You know, whether you insert parts of this or all of it, or look to have us help you implement it. If you do want more help. If you want to learn more about how we can help you, you’ll reach out schedule a time where we can talk, learn more about your business, review your situation, review the size, review your goals, all those sorts of things, see if we’re a good fit. If we’re not a good fit, by the way, we’ll look to get you connected to someone else who is. you can take the first step by setting up a conversation, having a talk, we can go you can go to breakthroughstrategycall.com, that’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. And all in all, here’s my hope for you. I hope that you take action with what I just shared with you, I hope that you apply what I’ve shared with you, because I know what it will mean for you. It will mean that you and your team have an ability to be build momentum, build massive growth, build a bigger impact, have a bigger reach, be able to make a bigger contribution doing what it is that you do. Right. And it starts with having a great growth blueprint, right and great growth blueprint. These give you the tools to do that. So apply these seven tools at least one or two or three or four. How would those three or four impact you let alone if you had all seven of these bullets in your gun so to speak to work with so apply it take action and then let me know how it works for you. I’d love to hear from you. You want to go deeper, talk about your business, how we might be able to help at a deeper level. Again, you can go to breakthroughstrategycall.com, that’s breakthroughstrategycall.com. Enjoy the day, seize the day. Make it a great week and we’ll see you in another segment coming soon. Bye for now.

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