HyperGrowth: The 5 Step Method To Triple Your Impact And Business [Podcast 250]

 

All businesses experience highs and lows. If you feel like you’re hitting a wall, or stuck, or like you’re the worlds best kept secret, then this episode is for you.

In this episode, I will share with you the five-step method to triple your business.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• The # 1 Planning Method to Grow Your Business (HINT:  It’s not a business plan)
• How to Differentiate Yourself In the Market (find out what a $100 MILLION dollar company did to stand out that you can use too)
• The simple approach to package your services and products to be 10 to 20 times more valuable to your clients.
• Simple, easy to model campaigns to attract, keep, and convert more clients
• The #1 Step to take to double the value of your business and turn it into an asset that gives you FREEDOM…

And more…

—

Listen to the podcast here:

HyperGrowth: The 5 Step Method To Triple Your Impact And Business [Podcast 250]

Have you gotten into a place in your business where you feel like you hit a wall? Maybe you’re suffering from burnout or overwhelm. Maybe your sales have flatlined or plateaued. Maybe you’re concerned about where the economy is going and how you’re going to keep the competitive advantage. Maybe you’re at a place where you feel like you’re spending a whole lot more dollars now to generate a client than you did a few months ago. If any of those are true for you, you’re going to love this segment.

This segment is called Hypergrowth: The Five-Step Method to Triple Your Business. This has been developed through working with thousands of clients over the years. What do you think you would learn if you had a chance to review over 4,000 businesses in the last few years? Not only review those businesses but also interview over 1,000 of the founders, the CEOs, the people that are running those companies, the entrepreneur running those companies. They’re creating the momentum. You were able to ask them, “What’s working? What’s not? Where are you stuck? What’s your biggest challenge? What’s keeping you up at night?” That’s what we did.

Grab a pen and a piece of paper, jot down some notes. I’d treat this almost like an advisor session, a consultant sitting down with you. If you want to get access to the full video of this, I would encourage you to go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com. You’re going to want to read through the end because we’ve got samples to show you. We’ve got case studies to reveal to you. We’ve got tools to give you. If you want access to those and all of the tools and resources as part of this, make sure to read to the very end.

Step One: Businesses Don’t Plan To Fail, They Fail To Plan

Let’s dive into the five-step method. Actually, it’s six steps. There’s a bonus step. Let’s talk about the first. There’s an old saying that most people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan. Let’s do a quick assessment. Let’s take an assessment of your business and I want to encourage you to do this in three key areas. When we work with our private clients, we expand this into multiple areas. However, let’s start with three core areas of your business. If you were to rate your business on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being lowest, 10 being highest, how would you rate the sales system in your company? That would be the first step.

Next, how would you rate the marketing system or process that you have running your business? Lastly, how would you rate your hiring system and hiring process on a scale of 1 to 10? No matter where you are, the key is the first progress starts by telling the truth, which is a quote I hear from Dan Sullivan. I believe it’s an AA quote, but it starts by telling the truth. In order to get you from where you are to where you want to go, it helps to have a good reference point. We want to talk about helping you build your plan. I don’t know if you realize this, but there’s a big problem now in business.

The things were relevant and hot a year ago, they’re outdated now. Market shifts and it’s going to shift. It’s predicted that the economy is going to shift in the next several months. Are you going to be prepared for what’s coming? No matter what happens, whether it’s an up economy or a down economy, you should be in the best position to be able to grow, build, scale and create freedom in your business. That’s what it’s all about. I want to encourage you, if you’re looking for a way to make the shifts in your business, let’s look at getting your plan in place. With each of the steps, let’s go deeper into your plan. Let’s talk about where do you want to be. Let’s get creative a little bit. Let’s get a canvas out and think through, what do you want in your business?

Dan Sullivan calls this the R-Factor Question. If we were to sit down one year from now and wave a magic wand, you and I were sitting down over a coffee, a tea or a cocktail and reviewing your year, what do you feel would have to happen for you to be able to get the results that you’re excited, happy and satisfied with? What would have to happen for you to feel happy and satisfied with your progress? What would that look like? What would that taste like? What would you be doing? What would you be doing more of? What would you be doing less of? Would you be working more on the business? Where would you be working more on creative things versus administrative things? What would those be? Would your hours be shifted? Would you have built boundaries to spend more time with your family? Think about those.

Let’s go deeper with your plan. What’s the one thing that you need the most help with? Think that through. If that problem, challenge or opportunity were solved, it would transform your business and your life to give you a bigger and better business while also creating freedom. Because it’s frustrating when you operate a business sometimes. How great would it be to put a plan together as it relates to having more in your life? Wouldn’t that be great? What’s the one thing that you need help with?

Let’s go a little bit deeper into developing your plan. This is like a coaching session. If I were sitting down with you individually, this would be something we would do. Let’s go through it. What’s getting in the way of you being able to accomplish these things? What’s getting in the way of your sales, your marketing, your hiring being at a ten? What’s getting in the way of having the satisfaction, happiness and progress that you want and solving the one thing one year from now? What’s getting in the way of you making that happen? Make a couple of notes. Is it time? Is it money? Is it your own mindset? Is your own limiting beliefs back? Let’s go deeper yet. Is it possible that maybe you’ve got some limiting beliefs or some belief issues around success and money that’s getting in the way?

You’d be shocked by the thousands of companies, entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs, maybe like you that we’ve interviewed. One of the biggest things that’s getting in their way is them sabotaging success. It takes time to pull that out but that’s the reality. You’re not alone if you’re feeling that. You’re not alone if in some way you’re looking going, “Am I good enough at this?” That’s why having a good plan can help you. Ideally, this gives you a good framework to start thinking through. This is a great exercise to do with your team. This is a great exercise to do every quarter, to sit down and tune-in and fine-tune your business and come up with your best plan.

Let’s talk about ways to develop a plan as you work to help your clients. You help to go out and provide services and products that change the world. We’re in one of the most exciting times in human history. Let’s go beyond your plan. Let’s talk about the plan of how you can impact more clients. By the way, if we haven’t met before, my name is Dan Kuschell. I’m the Founder of Breakthrough3X. I’ve had the good fortune to coach over 5,000 founders, CEOs and business owners. I’ve had eleven companies over the years, which also means I’ve had some failures along the way. I don’t want to paint this picture that everything’s been awesome all the time. I’ve crashed three companies. I’ve been through bankruptcy and divorce because I didn’t get it right. I’d like to think I’ve learned a lot from those.

I’d like to help you avoid some of those common mistakes too. I believe we can help you with some of the strategies that we’ll reveal to you that most experts aren’t willing to share. We’ll reveal to you new insights and new strategies that will transform the way you think about building, growing and scaling your business and most importantly, to create freedom. It’s one thing to build a business. We know a lot of people who build a business that are married to that business more than they are to their family and kids. How would you like to have the freedom in your business to be more out of the day-to-day, more in your genius zone and more in your sweet spot? The strategies we’re going to cover are going to show you how to be able to do that.

Tell the truth in order to go from where you are to where you want to go. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

Along the way, I’ve also had some successes. Having built eleven companies, we’ve had a handful of seven-figure and eight-figure companies. I was able to sell a couple of companies. I bought and sold companies along the way. It’s been an incredible journey. I’ve learned a lot from that. It’s not just building and growing a company but building an asset. There’s a difference between a company and an asset that you can exit. It’s either exiting for freedom or exiting to sell or both. How great would it be? The hypergrowth five-step method we’re revealing to you will give you some of the insights to be able to do that.

BOTE (Breakthrough, Outcome, Transformation, Experience)

Let’s get in the minds of your client. We call this the BOTE. The big problem we see is most people fall in love with their product. That includes me. Over the years, when I had some failures, I fell in love with my product and my service. That’s my damaging confession. That’s the truth. I thought it was going to be the holy grail of the world. Unfortunately, the clients and the marketplace didn’t agree. The marketplace will vote for our products and our services by paying us if they love it. If they don’t, that means we’re not hitting the mark. A way to be able to hit the mark more often than not is this framework called BOTE. It’s the breakthrough, outcome, transformation and experience that you create. Whatever your products are, you might have one product, a core product, a signature product, maybe it’s your highest value product, your highest value clients or it could be a series of products, whatever those are, one or many, you want to think about each one in terms of the BOTE.

What is the breakthrough this product or service creates for my client? What is the outcome it creates, the transformation? Think of how do you communicate that to your clients in their language? Do you want to know a secret on how to be able to get that language? Here is a simple tip to be able to do that. Think of who are your five hero clients for each of the products you offer. Start with one. Don’t get too crazy because then you’ll get an overwhelm and get stuck. We don’t want to see that happen. Pick one signature product and go, “Who are my 5 to 10 best hero clients?” You interview them. You’re going to make this interview not about you. You’re going to make it about them. Pick clients who maybe you jive with. They enhance you and you enhance them. You appreciate and utilize each other. You would refer to each other, even if there were no financial incentives. There’s been a financial reward as a result of them exchanging and doing business with you and vice versa and they love your products. Interview 5 to 10 of your hero clients is what we’re calling it and interview them. You want to ask them a series of questions.

On our site at Breakthrough3X, we have twelve questions to be able to ask your clients. I want to give you a couple that you can tune into. You want to ask things like, what are some of the biggest dangers in your business you foresee? What are some of the biggest threats you’ve got going on? What are some of the things keeping you up at night? What are some of your biggest opportunities over the next 3 to 12 months? What are some of your biggest opportunities over the next 1 to 3 years? What do you consider some of your greatest strengths in your business? Not only in the business itself, but also in your team. What are some of the greatest talents you’ve got in your team? What are some of the opportunities you’re not leveraging that you’d like to be leveraging? What’s keeping you up at night?

Those are a handful of powerful questions to be able to ask your clients. If you ask them, don’t be shocked when you have your five hero clients, you might have to pursue ten to get five to give you these answers and actually get into the interview conversation. Imagine what would happen to have that intel. Here’s what you’ll find. You’ll start to see the themes. You’ll start to see what is consistent between those clients with what you offer for that particular niche. It’s amazing that intel and few businesses will take the time to do this but it’s amazing. You can do some of this through online surveys. You can do this through phone calls. I love phone calls. I love getting heart-to-heart or person-to-person with the clients and the businesses because it has a bigger impact. Many companies are too lazy, too cheap and they’ve gotten too automation-happy to do some of these simple human things.

Being a human being in your business is a great strategy to be able to implement a great model to work with. I want to also flip it by making it about them with one more caveat to this. When you go through this interview series, you do want to make it about them. Here’s a way to make it about them. Ask them the question, “What’s the one thing you need the most help with right now?” Listen and then ask, “What would that do for you? What would that give you? What does it mean for you if you were able to get that solved?” What you want to do is become a conduit or a connector for them. Someone who can help them get the solution, whether it’s your solution if you offer that solution or become a strategic partner for them. You help connect them to the opportunity that can help solve their problems.

 

Step Two: Creating Your Position

Number two is creating your position. Here’s the thing, have you ever feel like you’re at a place where maybe it’s hard to stand out in a crowd? Maybe it’s a little noisy out there. Maybe you feel a little bit commoditized. Maybe you’re dealing with the little voice of doubt in your head, “Am I good enough, especially compared to them? How can I compete with them? They’ve got X number of years, X number of talents better than me.” Some people call this the imposter syndrome. You’re not alone. You can do this and we’re going to show you a formula of how to be able to uniquely position yourself. It’s not enough to be different anymore. It’s not enough to have a USP. This is a transformational approach much deeper than probably most experts have ever taught you before. I want to give this to you. I want to give you a couple of examples of this here. If you’re looking for a way to stand out. If you’re maybe feeling like, “I’m the world’s best-kept secret. If only more people knew me,” you’re going to love this segment.

If you’re maybe in a place where you go, “I feel like I’m an inch from goal. I’m almost there,” you’re going to love the approach to be able to take to this. This allows you to communicate to your clients easily. It gets your clients referring you far easier. It gets you the ability, when you’re putting out any messaging in the world, to connect with your potential right-fit clients much faster and easier because of how simple it is. There are four layers of developing the positioning in your business. Let me dive into that with you. The first is to get real clarity on your unique market. Truth be told, let me share another challenge I had in mind earlier. I was like, “My products and services serve everyone.” I will share with you what I discovered through that lack thinking is if I think they’re serving everyone, they’re probably not serving anyone. The reason is that it’s not connecting to an individual. You want to think of going way beyond the avatar.

First of all, there’s a tool that we offer and it’s called the Marketing Plan Blueprint. This ties in with both one and two. I know there are companies who you can invest two days, three days, four days event and come up with your Marketing Plan Blueprint. They are amazing and I would recommend it. I’ve hosted those. There’s nothing like sitting face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball, heart-to-heart with a group of like-minded peers who will guide you and who also are experts at this stuff. If you’d like to have a guide, we’re going to give this to you. You can go to Activate.Breakthrough3X and get the video. You’ll get links to the resources here. With the Marketing Plan Blueprint, we break this down in the unique market. Don’t make the mistake that I made thinking that I can market to everybody when no one will respond. You want to go beyond an avatar. What does that mean? It means you want to think of an individual.

Come up with a name of the person that would be your ideal client. My ideal client is a person named Joe. Joe runs a very successful business. He’s hypergrowth-focused. He wants to grow two times, five times, ten times. He’s got clients and he serves them better. He wants to make a bigger impact. It’s not just about money, it’s about making a bigger impact. His business is doing seven figures. He wants to scale it. He wants to create more freedom. He might even be able to pursue other passions and other purposes in his life to make a bigger impact in the world. That’s some of the characteristics. I’m very clear on that. They’re also the founder of a company or the CEO of a company. Although they don’t call themselves this, they would be considered an influencer. What is your unique market? I’m going to give you a deeper example of someone in one of the most highly commoditized industry who built $100 million company in a few years.

From our observation, they utilize this process and got real clarity around it. You want to identify your unique market. Here’s a strategy to think about with your unique market. Narrow down to be able to attract more. Niche down to scale up. Get clarity on your unique market. What keeps them up at night? It’s that hero exercise that we explained in part one. If you will do that, you’re going to have all the ammunition. Ideally, if you can record and transcribe it, you’ll start to see the language patterns. You’re going to start to notice some of the similarities and commonalities of your ideal or your perfect client. Get clarity on your unique market.

Next is your unique message. Here’s a way to be able to think about your unique message. What is it that you can say that only you can say, that no one else can say? Part of this can be your story. Isn’t it interesting when you’re going to an event or listen to a podcast or watch a training program, you hear two people have the same languaging, but you’ll resonate and connect with one and not the other? Your story alone, the way you deliver it can be enough that the message is unique, but I want to encourage you to go deeper. Let’s look at it this way. I want you to picture that in my hands, I’ve got a $1 and a $50 bill. Pull out your wallet and look at $1, $10, $20, $50 or $100. Notice they’re exactly the same size. They’re both the exact same weight. They have the same color ink on the paper. There’s only one distinct difference between the $1 bill and the $50 or $100 bill. It’s the message on the paper. It’s the positioning and that’s what we want to show you how to create in your business.

Being a human being in your business is a great a strategy to be able to implement a great model to work with. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

How do you create the value that’s 5, 10, 20, 100 times more valuable in your marketplace? It’s unique messaging. It’s not enough to say I’m different. It’s not enough to go, “I’m better.” Everybody says they’re better. That’s a platitude. You don’t just want to say, “I’m better.” Everybody says that. How can you be different? Sally Hogshead says it well. She was one of the top experts in branding in the world. She says, “It’s better to be different than better.” We’re going to encourage you through our program that you can do both, be better and be different. If you get deep in these four areas, you can communicate it so differently in the marketplace that your prospects will go, “They truly get me.” Have you ever worked with a company where you go, “They truly understand me?” Dan Sullivan has it right. He said, “People don’t buy from us because they understand us. They buy from us because they feel understood.” That’s where this four-layer approach comes into play. Tune in on your unique message.

Next is your unique method. How do you deliver what it is that you offer? I encourage you to name your method. When you name the game, you own the game. Name your methodology. We call ours the hypergrowth five-step method to triple your business. That is a naming methodology. What could you name? What would happen for you if you started naming? We’ve had things like our AIM process. We’ve had things like our hiring blueprint process. We’ve got all kinds of naming conventions and lots of company. I’m going to give you a real-life example to take it from a concept to where the rubber meets the road. Bear with me here.

The last one is once you get clear on your unique method, how you deliver it, you name it and you come up with a process for it, that’s where you come up with your unique offer. What is the unique offer? I want to give you two examples here. I want to talk about one of the most highly commoditized industries in the world. I want to talk about someone who I’ve worked with for years. He has become a good friend. The first is now on pace to do over $100 million as a business. They’re in a most commoditized industry in the world, the coffee business. When we assess their business and looked at it, when they went out to the marketplace, they didn’t go out and say, “We offer coffee. We market to everybody,” if you know anybody who says that.

They went, “What is the niche we could carve out here? What is the niche that we could go deeper and own this niche?” They said, “Let’s focus on health and fitness enthusiasts who drink coffee.” Had anyone ever done that before this company? No, not to the degree that they did. Health and fitness enthusiasts who drink coffee, what an amazing idea. Their unique message was to get fit and get healthy drinking coffee. Who knew you could get fit drinking coffee? Notice how simple these are and how simple each of these are communicated? It’s fitness and health enthusiasts who drink coffee. Get fit or get healthy while you drink coffee. Is that something that your audiences could understand? What could you do to create that simple message? There’s a great quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes. He said, “I wouldn’t give a fig to be on this side of complexity, but I’d give my life to be on the other side of simplicity.” Simplicity matters especially in the five-step method, especially when it comes to market, messaging, method and offer. I want to encourage you and challenge you to tune in on this.

His message, get fit while you drink coffee, who knew? His unique method, add grass-fed butter to the coffee because it has certain health properties and it has antioxidants. This existed well before he grabbed it, and then he coined it, and then he elevated it. You don’t even have to be the creator of it. He didn’t create it or invent it. He just expanded its understanding and then combined it with a couple things. He, into a degree, made a better mouse trap or better coffee. Add grass-fed butter to coffee, that was his unique method of how this offer gets out to the marketplace. His unique offer is something called Bulletproof coffee. Maybe you’ve had it. It’s awesome. Now Bulletproof has become an incredible brand in many different things in other programs, product services, as well as coffee and a lot of different things around it. What could you do to tune in and create your unique market, your unique message, your unique method, your unique offer?

If you want to come back, check out the video and get access to the tools like our Marketing Plan Blueprint tool that helps guide you through this process and get clarity on your ideal client, your message, your offer, your method, and all these different things. Go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com. We’ll give this tool to you. You have to opt-in and we’ll start working with you and help guide you through it. We’ll give you the tools so you can start putting it in place. Now is the time. You’re going to have a better plan. You can start immediately. What would it be worth if you do it immediately? Let’s look at that $1 bill and let’s say a $50 bill. Through the process of getting clarity on this and then starting getting it in the marketplace, you were to uplevel your plan and your position, just these two factors alone. What would that mean for you? What would it give you? What would it do for you? This is just two of the steps. There’s a lot we learned from reviewing over 4,000 businesses. These are a couple of real powerhouses.

 

Step Three: Packaging

That leads us to step three. Step three is packaging. We’re not going to cover the sixth one now. It’s powerful and we’ll talk about that in a future segment. The third one is packaging. How would you rate the packaging of you as the founder and CEO of your business or the packaging of your business? We can talk about packaging in all kinds of ways. Packaging in the before experience with you, the during experience with you and the after experience with you. What would that mean if let’s say you’re at a one on a low scale or closer to a one than a ten? What would have to happen for that to move to a ten? Think about that. Here’s why packaging ideas are so important. Maybe you were getting sales but now you’re not getting sales. Maybe part of your packaging model as you go with what you’ve built, you modeled some of your competitors in the marketplace. Maybe you’re at a place where your things have gone stale or flatlined.

Repackaging, doing a makeover of your packaging can be one of the greatest things. Think about what happens when you put a new coat of paint in a room. How does it make you feel? That’s what packaging can do. Some of the best companies like Apple is one of the best in the world at packaging. A lot of companies now are copying them. Whatever it might be, you get the elegant package that you get to experience it. One of our colleagues and someone I’ve had here on the show, someone who’s become a friend, Brian Kurtz, talks a lot about packaging and a lot of the different nuances of this in his book called Overdeliver. This book is packaged and he over-delivers in the book. He gives people over $1,500 in resources.

One of my favorite people in the world is Sharon and she sends us packaging every quarter. We invest in companies and real estate. She keeps in touch with us about every quarter and sends us these different clever mailings that we get from her and her team. There’s one that happened to say, “We must admit it’s hot and you are still so cool. Happy August, Sharon and the team.” What can you do to create elegant packaging for what it is that you do? Some people have told us that our packaging for our guides, our checklist, our blueprints, our processes are powerful for people to be thinking about. I go back to the $1 bill and the $20 bill example. That in many ways could be considered positioning and packaging. What is the packaging that would take you from being valued at $1 and turn it into $20 immediately? Be thinking about the power of packaging and what it can do for you. Think about packaging in the before experience with you, but during the experience. What about the after experience?

Here’s why packaging can be so valuable as well. What’s the most expensive client for you or me or any founder or any CEO to get in business? The most expensive client is that first one. It’s generating that first sale. Once we develop a client, it’s much easier to be able to offer them other things and to sell to our clients because we have an established relationship. One of the most powerful things is we think about what we do. We’re not in the transaction business. We’re in the relationship business. I’ll talk about a couple of metrics to be thinking of in the next segment here. We’re in the relationship business. You’re in the relationship business. Think about it. What would have to happen to uplevel your packaging to integrate and activate a deeper and more fulfilling relationship? In other words, for your clients to feel the breakthrough, the outcome, the transformation, the experience that we talked about in step one.

If you want to come back to see some of these examples, you can go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com so this isn’t just theoretical, but it’s practical and you can see it. I love to show and tell. That was one of my favorite classes in school, even in college. I’m a visual person. I don’t know about you. However, these are real-life examples and we’ve got more coming. It’s so cool that we’ve now got over 250 hours of insights, wisdom, strategies available. We’ve had many people like you who said to us, “The stuff you make available for free is better than a lot of this stuff out there.” Thank you, we appreciate it. If you feel like this would be a value to somebody, another founder or CEO, make sure to pass it along. Give them a gift. We make this available as a service. It also helps spreads our message. It also helps connect us to right-fit potential client in the future and a whole lot of different strategic byproducts as well. It’s leaving a legacy at the end of the day. Share it and give that gift to somebody. Share it with your team most importantly because there’s nothing better than finding people better than you and your team. They make you look good.

Step Four: Promotions

That’s enough on packaging for the moment. Let’s go to step four, which are about promotions. I could spend weeks on promotions alone. I want to shift the conversation around promotions because here’s the thing. You might say to yourself, “I’ve tried all kinds of marketing. I’ve hired somebody to run Facebook ads for me and it didn’t work.” You might feel like, “I’m too small to be looking at leveraging a lot of promotions or I’m not getting many quality leads anymore and it’s costing me a whole lot more. I’m cutting this off.” Maybe you go, “This developing content takes time.” I get all that. That’s why I think you’re going to love a different and a new way of thinking about this part of your business, which is promotions.

If someone gets a ten times value in the relationship with you, they'll continue to do business. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

First of all, you want to think of promotions in three phases. It’s the pre-unit or before you’re in business together. It’s the during-unit. You’re in the conversation and in business. It’s the after-unit, which or the post-unit, which means now you developed a client relationship and it’s ongoing. How do you continue to stimulate that? You realize this, you’re not in the B2B or B2C business. You’re in the P2P business, which is person-to-person. It’s belly-to-belly. You start looking at it from the perspective where it’s not a transactional business, but it’s a relationship business. It’s the most valuable capital we have. You can take our money, our business, our stuff, at the end of the day, the relationships move the needle. They’re the biggest needle movers. They can speed things up so fast. It’s amazing. Ideally, you start to think of your business from that simple perspective. Let’s face it, technology is changing. Could I give you a bunch of tactics on promotions? I could, but I want to talk about some simple things thinking of the idea of P2P and relationships.

Let’s move away from thinking of things as a standard metric of ROI. What is ROI? Return on Investment. Do you want to factor ROI? Yes, you do. I’m going to encourage you to look at it even in new way, which is Return on Interaction. What’s someone’s return on interaction with you as a business? If you go to the plan in that first step we hit on, which is breakthrough, outcome, transformation and experience. If you’re creating breakthroughs or an outcome or a transformation or a predictable experience for your client that they go, “This is something I can’t get anywhere else,” you will have a higher value client over time. It’s ROI times two or three squared or cube even. If you looked at it from return on interaction, what will that create? It’ll create more return on investment. Another way to look at it is your ROR. It’s the Return on Relationship with you. What’s the Return on Relationship with you and your business?

If someone gets ten times value in the relationship with you, they’ll continue to do business with you for how long? I don’t know. I don’t know that anything is lifetime, but what I do know is that it will last a lot longer than if it’s just a break-even experience or if it’s just an okay experience. If you think about it, what experience and relationship do you create or do your staff create with the people they interact with? If you have a sales team. Think of it through your business, not just you. It starts with you as the leader. As a leader, a founder, a CEO of your business, what are you doing at the end of the day? You’re a coach and you’re transferring leadership. What are some simple things? Think about all the things you bought in the last 30, 60, 90 days, maybe six months or a year. Think of all those things you’ve bought from different places, online, offline, companies, etc. Let’s talk about a couple of simple ways that most people overlook to expand the ROI and expand the ROR. I can give them to you and this is part of promotions and it makes a difference long-term and short-term. It creates immediate short-term ROI.

Here’s the thing to think about if we look at promotions. I’m not going to go into too deep of an explanation, but this has been around for 100-plus years, the psychology of human behavior. You typically will have about 3% of people who when you make an offer are going to buy from you right away. You have over another arguably ten to 15% that are going to buy from you anywhere from 30 days to six months. That’s roughly 13% to 18%. Now you’ve got a couple other layers of people that roughly you’ve got about 27%, 20%, 25% and then 30% of people. The 30% of people are probably never going to buy until it becomes a federally mandated opportunity. You’ve got a certain percentage of people from the 30% who hadn’t bought from you.

I’ll give you an example. There was a study done many years ago. It’s an older study, but it’s so simple. I want to use that example as it relates to your promotion. When I was a kid, I remember when our home transferred from an icebox. Do you remember your grandparents or maybe your parents having an icebox? The guy would come and deliver ice every few days during the week. They put it in this little thing in the side of the house and you take the ice and go put it in the icebox.

A company came along and said, “We got a new, better way. First of all, we’ll take out your icebox for you out of convenience. We’re going to stop delivering ice and here’s what we’re going to do. You can plug this machine into your wall and you don’t have any more ice. Here’s what’s even better about it. The same payment you’ve been paying for the ice to be delivered, which is about $25 a month, we’re going to charge you the same amount. After about three years, you’re going to own this machine.”

The machine went from an icebox to a refrigerator. Think about that. Does everybody have a refrigerator? Yes. Let me give you the statistics that I recall seeing about this. Do you know that when this company came out and they made this out, they thought it was going to be a home run right out of the gate? What happened is they found that only about 25% of people initially got the refrigerator and the company was going bankrupt. They were out of their minds. They were like, “I can’t believe that so few people are buying this.” They sent out a survey group to the homes that they made this offer to.

Do you know what happened when they brought the survey group out and they started explaining it again? Roughly, another 20% to 25% decided to buy it. There was another 50% that it took time. The next category of about 20% to 25% of people bought it when it became mainstream. They bought it when it became cool. We’ve seen this with all kinds of trends. We’ve seen it with TVs, computers, iPhones and smartphones. You can go through almost any industry. It has a very similar momentum in it. The last 20%, 25% of people who got the refrigerator, they only got it at a time when it became a federally mandated law.

What does this mean to you and your business as it relates to promotion? If we go back to the ROI and the ROR, there are choices in the marketplace. If people are going to choose to buy whatever it is you have, don’t you want it to be you? What can you do to stick in their mind, to give them a feeling of an experience, a breakthrough, an outcome, a transformation even when you’re not with them? There are some simple things. Coming back to you, think about all the different things you’ve purchased over the years or the last few months even. How many of those companies sent you a Thank You card to congratulate you or thank you on making a great decision? Think about the impact that it would make on all the purchases you made. You might have made hundreds of purchases over the last quarter or year. None of them. Would you stand out if you’d gotten a thank you card or congratulations? That’s number one.

Number two, when was the last time a company followed up a couple of days later to congratulate you? They call you and say, “We wanted to check in them.” Think about that. How many? Very few, if any. Number three, how many of those things that you bought, there’s an ongoing follow-up communication? I want to give you a couple of different ways to think about. Number one, you might want to install the idea of a thank you card. There’s a guy named Joe Girard. He was known as the greatest salesman in the world in the car business. He was interviewed and said, “How is it that you’ve averaged over five car sales a day for X number of years?” He said, “I send out my prospects and my clients some cards each and every month. I also add a PS that says, ‘You’re awesome.’” Isn’t that cool? What could you learn from that? I don’t know if it translates that you do that to prospects, but to all your clients, would it make sense for you to send out a thank you card or a congratulations card or a little note? What are some ways you can do that?

You’re probably familiar with Disney. My kids and I went on this amazing Disney experience and we did a bunch of tours. After the experience, we got this little note from Disney. It says, “I hope you had a swell time,” I’m talking about it right now, giving them some free advertising and they sent this, “Thank you. Your pal, Mickey.” It’s a hand-drawn character of Mickey. I don’t know what they send to everybody else and I don’t know if these are manufactured, but that looks personalized. It’s got our name on it, “Kuschell Party, Vacation 2019.” How cool is that? What could you do to translate something simple?

You could use a company like VoiceShot, which delivers a ringless voicemail and drops it. It could be you or someone on your team going, “Congratulations. You made a great decision about getting started with us. By the way, here’s the number to call for our VIP line.” When they call the VIP line, you can maybe make them some soft offers. How about something like this? This is something we send out to our clients, even people who are our guests or influencers on our show. We send out a newsletter quarterly. We call these needle movers and breakthroughs.

Build great processes to run the business so that good people can run those processes. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

By the way, if you want to get access to the needle movers and breakthroughs, go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com. Check out the video. There will be some links and resources and all that stuff and probably some info about how you can get your hands on this too. Each quarter we send out the thirteen needle movers and breakthroughs of the things we’ve learned working with our clients who many of them are high flyers and high profile doing some amazing things. We also send out a photo card. A lot of people send out photo cards at the holidays. How cool would it be to make it Christmas all year round? What’s that quote? “If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, it would be Christmas all year round.” What if you made it Christmas all year for your clients, the people that you consider valuable relationships? I can tell you by sending this out quarterly and we’ve done this for years. I get about 10% of the people who get this, ring me up, send me a text, send me an email and say thank you. If I’m out in events networking, I get people run up to me. They go, “I got your thing. I appreciate getting that.”

What do you think that does? Do you think that can stimulate referrals? Do you think that stimulates wanting to do more business together? Do you think that stimulates a conversation? What could you do? Could you do the phone call, the VoiceShot? Could you do a thank you card? Could you come up with some version of a photo card at minimum quarterly or maybe even some tips and insights? It’s only a couple pages, 1 to 3 pages typically. Steve Sims who is on our show said, “Thoughtful beats expensive.” Isn’t that true? What can you do to up your promotions game in the before-unit or the pre-unit, the during-unit experience, and then the after-unit experience or the post-unit experience working with you on your promotions?

Speaking of some other promotions, here are some other things that you can look to be doing. You could be sending out direct mail. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be a twenty-page magazine of some kind. It can be simple. You could send out an invitation. It looks like a birthday card or a holiday card. There’s one we did with a client. We designed it for them. It got amazing ROI, a return on investment, over 10 to 1. We’ve done this with several clients and gotten similar results with this model. It drives to a personal URL. You can see that, but what could you do to create something simple like this to send out to your best potential clients or candidates or alumni?

There are many different ways or different versions. For less than $1.50 per piece, you can send out a nice direct mail piece inviting them to an event or a webinar or all kinds of different things. I’ve got an example of one of our clients and the newsletter they have. They’re incredible. They are one of the best in the world at the steps that we have been sharing with you here. I’ve got a couple other examples. Their newsletter is multiple pages. Does it make an impact? CEO Mike Aguilar and his business partner, Rob, are amazing guys. They are some of the best in the world at applying the strategies that we’re talking about.

What could you do to up your game? I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the St. Jude mailing list. I’ve donated a fair amount of money and they send out some of the best mailing packages in the world. We want to talk about follow-up. They take this idea of follow-up seriously. I’ve gotten calls from them. I’ve gotten emails from them. I also get direct mail from them and there’s more. It’s a photo card like what you might see at the holidays, only we send it out 3, 4 or 5 times a year. We also make it about them. We show some of the highlights of our things going on, like a family thing. On the back, we make it about them. We take some of the best quotes that we found and we put a bunch on there and combine that with the actual newsletter.

Think of what could you do to up your promotions game. What could you do to make sure you’re not leaving 75% or more? If only 3% are buying from you, you’re leaving 97% if you’re not thinking through how do we up our ROI, meaning return on interaction or ROR, return on relationship and extending the conversation. Think of your promotions as a miniseries. Everything you’re doing, whether it’s social media or direct mail, all of these things are working together as a miniseries to up your return on interaction and up your return on relationship value. That is the key. When they’re ready to make a buying decision, who is front of mind? If they run into somebody who it seems like they’re ready to make a buying decision, who is front of mind? Do you want more referrals? Do you want more business? These are a couple of ways that you can do. If you want to come back to see these, you can go to Activate.Breakthrough3X. We have samples we’re going to give you. We’ve got some guides to be able to share with you.

 

Step Five: Processes

We’ve got a couple other things that we’ll hit on. We’re going to step five here. Let’s talk about processes. Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “I’ve got a small team. I wish my team could keep up with me. I wish I had another rainmaker like me.” That’s where this step number five come in. I was very blessed in my early years in the 1990s, which is when I started my very first company of eleven. I got a chance to learn from Michael Gerber. He wrote the book, The E-Myth. He’s now since written dozens and dozens of renditions or versions of it. It’s a powerful book. The simplicity of the book is build great processes and systems to run your business. Find great people to run those systems. I’m going to go a caveat to that. Don’t look to get great people to run those systems. Build your business from the perspective of getting good people to run those processes and systems.

If you can build a business where all it takes is good people to run the processes and systems of your business and the business is highly functional, highly profitable, do you think that frees you up more? If you build a business where you have great processes, but all the people in the business have to be unicorns. In other words, they have to be you as a unicorn, a super achiever, high achiever like a super performer. My belief is the shelf life of the business is low. It probably is not going to be a high-value asset that can be sold and it’s probably not going to create a lot of freedom. It is going to be constantly in turmoil and change and disruption. Because unicorns, every two years or so, they get unsettled. It takes one to know one. The thing is think about that idea of processes. Build great processes to run the business so that good people can run those processes. That’s critical to be able to think about.

Another thing that happens is you might have what we find a lot like marketing and sales. One of our superpowers is helping companies bridge marketing and sales. They’re not in silos and they work together. It creates this exponential momentum. Processes can help us be able to do some of these kinds of things. Another problem that we see is maybe you feel like you’re maxed out. A way to help leverage it is to build the business on processes and roles of processes, not on super talent. I’m going to give you a couple real-life examples because I feel that show and tell is far more important. This is an example of one of our process.

By the way, when you go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com and get a chance to check out the video of this, I’m going to give you the ability to get these checklists for your own business. You can model use this and hopefully, you’re using this. I built this one. This is called the CEO checklist. Essentially, it’s the Founder’s checklists, the entrepreneur’s checklist, the CEO’s checklist of being able to build something amazing. I’ve got this over on my wall, but it’s basically what to be monitoring on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis without me having to think about it.

I built this initially for me many years ago because I got so frustrated when I moved into more of the owner role, founder role, administrative role. I don’t know if you can relate to that. I’m not the type of person that likes to spend a lot of my time in administrative roles. I love relationship building. I love creating new things. I love innovating new things. I love helping opportunities go from this place to that place. The administrative side of the business was something that was an energy drainer for a long time. Not that it’s ever perfect, but this CEO checklist is a way to help make sense of it all, to simplify it all, to create more freedom in it all. It’s everything from reviewing your values, your vision, your mission as a company to understanding what to track, how to track it, who’s in charge of it, how to report it.

All these different things are in this simple CEO checklist. Imagine what a process like that, whatever your version of a process like that. I would encourage you to look at three main processes to begin with. Number one is as the founder, what’s your checklist of how you operate? Number two is what is your sales checklist, your marketing checklist, your hiring checklist? If you knock out these four as a starting point, especially if you’re a newer business or having established these processes yet. Because maybe you’ve been grinding it. Maybe you’ve been in the trenches. Maybe you’ve been building it. You could be doing $5 million, $10 million, $20 million in business, but still have not tuned in on some of these. For example, we built this process. This is our psychology on how we look at selling, how to sell more by selling less.

Narrow down to be able to attract more. Niche down to scale up. – Dan Kuschell Click To Tweet

It’s using the concept of the interview method, not a hardcore sales method. What is this? This is the outline to our scripts. How have these worked? One of the big companies I built got to over $20 million a year. Close to about $100 million in a few years and had over 175 employees. Most of those people were working in a role of sales. These scripts that we built here have generated conservatively. It’s been a lot, let’s just say that. What value do you think this is when we have someone come on our team and they get the psychology playbook of this? It’s not a word for word script. It’s an outline of things to be checking off the mind. One of the big things that companies looked for us is to help them retool, makeover their sales processes and how do we help them get more conversions in a cool way where they don’t have to feel like they’re in a boiler room or they don’t feel like they’re like overselling people. This process is amazing.

When you go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com, I’m happy to share this with you. You enter your name and info and you can get your hands on it. It’s that interview method of how to be able to sell more by selling less and the process behind that. We’ve got our hiring blueprint, which is amazing. One of the companies we built it for originally, having interviewed over twenty-some thousand people for the different companies I’ve built over many years now, you learn a lot. You learn what not to do in all of these different things. You learn what not to do in creating sales systems and having people sell for you.

I can tell you an experience. Let me tell you a damaging confession. One of the sales reps I had was pathetic. He oversold. He went off our outline and he went off our script. What do you do when you have someone who’s a rogue agent? That’s where you tighten up the ship. You make sure that you’ve got people using the stuff that you’ve created and you’ve got a way to build accountability. That’s why processes can be so incredibly important. I didn’t invent any of the five-steps, these 5Ps that we’re talking about, but they’re powerful.

Here’s another example of one of our clients who do amazing stuff. If you’re in a service industry, like HVAC, plumbing, electrical contractor-type business, you got to check these guys out at CEO Warrior and go check out an event. They host ServiceBusinessGrowth.com. They’ve got probably the best processes of almost any company I’ve seen in the education space. They’ve got dozens and dozens of different processes. They have trainers guide for the people that are demonstrating and running training. They do these intensive and they run a couple of training typically every single month. It’s a training guide. They have hiring, they’ve got marketing, they’ve got a 365-day follow-up and a whole lot more. What would happen for you if you built the right processes and then could get good people to run it?

People talk about McDonald’s. I think the industry has changed over the years. Maybe a system like McDonald’s may not be as sexy and appealing as it was 50 years ago. However, the concept, not the tactics per se of the day-to-day, but the strategy behind it of documenting what you do, it’s what we call the three D’s. It’s document it. How do you build process? You might be like, “This sounds great. I get the idea, Dan. You don’t have to tell me. I think I need them.” By the way, you can borrow ours. You can get a blueprint of how, but here’s a way to build your own processes. Number one, you’ve got to document it. In other words, do it and document what’s being done.

Warren Buffett apparently has a strategy. In one of the books I read about Warren Buffett, he says, “If you work for me at Berkshire, there’s one main job you have on top of what you’re doing. That’s to document what you do, so that if you move into a new role, you can hand it off it easily. Document it. Step two is to duplicate it. What does duplicating mean? This is about transferring leadership. It’s not just handing them a guide and go, “Here you go.” That’s one layer of it. It’s teaching somebody, guiding them, being a mentor. The duplication part is mentoring someone on the documentation to make sure that they get it. That leads us to document, duplicate, and then you can disappear. You’re out of it. That gives you freedom. That gives you the ability to be able to move and focus on the sweet spot that you want to.

The HyperGrowth Method: A Quick Summary

I want to give you a quick summary of what we’ve covered in our time together. I encourage you to catalog this segment and I would encourage you to share it with your team. I would encourage you to read it and then catalog it and come back to it about every quarter. Use this as a guide to set the pace for you. What did we cover? We covered the 5P method for hypergrowth to triple your business. Number one, it’s building out a good plan. If you want to get a good plan like a marketing checklist, go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com and we’ll give you access to a sample of ours that you can start using and these other processes that we’ve got. Step two, we talked about positioning. I want to encourage you to use the four-step method that we talked about, the four-step approach a create your irresistible offer, to make you completely unique in the marketplace, to stand out and go way beyond the avatar, go way beyond the unique selling proposition or even differentiation, which is something from Jack Trout. This goes even deeper than that. It’s layers and exponential of it.

Step three is packaging. What would happen if you could package your business to go from $1 bill to a $20 bill with a makeover, with powerful packaging? Step four, we talked about promotions. We could spend a lot of time on tactics and promotion. I wanted to get to the concepts of the strategies of how to think through your promotions at the three different main layers and why to think from them because only a certain small percentage buy upfront. It’s the ongoing communication that will help you get to the bigger marketplace. Step five is processes. Build out your processes. You can borrow some of ours ideally as you review. We started off with evaluating your business on sales and hiring and marketing. I asked you to evaluate each of these five areas. Ideally, we’ve been able to serve you here where if you weren’t at a ten, do you feel a little bit closer to a ten? It’s like, “I’ve got a better view,” or maybe some strategies that you can put in place immediately useful now that you can be in a better position in your business. Your packaging is better, that your promotion concept and the strategy of promotions and not feeling so burdened and bogged down and so on around your promotions.

Does it make sense that it’s ROI-based? Yes, which is the return on investment, but it’s ROI-based, which is Return on Interaction and creating a Return on Relationship with you and your business and your team and the processes. You’ve got a way to think about the processes. At the end of the day, we’re at one of the most exciting times in human history. It’s a time where the little guy, the little business, the small business, the small engine can transform the world. I encourage you, you can. When I was ten years old, my dad taught me something so incredible. My dream as a kid was to play pro baseball and it didn’t quite work out, but baseball gave me some of the greatest learning lessons in the world that I’ll take forever. I remember my very first seminar and clinic I attended was when I was ten years old. I remember this book and it had a page that talked about PMA. It was the title. Inside the book it said, “Success in sports, baseball and life is 90% mental and the rest physical.”

Ideally, if you think about where you’re at now, next year, the next two years, if you apply this, where could you be? Where could you be in the next year, the next two, the next three if you focus in on these 5Ps and mastering it? It’s not becoming an amateur at them or just hearing them for one time, but going in and applying and create mastery around it. It’s not mastering 10,000 things. It’s mastering a couple that makes all the difference in the world. My dad taught me when I was a kid, “Dan, if you take that same focus you did in pursuing baseball as a workaholic that you do in anything, you’ll be immensely successful. One last thing is always play big even when you’re small.” I hope those words speak to you. Regardless of where you’re at now, where you’ve been, what success you’ve had, what failure you’ve had, I hope that you’ll have that energy as a new business owner, a new founder, and play big, even if you’re small. Play even bigger starting now. You can do it. I encourage you to take action with everything that we’ve shared with you here. Apply it and put it in practice.

If you want to get access to the resources of this, you can go to Activate.Breakthrough3X.com. If this resonates with you, connect with me and go and leave us a review on iTunes at GrowthToFreedom.com/subscribe, which is a direct link to iTunes. Also share it with another founder, business owner, entrepreneur, if you’re in an organization like EO, YEO or Vistage or many of the other amazing programs out there. Share this with someone you care about. It will change their world. One person at a time, we’re looking at changing the world of business and making it so that even when you’re small, you can play big. Most importantly, you can grow, scale and create freedom. That freedom is either to exit completely, which may mean selling or getting free of the business, and you can stay in your sweet spot and do the things that you’re feeling like you’re meant to do. Isn’t that what it’s all about? There you have it. Take action, apply what you’ve gotten here and seize the day. We’ll see you next time.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Activate.Breakthrough3X.com
• Breakthrough3X
• VoiceShot
• Steve Sims – Previous episode
• The E-Myth
• CEO Warrior
• ServiceBusinessGrowth.com
• GrowthToFreedom.com/subscribe