Today's Growth Classics, Growing Business Today, Marketing your business for growth and success

This week is dedicated to what I am calling growth nugget week. I am going through a bunch of clichés, metaphors, one-liners. Basically I am going through years of either speaking notes, talks I have given, classes I have sat through, conferences I have sat through, anywhere I have looked through my notes and saw a one-liner that I circled, that I later brought back into my company, and saw a physical impact on either growth or savings. I have put them on a Microsoft Word document, and I am going to elaborate on these and talk about these. Hopefully my experiences, many of which are painful, and my experience of growth at the 80-employee level and with my growth over the past five years, hopefully these lessons or these nuggets can impact some of you.

I wanted to do a podcast in the way of using my experience to be your wisdom. The safest way to go through a minefield is stepping in someone else’s footsteps. If you don’t see blood, you keep going. In our 20-some-odd years, we now have 80 employees, a ton of vendor relationships and alliance partners.

Years ago, I was listening to a cassette tape from a woman who had over 3,000 employees. She was covering some management techniques that were groundbreaking to me. I couldn’t wait to implement some of the information and try some of those ideas. It was immediately fruitful, even that day.

I wanted to cover some of what I heard on that cassette tape maybe 20 years ago. Since then, I have elaborated it, adjusted it, made it my own. About half of what I am going to say I gathered from that cassette tape years ago.

Just spent a week on faculty over at CEO Space. I caught myself a couple of times telling a story about how some of my pain personally in business, when I look back at it, some of those most painful events are what are driving us today.

Some of you on this podcast know that my wife and I have 685 revenue streams in seven countries. They are all interdependent. That is a result of me making very poor business decisions in the ‘90s and putting us in a cooker to a point where I made a vow and commitment to find the best way to diversify income. When I stumbled on it, I exploited it a bit. With that, I caught myself telling the story this past week a couple times of how I was one time asked to describe how have we made the Inc. 5000 list a third time. We should have made it four times, but I didn’t fill out the paperwork two years ago for lack of time.

This one is pretty cool. It comes fresh from being in what we call SNAP tables at CEO Space. That is where the faculty sit at a chair, and people sit all around the table. You go from one person to the next, asking them what their industry is and what their biggest business challenge is. I am fresh off of a few of these exercises, and I came home with some of the questions and some of my responses. Figured I would put out a couple chunks into one podcast.

Throughout the day, I had a number of people at the table. One gentleman came down, and I said, “So what is your industry, and what is your current business challenge?”

I call this one, “The Danger of Running Your Business with Your Own Checkbook.” What I mean by that is everyone has a talking checkbook. Everybody, no matter how much money you make, no matter how much revenue your business runs, when you open your checkbook, it either says “Yes” or “No.”

You say, “Hey, can we take the kids to Disney?”

Sometimes you open the checkbook, and it flat-out says, “No.”

One Source Leads To Failure 100% Of The Time

This is Episode 24 of Today’s Growth: Growing Business Today. This is called the Value Experiment. I’m going to cover the concept of value in positioning a product or a service, but I am also going to do an experiment at the end of this. It should be quite interesting. Let’s get cookin’. When moving a product or service into the marketplace, we have to understand it’s kind of like an Oreo cookie. There are two pieces,Picture of a cream filled cookie and there is something in the middle. Two cookies and something sweet in the middle. There is a customer on the left, there is you, the offerer of the solution on the right, and in the middle, there is this sweet, tasty thing called their needs.

This is Episode 23. I am calling this podcast “Transfer Growth.” I caught myself reminding some of our management team some of the points of this podcast last week. I couldn’t believe that I have not done a podcast on this topic, so this one is huge. You guys have heard me before talk about the definition of selling, according to Brian Tracy, is a transference of feelings. Building a business is simply the stacking of sale after sale after sale. I do not mean selling your product or your services. That is not what I am saying.

Every single business has an initial sale. You have to sell yourselves on the idea. The second sale we make is we tell our idea to other people to get some buy-in.

Take IBM. Thomas Watson, when he originally founded that company, had an idea. He sold himself first. Then he had to test his theory, so he starts selling it to other people before it’s anything. Other people loved it. Some people get the exact opposite: Don’t do it. They also need the negative reinforcemen

This is Episode 22. It is titled “Present Competition.” The reason it’s titled that is because this week is Competition Week. These three episodes were dedicated to discussing the ins and outs of competition, specifically the three types, how to recognize them, and what to do about them. Whether we recognize them or not, there are three types of competition. Every single entrepreneur and business owner are battling these three continuously. They are entropic competition, physical competition, and present competition.

So this week is “Competition Week”.

These three episodes are dedicated to discussing the ins and outs of competition…

…specifically, the 3 types of competition, what they are, how to recognize them and…..what to do about them.

Whether they recognize them or not, there’s 3 types of competition that every entrepreneur and business owner battle from day one…

Entropic Competition