The 6 Levers of Growth | Ep 3

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:29:08.990

This is episode three, and I'm going to cover the six levers of growth and how to use them over and over as your business grows and evolves. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long, and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits that last. All right, we're kicking off week three of the Bottleneck Breakthrough series.

And in the last couple weeks, we've covered the bottleneck hierarchy and the bottleneck matrix. And today we're going to go through the six levers of growth.

And the reason I came up with these six levers of growth was I wanted to give a framework of what to focus on. A lot of business owners, for me included, when I first got started, it just was overwhelm.

And in my business, dealing with the latest and loudest, everything was white noise.

And the tools that I've given you the last couple weeks on the hierarchy and the matrix, again, are for organizing your thinking around where you're at.

But when I wrote the book and I came up with the six levers of growth over the prior few years with my clients, it was around a more holistic perspective on how to tackle business growth. What do you look at and what are the things that keep recurring?

How do you keep organizing your business in the focus of what you put your energy into to keep growing it? So in these six levers are what I think are the most holistic, broad, reaching organization of how to look at companies.

There's lots of frameworks out there that people look at businesses. I got started with Michael Gerber's E Myth, seven centers of management Attention. That was super useful.

It gave me some structure, gave me some sense of organization, some ability to divvy up a company around. But when I work with my clients, that seven centers of management attention misses some key pieces.

And so when I came up with my own framework of just the way my brain worked and what we keep coming back to, these six levers are what work over and over, and you keep coming back to as your company grows. So as we get into this, sorry, I just want to make sure that my video looks okay.

For those that are watching the video, as we get into this, the part for me that I think is so important to remember is that creation is where all wealth exists. Creating and that consuming is where all wealth is spent.

And so as you're growing your business, the trigger of growth is through innovation, through creation. And we're going to talk about these six levers, how you keep coming back to creating new parts of each.

And I've got a great case study of a client that kind of rested on their laurels. And I'll talk about what they can do and what I'm helping them do to get back to creating, get back to innovating.

So the first growth lever, this is what everybody comes to me for.

They all think they have a marketing problem because as we went through the bottleneck hierarchy, the first stage of business stability is getting clients. Making sure you got a consistent source of getting new clients. That's the foundation.

And so most business owners live in a state of anxiety around maintaining good, good client flow.

And so small business owners, figuring it all out themselves, they're spending their own money, they're trying to grow and grow and grow, but in the back of their mind, they remember those days when they didn't have a lot of leads. And so lead flow is like the crack cocaine for small business owners. So everybody comes to me for marketing.

They think that they need to deal with the latest new shiny.

I was just on a call this morning with a guy looking at bots for engaging leads and signing them up automatically in his industry, and he doesn't have a service that is one size fits all. And there's a lot of variety in his industry and in his service level. So we realized he cannot use a bot to automatically sign people up.

His staff has to get involved, and given the tools in his industry, he has to do some custom quote generation for each prospect. So business owners are constantly looking at the latest and loudest or the new shiny, the latest fad for getting more clients.

So they come to me, they think they have a problem there, and inevitably we end up tackling systems. Because as we go through growth, the way things are sustained is through systems.

And so I view, I started out writing this book, that marketing and systems are these both sides of growth, that you use marketing to grow and to create new channels of lead flow, and then you use systems to consolidate that growth. Because if you don't have good systems around those bottleneck stages that we've talked to about the last couple weeks, nothing lasts.

You end up innovating, creating new things every time you get new clients. And so without systems, there's no sustainability. So I thought, you know, marketing and systems, there's no book out there.

There's no framework out there that talks about the two hand in hand. There's a whole world of marketing gurus and people talking about copywriting and positioning and landing pages and funnels.

And all of those shinies in the marketing world, new shinies.

And then there's a couple systems guys and Michael Gerber and Sam Carpenter that talk about the system is the solution and the franchise prototype is the goal. And your goal is to have everything documented so you can replace anybody in your company and it'll continue to run without you.

And it becomes systems driven instead of people driven. But there's no bridge between the two. And so as I started working out this framework, those were the two foundational pieces.

And as we go through systems. And so I ended up laying the whole book out around these six levers of growth because it's the most logical approach to solving bottlenecks.

Whether you jump into a specific area, one of these levers, because it's an acute problem, or you take a holistic approach which the book is laid out around. And we're going to get into each of these levers in a second and the order in which I think you need to tackle them.

But from marketing and systems are the foundation, then the next piece that made the most sense to dig into with my clients was strategy.

And this is what I start the book out with after the intro, after highlighting what bottlenecks are, because in strategy, this is where so many businesses are broken.

And there's a book out, I can't remember the title of it, it's just launched, but it was something about that the average business fails within the first five years, but it really fails in the first five minutes because they have a poor revenue model, they have a poor business strategy, they don't have any differentiation in their marketplace, they don't have a sustainable advantage. They've just found some way to make money to service some clients and get started. But it ends up hitting a ceiling.

It ends up breaking once it gets to a certain size. And so this is where I think so many businesses start okay, but then they never revisit it.

And the situation for me with my clients is a lot of times they're coming to me and they're right at the million dollar mark and they've grown well, but they're tapping out. And it's usually the next lever we'll get into in a second.

But when they get past a million, into the 2 to 3 to 4 million dollars range, revisiting strategy is really critical because they may have, and this is a great example for a client of mine, they've been in business 15 years.

They were super innovative in their space 15 years ago, but they've not done much innovation on Their service offering to their clients in the last few years and the market's caught up to them. So now all of their advertising is harder, all of their sales team is less effective because they're competing with so many more alternatives.

They're not able to order take.

And they've admitted that when they started it was order taking because they had a great innovation, they were way out ahead of the marketplace, but they've kind of rested on their laurels and now they're in the $5 million range and they're kind of stuck. And so we're improving their sales and marketing and some of their systems.

But really for them to continue growing, they've got to go back and innovate. They've got to get back to the strategy.

And so this is why these six levers are something you keep coming back to over and over as your company grows. And it's not that you have to do it every month, it's not that you have to do it every quarter.

But as you go through that bottleneck hierarchy and you start seeing things that you challenge, that you're dealing with, that are coming up and you're struggling with going back to these sections in the bottleneck framework, in the six levers of growth are tools that'll help you tackle it from a new perspective, reassess where you're at. So strategy to me is huge. And that's where we start. Move into marketing in the book, then next management.

And this is like the four letter word for small business owners, they think that management equates with bureaucracy and they think that management is, they correlate it to micromanagement. That's the most common thing is, well, I don't want to go over that with, that's too detailed. That's getting in the weeds.

But the reality is if you're not defining what you want your staff to do and you're not setting the rules by how they're measured, nobody is. And so your staff will default to whatever is easiest or whatever they enjoy doing the most, most often.

Which it does not equate to be strategically aligned, mutually aligned benefits to the long term vision of your company.

So as you go through management, it's all about, for the average small business owner, it's all about figuring out the hacks, the quickest shortcuts that you can stomach to implement, to be able to manage effectively, changing your mindset from I just need somebody to do this to, okay, I need to equip, train and support staff so that they're able to get things done as effectively as possible and then monitor and review, keep some accountability so that they're headed in the right direction. And that's where a lot of business owners, especially in the 1 to 5 million dollars range, lose sight.

They're not checking in with their staff, they're not paying attention to the key metrics, they're not making sure that the team is continually improving. And so like in this client case that I'm talking about, where they've not innovated, another thing is, is nobody's managing the sales team.

There's no, there was a sales manager, but the person, his personality was a little too gruff for the rest of the staff and he ended up leaving six months ago. And so they've really been without management. And without management, nothing's really getting measured.

And without being anything measured, they don't know what to improve. And so it becomes this vicious cycle that business owners want to stay in the high level.

They want to be visionary, they want to build a team, they want to have things more hands off. But without any oversight, it becomes a situation of the cat and mouse situation where when the cat's away, the mice will play.

And it's just that the staff doesn't have the same mindset and perspective as the owner. And so their goals aren't going to always align by default. So then for management, we go into systems in the book.

And systems are all about documentation, all about making sure that things are done smoothly, making sure that things are done consistently.

And of course, the systems guys, the Sam Carpenters, the Michael Gerbers, I think they take it to the nth degree and they end up overwhelming typical small business owners. And because the owner thinks, gosh, every system leads to another system, every system's output is the input for the next system.

And, and they quickly realize they could spend a lifetime just documenting systems. And that is not fun and that's not feasible. So they tend to overwhelm it.

And so my perspective is start with where you're wasting a lot of time and, or staff are repeating themselves, asking for help where there's a lot of drop off, start there, work on systems there, and don't worry about getting the whole business systemized and worry about documenting everything and having all this business process automation.

I know that's really popular for some people to look into and it's worthwhile when it's the right time to, and the scale's there and the resources are there to put into it.

But most businesses in the $1 to $5 million range business process automation's not needed, just some basic training around systems, some documentation. I like having it in binders on somebody's desk for things they've got to do over and over.

I like revisiting kickoff meetings for new clients for big projects, making sure that the kickoff process is going smoothly, having a checklist for that I think I referenced, maybe it was another call recently, but the Checklist Manifesto, it's a great book on a very simple process that is proven in the healthcare world to reduce surgical issues, infectious disease rates, based on letting anybody in a surgery room be able to chime in that when a step was missed in a checklist process, like say for a knee replacement surgery, that if somebody missed a step because everybody sees the checklist, anybody can chime in. They're not just reliant on that doctor to trust that that doctor knows what they're doing and that they're getting every step right.

So that's where systems, I think you can start looking at systems. And then the next lever is vision.

And this oftentimes needs to be revisited after a few years because we all start a business for various reasons, most often because we have a passion for doing something that we can help with and or we found a way to make a buck that pays our bills that's a little better than working for somebody else. That's often what starts, what motivates small business owners to get going.

But over time, especially after you clear that seven figure mark and you're in the million dollar range, what's the goal? What is the purpose of this business now? What's changed in your life? Have you had family situation? Have you had catastrophes?

Did you have some big goal change? Did you have some big epiphany now? And maybe this business isn't serving you as well in its current state.

So to me, that's where figuring out where you want to go is the most important decision before you get into all of these other bottlenecks, is in an existing business now starting a business out.

There's lots of reasons people start businesses, like I've said, and there's a lot of programs out there that get people to cast vision and paint this big hairy, audacious goal that they want to change the world with. But that's not us, that's not the people I deal with.

I wouldn't and I would say when you're starting something that's really a little bit more navel gazing than I think is necessary to cast that big vision. And I think, shoot, I Can't think of the guy's name, the Four Horsemen or the. The Four is his book. Scott Galloway.

Yeah, he's a NYU professor, real bright guy.

And he gets into the venture capital space and publicly traded companies and he talks a lot about the, I don't remember the term he uses, but it's essentially gobbledygook like that. People in those businesses are casting too much vision and they're going too ethereal, too abstract.

And that's clearly not us in the small business world, especially the self funded space. So now that you have a business though, what is the point?

And I think this is worth revisiting at least every couple years, if not every year, because life changes.

And to me there's nothing worse than seeing a business owner who starts a business, has some success, but is now trapped by that business because they've not thought through changing it to serve their lifestyle needs better, figuring out how to keep innovating in the marketplace. Maybe they missed an opportunity to sell it because they just had their head down and they didn't know what their options were.

And so I've got a friend, he's got a company that he was just going to sell it forever, he was going to grow it forever. And he's kind of the Warren Buffett philosophy of build and hold and maintain the value.

And his biggest competitor got acquired for about 120 million at the end of 2018. And so he thought, gosh, I should just look into what options are.

And he ended up doing a big private equity deal and took a lot of money off the table in short order in 2019 after realizing, wow, there's a huge appetite for companies like mine that investors want to get involved with.

And so that changed his vision, it changed his opportunity because he was able to look up, able to look into what's going on around in his marketplace and drastically changed the trajectory of his life and his family's life because he was willing to revisit what's going on around and do some research. And that all happened in about four months.

So it's not something that you've got to go and change everything drastically overnight, but by just looking and revisiting what is the goal. Because the reality is the business is yours. You create all the rules. What's going on in the business is everything stems from you.

And so I think equipping you with the ability to go back and revisit this stuff is really, really important, especially as you're looking to tackle other bottlenecks, because the reality is once you realize you're your goals have changed for the business, you no longer want to become a hundred million dollar company and be on the Inc. 500 list and speak on stage all the time. You're like, you know, I think this would be better as a cash cow.

Maybe we keep it at 10 to 15 million and I build a great management team and I love our industry and we continue being a good innovation company there and it becomes more of a cash cow. Well, all of the decisions around tax tackling, bottlenecks start to change. All the solutions change based on where you're headed.

So I love the Alice in Wonderland quote when Alice is dealing with the Cheshire cat and I'm probably going to butcher it right now. But Alice says, well, which way should I go? And the Cheshire cat says, well, where do you want to end up? She says, well, I don't know.

And then he's like, well, it doesn't matter which way you go then because she doesn't know which way's out or that she's in this dream. And so it really doesn't matter what decision she makes. It's all the same. And so I think that's where the vision really comes in to be valuable.

And then the final lever in the six levers of growth is mindset. And I will state this till the day I die. I think mindset is the most important lever of all. I don't think.

I think at this point I can make enough cases that prove that without the right mindset, without getting healed in in your head, without getting rid of emotional trauma and limiting beliefs and the baggage that we carry, your business is never going to fulfill the potential of the vision you have for it. There's always going to be something inside you that you're wrestling with that you're having a muscle past.

And tackling mindset not just makes your business better, but makes your whole lifestyle better, makes your relationships better, makes your internal peace better.

And I found that over and over and over as the head trash or whatever is going on between your ears as an owner gets better, everything else gets better in your business. And I put this last because less than half of my clients really want to tackle mindset stuff. It's painful sometimes, it can be hard to go through.

But for, for me, I found that it's worth all the gold in the world to work on this stuff.

I now when I see something coming out of my life, there's something out of my soul, whatever that is, some unrefined part of me and it's creating friction, it's causing problems. The minute I recognize something's there that needs to be pulled out or revised or refined, I lean into it and it's not fun.

And it's usually messy and it's usually stressful. Excuse me. And the process can be unfun. Let's just define it as that.

But once I get to the backside of it and that thing is resolved, it's life is just that much sweeter. And so my personal philosophy is being self aware and leaning into things that, that I see are currently in front of me that I can improve.

It pays off in spades. And a great example, I just was talking to a client the other day about, he had a drug addiction background.

And I was at a conference years ago, back in 2015, and a guy speaking there had had a drug addiction background. And both of these guys, my client and this guy speaking, have made massive improvements in their life.

They've got great families, they've got great businesses. And so I asked the guy at the conference back in 2015, his drug of choice was meth.

And I've had a lot of friends over the years that have struggled with that. So I know it intimately, I know it well. And I said, hey, when was the last time you had a tweaker show up in your life?

And that's what we call, affectionately call people who have meth addictions. As they're tweakers, they tend to get really fixated on one thing and tweak out is where the term comes from.

And he says, you know, it's probably been four or five years, but he'd been clean about 10 years. And I said, what do you think changed four or five years ago that caused tweakers to just stop showing up in your life?

Because tweakers are everywhere in the world. They're in every city in America. They're all over. It's a problem. But for him, they just stopped showing up.

And he looked back and said it was really clearing mindset stuff. And so even though he was clean for four or five or six years, tweakers were still coming across his life. It doesn't matter where you live.

It doesn't matter what part of the world or what neighborhoods you live in.

If you have a mindset that is still unhealed, you still have baggage, you still have trauma, and you come out of a drug addiction past, drug addicts are still gonna be around you, users are still gonna be around you. It's not until something inside. And I don't know what exactly that is for these guys, but my client was saying the same thing.

He's like, yeah, you're right. I haven't had anybody like that in my life in a long time. And it's not that they changed where they were going.

It wasn't that they stopped hanging out in certain neighborhoods. It's literally something in their brain, in their soul, in their heart changed and those people stopped showing up.

And so if we can look at that example of addicts and the people like them that they are no longer around or no longer seeing show up in their lives on that scale, it works exactly the same in business.

And that as you keep dealing with things that cause you to not want to communicate, not be a leader, not confront, not ask for what you want in negotiations, all of those things that are resistant to resistance to getting what you need to grow your business, as you keep clearing that stuff and healing that stuff, everything gets better in your business. So to me, that's why mindset really is the ultimate lever to pull.

And it's not something that is as easy to fix as, say, systems or management or marketing because there's less people available out there to help you work through this stuff. Counselors are good, but sometimes it's a long process.

That's why in the Facebook group Bottleneck Breakthrough Method, I share resources of the mindset coaches that I've worked with, Justin Ferriman or Jen Cudmore, or the techniques like biofield tuning that I recently did, that just cleared some massive stuff and made a huge difference immediately in my life. Those are the fastest paths I've found to getting this stuff resolved.

And so I think as you look at these six levers of growth and think through, well, gosh, which one do I tackle next? Which one do I go through?

To me, that's why I outlined in chapter one, at the end of chapter one, some acute areas like is your sales team not closing or is your marketing not as effective as it used to be? Go to that section in the book. Go to marketing. Are your staff a big pain?

Are you not able to get the outcome from them because you're so frustrated with all them, with them all the time, go to the management section. If you've got a lot of change orders or things are falling through the cracks, go to the system section.

If it's been a while and you're just kind of overwhelmed and you're not sure what exactly you want anymore, you're going through midlife crisis or mid business crisis, let's call it, go to the vision section and it'll help you continue to grow your company as it evolves. Because we all know, as Mike Tyson says, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

We all had plans of where we wanted our businesses to grow, and they never grow along those plans. It's impossible. Never happens that way. And so there's always change.

And I think that's why I wanted to equip you guys with these six levers of growth so that you can go back at any time that this book, this framework, becomes a reference manual for you to continually grow your business and continually upgrade your skills as you get further and further along in the process.

Because the reality is the challenges never leave the problems, never leave the implications get bigger as the dollars, as the number of zeros behind your revenue go up. But it's never easy street. It's never set it and forget it. It's never the fantasy of passive income for life.

The reality is that I think business, parenting and marriage are the best crucibles to keep drawing out more of us and drawing out our highest potential and helping us get to the point where we're operating as effectively as possible, getting the greatest outcome, the greatest joy, the greatest satisfaction, the greatest fulfillment and making the greatest impact in the world.

So as we wrap up here, I think those six levers of growth have been obviously the foundation of how I help business owners and giving you the Bottleneck matrix and the Bottleneck hierarchy as quicker reference points of where to look at what's next. Obviously, the book is the most useful resource I've created to help you continue to grow your business.

The Facebook group Bottleneck Breakthrough Method is continuing to grow. More resources given there. Obviously this series turned into a podcast to be able to share it with you.

I'm happy that I'm able to share all this stuff. I'm happy that I'm getting great feedback from people that it's really helping their businesses.

And there's more and more ways evolving of how I work with clients. So I'm looking forward to digging into this stuff with you guys.

And for those of you on the live call, feel free to stick around and ask questions if you have any. Otherwise, this has been fantastic and we'll dig in next week in week four in this series.

And to be honest, I'm not sure exactly what we're going to talk about, but that's the fun part.

There's always something worthwhile to dig into and I'll probably do a survey in the Facebook group for people that have watched to this point and consumed to this point to see what it is of a series of options that makes the most sense for them to get help with. So any final questions here, throw it in the chat. Otherwise, have a great day.

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