Becoming Disruption Proof with Brant Cooper: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by high level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to become disruption-proof. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Brant Cooper into EO Fire Studios. Brant is a New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and founder of Moves the Needle. Brant serves as a trusted advisor to startups and large enterprises around the world. And today we talk about how you need to embrace the exploration and learning side in order to execute better and focus on creating value for human beings.

0:34because the more value we create for others, the more it comes back to us and owe so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Brandt and our sponsors. Fire Nation, we believe this is your year to take your business to the next level. Start your transformation by attending the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies?

1:12Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Brant, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Shout out to the nation. Happy to be here, John. Thanks for having me. I think that people are execution minded and we love to say, you know, a failure is a failure to execute. And we love to talk about we got to execute this and execute that. We're in execution mode. And I don't know that everybody would disagree with this, but it's not top of mind is, uh, is learning is being in exploring mode.

2:06And, uh, I think this is true of, of, uh, all entrepreneurs is embracing, uh, the learning exploration side, uh, in order to be better executing. I love saying be curious, Like Fire Nation, just be curious, like be adventurous, like actually want to learn, to educate yourself, to peek around that next corner. I mean, why not? I mean, this is a very exciting world if you let it be. And most people, Brant, they seem to be screaming from the rooftops, disrupt your industry. If you're not disrupting your industry, you're dying. But why would we want to become disruption proof? I think it's because our daily lives feel disrupted.

2:55So even from a business sense, if we look at the pandemic, we look at global supply chains, ships stuck at a Suez Canal that disrupts supply chains. If we look at ransomware attacks brought down a health care system here in San Diego, if we look at the mass resignation that the big corporations are talking about, we have these disruptions because of the interconnected world that we live in and the speed of information and even the speed of disinformation. John, we live in a more complex world than we're used to and we face so much uncertainty that we actually have to start thinking about, in my view, managing and structuring our companies differently to deal with a world filled with uncertainty.

3:44And so that's what disruption proof means. How do we actually build into our processes and into the very organization of our companies, the ability to be resilient, aware of all of the changes, dynamic, able to change what we're doing based upon new information? What does this mean for businesses? I mean, what does disruption proof mean for those people that are listening, our entrepreneurs or small business owners? What does that mean? So in practice, it means this ability to delegate decision making. It means empowering our employees to solve problems. It means teaching them not to wait for us to tell them what to do, but to drive impact in their daily lives.

4:32And so it's a it's a different mindset. It's it even gets back to the learning or the exploration mode that we were discussing earlier. It's building into our daily work, this ability to be curious and to look outside of ourselves and take in new information and to solve problems as we run into them. and mostly what we teach entrepreneurs and startups is how to look and act like big companies and we structure them in particular ways we we organize them based upon functions and we we begin to structure them as if they are a big company instead of that curiosity and that uh entrepreneurial spirit that got them into business in the first place and so that's the ethos that we need to maintain, I think that what's different is that we actually have to build it in.

5:24We have to purposely build it. We can't just declare that this is what we want to be. We actually have to create this agility among our team members, form teams around this concept of agility, and build that spirit into the work that we're managing. Well, at the top of the show, and then just a little bit right there, we talked about being curious, about being adventurous, about exploring. Let's talk about that exploration behavior a little bit more. Give us maybe a specific example of what that would look like in the real world and tell us why we need it. I think that's a fundamental part of it for the owner of a business, for a founder, is this idea of admitting what we don't know.

6:07And so again, we sort of get back to that execution mindset, we become leaders, we grow our teams, we have this responsibility to execute, and we fall into this trap of I'm the one that's supposed to know. And so if you put on this other hat, you put on this exploration hat, that it means what is it that I don't know? Where is the bottleneck in my growth? What is it that's stopping me from getting to the next level. And so that requires a certain amount of self-awareness and vulnerability. And once we're able to ask ourselves the question, then we can go into this exploration mode. It could be, it could be something as simple as I need to, maybe I need to run experiments on updating a sales script, or it could be, you know, I feel like my particular market segment has run its course.

7:00So maybe what I need to do is an exploration day is sort of what I call it is in and I pull the team together and we're going to run some experiments on trying to figure out how we can leverage our existing products into a new market into an adjacent market segment. or perhaps there's tweaks that we can make to our offering in order to go after a completely different market. And that this doesn't happen just inside our heads, but that we actually can then run experiments, specific experiments to test our assumptions about how do I overcome whatever uncertainty is facing our business in a daily basis.

7:38And I think that this is the, to me, John, this is what sort of the pandemic drove home was that suddenly our consumers don't have the money that they used to have. Our small business customers are going out of business. And so the very core business that we're in maybe has changed and it's no longer there. And if we're just in that execution mode, if we're just going to do today what we did yesterday, then that's going to lead to failure. And so we have to go back to that exploration, that learning mode in order to tackle whatever uncertainty faces the business in the current situation. This is a new world, Fire Nation.

8:15We need to learn. We need to explore. We need to, again, just really get excited about what's next because what's the alternative? I mean, why not be excited about what's next? Because it can be new. It can be unveiling. It can be just something that you may never have thought of if just the fork of time, if we weren't experiencing currently what we just experienced over this past year and a half, two years. And we have a lot to talk about when it comes to scaling, when it gets all about focusing on starting the right way as opposed to the wrong way, when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

8:54Fire Nation, is this your year to take your business to the next level? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Yes, it's month to month and costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Schedule your free personal 13-point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EOfire.

9:30because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, you will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories and learn about attending the Thrive Time Show two-day in-person workshop featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Become the next success story. Schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

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11:08So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Brant, we are back and we hear people talk about scaling, about leveraging, about how we need to scale and leverage every aspect of our life. It's just something that you just seem to hear on repeat. Does disruption proofing scale? Again, we have to be able to ignore some of the advice that we get. So oftentimes the people in our lives, mentors, advisors, investors even come from a world that was not filled with so much uncertainty.

11:56They come from this industrial age mindset where we knew if we produced a product that there was a market for it. And that just doesn't exist anymore. Customers have so much power. They're all running around with computers in their pockets and they know so much about businesses and about products and services. And they have this power to be able to switch from one vendor overnight to a different vendor. And so that, again, it adds to the complexity and the uncertainty of this digital age. And so we need to build that exploration into, we need to maintain that even as we scale. And so the trick really is, is to form your teams based around accomplishing missions.

12:40And so those missions, if you aggregate all of the missions that your teams inside your company have, then you roll that up and that's what your strategic priorities are. And so you can imagine a structure of an organization that is based upon aggregating missions towards these priorities instead of the current way of organizing our businesses around function and the tasks that individuals do. Well, you can't really draw a straight line from somebody that's repeating a task 100 times within 100 days to actually achieving an outcome. And so part of the dealing with complexity and uncertainty is diversity, interdisciplinary teams, cross-functional, empowering smart people to solve problems.

13:28So instead of us just telling them to go execute and go do these things, it's allowing them this time and space to explore and then building that into the processes and structures of the business. And that's how you scale it. You scale not based upon adding more marketing people necessarily or more product people or operations. We don't think about it in terms of the function, but we think about it in terms of what is the outcome that we desire. So imagine a special forces team, special forces team in the military. You have a specific mission. You're going to go in and take out this particular objective.

14:05you actually assemble the team based upon the functions that are required in order to accomplish that mission. And if you're going to scale that, then it's based upon all of the missions that you need to accomplish, not based upon this idea of simply scaling a particular part of a company. And so it requires this mindset shift to think about continuously, think about outcomes and how we're going to measure the progress towards outcomes instead of measuring people's tasks. And so then it's inherently scalable. It's just thinking about it in different terms than what we're accustomed. And that's one of my big takeaways from what Branch has shared.

14:44It's thinking about it in different terms. And why would we not want to think about it in different terms? We live in a different world. And everybody, by the way, lives in a different world in the present moment. We're going to live in a different world a year from now than we're living in right now. And why not be evolving? Why not be open to change and adventure? And if Fire Nation is listening and they're like, this is something I can really dig. I'm really into this. I get it. What are two things that we can do right now to get started? Number one is have a bold experiment day. But this is what I mean by building it into our work.

15:18Instead of just sort of trying to generate this ethos or this culture of people need to be in exploration mode, you have to actually put it on the schedule. And so on this bold experiment day, you assemble a number of challenges based upon the resources inside your organization. You want to form teams of four to six people, and you are assigning each one of those teams a mission. And the mission challenge has to do with some sort of uncertainty that's in your business. And again, it doesn't have to be like, oh, I'm going to go disrupt the world. It could be something as simple as updating a marketing plan or testing a new marketing idea or testing a new product or service or updating a sales script.

16:00So it's any challenge or it could even be operational. It could be that my engineering group is not not working very well with my product management group or my design group. So it could be any sort of challenge that's inside the business, either customer facing or internal processes. And you have a number of those challenges and you assign those to the teams. And during this bold experiment day, their goal is to go and seek understanding of the stakeholder, whether it's a customer or an internal leader, develop empathy, and then run some or design and then run an experiment on how to overcome that challenge.

16:39and this way i think what what your audience will find is that they're able to accomplish these challenges they're able to solve these problems that normally would just be put on the back burner or would maybe keep you up at night uh and you just don't have the resources to tackle it um and the idea is is that in the end you will see that number one your team actually has the ability to do this so maybe they need a little bit of training maybe they need uh you know they'll make some mistakes along the way, but fundamentally smart people solve problems and we just have to sort of get out of their way.

17:14And the second thing that you'll find is that your execution work becomes more efficient by building this exploration into the work. And that's really what I want you to take away. It's in the work, Fire Nation. You get in the work. So, Brant, we've had a pretty solid theme throughout this entire interview. I mean, we're talking about adventure, being curious, being in the work. We've been talking about, you know, essentially let's become disruption proof. So what is the one thing, the key takeaway you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our entire conversation today? Give us a call to action about how we can learn more about this and you and anything else you want to share.

17:57And then we'll say goodbye. The number one driver for me to write this book, Disruption Proof, John, was that, you know, we choose capitalism because capitalism is the best way to solve problems. And what we need to do as owners, as founders, as startups, as business people, is to focus on creating value for human beings in the world. And the more value that we create for others, the more that it comes back to ourselves. And, you know, if we focus just on creating wealth, then we create wealth for a few. If we focus on creating value for other people, for customers, then this value gets spread to all, including ourselves.

18:41And so that's really the big takeaway. And in order to do that, in this new digital world that's filled with all of these uncertainties and these disruptions that roll across the economy, we have to use structure and manage our companies differently. We have to attach ourselves to this ethos of developing empathy for customers and for our colleagues and our workers for committing ourselves to creating value for people in an ethical way and then building into our institutions this idea of continuously being learning and exploring in order to accomplish that objective. And it creates a virtuous cycle.

19:21This is then what ripples through the economy is this idea that we can that we can raise the standard of living and create value for all and be successful for ourselves. So I think if your audience is interested in learning more, please come to brentcooper.com forward slash fire and they can get more information on the book and how they might engage with me in learning more how to apply this to their business and their everyday lives. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with BC and JLD today, so keep up the heat. Head over to eofire.com, type Brant in the search bar.

20:05The show notes page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about today. BrantCooper.com. Go check it out. Go learn more about everything he has going on right now. Fantastic stuff. And Brant, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Brandt. And Fire Nation, if you've ever thought about creating a podcast of your own, the podcast journal is for you. It is gorgeous. It is faux leather and it will guide you step by step in the creation and launch of your podcast in 50 days.

20:46Visit thepodcastjournal.com. thepodcastjournal.com. And I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Fire Nation, we believe this is your year to take your business to the next level. Start your transformation by attending the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and featuring football star and entrepreneur Tim Tebow and President Trump's son, Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, And request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies?

21:24Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software. Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

21:43Thank you.