Future Proofing Your Business with Dorie Clark

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down how to future-proof your business. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Dori Clark in the EO Fire Studios. Dori is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Long Game, an executive education faculty at Columbia Business School. Today, we'll talk about how to be resilient in turbulent markets, auditing revenue streams, scenario planning, strategic experimentation for career development, and oh, so much more.

0:35And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Dori and our sponsors. Do you have the right mentor in your life right now? For the first time in seven years, I'm opening up a few mentorship slots for individuals who know they need the guidance and accountability to take their business and life to the next level. Email me at john at eofire.com with a subject line mentor and we'll schedule a 15 minute chat to go over the program and see if it's the right fit for you. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future proved their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform.

1:15Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire. Dori, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. John, thank you. It's so good to be here with Fire Nation. So something that I believe that most people probably disagree with is I was flabbergasted by this statistic that over the course of their lifetime, about 80 % of women and just under that for men have children. And I think that is amazing for them. I'm glad for them. But I actually think that we need to be much more selective about who who has the right to be parents.

2:03I think that certainly if you are an entrepreneur, it's easier if you have more time, if you're not a parent, but I want only the very, very best people to be parents. And so I think we should flip the ratios. I think most people probably should not, and we should save it as a reward for the most awesome among us. Well, luckily Elon Musk does not listen to this episode or this podcast whatsoever, because he would probably have a strong disagreement with that. But that's the point of this question is something that a lot of people would disagree with. And today, Fire Nation, we are talking about future-proofing your business.

2:38And Dory, you know this more than most. The markets are changing fast, freaking fast. And there's a lot of people that are stressing out over this. So how can we be resilient in turbulent markets? Yeah, this is the question that is on everybody's mind is how we can do it. So one of the ways that I think about this is doing a preventative audit of your revenue streams. If you are an entrepreneur, one of the biggest risk factors that I think some of us fall into inadvertently is getting too dependent on one client or two clients. And at the time it feels easier. It's great to have business concentrated.

3:18You don't have to be pulled in so many directions, but it can ultimately be a risk factor for you. If too much of your revenue is coming from one source, if that changes, if that's disrupted, it becomes a real problem. And so I think we all need to be looking, especially as we're in the earlier part of the year, at where our money is coming from, how diversified our sources are, and are there places where we're inadvertently putting ourselves at risk by having too many eggs in one basket? Fire Nation, we don't need all those eggs in one basket for obvious reasons. And you did mention that auditing of revenue streams.

3:57Tell us the process. Tell us more. Yeah. So ultimately it's, it doesn't have to be difficult in any way. I mean, you can go in and whatever your system is, whether it's a QuickBooks or something fancy, or even just an Excel spreadsheet, we need to look at how many clients you have and what percentage of your revenue they represent. Perhaps even better next level is to look at the types of things that you do and if you can diversify within that so that perhaps you're offering different types of services or different types of products. But we want to make sure that, I mean, essentially being an employee means you have one revenue stream that is from the person that has hired you.

4:41And so as an entrepreneur, we don't want to replicate that. We want to make sure that there are multiple legs on our table so that if you're doing the mental exercise and saying, OK, if I lost this client, let's say they represent 40 percent of your business. Is that is that something that you could actually sustain? Would that be a big problem for you? Not a big problem for you? And I think ideally we should whittle it down so that for any client that we have, if we lost them, it would not be devastating to our business. That is how we can build in safety into our corporate model. So before we move along, give us maybe one real world specific example of this with you, maybe with one of your clients.

5:23Take that away. It starts with a good thing, which is that you're doing great work for a client and they keep giving you more and more work, which feels very validating. but eventually it can represent a share of your business that is a little bit frightening. I actually run a mastermind and just last week we had a meeting at my place in Miami and one of the members said that this was a top goal for her because there was a client that loved her so much. They actually wanted her to be on staff and she said, no, no, I'll just consult for you. But the client was making up more than half of her income And she realized that if anything changed with that client, if the person who allocated the budget left or there were disruptions somehow in that company, it would eviscerate her business.

6:18And so she wants to do business development so that she can get more clients and therefore more security for herself. Let's move on to scenario planning. What is it and how do we do it? So another way that we can begin to future-proof ourselves is actually sitting down and doing a little bit of planning for the future. Now, we know in general, of course, this is a good idea, but there's actually a really specific model. And it was something that I started to get interested in around the time of the pandemic because I just kept beating my head against the wall saying, why didn't I recognize that this was a threat?

6:55Why didn't I see this coming? And of course, most people didn't. But it got me interested in the concept of what would it actually look like? So scenario planning is something that began in many ways in the 1970s in the oil and gas industry. And it became big in the military. And ultimately, you write a story and AI can actually help with this. But it is what are different scenarios in the future? And just sort of spitball for, you know, in five years, what might things look like if everything goes great in your business? What might things look like in five years if something were to happen that would cripple your business?

7:36Let's say you lost a client that represented 40 % of your business. What would things look like if AI really disrupted and took things over? And you can come up with different scenarios, try for three to five, and make them as different as possible. And the goal is not to precisely predict things. We're just guessing. Nobody really knows. But the goal is to begin to identify possibilities, including ones that are a little bit outside the norm, just so you will have thought of them. And then the magic happens with the next step. The next step is about saying, OK, if this actually were going to be the future, what could I do to hedge my bets?

8:19What could I do to make this disaster scenario less bad? Or what could I do to enhance this optimistic future? And the interesting thing is that oftentimes, even if the scenarios are really different, the steps that you can take to protect yourself in that future often overlap with each other. So there might be five totally different futures, but maybe there's only a handful of things that you can do that would make you more resilient. In my case, I realized I did a lot of planning around the idea because I was doing a lot of keynote speaking. And I thought, oh gosh, if there's a recession, they're probably going to cut the keynote speaking.

8:57That's not going to be good. Or, oh, what if I got sick and I wasn't able to travel? Those are scenarios I thought about. I never thought about a pandemic, but the answer to all of that, which is do more online courses and do more online communities solved for all of those things. And so I spent more time doing it and it's been very helpful in my business. Fire Nation, it's just so powerful to be prepared for these scenarios because when you are and everybody else isn't, that's an opportunity for you to have massive market share gain opportunities that are going to be available to you that otherwise were not.

9:34And we have a lot more to talk about when it comes to future-proofing, everything that you do, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. It would be really nice if we could predict what the future holds for our business. Talk about saving a lot of time and frustration, but predictions are just that, predictions. Rates will rise or fall, inflation's up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until we can actually see into the future, over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one fluid platform.

10:08NetSuite gives you one source of truth so you can have the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. And with real time insights and forecasting, you can see into the future with actionable data. If our businesses needed this type of software, I'd use NetSuite in a heartbeat because whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash fire. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash fire.

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11:58Tell us more about that. Absolutely. So one of the things that we often get locked into as entrepreneurs is the desire, if something is working, to just keep doing more of it, which, of course, makes sense. It's logical, but it's only logical up to a point. And if we're going to be preparing successfully for the future, we have to realize that while it certainly makes sense to do more of the thing that's working, a part of us needs to step back and say, but what if it doesn't work forever? And that's why it's so crucial to spend at least a portion of your time doing small experiments so that you can be ready to pivot or ready for other possibilities.

12:41And so in my book, The Long Game, I actually talk about Google's famous 20 % time, which some of your listeners will have heard of, where they encourage staffers to spend up to 20 % of their time on kind of long shot experimental things. This is how Gmail was created. This is how Google News was created. Now, the crucial thing to acknowledge, it's even though technically Googlers are encouraged to do it, very few do. This is the reality. People are busy. Like nobody kind of has a lot of time to do this. You have to really struggle to make time. But what is also true is that if you take that percentage of time, and 20 may be too much.

13:23If you're really busy, maybe it's 10 % of your time. Maybe it's even 5 % of your time. But those small experiments of going out and meeting people, you know, having a networking coffee with someone who's a little bit outside your world, that's a strategic experiment. Or reading a book or listening to podcasts that you wouldn't normally do. Just seeking out new ideas, new information, new contacts. Those are the things that actually help keep you resilient and keep you prepared so that you're not 100 % all in on a thing that's going well now but could evaporate tomorrow. Let's dive into some strategies that we can use to cultivate loyal, engaged followers that actually drive business sustainability.

14:08Yeah, so sustainability, I think, is the key here. not necessarily in an ecological sense, although that's fantastic as well, but just the idea of how do you create a business that is not so boom and bust. For many entrepreneurs, we have the problem that business may be wonderful one month and the money is rolling in and then the next month, for reasons that feel really frustrating and sometimes even beyond our control, things dry up and it gets scary because things are so lumpy and you wonder, oh my gosh, am I going to make this much money again? Has it gone forever? What do I do? So you want to have a business that is a little bit more predictable, a little more sustainable so that we can worry less.

14:54I think that's a goal for most of us. And it really comes down to cultivating loyal followers or loyal customers over time. And how do we do that? Ultimately, for all of our businesses, I think it's about creating communities. And in some cases, I may mean this literally, that it's a helpful thing to have online or offline communities. But I mean it more broadly, more metaphorically. So many businesses treat customers like transactions. Okay, you know, they bought this thing, I gave them the thing, great. And then we essentially forget about them until it's time for them, hopefully, to come back and buy the thing again.

15:38And if we if we satisfied them, we hope that they'll do it. But it's a lot of crossing fingers and and just praying they'll return. But if you keep in contact with your customers over time, whether it's it's even through content creation, you know, creating really great newsletters that people want to subscribe to for years, creating a podcast like you have that people want to listen to every day. These are the things that keep you top of mind, that create a kind of parasocial relationship. And this is true not just for kind of thought leader brands or professional service providers. It can also be true for products.

16:18I mean, if you are a driver of certain kinds of cars, for instance, there are clubs where you can be invited and, you know, have special off-road experiences. and communities that are around it that make you feel, oh, it's not just that I bought this car, it's that I'm part of a community of owners of this type of car. And that sense of identity is what keeps people coming back forever. And that's what makes for a predictable business. Dory, we've known each other for a long time and you know I love the word focus. Follow one course until success. So I wanna talk about strategic focus. Specifically, knowing which goals to pursue in our business.

17:05Take it away. Thank you. I know you are the master of focus here. And I love all of the things that you've done and created around that. I think ultimately, again, we all know as entrepreneurs that focus is important. And I think the vast majority of us probably hate that because the whole reason we're in entrepreneurship is that we we like people we like ideas we like new concepts we like playing with things and so it's really hard to will ourselves to say no and to say okay i'm not going to do all these things so that i can do this other thing but it is true that when our attention is frayed and pulled in a million directions we get less done that's just a fact and so for me the key question is about how to do a favor for our future selves.

18:01That's the way that I like to frame it. Because ultimately, there are things that we can do in our business and in our lives, where it may not be pleasant in the moment. In fact, it probably isn't. But it's something that in the future, we will say, Oh, I am so grateful I took the time to do that, that I took the time to clean off my desk so that I can find the thing that I needed and I don't have to spend an hour rooting through papers. I'm so glad that I went to the dentist every six months to get my teeth cleaned so that I don't have to have a root canal. And I'm so grateful that I took the time to build my network so that now that I am at a crossroads, I have people that I can call who are interested in buying my product or investing in my company or whatever it is.

18:48And so I think that's the lens. When we think about strategic focus is what are the things that our future self will be grateful to us for having done? And what are the actions that we can do? I mean, there's any number of things. You can send that email. You can do that research. You can waste time in a million ways. But it's asking yourself, what is the thing that I can do that will make everything in the future easier because I did it. Dory, per usual, drop in value, Baham's left and right. I thank you. Fire Nation thanks you. Give us one key takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation today.

19:29Then give us a call to action on how we can connect with you, learn more from you, consume more of your work. Then we'll say goodbye. John, thank you. I think the key takeaway is that ultimately when it comes to making smarter decisions about the future, being a long-term thinker, preparing for a future, which, you know, definitionally is unknowable, you know, we have to guess what we need to do is to tap into our courage. And that's a little bit of a loaded word in some ways, like that's a word about character rather than strategy or even tactics, right but it's about what kind of person do you want to be and it takes courage to make choices that are perhaps don't feel valuable today but will be valuable in the future and it takes courage to recognize that we don't know the future we just have to take our best guess and put our chips on the table.

20:34But when we do that, and when we are courageous, we are able to be the kind of person that we want to be, be the kind of entrepreneur and leader that we want to be. So that would be my takeaway that I'd like to leave Fire Nation with. And if people are interested in these topics, my book is The Long Game. And there's a free long game strategic thinking self-assessment folks can get at doryclark.com slash the long game. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with DC and JLD today. So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com.

21:12Just type Dory, D-O-R-I-E in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up as well as some other fantastic episodes that Dory has done with me over the years. Dory, one more time, give that URL call to action. Absolutely. Thank you. It's the long game strategic thinking self-assessment. You get it for free at doryclark.com slash the long game. Dory, 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. Thanks so much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Dory for sponsoring today's episode and to Fire Nation.

21:49Over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs and created a revolutionary 17-step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit uncommonsuccessbook.com, and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Do you have the right mentor in your life right now? For the first time in seven years, I'm opening up a few mentorship slots for individuals who know they need the guidance and accountability to take their business and life to the next level.

22:32Email me at john at eofire.com with the subject line mentor and we'll schedule a 15 minute chat to go over the program and see if it's the right fit for you. Over 41 ,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash fire.