Build to Sell, Not to Survive with James Vincent

30:51And you kill the whole goal. The fact that you set it as a goal by definition means you don't know how to do it. The reason we set goals is to do the learning, to do the growing, to grow into the goal. So you'll be an example from my own life. At 16 years of age, I met Jim Rohn, E. James Rohn, and I set a goal of financially retiring at age 25. Everyone said, can't possibly happen. People actually sat me down and told me why it can't happen and how it won't happen. And the reality of it is the 16-year-old version of me couldn't do that. What they didn't acknowledge and what they didn't understand is I was willing to give myself the time and energy to learn, to study, to read, to get mentors and coaches.

31:32And so I became the person that made that goal a reality. We have to grow into our goals. So we set the goal of getting off the tools so that we then say, okay, well, what have I got to learn? What systems do I have to put in place? Where do I have to study? What coaching do I need? Who do I need to get around? Because if other business owners have done it, then you can do it too. You know, in our membership programs, James, there's a reason we have solopreneurs all together. We have small business owners all together, and we have mid-sized business owners together and executives all together.

32:03We put them together because they're going through the same learning process. Solopreneurs are learning how to go from themselves to trusting an employee, to growing enough to let go and let someone else do it sort of thing. They're learning that. And small business owners are learning how to become managers and leaders and actually build people so that the people build the business. So all of these different aspects. Do you have to set the goal? No, you don't have to set the goal. But if you want to get your business to run without you at some point, the first thing you have to do is get off the tools or have the ability to get off the tools.

32:38Is learning the epicenter of, and that's not a leading question, by the way, feel free to correct it. Is it the epicenter of personal development? Learning is a part of personal development because learning doesn't bring wisdom. Action is the most important part of personal development, doing things. There's a lot of people that have read a lot of books and never done anything, and therefore they don't have any wisdom. People say knowledge is power, and I disagree. I believe that wisdom is power because wisdom is knowledge applied. You've learned how it works, how it doesn't work sort of thing.

33:14And I've written every one of my books I've ever written is based on what I do, not based on a theoretical ideal. It's, okay, I wrote a book on marketing because that's what we're doing in marketing right now. Why do I have ownership shares in two marketing agencies? Because I want to learn all of this stuff. I want to grow. But when you talk about personal growth, the second word is the most important, growth. You know, you ever been back to a group that you went to like high school or college with and they said, wow, you've changed. You go, wow, you haven't. You know, it's like we're supposed to grow.

33:49We're supposed to change. We have to grow into becoming a great business owner. then we grow into an investor and then we grow into an entrepreneur it's like our growth factors we start out as your entrepreneurial journey whether people realize it or not started out in school as a student you started your entrepreneurial journey what did they teach you they teach a student is an apprentice employee all right what is an employee an employee is apprentice self-employed person the challenge before most people go into their own business is that they don't do enough apprenticeships so they haven't done a sales apprenticeship and a marketing apprenticeship and a finance apprenticeship.

34:25All they've ever done is an engineering apprenticeship or a hairdressing apprenticeship or a carpentry. People say, I've got 20 years business experience. Oh, really? You've done 20 different things? No, no, I've done the same thing for 20 years. Well, that's not 20 years experience. That's one year's experience done 20 times. So you might become a master in that one field, but a business owner is more of a generalist. A business owner knows enough about sales to be able to hire great salespeople. Let's imagine, James, I wanted to hire a marketing manager and I knew nothing about marketing. I'm not going to hire a good marketing manager.

34:59I don't even know what questions to ask. If I'm going to go and hire a recruiting agency to do my recruiting, I've got to study half a dozen books on recruiting to even know what should I ask them. This is the craziness of, I'll put it even more blunt, your business will grow to your level of incompetence. The moment you stop learning, your business stops growing. your dad give you that feedback last didn't my my dad gave me a lot of very blunt feedback over my lifetime you know uh i'd went to him when i was about 21 and i was complaining about can't get good people and all of that sort of stuff but what dad said to me when i complained about can't get good people he looked me dead in the eye and said brad you get the people you deserve you're an average manager running an average company highest caliber a person wants to work for you is average and he was dead on right until I became a good manager.

35:53I couldn't get good people until I became a great leader. I couldn't get great people until I built a great company with an amazing mission. Like when you look today, James, of our mission of installing a boss in hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world, saving business owners, our customers are part of the mission. They don't come and become a customer at Action Coach. They join the mission. they join the movement they want to help we've got like for instance just a week ago a carpenter now he joined our organization and within a week he brought 10 other business people in with him because he's like all my buddies that i work with on job sites are all going through the same thing he bought plumbers he bought locksmiths electricians he goes every one of us needs to do this because it's a movement.

36:43Business owners helping business owners is really important to me. It's at the core of what we do. Every business owner needs to have a peer group, a group that they're working with and helping each other and growing together. And that's why I think it's really vital for us to recognize that building people is what we do. Yes, we install the ABOS system, but mostly what we do is build great business people. Okay, so control the time, control customer service, control the finances. Which one do you want to go with first? Let's do finances. That's what kills companies. Why did you choose that then?

37:24Because it kills them. If you're not in charge of your finances, then your business can't perform. You've got to run your business on between 30 % and 50 % of your income. You've got to have 20 % of your income going into a profit account approximately. You know, there has to be profit. The measure of a performing business is profit. There is no other measure that matters. People talk about their mission. And yes, mission is vital in business. Yes, people and employee engagement is vital. If I'm the CEO of a business, I'm in charge of four things. firstly numbers and that's not just historical numbers like profit balance sheet they're historical numbers james they've what's happened i've got to be in charge of the future predictive numbers like what's my lead flow what's my conversion rate what's my repeat business rates what's my and then you go to the next set of numbers which is part of culture that's my second job so knowing the numbers building the culture and culture is you've got to look at two things You know, what is your, the number of culture is really employee engagement numbers.

38:42So knowing what level of engagement you have with your team and measuring that. Then you've got to, your third job is customers. Okay. That as a CEO, you've got to be spending 20, 25 % of your time out with customers, meeting customers, talking to customers, finding out from customers. And you can do that in online forums. You can go and visit job sites. You can go to your stores, but you've got to be at the coalface a percentage of the time to be able to do it. And then what's your score there? Net promoter score. So, you know, knowing the numbers in every area is important. And then my fourth job is recruiting as a CEO.

39:20So recruiting great team members out there in the world. I remember one of my businesses, which I've sold now as a restaurant, and my partner in the business said to me, Brad, we need a new director of wine. and uh so i just happened to be at a restaurant a few weeks later and i met this young lady who was just an amazing som and had built this phenomenal wine program but they just didn't have much wine and i and i was chatting with her about it and eventually recruited her to come and run our wine program and she tripled our wine profitability you know because she's just so good at it so yeah they're my four jobs as a ceo and finance and numbers is number one and i think a lot of people they just trust their CFO with it.

40:03If you're the CEO, you need to sit with your CFO on a very regular basis and go through the numbers and ask the questions. I remember when I interviewed Lord Sugar and their start of every single board meeting is going through the numbers. And I've never done anything different. Every time, start with the numbers, go through the numbers. And even if the numbers are phenomenal, okay, why did we predict we were going to do less than that? Why were the numbers different to what we predicted type thing? And if the numbers are worse, well, what did we miss? What did we not do? All of those sorts of things.

40:36But coaching starts with numbers. Business is, the language of business is numbers. Some of the listeners might not label themselves a CEO. They might label themselves as, I don't know, owner or? Owner, MD, you know. I mean, the general manager, boss. It doesn't matter what you call it. I use the term CEO and it's interchangeable with all the others. But there's a big difference between being an owner and a CEO, James. If you're the owner and the CEO, you're probably doing a bad job at both of them. Meaning this, companies I own a share of or I'm the owner of, my CEOs work harder than if I didn't own a share.

41:17Why? I'll go back to my early days as in business. I was the CEO and the owner of the business, and I was very good at lying to myself, and most business owners are. It was like, oh, boss, how did you, you know, I would go home and report to the owner as CEO. Well, I did really great today, Mr. Owner. Yes, you did, Mr. CEO. You're phenomenal. Like, I would, the advantage of a big business over a small business is a set of directors or a board of directors and shareholders who demand growth. That's why a lot of people come to us at Action Coach is for the accountability. I believe there's four reasons why people come to us.

41:53And one of them is community. Another is accountability. Another is results. And another is the education. So we call that care, community, accountability, results, and education. Now, many of them think they're coming to us just for the results. But to get the results, you need a community around you that builds you up because it is lonely. um you need an education structure that that works and and you know having that but you also need accountability and that's why as a coach what i do with most people when i'm coaching them is i act as their board of directors or act as the owner with them as the ceo sort of thing so eventually i want every ceo of a business to do what i do and that is run their business in an hour a week.

42:38As a coach, I run those businesses in one hour a week. And I want to train my CEOs in all of my companies and every CEO we coach to be able to get your business to a point where in one hour a week, you can run your business. You're coaching your CEO or your MD or GM or whatever terminology it is. One hour a week, you can coach them. And part of that is knowing your numbers. You've got to be able to read the numbers pretty dang quick in that hour a week and go through of them. Now, what you said right at the start was run your business on 30 to 50 % of the income. Is that the right benchmark? Your cost structure should be somewhere in that basis.

43:17You should have a profitability of 20 to 30 % in a good organization. You want to be at about 30 % profitability. That's where you want to get to. Now, when we start installing ABOS, a lot of the times companies are running at fours and fives and 10%. So what we work them on is every quarter adding a percent. If every quarter we add one more percent and wow, sometimes they beat it and they get two more percent in profitability. And sometimes that's volume and sometimes it's cost cutting and sometimes it's better purchasing and sometimes it's increasing prices. Many times it's better marketing to get better customers so that they're not haggling on price sort of thing.

43:56When we're installing a boss into a business, and I use the word install, James, because it really is it's an installation of a business operating system okay and when you look at just the financials aspect installing our financial management system you'll go through and there's about 120 different strategies within that with your coach you'll work out which are the top 10 to 15 you need to install immediately and which ones can happen over time so we get immediate installation of the real control factors so that now we can make real decisions without real numbers you can't make great decisions in business you've alluded to time a few uh a few points you know and you mentioned productivity what's the key to getting control of your time um make a list start the top start at number one eat that frog you know every single day every customer of ours makes a list of what they got to get done tomorrow they prioritize the list they time allocate the list and they put it in their calendar you do also go talk about you know moving focusing on the thing that moves the needle the most and the number one thing of the day you know brian tracy wrote the book how to eat that frog and we tell everyone what's the most important thing it's first on your priority list every single day the most important thing happens at 8 30 or 9 whatever time you start work you don't have any meetings scheduled you can't schedule meetings until a little after that you have to do that first most important thing first thing every day and for most business people that's sales for most business people they need to make it rain make it rain mornings to just or make it rain monday whatever day it is whatever time it is but if you don't have a make it rain time allocated in your calendar in your diary then your business is not going to succeed you got to make it rain you're the owner your job is to bring in the money in your system you also talk about org charts and the importance of an I'll chat now and I'll chat in a year from now and I'll chat when the business is finished.

45:55And that also helps you get your time back or focus. Well, who does what by when? Knowing which seat on the boat you're in and which oar is yours to row is kind of important. When people don't see where they fit into the big picture, where they don't know how their role impacts other areas of the company, it doesn't work. It's why our Lion meetings in management training happen on a Monday morning. It's a group session. People forget the purpose of meetings. The purpose of a meeting is communication. They think it's about, you know, reporting. And the purpose of a meeting is to communicate. So everyone has to add value to the meeting and communicate because otherwise things fall through the gaps.

46:40You know, when it comes to time, though, James, it's all about productivity in the organization. That's the measure. What is our productivity measure? making that list every day as a 30 % bump in productivity and companies. And people have proven this all their life. They make a list the day before they go on vacation. They get so much more done. They leave for their vacation early. Like it's why not do that every single day of your life? I started doing it though, not for productivity. I started doing it because I couldn't leave work at work. I would go home and I'd be thinking about work all day.

47:11So I just started writing my list of what I needed to do the next day just to get it out of my head so that in that drive home, I could switch off and become a dad and become a husband. So when I walked in the door, you know, I saw it growing up and my dad was a different generation, but he would come home from work. He would go into the formal lounge with his newspaper and his couple of beers and he would sit in there and mum would tell us boys do not talk to your dad till he comes out of there and he would come out of there from dinner and then after dinner we'd go and play cricket or do something with dad but he needed that shut off time well I didn't want to be that dad I wanted to walk in the door and pick up my kids and hug my wife and and be ready so I started doing that and then I noticed the productivity increases and I went holy heck I gotta get everyone doing this and so everyone started doing it and we all got more better performance so pretty simple isn't it You would think it's simple, but my God, our brains are great at complicating things, James.

48:12We're very good at complicating things. Plan tomorrow to there. Yeah. Talk to me about getting control of customer experience. So delivery mastery and mastering the product or service delivery is, it starts basic checklists. Okay. um most companies when if a business owner says to me you know i've got my team's performance is up and down i've got great days and bad days or show me the checklist they have to follow and what's their answer well we don't have checklists so like what's the one business in the world where you want to control the customer experience perfectly the airlines we're sitting here at farnborough there's the airport right there what do we want we want that plane to take off and land perfectly what percentage of the time 100 correct so what do pilots have every single flight they have a flight plan they have a pre-flight checklist they have a checklist they walk around the plane fill in the checklist they get on the thing they follow the checklist the co-pilot's job is to ask the pilot to run through the checklist there's checklists to make certain that everything happens to perfection now when things go wrong that's when training kicks in systems mike bash taught me this he was one of the founding vice presidents of federal express he said systematize the 80 percent 80 of things are routine 20 of things you train people for so yes on a on a flight 80 of the time it's going to go perfectly there's a you know it's a computer run that's all of that sort of thing 20 of the time you need a genius sitting at the wheel to be able to do that stuff so it's it's 80 of tasks in business are routine james they're done every day they're done every hour they're done every week, every month.

49:53And once you get it, that those things need to be systematized, and whether that's a checklist or a video or photographs, like in our restaurant, we have a photograph above the stations in the kitchen that show this is what this should look like when it's clean. And this is what this should look like when it's prepped and ready for the day. It's a simple system but it's it's it's making sure that there is consistency of delivery we don't want because you want referrals you better have consistency of delivery if you give me good service one time bad service the next i can't refer you because i don't know if i'm going to get if my friends or colleagues are going to get the good or the bad service time consistency of delivery is more important than amazing delivery what about customer feedback what role does this play in customer experience you want as much customer feedback as you can possibly get you want all of the negative feedback you can possibly get is that the key to controlling complaints uh you want as many complaints as you can get because then you fix it so you never get that complaint again there's a difference though between going and asking for them and and and receiving them yeah if if you're reactive with customer service you will get complaints on online they won't actually come to you with the problem how many times James have you eaten at a restaurant and they came to you at the end and there was four or five things went wrong and they came to you at the end and said how was it you said oh great thanks especially you British you know you're gonna definitely not tell anyone that they've done anything wrong you know if you came to them and said hey if there was one thing we could have done better tonight for you what would that have been all of a sudden now you're enlisting the assistance of your customer to make your business better it's really crucial how you ask that question and you having the question and how you ask it though oh yeah you've got to have built relationship and rapport with the customer you don't want your waiter going over to the customer and the waiter's been ignoring them all night and then they go over and ask if there's one thing we could have done better well you could have showed up you know it's like people aren't going to be obvious with you if you haven't taken care of but let's go back to the original point train the people for that that that uh dealing and engaging with people but then they systemize the routine, if you like, is the question that you ask.

52:16Yeah, I got one of my buddies who runs one of the biggest restaurant nightclub groups in the world, and they train every employee with an inch of their life. Even employees who've been waiters at restaurants or bartenders for 20 years, when they come to them, they retrain them all. Here's how we say things here. Here's how we do this here. Building consistency in the systems is one thing, but you've got to build consistency in the soft systems. How do you answer the phone? How do you greet a customer? If you walk into a retail store and they ask, oh, hi, can I help you? You know they've done no training in that retail store.

52:55They don't value their people enough to train them. They don't invest in the humans that are in their organization. One of the biggest reasons people stay in companies is how much they're learning. I have a young intern in my office in Las Vegas and he decided to step backwards in his career to take an internship with us for one reason. He said, I'm going to learn more here and set my career up for the rest of my life. Most, if young people only understood your first job should be, your first three jobs technically should be jobs where you have a great mentor or a great ability to learn. If you can learn in your first three jobs, then your career is set.

53:36but they go and get a job based on how much they're going to make no your job is about how much you can learn set yourself up get great mentors you know kind of wraps up the getting control element of your system control of time control of money control of delivery of the service and knowing where we're going and control your own personal development and personal growth? Yeah, that one comes right through the whole thing. I think that, you know, we teach it that there's six steps to a boss to growing the business, to installing that system. But there's also six levels of your personal growth. And in the beginning, you've got to grow from being self-employed to a manager.

54:18You've got to grow from a manager to an owner, from an owner to an investor, from an investor to an entrepreneur. You've got to go through those scales. So, and a lot of them, there's emotional growth, There's knowledge growth, skills growth. The next level that you talk about is getting profitable. Yeah. So cash flow, control, then cash flow. ABOS step two is money. Let's make more money. Now that we've got a good customer experience or a consistent customer experience, now that we know we're making money, we've got control of our finances, now we know we've got productivity and we know where we're going, now let's feed the beast.

54:55Let's get the customers. Feed the beast. Now you've got a profit growth plan kind of system with five key components in there. Let's go through each one, one by one. Leads by conversion equals customers. So there's the first two leads and conversion. Customers by number of transactions and average sale equals revenues or turnover, sales. So there's your next two. And then finally, sales multiplied by margins equals profitability. So your five areas, and let me take a quick step back. people come to us and they ask for help with three things number of customers total sales and profitability the problem is those things if you look at the formula and and hopefully we can put in the show notes here this formula or a link to the actual formula the formula says those three things are the equals they're the end result of five things the five most important factors in marketing are leads conversion number of transactions which is repeat business average sale and margins.

55:56Now, if you go into our system within ABOS, there's more than 80 strategies you can install for leads. There's more than 80 strategies for conversion rate. There's more than 70 for repeat business, more than 60 for average sale, and more than 60 for profitability. So when someone comes to us, the first thing we do is start testing and measuring, start to know their existing numbers. From there, we go and work out what do we need to install in these different areas. We would generally start with margins and average sale and conversion rate. We don't usually go to lead generation first because what's the use of getting more leads if your conversion is average, if your average sale is low and your margins are not there.

56:39Is there a trap there? Because a lot of people want to go more leads. Oh, first thing they do when they go to marketing is they go to a marketing agency and say, I need more leads. Well, what's your conversion rate? I don't know okay then let's work on your conversion rate first that's not obvious you know yeah because if I'm if I'm a business owner it's easy to say we just need more leads rather than going and looking at that number vanity metrics lead flow is a vanity metric Average sale is a profitability metric. If I can get 10 % more money out of every single customer that comes through that door and makes a purchase, I've just increased my revenues by 10%.

57:26If my margins, if I can start selling products or services that have a higher margin, my bottom line just went up. If I can get 10 % more margin in every sale, I don't make any more sales. all I do is sell things with more margin in it than there was before, more profit in it than there was before. I change someone's mind from buying that brand to that brand because that brand I get 10 % more profitability in it. Boom, I've just added 10 % to my profit. No, I haven't added 10 % to my profit because if I've increased my margin by 10%, I've probably doubled or tripled my actual bottom line leftover money in the bank.

58:10These are the things that are very important for us to understand that 10 % increase in average sale probably doubles or triples the profit from the sale. It still cost me the same marketing to get the sale. It still cost me the same wages to get the sale, if I got a 10 % boom, my bottom line increase is massive. My conversion rate, if I'm already getting 10 customers calling my business a day or 10 customers messaging me or 10 people giving me their name and email on my website, right? If I can improve my conversion rate by 10 % better. My marketing costs just plummeted per customer. My cost of buying a new customer went down dramatically, not by doing better marketing, not by anything, just by the fact that instead of getting two out of 10 to purchase, I got three out of 10 to purchase.

59:08I just halved my marketing cost. Profits go through the roof when we fix those three. and they're the easiest they're the easiest lead generation is possibly the hardest of the five what's standing out for me is a few things one is pay attention to this system if you like the five areas the uh the things to move and have a plan for it so i mean you said you've got 80 strategies at each one of those i don't need to implement 80 strategies though no you'll probably implement somewhere between five and ten on each one on each of the five so somewhere between 25 and and 50 strategies and this is why you call it the profit growth plan because there's 25 to 50 strategies that are being worked and if each one of them adds one or two percent you've just done 100 you're good at that aren't you about giving direction you said each quote one percent you said set a goal forgetting of the tools people want the silver bullet james and the silver bullet in business is 100 ideas that add one percent it's not one idea that does 100 growth in your business people put their not like they'll go and build a new website and think this will be the thing this this is it it's going to solve all of our worries and no it's not does your website have 100 different ways for a prospect to say i'd like to i'm interested does it have 100 offers for your prospect to say, I'm raising my hand.

1:00:36I want some more information. Marketing is a love of mine, James. I absolutely love it. Just converting a prospect. I'll give you a simple example. Someone comes to us at Action Coach and expresses interest to join our coaching or I want more information about coaching. right they will get an immediate email back to them they'll probably get uh they've probably requested an e-book or they might have uh requested our two weeks start a coaching program or they might have requested a uh download of an infographic or you know we've probably got 50 e-books for free on actioncoach.com we've got dozens of infographics that people can print and put on their wall as a reminder of the great things they can be doing all of the abos system is all there type thing for them to print and put it on the wall and reminder of this formula in fact they can go to the website and download the infographic of the five ways formula and stick it on their wall and remind themselves every day i've got to be doing leads conversion average do you know what i mean but by the way that point is massively important in in internalizing the principle when you walk around it when you see something every day it kind of sinks in almost on a subliminal level you know it it's it's for goals it's for all sorts of things i remember before i bought my first rolex i had a picture of solid gold blue face submariner it was stuck to the side of my computer screen for three years before i got to the point where i could where i hit the goal that allowed me to buy it okay to have the money to invest we've got to make it so let's go back to marketing now where do we start with marketing well so the five ways that we talked about okay the next area you go to is repeat business so the reason i brought up action coach when someone comes to us in marketing is that once they give us their name there is then a 31 30 day email sequence we've gone historically marketing was a weekly thing well historically it was monthly when i first started in business you communicated with your customers monthly you sent a monthly newsletter.

1:02:47Then it went to weekly when we got email, right? And now it's daily. So a good marketer today will communicate daily with the customer. So we have the first 30 days emails mapped out. Why? You don't go to Netflix and start at season three, episode five. You go back and binge season one, episode one, because you got to learn the backstory. Well, when I join a company, if I go into their normal newsletter, I don't know all of the basics. See, for example, I ask a business owner, how many of your customers know every product that you sell? None. So when I'm talking about repeat business here, people that don't know what you do can't buy it.

1:03:30If your customers don't know that you offer something, they can't buy it from you. So what are your offers? What are your reasons to go back and communicate every day? I have an email sequence where literally every single day, a business owner will get an email from me if they're on the Action Coach database, and it will talk to them about a singular problem that they could be experiencing business and two or three solutions they can do. Now, if you're a business owner, do you want every day two or three ideas from me how to grow your business? Yes. So it's not a waste. It's not spam. It's informational.

1:04:07Now, at the end of it, I say, by the way, if you want more on this, please just hit reply, reach out and book a call with me or one of my team or read this thing or go to this article or do that. You know, I see that as a very big part of the repeat business, but repeat business is all about creating offers. If you're not creating new offers every month, you're not getting enough repeat business. And it could be the same products, same services, but you've got to create a new offer a reason to call me back a reason to ask me to do something what's your reason to bring me to the next thing to the next thing to the next thing a business that does not ask their customers to come back well let's go back into the business that does not collect a customer's name email and cell phone number is wasting marketing money today if you are not collecting and let's use i've used restaurant as an example in my restaurant when someone sits down at the table we don't just want to collect the name and address of the first person that booked we want everyone in the table to become part of our vip program so we go to the table with an ipad and say hey listen we'd love everybody here to be a part of our vip program um here's the benefits of it if you want to join fantastic just name email and phone number is all we need please pass this around the table so we get name email if someone brings a group of 12 we've got 12 people to follow up now if a family comes in they're not all the same you know they're a brother brother and sister that so we get all of the database so that's your first thing how are you collecting names and addresses from existing customers and prospects you've got to have as many methodologies as you can to as my book says get people to raise their hand and say i'm interested Now, from a repeat business perspective, we just need to consistently ask them to come back.

1:06:05What have we got? What reason do we have for them to come back? I'll give you an example. A buddy of mine was in the insurance business, and I sat down with him and I said, what is your average policy number per customer? And he said, it's 1.18. I said, so what you're telling me is that you have – we went through it just before. He had 30 different types of insurance that someone could buy from him. and his average customer had 1.18 types of insurance i said let's go and do a service for all of your customers let's go and serve your customers better let's go and sit down with them and say hey listen as an insurance company we have 30 different types of insurance that you need you don't need 30 in any way shape or form but just to make sure that should anything happen in your life we want to make sure you're covered and now so last month you saw the fires in california right people lost their homes they said so that's one that we go to people with we say hey listen we're not sure if you have because you don't have your homeowner's insurance with us we're not sure if you're covered for fire it would it be okay if we did a survey with you to make sure then if there's a flood hey we're not sure do you know what I mean like there's many reasons to go back to them but just by going back and looking at we increased his average policy count to 2.3 something So almost more than doubling his business, quadrupling his profit just by saying, how do we get our existing customers to come back more often and thinking it through?

1:07:33Now, again, when you're installing ABOS, we'll coach you through because the ABOS installation comes with coaching. When we're installing the systems to get repeat business, it's not just about a CRM. It's about what are you putting in there? What are you doing with that? How are you doing? That's why the coaching is vital. Every 90 days, we bring you into plan. And every 90 days, we're looking at your ABOS numbers. And we're saying, okay, what is your current repeat business rate? And again, these are just measures that we look at. And final area of marketing, James, obviously lead generation.

1:08:07This is one where I could literally sit here with you for five days and never stop talking about marketing. I love it. I love it to death. I think it is one of the most amazing things. It is the lifeblood of a business. it's it's what breed brings oxygen to an organization how do we generate leads how do we convert those leads into customers the myriad of ways of doing that is just it's so much fun for me to watch a company learn how to actually consistently and predictably buy customers i wrote that book buying customers it's now in version 2.0 i think i'm probably gonna have to update it again um but when you understand that if you take 20 and and you put it into the market and you get 100 back it's pretty exciting i i learned this when i had a dog food business home delivered dog food our first sale to a new customer was 108 on average it was a six week supply of food and it was and i could do it for under 38 dollars so my profit on the first sale My GP on the first sale was$38.

1:09:16So I had to buy customers for less than$38. My radio ads would buy them for$24.50. I had some TV ads that were buying them for$4.50 a customer. Now, when you understand that marketing is math and it's all about measuring, and also when you truly understand that 80 % of marketing fails. I'll give you an example.

1:09:44So when I do a new marketing campaign, we do what's called color block testing. So we will go to meta. I use meta and Instagram for most ad testing. I do a lot with Google, but most ad testing I'll do on a meta program. So I will, and I use light blue. I don't know why. I just, when I first designed them on Canva a few years back, that was the color I started using. And so I still use it today. And I will create a dozen headlines based on different hooks. So in my book about advertising, I show people all the different types of hooks. And today there's many different types of hooks out there that get people to read.

1:10:22And a hook is another word for a headline. So I get the headline, seven reasons why this, blah, blah, blah. You name it, I've got all the headlines, right? I'll create 12 of those. I will color block test them. I'll put$30 on them, each of those. So$360, I will test those things. i'm looking for uh between a two and a half and four percent click-through rate it's got to be two and a half if it's above four then i'm doing something wrong in most cases because i'm actually getting an audience that would be non-buyers does that make sense it's like i've put up i've just got too many people clicking and i'm looking for a purchase of about two dollars a click or less for what I'm selling.

1:11:09Now, those metrics will be different for other people. And again, when you're installing ABOS, your coach will go through with you what your metrics should be. But here's the crazy part. We now have competitions in our marketing teams to write the 12. Each of us will get to write two or three. I'm the guru, right, James? I've been doing this 30 years. I've been writing headlines forever. The last three, one of the interns beat me. Why? Because the target audience is young entrepreneurs. I'm 54. I'm not writing the exact right copy for them, if that makes sense. I've got to get my head. And so this is why I love employing young people because they help me in marketing in ways that others never could.

1:11:53But we will do that testing. And then once we get to the two, we'll nail it down to two of them. We'll write another six versions of each of those and do the test again. once we've done the color block testing we've got so we've done from 12 down to two we rewrite both of those slightly different versions of them then we'll go and put a photograph behind it and we'll do 12 different photographs on the headline that we've chosen right so we found the one that works the best we'll put 12 different photographs behind it then we'll do 12 different offers. Then we'll do 12 headlines underneath. And so overall, I will invest somewhere in the vicinity of 5 ,000 and one month to test an ad.

1:12:38And at the end of that, I can then put 100 grand, 200 grand, 500 grand or a million dollars into that ad. You know why? Because it's a self-liquidating offer. That ad will make me more money than I actually put into running the ad. It's called roll ass return on ad spend so if i'm out there and i'm spending a million dollars on a campaign and making two million dollars from the campaign i've got free advertising for the rest of my life as you were describing the this profit growth plan with the five ways in it you alluded to maths martin's about maths um 80 of it fails you started even before that you were talking about the importance of data even before that you were saying look there's going to be between 25 and 50 strategies that you're going to be working in here and i'm tying that by to something you said earlier on about the ceo's job number one you said was numbers and that's the thing that's standing out on this growth plan you know the numbers for each of those five areas well let's even go back further james the first question i ask someone you ask me where do you start with this.

1:13:48The first question I ask you is how many new customers per day do you want? I love the per day. Per day. It has to be per day. Marketing is a daily algorithm. Marketing is not a monthly thing we measure. It's not a weekly thing we measure. It's a daily thing that we measure. We measure marketing and sales results daily. In fact, sales results you'll often measure hourly, depending upon the business or the type of business that you're in. Now, if you're a 90-day sales cycle. Obviously, we're measuring leads daily, conversion through the sales process daily, step-by-step process. But where do you start?

1:14:22You start with answering this question. How many new customers do I want and can I handle per day consistently onboarding them perfectly and doing an amazing job that I will keep them long-term? Now, most people say, oh, I can have an unlimited number of new customers. I'm an online business. Absolute rubbish. You can't have an unlimited number. Firstly, your server would blow up. Don't be stupid about unlimited. How many can you handle and onboard consistently, persistently in your business? Now, I'm going to teach you a magic word with that. Let's imagine I'm using my business, James, the business coaching business.

1:15:03My average partner out there in the marketplace, so in every city that we have an operation, my action coach partner in that marketplace will tell you that they can onboard maybe one customer a day. They can't onboard 50 customers a day. It's just not possible. Now, we could say, oh, we'll do it through technology. Great, but we're not going to give them the level of service that we want to and keep them as long as we want to and get the results that we need with them if we do it that way. So I'm talking about a one-to-one coaching client, whether it's an executive coaching, CEO coaching, corporate business coaching, or small business coaching, mid-sized business coaching, marketing coaching, sales coaching, system.

1:15:46We have all the different coaching genres, right? The magic word now for marketing is only. We only take on one new client a day. We're going to see if you meet the criteria to be that only one person we add a day. Scarcity is big in marketing. you're pretty passionate about this subject, aren't you? I love marketing. Marketing is possibly the most fun area of business. What would you say to someone who doesn't quite have that relationship that despises it a little bit? Well, I'm an accountant by training, and I think you know that. So as an accountant, we're trained that marketing is an expense, and for most companies it is because they don't do marketing properly.

1:16:33Marketing is an investment if done correctly. It's the best investment in the world. If I can take a dollar and turn it into$1.50 by the end of the day, right? If I can do marketing and for every dollar in marketing, I can make$1.50 within 30 days. Let's just do 30 days, right? So I've had a 50 % ROI in 30 days. I take that money and I do it again. My ROI is amazing. I love it from that perspective. If you are a good marketer, it's an investment. Every dollar out brings in two, four, 10, 20, 100 back to you. That's what you say and develop the investment mindset. But you got to test and measure.

1:17:14You got to do the math. Numbers. Got to do it. Numbers don't lie. Well, let me just give you the numbers that blow people away, James. If I get a 10 % improvement in each of the five areas, right, just 10 % better, 10 % more prospects, 10 % better conversion, not like from 30 to 40. But from 30 to 33, like just 10%, minute changes that we can do. Just measuring them usually gets us a 10 % improvement in this stuff. If I do that, what do you think is the improvement in A, my revenues, total sales, and B, my profitability? My total sales are up 46 % and my profitability is up 61%. It's leverage.

1:17:55Divide to multiply. 10 % times 10 % times 10 % times 10 % times 10 % times 10%. It's a 61 % multiplier to the bottom line of a business. So if the bottom line's a million, you're on 1.61 million next year. Correct. On 10%. 10 % in each of the five areas. Now imagine I broke that down even further. Imagine we went to lead generation and we looked at 10 strategies for lead generation and we improved each of the 10 by 10%. Like referrals. People, we install a referral system in their business. And they're like, well, we get some referrals. Yeah, but do you have a system for it? No. All right, let's install our referral system, the ABOS referral system.

1:18:34Let's install it in your business. There's 24 stages to the referral system and it'll work. And they go from getting the odd referral here and there to getting a systematic methodology of referrals happening daily, weekly, monthly, depending upon the timeframe of their business. This profit growth five ways system, is this the engine of the business? is this it is by far one of the most important engines in the business yes because this is your predictive indicators this is not like historic numbers like profit and balance sheet those are historic numbers that's what happened these numbers can tell you what's going to happen let's imagine you have a sales cycle that is 30 days so say you're a construction business and from from when they connect with you to when you bid and win the job is a 30-day thing right How many leads you get in March Will tell me how many sales you're getting in April I can tell your cash flow in May Because of how many leads you're getting in March That whole anticipation And the ability to see around corners And the ability to think ahead It allows me to hire more people in the right time frame I don't have to hire them at the last minute It allows me to buy more equipment at the right time frame It allows me to get my leasing correct It allows me to do all of these decision making that is a big part and that's why marketing is so important so we start increasing volume so you get control then we start increasing volume and you get the real cash flow happening once you've got volume then we've we've got a good solid business to build upon look you you're even convincing me on this you've come visit many times it's probably a passion what's the take-home message for this for getting the profit growth strategy in people's businesses?

1:20:20Dude, there's so many, but know your numbers and set a goal for your numbers. So let me break that down for you. Let's imagine we did that first thing I said we do, when do you want to finish the business? So we answer the question of when do you want to finish the business? And you said to me, James, Brad, I want to finish it by this date. And I then asked you a few more questions. I said, well, what do you want to sell it for if you sell it? You know, I don't know. I said, well, okay, let's look at your dreams and your life. Because your business is a vehicle to provide for your life. It's not your life, right?

1:20:51And you said, Brad, I want to sell it for 10 million quid. Fantastic. Seven years from now, 10 million quid. What do you think you've got to be doing in revenue for it to sell for 10 million quid? Now, this might take a few weeks of research to go away and look at your industry and see what are the multipliers and the multiples and who's buying and what they'll pay for it. And let's imagine we come up with, well, it's got to be doing 100 million quid in sales and it's got to be doing 2 million quid in profitability because your industry, whatever you're doing is a low profit industry. Fantastic.

1:21:21So we've got to 100 million in sales, 2 million in bottom line profits. So we can sell this thing for five times EBITDA, five times profits is your model. Fantastic. fantastic we then go through james and say in seven years here's what your lead flow numbers have to be here's what your conversion rate has to be here's what your repeat business rate your average sale and your margins have to be by six years we've got to get it to these numbers by five years by four years by three years by two years by next quarter we've got to have this growth in it so i know what your numbers need to be for seven years out i can plan your marketing i can plan what are the strategies we need to implement the abos system how do we install these strategies to go from this conversion rate to this conversion rate how do we install the strategies to go from this number of transactions to this number of transactions classic reverse engineering but with absolute detail it's giving you the profit the system and the strategies of a boss you got the average business owner i've tried everything i said well okay here's three and a half thousand strategy cards pick which ones you've tried it's we've developed a toolbox within a boss that gives the owner control back of the growth of their business it's no longer a guessing game yeah to be honest though is even if you've tried it once to me they say it wouldn't work next time because you've got another formula that says b times do equals half yeah so i did this but you've not only got to do it you've got to you've got to be well it's like the person who says you know i've tried telemarketing great and how many books did you read on how to do sales on telemarketing how much training did you have on telemarketing how much sales training did you get how much did you test the script to be able to know exactly what works what doesn't and you know i i'm a very big test and measure guy and when people tell me they tried something i go back to well show me the numbers well i made 10 phone calls then you didn't try anything there's no testing in 10 i was a coach for my kids uh soccer team my older daughters they're now 22 22 and 23 but back when they were in under 12s it was a young girl on the team and we were learning laces kicks we had to call them for the kids you know they all kick with their toe or then they kick with the inside of their foot so we taught them inside outside foot and now we're teaching them front of the foot the big kick you know the booming front of the foot off that thing and i said to all the girls right over to the fence 100 laces kicks one girl comes back after five of them she says coach i'm no good at these are great go do 95 more and tell me if you got better

1:23:55i interviewed darren cahill who's possibly the goat tennis coach of all time you know uh leighton hewitt andre agassi um his yannick sinners his current uh thing five number one sorry four number one players this guy's coached and i said what's what's the goal when you go out there do you set the big goals do you do you look at the big hairy audacious goal he says you know what we look at doing one small thing better every time we go out on the court just one thing just a little bit better you know we don't sit down and go we want to be number one in the world we go hey we haven't yet beaten this guy this year let's aim to beat that guy there's two other bits i want to talk about regarding this getting profitable uh section of your model.

1:24:43First one is sales process. What is a real sales process? Sales is technically a scientific thing. Again, if you break it down, what is the information someone needs to know to be able to make a decision? Now there's multiple buying styles and whether you go with the disk profile, the communication of the VAK, the neuro-linguistic programming the bank spin there's all different buying styles right but what it starts with is a flow chart and the flow chart starts with when someone connects with us what do they have to do right through to how does someone actually make their second purchase with us the flow chart should not stop at the single purchase a single purchase is not a customer they're a shopper they've made a transaction with you in order for someone to become a customer they need to become accustomed to doing business with you like the second time you go to a restaurant you already know where the bathrooms are you already know things do you know what i mean you're accustomed to it and we call that the ladder of loyalty and and the ladder of loyalty takes someone from a suspect a potential customer to a prospect meaning they've raised their hand and said hey i'm interested and remember back in marketing today and and this really goes into the sales system if i can just spend a minute on marketing and sales today is very different to where it was pre-covid and pre-10 years ago 20 like i'll go back when i first bought a car okay when i first bought a car you went to 10 dealerships you looked at all the cars on the lot and and you got the brochures and you took the brochures home and then you studied it all and then you went back and test drove one or two of them sort of thing today the world of buying is different i'll give you four sets of statistics that I think are very important.

1:26:30Number one, it's now more than 40 % of buyers do not want to talk to a salesperson in the transaction. They don't want to ever deal with a human. The younger you are, the higher that percentage is. The older you are, the more chance you want to get on a phone and talk with a potential salesperson. So the role of the salespeople have changed dramatically. The role of marketing, Google gave us these statistics. So Google did an analysis they called ZMOT, zero moment of truth, which says 7-11-4 is their essential numbers, meaning seven hours of research, 11 interactions in four different places. Now, let me explain that.

1:27:13Someone today making a decent size purchase. So let's actually go back to purchasing behaviors. If I know what I want to buy, I go to Amazon or something similar. Okay, I'm already there. I open the app and I click and I might do a minute search for the item that I want or I might even search the category of item. Usually if I'm doing more research than that, I go to Google. google the top searches are um best this reviews of price of problems with buying comparisons they're the main searches the categories of searches marcus sheridan's wonderful book uh on on that subject um they ask you answer is phenomenal about helping us learn that.

1:28:02So they do those searches, right? And they're now doing research. Now, if I don't know what I want to buy, I go to YouTube and I type in how to do something. So YouTube is like the, how do I do it? And then on the YouTube, someone will go, oh, and I use this product to do it. And you go, oh, I need to buy that. So you go to Google and you research buying that and so on. Okay. So in the 7-11-4 study, what Google found is that people will on average do seven hours of study to make a purchase. Now, a bigger purchase is more hours, a smaller purchase is less hours, obviously. So if I go to your website and you don't have seven hours of videos, articles, audios, podcasts, e-books, price calculators, et cetera, if you don't have all of that, I'm going to bounce back off your site and go and find a site that gives me enough education so that I buy.

1:28:59People do not, and this is the next statistic, people want to be 70 % of the way through the purchase before talking to a salesperson because they don't want to appear stupid. They want to have done their research and know what questions to ask when they go in to talk with the salesperson. So for example, someone looking at Action Coach might be watching this whole podcast in order to learn enough so that when they speak with a coach, they feel confident in asking them, how do I install ABOS? I really need sales right now. Do I have to do the ABOS installation in the order Brad talked about it in, or can I do this part first because I need more conversion rate immediately?

1:29:41Can we focus on that immediately? They're going to ask educated questions. Now, the 11 interactions, and this part often surprises people because pre-COVID, we used to do a lot more business face-to-face. The technologies of Zoom have ruined a lot of salespeople. The technologies of social media have ruined a lot of salespeople. Columbia University, this is my fourth statistic, came out and shared with us that one hour of face-to-face time is worth five hours of Zoom. So they did the whole study. So if I'm in sales today, my goal is to be first to respond and first to get face to face. Because they're already 70 % of the way through the sale by the time they connect with me.

1:30:36Remember that. By the time they connect to a salesperson, not a marketer, but by the time they connect to a salesperson, I'm already most probably 70 % of the way through the purchase. So the speed, Jay Baer teaches us these days, that the speed of response, now there are statistics showing more than 40 % of customers will buy from the first company that calls them back. It's gotten that bad out there in the marketplace. So if I am the first, if I don't, and this is where even AI technology, we're now using an AI technology that when someone calls to book in an appointment or someone fills in their detail to book an appointment, the AI will call them within five minutes.

1:31:23Now we've shown this, right? If we call them inside two minutes, it's too fast. They're stunned. They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, big brother, what's going on type thing. If it's five minutes in, they feel comfortable that a human has seen this and responded to them so the ai will call you james and say hey james it's uh brad calling from action coach we noticed you booked in for our two week coaching program to get started with us and we're very excited by that i just wanted to book you in for your first uh social coffee meeting with one of the coaches and i was looking at a time in that and they're like hang on i just filled that in i know we have an office here we work 24 hours a day because we're a global business.

1:32:06We want to make sure that if you need help, we get you to help as soon as we possibly can. So what's a good time for you to get into your first appointment? Now, your coach doesn't have any appointments available until next week. We've got Monday and Tuesday as allocated times, and he's going to be in your area on Tuesday. How about Tuesday at two o 'clock? Could we do that? Now, by the way, James, coach said he'd rather you selected the coffee shop do you have a favorite coffee shop if you don't we can go back and this is ai all doing this now if they ask you hey is this a real person it says absolutely i'm an ai assistant and i do this for brad and i help out with doing all this stuff we found that the systems make us much more effective and but if we're not in touch with them within that immediate timeframe, we don't get the sale.

1:32:56So to finish the statistical thing, seven hours, 11 interactions, could be emails, could be phone calls, could be face-to-face. I prefer face-to-face today because I think that phone calls and face-to-face beat text messaging and stuff. But I will add this iteration. If someone messages you on Instagram, don't call them immediately. reply on instagram you know many chat now does that for you again ai it'll chat back and forth on email email has ai now that will chat back and forth on the emails and so you build those systems in to build that face-to-face or to build that book that phone call in so that a real human can be face-to-face or that now the four is four locations that could be your youtube channel it could be your website it could be your linkedin profile what people don't understand about social media, James, is that social media is really three things.

1:33:53Number one, social proof media. If I'm looking you up, I am going to check you out on social media and see all of the stuff on there. It's social proof. I want to see before and afters of your construction job or of your dental reconstruction. I want to see happy customer testimonials. I want all of that sort of stuff. so i'm going to your social media for social proof your linkedin who's endorsed you who hasn't all of those sorts of things the second thing is that where people mistake social media they think it's about what you say it's not it's about what other people are saying about you but let's just use a very simple example of giving people an opportunity to post about you um one of my restaurants.

1:34:38I've sold out of it now. But when people came in, we trained all of our people. We had a photographer come in and train all of our waiters. But when we bring them the first drink, our waiters are trained to ask, by the way, whose phone should I use for the group photo? We give them an opportunity to post on social media. We take the photo. By us taking the photo, guess what all of a sudden happens? They're now posting a photo, tagging themselves at our restaurant holding up the picture of them with these beautiful cocktails. Now, the third thing about social media is it should be social marketing, not social media.

1:35:17Now, I know that, and we can talk about media and creating content all you want, but it's got to be marketing, not just media. It's got to actually convince people to connect with you. It's got to convince people just getting a lot of likes and shares and that doesn't make sense. What do I want people to do? I want people to DM me. I want them to email me. Hey, instead of putting up, hey, I just wrote a blog article on this. Here's the link. I'll put up, hey, I just wrote an ebook on this subject. If you want a copy, DM me or type ebook in the messages. I want people to start a conversation with me.

1:36:00So once they start a conversation, I can then get in a conversation back with them and conversations lead to conversion. So you asked about sales. Marketing now is a big part of the sales engine. Marketing has to do 70 % of the heavy lifting in sales in most cases today. So that 7-11-4 is a vitalness to get the communication. Now a reminder though, that between 8 and 20 % of people are ready to buy when they first connect with you through marketing channels. Now, the majority of marketing channels, what that means is that 80 to 90 % of people who raise their hand and say, please give me an ebook or, hey, I'd like a quote or, hey, I'm interested in a brochure or download this.

1:36:4380 to 90 % of those people are not ready to buy. They are ready to be nurtured. They're ready to build a relationship. They're not ready to buy. So you have to have those nurture sequences. You have to have those emails. You have to have the offers you have to have all of those things planned and this is why great crms and great funnels are massively important in this so another super important part of making more profits is retention of customers now when i say retention of customers how is that different from customer service customer well today you have customer experience and customer service customer experience is planning for them to have a great experience so mapping out the customer journey okay customer service is who takes over when something goes wrong so used historically we only had customer service and there was more things going wrong because we didn't plan and map the customer experience do all businesses need both yes yes you must have both you must plan the customer experience because if i want them to do as much repeat business as possible i've got to make certain that i've planned their repeat business to the point where i'll give you an example a florist client we sat down with them and we were looking at their repeat business from customers and i said uh how how well do you know your customers and i said well what do you mean i said well take me for example if i was your customer would you know my wife's and my anniversary date would you know my wife's birthday would you know my mother-in-law's birthday would you know my sister's birthday would you know uh do you know what i mean like james they didn't even know these things so how could they build a plan for the customer journey or the customer experience what if they got to know me and they said brad listen as a service what we do is we call you a week before uh all of these major events and just ask you what type of flowers or what type of arrangement or if it's still okay to send an arrangement of that sort what price point etc Is it okay if we call you a week before Valentine's Day and a week before all of your anniversaries and things?

1:38:50Or, Brad, would you just prefer we put it on automatic and made it happen for you every single event and it was just taken care of? Yes, that one, that one, please do that. Okay? And then they're like, oh, and by the way, Brad, because you're married, I know that a lot of people forget to just buy flowers for their wife. what if we put you on our monthly program that any month where there wasn't something special we would just pick a day and send flowers to your wife of course we'll text you to let you know that we've sent them so that you're not surprised and things plan the customer journey give you another example uh my wife's hairdresser has my phone number why do you think my wife's hairdresser has my phone number to to tell you he texts me brad lauren just had her haircut and color she doesn't color she had her haircut today just want you to know before she gets home please don't ever tell her that i've told you this so when she gets home or when i get home i can hey did you get your hair done today looks amazing what does she think about the hairdresser Every time I get my hair cut, my husband notices.

1:40:01And people go, oh, that's just, no, it's an amazing service that he does to help me be a better husband. If you plan the customer journey, you create raving fans. As we talked about before, you get a suspect, turn them into a prospect. The prospect becomes a shopper with a singular transaction. We turn them into a customer by getting them into a repeat transaction. Your offer to a brand new customer must be, if they're a first-time customer, you need to do something amazing. What's the amazing offer that you give them? Let's talk about getting the business run by systems. Is this the first part of getting off the tools?

1:40:41No, the first part of getting off the tools is getting control of the base. The second part is getting enough money that you can employ people to get off the tools, hence the marketing being second. You've got to be able to employ people to be able to get off the tools. systemization is then the next phase of that so that anyone can deliver or anyone that's trained well enough can deliver the program or deliver the product or deliver the service type thing i'll give you an example one of my friends has a sports massage business and he hires masseuses who are 10 years plus he won't hire them unless they're 10 years plus okay he then puts them or another two weeks training and systems learning so they learn his way of doing it so the systems are of vital importance but until you have volume of marketing until the marketing has got you enough customers the doing systems is almost not worth it because you systems is where we start to take paper systems and turn them into technology systems is where we start to get really clear on our vision for the business i don't like people doing their vision when they first come to us because until they've started doing marketing and got some volume, they probably can't see just how amazing their business can be.

1:41:55They probably can't see just how big it can go. You do talk about going big as well when you speak. Yeah, look, my thing is exponential business growth. It's about scaling your business. It's about multiplying the profitability of the organization. You don't have to just go percentage growth. You can go multiplied growth, but for multiplied growth, you need scalable systems. If the systems aren't scalable, if you want to open 10 offices or 30 stores or 10 cities or five countries, the systems had better be dang good to be able to handle that. So we've got technology, we've got automation systems that we can put in place.

1:42:34We've got HR people systems, education systems. What other kind of systems are we putting? Well, systems doesn't start with actually putting the systems in place. Systems starts with directionality. So setting the vision for the organization, setting the culture document for the organization, setting the mission and those things, getting really clear on where you're going. You know, for me, leadership starts with a framework. And the framework of leadership is having a direction and clear, measurable objectives and key results in the organization. it has to have a plan because there's there's no you don't systematize just for the sake of systems you systematize to achieve something to go somewhere to do something so unless you know where you're going putting the systems in play doesn't really make much sense having the checklists and all those basic things absolutely that's part of the foundation but when we come to the high-end systems we want to start with understanding where we're going who do we need to create systems for like what is the organization going to look like um you mentioned org chart earlier building the org chart and again in the abos installation people build their org chart in the systems i think so yeah i mean just to go through your nine at this level there's setting vision there's a culture there's the mission we should directional things as you've said then there's org charts then there's roles and responsibility through position agreements yes then there's the kpis the dashboard system then the you got to know where you're going and what you're measuring and then you can create systems to get there you do i mean let's let's get them let's get them all out here because you've you've also got your weekly means well so that's your management system your management system does that your leadership system does that your high performance team systems do those things that's part of the human side of the systemization conversation like when we talk systems james what i i like to make it simple for people i don't want an iso 9000 manual i want a video that trains me how to do something you know a video on a checklist is better than a 74 page manual that gets in the way if people aren't using the systems in your business it's probably because the systems actually make their job harder than easier.

1:44:57I want to reformat the client intake form so that it asks them all the right questions and that's how I systematize the client intake. Or if I do that on the digital system, they've got to put in these things and once those things are entered, then we do a proper intake of a customer. Does that make sense? Don't make it so that it adds work, make it so that it's part of the work and it makes everyone's life easier not harder type thing systems should make everyone more effective more efficient not less efficient and less effective i find too many companies where they install systems that slow people down rather than increase productivity your system should increase the productivity of the humans should we just go into leadership then because you mentioned a couple of things passion focus and i've learned you mentioned in the past it's about communication too yeah so a leader's so leadership is a framework first meaning vision mission plan objectives key results all of that stuff if you don't have that where are you leading them to second part of leadership is the skill set that you need to have and communication is obviously very high up on a leader's skill set if you haven't done communication training then you're going to come to us and do some communication training does that make sense Yeah.

1:46:16You know, but you also got to look at, you've got to have delegation training. You've got to have, you've got to have, you know, all of those things because most leaders don't delegate, they abdicate. There's no system, there's no training, there's no accountability or no scorecard kept. Therefore, they're not delegating, they're abdicating responsibility to another person. so if we take that and say yes framework then the skills and there's a whole bunch of skills that we take people through in our 12-week leadership training but then there's the um core of who you are as a leader okay so the core of who you are really comes back to your leadership style and you want to define your leadership style because what the goal of leadership is is engaged team members if our team are engaged then they're getting higher performance if our team are engaged then our customers are engaged if our team are engaged they see their work as more of a calling than a job you know it's so there's job career calling is essentially the order that we see people go through in many companies there are some areas of the company where they are just jobs we would prefer to have them as a career um for for example one of my friends owns a janitorial business and so all his people do is clean hotels well how do you see that as a career is really about the heart and soul of the business not about the the tasks that they do or the type of cleaning material that they use so that's an important aspect i think leadership for someone if someone is in a leadership position, they've moved past accountability.

1:48:02See, management is about removing three behaviors, really, and that is blame, excuse, and denial. If we have good management systems in place and good training in place, we build competency, we build productivity, we get a person out of blame, out of excuse, out of denial, to a level we call responsibility. So we call it the point of power. Below is blame, excuse, denial. Above the point of power is ownership, accountability, responsibility. someone in a job will be doing blame excuse denial someone in a career will be doing responsibility so their natural behavior is a level of responsibility to doing the job and doing it well to move into management you've got to move up to accountability now you can't give someone accountability they have to take accountability someone that shows you initiative that they want to be in charge.

1:48:54Why do you say that? Because you over promote people. When you over promote someone who's just good at the skill, they lose, they leave the company. Someone has to want to be accountable, held to account to move into management. Okay. Now, how do we train managers? By running our management system, our weekly meetings, our Monday meetings, our Thursday meetings, the daily forms, the weekly things that they do by using the management system, they learn to be a good manager because they've been managed well they learn to be a good manager in the leadership side of it you've got to learn you've got to build the framework so everyone can be a great leader you've then got to learn the skills of leadership communication being obviously a priority in that one that i teach and then you've got to know what your focus is as a leader your leader's job is building people to be passionate and focused your leader's job is to build more leaders that's the job you build a great manager and then you build them into a great leader because the leader steps up to ownership they own the business in their heart they don't have to have shares but in their heart in their head they own this thing it's theirs they are the the core it they own it in their heart in their soul and that's where when i talk about the ABOS manifesto and I share with my people about it.

1:50:18If my people don't get a tear in their eye when I talk through the manifesto of what we're aiming to achieve and how we're aiming to help business people get their lives back, then I know I've done a bad job as a leader. If I haven't brought out that level of emotion in people, then I've done a bad job as a leader. And that's because I don't feel the emotion for it. If I've written it in a way that it's not bringing out emotion in me then if it doesn't make me feel a little bit emotional then how the heck is it going to make them feel at all emotional and tied to it and buy into it and love okay strong leadership is at the top of your six uh key framework all right so we've just talked about strong leadership there and finding the style the next part is common goal yeah yeah the if i go into an average company today and ask them what's the goal of the organization they can't tell me they can't tell me they can't tell me the goal and if they can tell me the goal it's like you know a million bucks a quarter or you know it's like an and a goal it has no passion it has nothing so to be a common goal three things must be present number one everyone must know it okay number two everyone must win from it staff customers

1:51:36suppliers, everyone's got to win from it. Okay. And number three, it's got to have some meaning greater than money. Can't just be about money. You know, if you're a business owner and, and, uh, you think that your staff get excited about money, you're, you're kidding yourself. They don't get excited about that. They get excited about doing great work with great friends and great people they get excited about achieving amazing things okay in your six keys to winning team so we've got strong leadership first we've covered that common goal and we've got rules of the game and there's two types of rules culture and some other rules yeah so your basic rules is your employee manual right these are the rules of when you show up when you leave how you check in how you do like that's just your employee induction manual type thing your most important rules are your core values okay so what are the core values of your organization and document them don't just think of them but actually document them you know at action coach we have our 14 points of culture that define who we are as people because who you are and why you do what you do is so vital in the world today.

1:52:52People don't want to work for companies that don't understand who they are and why they do what they do. Are points of culture the same as core values? Yeah, it can be. Yeah, you can use many different terminologies for it. I like the term culture because it defines who we are. I know Zappos is a phenomenal example of this when they use the term core values but we also have public core values and our care core values of community accountability results and education so we're very clear to the market this is who we are these are our points of culture if you want to join this team these are the rules we live by you know if you're not willing to live by these communication methodologies if you're not willing to apologize for upsets first and then look for a solution then please don't join our company you know if If you upset someone, first thing you got to do is apologize.

1:53:45Now, only after you've done an apology can you look for a solution. If you make a mistake with a customer, if you're not willing to strive for excellence, then please don't join our company. If abundance isn't something you want to live to, if you want to live in scarcity, please don't join our organization. We don't live that way. We set the culture based on what is important to us. And by doing that, we can attract people who fit our culture, fit our core values. You're saying it like, if you don't want this, don't join, like to put people off. Yes. Now, the reality is from the reactions I've seen people who reflect on your points of culture is they find inspiring, not the opposite.

1:54:27But the right people find it inspiring. The right people go, that's amazing. I want to work there. I want to be a part of that team. I want to join that culture. That is me. I believe in that. I've seen that. And then other people go, that's the dumbest stuff I've ever seen. Brilliant. Don't join us. If you don't believe in what we believe in, if you don't want to help us on our mission of world abundance through business re-education, if you don't want to help us save one business at a time, if you don't want to help us create jobs, create economic impact, if you don't want to help us do that, fantastic.

1:55:05Fantastic. You want to attract the right team members, not all of them. And unless you tell me who you are and why you do what you do, I don't know enough about your company to join it. How do I become a great team member if I can't understand the culture of your company? How do I make a decision that I do want to be a part of that or don't? there's three more important aspects of your model on leadership not leadership on team um action plan is next yeah and we've talked a lot about that already but it basically a team can't be a great team unless they know their position yeah and in you talked about the 90-day plan earlier on the three-month plan yeah what about a plan for the sales team a plan for the marketing team a plan for the delivery team All of it's got to be planned.

1:55:57And so when we do a 90 day business plan, we also do a 90 day plan for each team number. Like every team member in the company gradually has their own 90 day plan. Now in the beginning, if I'm coaching your business, James, I won't bring all of your team in and start them doing 90 day plans on day one. you know we'll gradually install the management system and gradually move them to 90-day plans but we'll want you as the owner to do your 90-day plan in fact our first two weeks coaching with you one of the things we do is start defining what is the first 90 days look like because in your first 90 days you're usually going to find there's three or four things that we have to fix immediately like three or four things that are losing you money costing you badly right and And there's three or four opportunities in that first 90 days that we can take advantage of to make a lot more money.

1:56:47So that's usually where we find it. But we plan every 90 days. It's an action plan. It's, you know, you break it down to your 12 most important things because there's 12 weeks. But if you do that with yourself and then your team does it and then gradually through the organization, every member of the organization has their 90-day plan. And then there's a cadence of meetings to review. so at the end of month one we review the 90-day plan are we on track with this are we moving in the right direction what have we forgotten what have we missed what do we need to do end of month two there's another review segment of the plan and a brainstorm of what's going to come for next quarter those cadence of those meetings that are part of your coaching your coach goes through this stuff with you to make sure that you are on track you know it a business owner does an amazing job with their team when everyone knows who's doing what like you don't have a football team where they don't know their job they all know their job they know their position they know the plan they know what they've got to do give me another example of planning and how it works with people um one of my kids friends at school his dad was a professional golfer and he played on the nationwide tour and he got his pga card and he started playing he won a few a few tournaments and after about 12 months he was having a slump and it was christmas time and he was out for some dinner and we started chatting i said dude what's going on he said dude i just want to make the cut i said what so i just i just need to make the cut some weekends i said can we i asked him permission i said is it okay if i coach you for a few minutes and he said yeah i'd love that you know the highest paid business coach in the world offering you a few minutes for free yes yes i will take that i said what's the next tournament he told me the next one i said and what's the winning score for that tournament gotta be he said i don't know i said what's we pulled it up the last few years that tournament at that course was the sony it's in hawaii and he said well to win that you're probably going to need to be 16 to 18 under the thing so great let's make a plan then which holes are the birdie holes which holes are the potential bogey holes which holes are the almost always going to be par so how are we going to get to 18 under we need to over four days we need to aim for six under every day because we might not perfectly get it let's make this plan so you see how we built a plan for him to no longer see his previous plan was just pay the bills because if if you if your goal is to make the cut and you fail you've made no money if your goal is to pay the bills and you can't afford to pay all the bills then you're out of business your goal has to be to achieve an amazing level of something your goal has to and in his case your goal has to be to win now if you don't win automatically you've made the cut so you've at least paid the bills for the week does that make sense like you go for the massive one and the automatic result is at least that small thing i guess paying the bills happens no matter what because you're going for amazing but that action plan breaking him down and just going through step by step by step and then i said to him i want you to plan me every hole what clubs

2:00:36I said I want to see what club on every single hole break it right down for me because if you can't show me how you're going to do something i don't believe it's going to happen so that's an action plan james all right let's talk about risk what role does that play in team development uh so point number five of the six is support risk taking if you're asking someone to do something new they're taking a risk you can't have an organization where people hide their mistakes you have to have a culture where you're open about mistakes they come on that though people do hide the mistakes but it's not just common in business it's common in households it's like your kids will hide their mistakes from you because they don't want you to be they don't want to be yelled at sort of thing and this is where learning good management comes into it james like in our management training there's one segment in fact there's one whole session on how to be a good manager and ask good questions because a bad manager asks negative questions and people get scared of taking risks so why isn't this out to the customer it's a negative question it's asking what went wrong and the only behavior capable of the person is blame excuse or denial if i said to my kid you know whose turn is it to set the dinner table they both point at each other type thing and whereas if i use good management questions they move people forward hey james what do we need to do to get this back out to the customer hey kids what do we need to do to get dinner table set and also we need to understand that the english language and there's some languages in the world where like uh you know in there's certain things that don't make any sense in the chinese language because like it just they just don't have a word for it type thing the english language is a double negative language meaning no worries not bad you know no problem don't jump on the bed right so go to google and type in don't show me a pink elephant it's going to show you pink elephants the human brain doesn't work on double negatives it works on positives it works on direction so instead of don't jump on the bed hey please get down on the floor please put your feet on the floor immediately do you know what i mean or please sit down on the bed immediately and so with a management and risk taking if we're if we're hurting people for when they do something wrong if the only time they hear from us is when they make a mistake we're not supporting the risk that they are having to take to do new things.

2:03:21But the risk taking starts with you as the leader. You've got to be willing to put yourself out there and do new things. What does it take though to embrace that philosophy? Growth. The growth philosophy. You're only going to grow if you... Growth takes pressure, right? Second law of thermonuclear dynamics teaches us that unless there is pressure, perturbation, there will not be growth. Now, the thing is, I'm looking out the window here and there's trees out there. They're either growing or dying. A business is either growing or dying. You cannot stand still. Status quo is impossible. It's a law of nature.

2:03:53Like the tree is either growing or it's dying. It can't go, hey, you know what? I'm going to stop growing right now. This is exactly the type of tree I wanted to be. I'm good. It dies. Businesses do the same, whether it's the competitors coming past you that's killing you, whether it's losing customers because you're not innovating. Ten years ago, you go to a hotel. Where did you get the internet? You went on a dial-up in your room, right? But nowadays, if you go to a hotel and they don't have free Wi-Fi that's high-speed internet with no password, you're upset. The world innovates at a speed and every business innovates and every business has to grow and either be disrupted.

2:04:31If we look at COVID, COVID disrupted the world because it moved us seven years in advance in one year. Now, the reason I use seven years is because Amazon were doing the numbers they'd predicted to do seven years later in one year. So that was sort of a good metric for me to see how fast we changed. And what happens for business is either you are innovating, you are doing new things, or you wait until the world almost crushes you and then you have to do new things. It's better to do new things when you want to do them, to innovate when you want to, than wait until you're about to die and then you have to do them.

2:05:09Being forced to innovate by the market is not a good position to be in. let's talk about your last point which is uh the engagement piece 100 inclusion 100 inclusion and involvement it is a responsibility of both the leader and the team to have 100 participation why do you say leader and the team everybody uh it's the leader has to include everybody and the team members have to involve themselves because um let's imagine that we have a team of 12 people sitting around the table and one person doesn't put in any input what do we know is going to happen they're going to leave the room and have ideas that should have been shared that didn't get shared and they're either going to bad mouth it or they're going to do things differently when let's just use a football team as an example if you've got everyone out on the pitch and one person's not not involving themselves the team loses you can't win in in business business is a team sport right it's it's a team game you need the whole team to play if you've got two team members rowing backwards four team members just sitting there on the boat doing nothing and two team members rowing forwards you might as well fire 80 of the people yeah that's true and just keep the two that are rowing forward that's such a true analogy so if you as a leader don't insist on them having a say insist on their opinions if you had to sum up the importance of leadership and team level what's the take-home message for the listeners just build people you build people they'll build the business if you focus on building the business and building the customers and building the systems and building all the other things, you can forget all of the other stuff and just build people.

2:07:01If you build the marketing manager, guess what? They'll build the marketing. If you build the systems people, they'll build the system. If you build the tech, you know what I mean? If you build people, they build it. So why is exponential growth your favorite part of business? Pretty simply put, over the years, I've taught every subject, sales, marketing, management, leadership. I've taught all of them. So in building the ABOS system, that was the thing. But what it all comes down to is exponential growth. What everything comes back to is you're building a model that you can then take and have exponential growth.

2:07:37The way I sort of explain that to people is you use the Ray Kroc understanding, right? Ray Kroc found the system. The McDonald's brothers built the quick service system. them they sold it well they sold it to taco bell and burger king and they built the mcdonald's business on it right well ray crock found a model and then scaled and exponential growth that model so what we're doing in the first four levels is creating a model so we're building a restaurant we're building a plumbing business we're building a thing and then what we're saying is okay how do we now exponentially grow this thing if we've spent let's imagine james we spent two years building a restaurant getting the the recipes right the look and feel right the cocktails right we spent two years getting it to be so good the marketing's working the sales system's working everything's good it would be a waste of those two years to keep that restaurant in only one spot.

2:08:47It just makes no sense. If you've created something that is so good that makes money, it's a money-making machine, it's got the mastery, it's got, it's got, it's got. The next question is how many locations should that restaurant be in? Amazing couple of young guys do a home construction business. They're in a town called Asheville, North Carolina. They do 40 million a year in construction, new construction refurbishing homes etc they came their coach bill bought them to me for the million the billion dollar business plan and i sat down and i said all right it's x times y you have a 40 million dollar model how many cities can we fit that 40 million dollar model in i want you to do your research across america how many cities are like the city you're in they have similar buildings similar structures similar codes similar age range similar similar similar they went and did it they found 82 cities so i'm like fantastic so if you want to build this business properly like digging a gold mine you don't with a gold mine you don't harvest just enough gold so that you can stay alive you find out how much gold there is and you harvest all of it so there's 82 cities that they could possibly have or 83 the one they're in plus 82 more that they could have a$40 million a year business in.

2:10:13They can go buy some and fix them and do more with them. They could start it themselves. Do you know what I mean? Like there's 82 cities for that. So we sit down and we work out four rides is 32. So your goal should be 3.2 billion a year. Are there construction companies doing 3.2 billion a year? They sat down and said, yeah, there's tons of them doing billions a year. Great, so we know it's possible. So what have you guys got to learn in order to open in 82 cities? Now, what this whole exponential growth thing, and this is what we're coming to, the five disciplines of exponential growth, strategy is the first.

2:10:48And so we had to sit down and look at what business model will they use to open in 82 cities? Will they franchise? Will they license? Will they raise capital and open it themselves? Will they buy other businesses? So the strategy looks at the business model, which is four main things being leverage, scalability, marketability, and opportunity size. So we've already done opportunity, 82 cities that are big enough for them to do it. So it's a$3.2 billion worth of gold in them, thy hills. How much of the$3.2 billion do you want to get? Well, so opportunity is the first thing and we got to set the goals based on a percentage of market size, not based on our own personal needs and wants or not based on 10 % more than last year.

2:11:33That's just weak goal setting. It takes someone doing the first four layers to be ready for this layer. If someone's listening to this right now and they're going, I'm ready for that, then great. You've probably already done a lot of stuff and a lot of work beforehand. But many people at this level will be going, I'm going to do that in a few years time. so opportunity size is one marketability is the second you got to do your market research how much market is there is there demand for this like in their business in construction is there in that city is there demand for new buildings is there demand for renovation of old buildings that you have to do your marketability okay then you have to get to uh leverage and scale but as i've taught you before leverage is do the work once get paid forever so you want customers that keep coming back you don't want to do get a customer once and then never have them again sort of thing and then finally scalability is that the next sale costs less and is easier so if you look at i don't know my rental business that i used to have i sold that one it's renting out electronics and stuff okay so the first to rent out the first refrigerator took a lot of work to rent out refrigerator number 100 was easier and cheaper than number one number 1 000 was easier and cheaper again number 10 000 was much easier and much cheaper as the business scales it's got to get easier and it's got to get cheaper uh as you grow it can't get harder and more expensive as you grow what's the key to making that happen planning it really no measurement of numbers making decisions systems technology all of those sorts of things in every week tinkering tweaking build this build the right model and then put it in as many cities as you can so the second part if we look at all five strategy is number one people is number two and we've discussed people a lot here but when you're in a scale business people is mostly about recruiting when you're in a scale business you're recruiting let's say you're opening like those two guys they're going to open 82 new offices so they need 82 managers they need 82 office managers they need they need they need like recruiting a scale recruiting at scale is very different than recruiting to replace someone you lost we then move in from people and and we could again spend hours on people but it's really about having that great hr person whose job is to recruit recruit induct train and build new offices like if you think about and this is where also a lot of it in the people side could be buying companies we could be looking at buying and then it's culture induction and all of those sorts of things so if those guys with 82 cities they could literally go to those 82 cities make a list of all of the companies similar to theirs and work out which ones that fit and they go and make an offer to buy 82 businesses does that make sense so it could be recruiting it could be buying it it could be there's many ways it could be training it you could have to build your own training school but again this is that real scale stuff i don't want to spend too long on this because it's usually much higher level than most people are needing when they first meet with me what stage of the business journey should you recruit a hr director because that's it's a senior position whether you know head of hr whatever you you want to call it put a cheap on the front of it's different for different industries but when when you get to the point of 20 ish people you're going to need someone in charge of recruiting because you're going to be replacing a person a month basically you're 20 people whether it's them moving away someone got sick growth of the business if you get to a point where you're recruiting a person a month you're going to need someone in charge of that i mean the thing that's floating around my head for the listeners is some of the listeners are thinking all right so what's the what do i need to have cash flow wise and how do i finance this well yeah the whole financing aspect is you've got to build the business plan and learn to raise capital you either learn to raise capital through franchising or you learn to raise it through debt or you learn to raise it through equity or you learn there's many ways to raise capital and that's another thing that people have to learn at some point where should someone start if they want to learn about raising capital because a lot of the listeners do want to do that brad where you start is build a database and build an entrepreneur to be invested in you won't raise capital until you are the type of person that people want to invest in so you need a track record and a reputation that people want to invest with you yes you can go read all the books and do all that sort of stuff but that's where it starts build a database of potential investors every single person you've ever met in your life should be in a database that you keep in touch with because one day you're going to have a business that you need people to invest in and you're going to want to ask them to invest okay so we've got strategy we've got people we've lent into the importance of the hr director or head of uh people also business development is part of this biz dev your marketing manager that was brilliant when you were doing a million bucks a year will be a divisional manager you've got to learn when you go to scale you have to learn to demote people or or move people on or sideways shuffle people because let's say i'm i'm at a million bucks a year and my marketing budget is a hundred grand for the year right the person running my marketing budget for a hundred grand will not be any good if i've got a 50 million dollar a year marketing budget that makes sense totally different set of skills totally different knowledge base so what i had to learn as i scaled and and you'll even remember one of my ceos who the business got to a point where it was just too big for him and i had to step back in and run the company and move him to the side where he became CEO of a division of the company.

2:17:28Yeah. You know, you've got to learn that your people, you can't scale people as fast as you can scale a business. So some of them have got to step aside and allow for a higher level person to come in. If I'm a HR director in a company with 50 people, and then I've got a company over here that's got a thousand people or employing a thousand new people a month, that's a different HR director. It's a different, you know, chief HR person. So that's a big part of the people. But when you're looking at execution and you're looking at business development, both of them at scale are different. You are on massive recruiting of execution.

2:18:17you're on massive purchasing of new equipment new systems new places new things like imagine opening five new subways a day how many ovens does subway then need per month distributed worldwide they may as well go and buy the oven manufacturing company and do it you look at amazon when amazon moved to electric vans they went and bought a share of rivian to build all the vans for them they had to capitalize the car company the car company didn't have the capital to build enough fans for amazon amazon had to buy a share and capitalize them apple did it when they made their phones the companies didn't have enough money to print the screens for the phones like making that many glass screens holy heck they had to capitalize the company they had to invest and buy in them sort of thing so it's different execution is different at scale and marketing when you're opening a new market, you have to learn launch marketing at scale.

2:19:13So there's a big difference between acquiring customers and launching a new business. When you're at scale, when you're at exponential growth, you are launching a new territory. So you've got to learn how to get into a brand new market and get a core group of people that then you build from sort of thing. so if you if i give you an example of that there was a dating app in the u.s and they learned how to scale by starting at colleges they went to colleges and specifically colleges that had a greek system so it had fraternities and sororities they found the biggest fraternity and would sponsor a party and pay for everything and for anyone to get in they had to show that they had the app downloaded and their profile created.

2:20:03If you had the app downloaded and your profile created, you got in. So they threw a party for 2000 people out of college and hey, presto, they hit critical mass in that town. Does that make sense? So you've got to learn launch. You've got to learn critical mass marketing when you're going at scale. And it's very different to the other marketing. It's not acquiring two new customers a day. And the final part of the jigsaw here is mission. you talk about vision mission and culture earlier on in your system development but mission here is different you will not have a scale business all of our studies all the shows you will not have a scale business unless your business is doing something meaningful it's got to be adding value to the world because you won't get employees and you won't get customers like today a customer can go on an app and they can see uh your carbon footprint they can go and see all these things And the younger people are, the more it is important to them that a business that they are buying from and doing business with or working for is adding value to the world and doing great things out there in the world.

2:21:10Less and less do people want to do business with companies that are destroying and doing bad things and not taking care of people. We see this all the time when, when, uh, remember the clothing companies that got caught with running sweatshops and stuff like that. And people just boycott them instantaneously. You know, when we see people doing bad things in the world, the world very quickly responds. And so your business had better be mission driven in some way, shape or form. It better be adding value to the world. It better be adding value to your customers, to your people. I go back to the word I mentioned earlier, love your people need to love working with you.

2:21:47and your customers need to love doing business with you. There are multiple stakeholders in business and mission ads. So not only are there the team and the shareholders and the customers and the suppliers, but you've also got the community. Community has become a stakeholder in business when you get to scale. Now, if you're a small business doing a million bucks a year or a million quid a year, the community doesn't really do it. If you're doing 100 million a year, the mayor is looking at your business the newspaper is looking at your business there are people looking at you and making sure you're doing the right thing and if you're not they will call it out correct so there's a different glass door your employees will tell the world what it's like to work for you you want to be that place where you're winning the awards of best place to work why why do we see airplane companies moving to biofuels and these because they know that if they don't, they're going to get beat up for it.

2:22:46They're going to get judged. Yeah. And I'm not going to do business with you. There's a percentage of the population now that's a, a, the fast growing percentage of the population where doing good is important to them. Now, the challenge with that is that that's not a global thing today. Like, I mean, let's be blunt. China, you've got still 20 % of China lives in abject poverty. it's hard to convince a guy in China living in abject poverty to worry about global warming. We're here in the UK right now. You guys contribute maybe 2 % to the world's carbon emissions, right? And if we halved carbon emissions in the UK, it would mean zero difference to the world.

2:23:37So it's hard sometimes to have social responsibility on a global scale. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try uh the sixth level on your system is entrepreneurship and freedom freedom and a lot of people start a business and they claim to be an entrepreneur are they an entrepreneur when they start well in my opinion a business owner owns one business an entrepreneur is someone who builds multiple companies with the idea of capital value increases meaning you buy and sell companies okay that's that's where i position entrepreneurialism you can call yourself an entrepreneur one business if you want but i see that as a business owner multiple is where i see you as an entrepreneur when when we said management earlier on you said management's about competency and productivity when you said leadership you said it's about focus and passion maybe communication as well what's entrepreneurship about capital capital value so buying something that is worth uh so let's go backwards a step in business the value of a business is determined by the EBITDA the profit of the business determines the value of the business if i buy a business and i double the profit what did i just do i doubled the value of the business at the very least i doubled the value of the business so if i put it under management i've now increased the multiple if i increase the business to be more than five million a year in EBITDA, I've moved it into a different buying range with a different set of buyers.

2:25:08A very small business will only be purchased by someone looking to buy themselves a job, so they will not pay much for it. A mid-sized company will be purchased in most cases by an individual who's created wealth, and so they'll buy another business. A large business will generally be acquired by either a capital organization or a public company. So whether the capital organization venture capital, home office, whether it's a hedge fund, whether it's an investment group of some sort or a public company, that's where the biggest sales happen. So entrepreneurialism is about capital and really wealth is about that first ever group of capital.

2:25:52I didn't understand this early on, but capitalization is the key to wealth. The faster I can capitalize, meaning build it and sell and then I have capital to do the next thing, whether that's in real estate or business or shares, whatever it is. But the level of freedom, James, is really about time freedom, life freedom, health freedom, all of the things that you get when you have a commercial profitable enterprise that works without you. Yeah, do you know what kills most sales of businesses? Is the owner just doesn't want to let go of their baby. That's why when we coach people to exit their business, again, it generally takes about three years to coach someone on exiting their business.

2:26:36A big part of the coaching is what are you going to do afterwards? We've got to help people learn to let go. The biggest breakthrough is over the years, I've interviewed a lot of our customers and asking them what was the biggest breakthrough moment in their business's growth. And they said the biggest breakthrough moment wasn't marketing, it wasn't finance, it wasn't anything. It was when I learned to let go and allow other people to do their job so as a business owner you learning to let go is a massive part of the success of the future of your business so we started this podcast with what's a real business one that works without you and one something that you said earlier on was tom watson the kind of phrase working on not in how important is that working on yourself and on the business our first like the first 12 week program we put even the smallest of businesses through we teach them that at the end of the 12 weeks we want them to have a 10 increase in revenues and we want them to have found four hours a week to be able to work on not in so he starts at four hours a week yeah yeah we need to find that it takes about 12 weeks to find those four hours unless you've got a fairly sizable business then you can hand off a few things and pretty quick and And just quit the dumb things that you're doing, you know, quit the time wasters.

2:27:56And commit to new stuff. Yeah. And that's where we put it into the calendar. We eventually get business owners to take one day off a week from being at the office. They're still going to work, but they're going to work from home or work from a different office. So they're not in the space of their business. So they're working on, not in. Once we get them to that one day a week of being out of the office or out of the shop or out of whatever, then they really start to fly. So get off the tools one day a week at home, then build it so it runs without you. But it's all about just, James, I can't harp enough that if you install the operating system, it does it for you.

2:28:35If there was a movie that was made on Brad Shudders, what would it be called? Look, ultimately, James, I want every listener to understand that there is a better way for your business. It doesn't need to be hard. It doesn't need to be tough. It can actually be simple. You're going to have to put the work in. But what would you rather, to do hard work and not make it a better business or do hard work and make it a better business? Have it running without you at some point. And we've got enough success stories and case studies and people on our podcasts that just tell everyone this, it does work.

2:29:20Now they've listened, what's the first action? Jump on the website, start your first two weeks with us. What's been your favorite part of the conversation, Brad? Favorite part of the conversation? I think just the fact that we did the entire ABOS justice. Like you can't do a boss justice in 20 minutes to try and explain it to someone. There's just too much. There's just too much in it. And to the fact that we took the time to do it, I think is probably the biggest thing. Yeah. On behalf of everybody behind the scenes as well, you know, thank you very much for giving this amount of time. Thank you to those who listened to me on one and a half or two times speed.

2:30:09Thank you very much, sir. Thank you, James. Thank you.