Stepping Back to Scale Your Business

SE EP86 Scale Up (12_16_22)

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Show on Startup Club. This show is actually a live show and podcast, and if you’re catching it in podcasts, you might not know this, but you can actually come and listen to this show Every Friday at two o’clock Eastern, we run this show with exception. The first time we’re gonna break that rule is next week.

We’re running at Wednesday at two o’clock Eastern, and next week’s topic is going to be all about chat, G P T. We’re so excited about this and we’re getting some experts in for this show on Wednesday. We think that this technology, this AI technology is going to be a game changer. It is going to be a revolution.

It’s something that I call a paradigm shift, and when you can catch a paradigm shift, oh my gosh, you can scale your company. Well, first of all, if you’re interested in this [00:01:00] topic about scaling, Please share the room right at the very bottom of your screen. There’s a button. And Michele, I’ll get you to do that as well.

Share on clubhouse. I’m doing it myself right now. Right at the very bottom. You can see it. I just shared it. Yeah. One right now, Cher. Um, if you could, if you’re in the room and you think this is a valuable topic, I think it is. I find it fascinating that there are 32 million businesses in the United States, and a stat that I learned from Kevin was at 4%, only 4% actually scale.

So why is it that they don’t now? I know that a lot of people don’t scale their businesses because of, you know, because of life choices and, and let’s be honest, it’s stressful, it’s scary. Kevin, uh, welcome to the show, Kevin. Uh, you wrote the book, the Preneur Entrepreneurial Scale Up System. You know how to overcome challenges of achieving seven figure business success and beyond.

And we are here today to listen to you and ask questions and. [00:02:00] and, uh, and really understand, first of all, why is it that there are 33 million businesses in the United States and only a very small fraction scale. Yeah, great. Great to be here. Thanks. Thank you, Colin. Um, yeah, I, I think there’s, um, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a number of, number of reasons.

Um, and of course, choice is, choice is one of those, not, not everybody wants to, wants, wants to scale, and that’s, that’s absolutely fine. But for those that do, then, um, there’s a number of, number of challenges and one of those is, um, one, one of those is whether we’re thinking strategically enough and, and actually looking into where we might be able to create a competitive advantage and.

You were just, you were just talking there about, um, uh, uh, about doing something that is, that is gonna be, uh, a sea change, a paradigm shift, you know? So thinking strategically, how can we really have create a competitive advantage [00:03:00] is, is one of those that a lot of us don’t do. We just, we just kind of create a business and, uh, do the best that we can, but don’t really think about how we can do something much better and create that advantage.

And, and, and then another of course is then that, that ruthless and focused follow through and really then being, being ruthless about where, how we’re gonna execute on that, on that strategy and avoid getting distracted and caught in all sorts of things. And one of those would be the, the owner’s trap where essentially we’re just, uh, we just create a business that is overreliant on us as the individual owner of the business, and therefore can’t scale really beyond, uh, almost beyond the number of hours that we can work in the business.

All right, so let’s try to unpack a few of these ideas cuz you’re throwing a lot out at already, which is great. Um, and it’s, it’s interesting because you wrote this book on scaling the entrepreneurial Scale up system by Kevin Brent. And yesterday I just submitted the final [00:04:00] manuscript for start Scale exit Repeat, A Serial Entrepreneur Secrets Revealed, uh, to Forbes for publishing on October 3rd.

And so we cover scale quite extensively. It’s actually the largest section of the book. And you hit on two concepts a minute ago. The first is this idea of the entrepreneur getting in their, getting in their own way. Let’s, let’s talk about that one first. Can you, can you explain that a little more? How, how and why are entrepreneurs so good, or founders so good at the startup phase, but then fail to scale?

Hmm. Well, part one of the reasons is of course, we’re, because we’re self-starters, we feel that we should be the ones that should be coming up with all the answers. And, uh, and to a certain extent doing all the, all the doing. And, um, and it’s a struggle for us to then empower other people in the business and give away a little bit of that [00:05:00] control, um, and allow other people to, uh, to it effectively be, be empowered.

And, and, and that can be one of the restrictions then in the, in that we’re too used to directing that business and having that leader follower mentality and not creating other leaders within the business. And of course, if we want to scale beyond a certain point, then we need to create other leaders within, within the business.

So I think, I think the first key point here is that entrepreneurs, startups, founders, we need to understand our personality. We need to figure out what it is that made us successful in start and what do we, how do we need to change in order to be successful in scale? And I do believe that the dominant instinct is a, is a prevalent trait amongst all entrepreneurs.

This dominance is what gets us out of the gate. It’s what gets the job done. Mm-hmm. . But then when you begin to have to rely on others, rely on other managers, [00:06:00] rely on other leaders, let them make mistakes in front of. That’s not easy, is it, Kevin? Not, not at all, in fact. Um, yeah, absolutely. Hitting on, we, there’s a section in the book actually around our personality profiles and how that, how that influences, uh, influences us in, in business.

And I’d exactly absolutely agree with you in that, to, to get a business off the ground, you’ve gotta have those dominance traits. Um, and, um, but then as we take on people, we’ve got to either develop our, our, our empathy skills, our, our, our, our, our less, you know, the, the ones that are more around managing people and building people teams, or we’ve got to be able to bring people into the business that can complement our personality and our skills to enable other people to flourish within the.

So Kevin, I just wanna jump in here for a second. You know, I, I’m, I’m a, I’m crazy for processes and I love reading books [00:07:00] that have lots of, you know, aids to help us plan and move along that are practical. And I found that from your book. But one of the things I thought particularly interesting that I, uh, think is a little bit different than a lot of books like this in a good way, was your fundamental, you know, principles about scaling and the indicators on what you need to do at the next level revolve around people.

Uh, I’d love for you to share with the members what your, your, what your, um, you know, what your belief is there, what you’re teaching there, what your system is. But before you start, I just wanna say everyone in the audience, if you send an email. To hello@startup.club, and you’re one of the first three people to do that.

We will send you a free book, probably an ebook, but you will get a free book. So I strongly suggest that you do that as well as join our [00:08:00] email list. It’s a great way to get, you know, that additional access. So, Kevin, why people like, explain your, you know, your theory about, you know, which way to go. And it’s all around people.

Thank you.

Sorry, I think you cut out there for a second. Michele, Kevin, did you pick up the question? Um, uh, a, a little bit, I think around the, around the people, people side and, um, are you referring perhaps to the, to the, to the inflight checklist that we, that we have within the, within the book, Michele? Yeah, that would be great if you gave us some insight into that.

Yeah, so, so one of the, the, the ways that we, one of the differences I think in the way that we look at, at this whole business of scaling up our businesses is that instead of looking at it as a growth curve, which, you know, could be a linear curve or, or, or, or [00:09:00] whatever, however, we might normally think about growing a, growing a business.

We look at it in terms of a series of stepping stones. Um, and that is around the numbers of people that we have within the business. Because at the end of the day, um, with a few exceptions of types of businesses, it’s the teams within our, within our businesses that, that either can unlock the power of, of, of our, of, of what we’re doing, or actually can hold us back if we get it wrong with the, with the people.

And, and those stepping stones are, In sizes and numbers of people. So if we think about it as a, uh, when we start a business, and we might be on our own as a solopreneur, that’s great. So we can, we can climb the ladder of success if you like, for a one person business, and we can build that business to be a great little business, nice little profitable consulting business, maybe something like that.

But if the, but the next stepping stone of if we want to move to the next stepping stone would be where we’ve got a team of three to five people, something in that, in that order. And, uh, and that’s a different kind of [00:10:00] business from the one person business. And we need to think about a number of aspects as to how we’re going to get to that, but also in, and what the business needs to look like.

And, and the reason that that is, is that the business starts to get a bit more complex when we’ve got three to three to five people. If you think of the number of relationships that are going on there, um, we’ve got more complication within, within the business. But equally, if we’ve got four or five people within the business, if one person’s not quite.

Working, uh, working out, we’re not going to suddenly go back to just having that, um, having been being on our own. So we’ve got the power of those people starting to start, starting to work together. And the next stepping stone then up from that is probably when we’ve got a team of about eight to 12, eight to 12 people.

And, and that’s probably about the limit that we can get to as a leader follower type business if we are the leader of the business driving everything through, uh, with eight to 12 people. To get beyond that, we probably need what we do need to create a senior [00:11:00] leadership team beneath us. And we’re then talking about probably having 20 to 25 people within the business.

And, and this is because as, as. As teams of people, we work best in those sort of numbers. Groups of either three, three to five can be really powerful, but also eight to 12 and, and fact, if anybody that’s got a military background, if you think to the way that units and squads are put together within, within the military, you tend to have have them in those sort of numbers.

And that’s the way that we think about building the business. And at every one of those stepping stones, the question is, Have we got to the top of that? Have we got a business that’s functioning as efficiently and as profitably as possible at that stepping stone? And let’s get it to that before we even think about trying to navigate to then the, the, the next one.

And if we’re going to then make the journey to that next stepping stone, we need to think about what the business needs to look like at that next stepping stone in terms of [00:12:00] what’s the strategy for us to get there and the business model that we need. What’s the people need that we’ve got within that, how are we gonna make sure we execute on that strategy and have we got any cash requirements for us to get from, from this stepping stone to that, to that next stepping stone so that we avoid a valley in between those stepping stones?

And, and that’s typically what can happen is we can get stuck in a trough or a valley of death between two of these stepping stones if we don’t think about it in the right way. Yeah. No, I, I, I see where you’re coming from. It’s like, You want to think about one piece at a time. You don’t wanna go too fast and then you stumble and the whole thing falls apart.

I, I, I, yeah, I think, I think you’re onto something there. I also think that, you know, we’ll stick with people for a minute and then we’ll move over to what you talked about at the very beginning around a competitive advantage. But I also think that it’s one thing [00:13:00] to le manage people. It’s another thing to lead people.

And it’s a third thing to lead leaders and, and then we’ll move on from people. But did you wanna just sort maybe comment on that third point that how do we find great leaders to help us run these companies to. Yeah. And of course that’s, that’s really difficult. And we need to be able to create that culture within the business where we are able to empower people.

And, um, there’s a great, there’s a great book, um, by David Marquette around, um, turn This Ship around. And he talks a lot about that, about how do we create other leaders within the business. And the the first thing is making, uh, getting people to think about the intent. So instead of giving orders, um, and telling people what they need to do and the, and the detail, we need to give them intent.

So where is it that we’re trying to head and what, and what’s the reason that we need to, to be there? And if they understand [00:14:00] that, then the next, the next question is, is what I, if people are coming, coming to us for, for answer to questions, we need to be able to empower them. And instead of giving them again the orders, we need to ask ’em questions.

Like, okay, so what do you think is the right thing to do? Or, or, what am I thinking right now? Is the, is is the best Next question. So you’re trying to get people to think about, um, what would it be like to be in, in our shoes? And if they had to think in our way, what, what would, you know, what do they think I would, I’m thinking Right, right now.

And um, David Marquette gives this great example. Um, he’s a submarine captain, uh, taking over control of a sub marine. And realizing that actually it can’t be the best model that he’s as the, as the captain of the submarine with 220 crew members, it can’t be that he’s the only one that can make all the decisions and tell everybody what to do.

So he turns that around completely and, uh, gets people to go here. So if the intent is to, [00:15:00] um, position this, the submarine, uh, to be effective in this particular campaign, then um, it’s the question. Okay. So, so what do you think we need to do to be able to do that? Well, I think we need to head in this direction, dive to this depth.

Okay. So what am I thinking right now where you’re probably thinking, is it safe to do so? And that’s the, that’s the question about what am I thinking and, and that psychological or that safety really within the business and we need to be giving. Giving people within our businesses that combination of the intent, which is what is it we’re trying to do, getting ’em to think about in our shoes, what’s the, what’s the thoughts thing to do?

And then also in the longer term, is it the right thing to do? And that’s where understanding all of our long-term goals of the business, the values of the business, so that people have that framework to be able to think in the way that we want ’em to as as leaders. So that’s a bit of a long-winded answer, but, uh, hope that, hope that helps.

Well, I’m, I’m, I’m coming back at Pressy a little again on the same, similar question is [00:16:00] like, but how do you find them? How do we find these people? You know, I’ve got some my own theories. I know Jack Welch talks about hire people with runway. You’re a $10 million company. Hire somebody who’s run a hundred million dollar company.

By the way, don’t hire, don’t hire somebody who’s run a billion dollar company, cuz they cannot make the adjustment downward that extreme. But you want someone who’s already been there, done that before and. , if they have, they’ll be, they’ll help you get from 10 million to a hundred million or a million to 10 million.

Uh, any thoughts on how we find these people? Well, they’re clearly, this is, this is the difficult, this is a really difficult thing. And the whole, especially at the moment, the whole aspect of recruitment is a challenge for, um, for any, any business, what you are, I think what you’re referring to there is a, is is also a fundamental decision between are we better off hiring?

Several junior people, um, and trying to train them up within the business or, um, if, if investing in somebody that’s a bit more senior and has got that, got that [00:17:00] experience and, and generally the latter is the right thing to do. We’re be, we’re better off looking for and finding somebody that, as you say, has been there and been there and done it.

Um, and even if it costs us a little bit more to do that, the return on it is probably likely to be greater than, than trying to, uh, take on people and, and, and train them up. But in terms of, in terms of finding these people, then, um, You, you’ve got all sorts of things that we need to do, but it’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s not easy.

You know, you can be looking at your, you can be looking at your competitors. You can be looking at other, other, other businesses, um, and be constantly on the lookout for these people. And, and I think that’s, that’s one of the, one of the key takeaways is that if we’ve got an idea of where we’re headed with the business and what that next stepping stone is, and the kind of people that we need at that next stepping stone, we’ve got a for, got a forward view of it, and we can decide whether we are then developing people from internally or whether we need to be looking for particular [00:18:00] type of person externally.

We can start doing that well in advance of the point when we. Absolutely need that person on board. And we’ve gotta give ourselves time to do that. And essentially always be recruiting, always be on the lookout for good people. And when you spot a good person, you want to then start to try and, and initiate those conversations.

You may not be ready to take them on at that time. They may not be ready to come to you, but you want to start to build that, that relationship and building up a kind of a people bank, if you like, so that when it comes to the point that when you do need somebody, you’re not starting from scratch and scrambling around and essentially it’s like going shopping when you are, when you’re hungry, you would just end up with, uh, with rubbish in your trolley.

Yeah. I I call it a scale up in zero mentality. So if we’re gonna scale in zeros 10 x our business, let’s try to, um, let’s try to vision what the company’s gonna look like, who we need. And you’re right, it takes time. You can’t just [00:19:00] instantly do it. Like you need to be able to think about, go to trade shows.

Meet your competitors, your customers, look within your organization, who’s got the talent that you might want to invest in? Yeah, to help you get up to that next level. Um, uh, if you’re in the audience and you think this topic’s fascinating, we’d ask you to share the room. It’s right at the very bottom of the row.

And do it again right now. Uh, I think that’s the second time I did it. I don’t, I didn’t get in trouble for that. But, um, , share the room. Again. It’s at the se it’s right at the very bottom, second button from the left. And also, if you wanna ask a question or you want to talk about your scale up, your story about scaling your business, or any tips or tricks on scaling your business, please raise your hand.

It’s Friday afternoon. And Michele, Mimi, Kevin and I we’re just having fun up here, and it’s a little bit lonely sometimes, so we’d really encourage you, uh, Maureen, or Lady Jules or Stephanie Ccare Mohammed to raise your hand and, and come and join us and everybody else in the room too, if you’re, and I’ll tell you this, um, , [00:20:00] we have an announcement.

We’re actually launching startup v i p and we’re limited to 2000 members. And if you join the room, you come on stage and you’re actively involved in startup club, you will be invited. Michele is personally inviting. She runs the, the room. Yes. Personally inviting people. Kevin Will, will, will invite you to become as well.

And it’s just a hangout room. It’s just a hangout room. There’s no shows. People just go there once a week for half an hour right now and just hang out and chat about different things. It’s very loose. There’s no show or anything like, like that, but the idea is to connect and network and help each other succeed more.

So, uh, I encourage you to jump on stage and uh, and ask questions. It’s a great topic. So let’s go to the, the earlier you talked about a competitive advantage. Mm-hmm. . So a business today, it starts, you know, you might have a hotdog cart on New York, but you wanna scale to 10 hotdog carts. , but your hotdogs are the same as everyone else’s hotdog [00:21:00] or, you know, what’s the, what is it that you have that’s unique and different that can help you scale?

We call that the X factor, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll comment on it a little bit more, but I want to hear from you how businesses need to think differently from startup phase to scale phase. Yeah. Well, I think, and I think that’s, it’s a great example if we take the hotdog hotdog stand, because if we break strategy down into, its really simple basics, there are only two key decisions that we need to make from a, from a strategic point of view.

One is, one is where we’re going to play. What, what, what playing fields are we gonna play on? And the second one is, how are we going to win? And um, and if you want the kind of business school words for that, it’s what’s our participation strategy? So where are we gonna participate? What markets, what segments?

And the other one is what’s our positioning strategy? Um, and so if we take our, take our hotdog Stan, that you’ve just just [00:22:00] said, we might be in, in New York and we wanna have 10, 10 sites, or how many we want to have, the first question is, where are we going? You know, where are we going to cite those? If that’s, if, if we’re playing in the hotdog market, where, where are the best sites or where are we going to cite?

Are we gonna cite where everybody else is? And it might be the, there might be the most customers around, but equally there might be other hotdog stands or other types of competition. Maybe there’s somewhere that’s a bit quieter that actually we can, uh, maybe be, um, maybe be the only one there and, and be a really, really good site.

So that sort of might be our, our, our participation strategy. Where are we going to participate? And then we’ve got that strategy to win question, the positioning strategy, and that that comes around two, two key aspects. The first is around our office. So are we going to do something around our hotdogs that means that we’re better than anybody else’s hotdogs and can, and therefore can we charge a premium for, for those, [00:23:00] for those hotdogs?

So are we gonna do something really, really special that makes them, makes them different from, from everybody else’s? Maybe it’s a secret source or, or something. Something like that. And the that’s, so that’s our offer advantage. Or offer question. And the second is our cost advantage. Maybe actually we are going to sell fairly standard hotdogs, um, but because we can source the hotdogs cheaper than somebody else, or we’ve got a special way of, of making them or, or doing them or something, that means that actually our cost base is lower than our competition.

That means that we can charge the same price as the competition and make more profit. Or maybe if we really want to, we can maybe discount versus our competition, but still make significant profits. So with a very simple business there we’re, we’re illustrating that idea of what’s, where are we going to play?

What playing fields are we gonna play on, and what’s our strategy to win in those, in those playing fields? And they’re the primary decisions that we need [00:24:00] to make from a strategic point of view. And then of course, we need to work out, okay, if they’re, if that’s our strategy, how are we going to then execute and deliver on that, on that strategy?

I like it. And, um, you know, I mentioned X factor. Um, I’m, I’m trying to work it out on a hotdog stand here, but maybe, you know, you come up, I mean, one idea, it’s my, this is my wife’s a vegetarian, right? So you have a separate barbecue that does vegetarian hotdogs and nobody else has. Now we’re unique and different, and by the way we might not know this, but people often go to restaurants where they serve vegetarian food, but the vast majority of the people in the group eat meat.

But you, you have one that is vegetarian and we have this in our office all the time. It drives me nuts a little bit, to be honest with you. But, you know, we actually, um, uh, go to a particular restaurant because they do serve vegetarian, even though we’ll eat meat-based dishes. And so that’s unique and different.

I know [00:25:00] Verne Harnish talks about this. I know that, um, Jim Collins talks about this in his book as well. Yes, yes. Around this X factor. So when, when, uh, In the United States, dominoes came out with 30 minutes or free, uh, and Toronto was pizza. Pizza, 30 minutes are free. And we had a pizza restaurant and I was 18 years old and I’m like, oh my gosh, they’re all gonna go bankrupt.

This is ridiculous. You can’t do it. Well, what they did is they re-engineered their entire business from processes to systems, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s their X factor. That’s what made them the most successful pizza companies in the world. And you think of national car rental. Have you ever used National Car Rental, Kevin?

I don’t think I have, actually. No. So listen to this. So what I hate about travel is you go, you land, you’re do an alls travel, and you go, you have to line up at the desk, it’s 30 minutes. And then you gotta, you know, national car rental about six years ago or 10 years ago, came out with a system where you just show up, get in the car and go, [00:26:00] what an what an idea.

You picked your own car, you get in your car, the security gate, you do hand over your license, show your id, and they have your Visa on file and you just go. And what a concept. You don’t have to wait a half an hour. So if there’s bottlenecks in your industry, then you can break those bottlenecks. Right, Kevin?

Absolutely. That’s a, that’s a great way of looking at it. So it’s, it’s, if there’s a bottleneck or if there’s something that frustrates you about, about that particular industry, a, a, a real bug, and, and if you can find a way to maybe fix that, as you’ve just illustrated really nicely in that, in that example, then you’ve got something that might disrupt the market and create a competitive advantage.

You know, there’s a great example, isn’t it, around the. Federal Express. You know, they came up with the first hub and spoke, um, idea, I think he was a student at, at, at Yale. Um, and, um, you know, he, he disrupted the market because he said, you know, this is just, this is, this is the, this is the problem within the, this is ridiculous that we’ve, that we’re doing all of these separate legs or [00:27:00] whatever else.

It would make much more sense to change that completely and create a new model with this, with this, with this hub and spoke. So if you are, if you’re able to think in that way and come up with something that really is disruptive, Clearly that’s fantastic and that’s gonna give you a, a, a, an advantage that probably will, um, will last for some time.

But even if we’re not able to disrupt in such a big way, again, we can think just going back to that hotdog stand and, and with, with a, with a, with a relatively simple business, we just need to be thinking about it a little bit more in those lines rather than, well, I’m just going to sell hotdogs and everybody else is doing them at this price, they’re doing them in this way.

So I’m just gonna do, try and do more of the, more of the same. Um, that’s unlikely to, to give you anything that’s gonna give you any long-term success with your, with your, with your business. But the other thing with. Any of these is, of course, you’ve gotta keep reinventing yourself because you might come up with a competitive advantage [00:28:00] and, and most things are likely to be copyable in some way.

I mean, of course the best competitive advantage would be one that would be almost impossible for somebody else to, to copy. But generally, if you are successful with something, somebody’s gonna see that happening and they are then going to mimic you unless you’ve got something that’s gonna completely protect it, like a patent or so, or, or something like that.

But you’ve got to be constantly on the lookout for, okay, well that’s working for now, but let’s not stand still. Let’s look for the, for the next thing. The next thing that we’re gonna involve into that will keep that advantage going. Yeah. And in our incubator, we have a company called pod.com and you know, we’ve done a number of Me Too products and almost every time it fails, we invent a new category, do something unique and different, and it just kills it and takes off.

So. Be different. We have a, a brave soul lady Jules, on the stage here. I think you’ve been on with us before. We’re excited to have you on again, a brave soul and uh, and Michele, we have to invite her [00:29:00] to the v i p club cuz I’m telling you, we, uh, yes, we appreciate, we appreciate you coming on stage Lady. Do you have a question for Kevin or a, or a thought or hello, you know, a stake scale up story.

Hello everybody, this is Lady Jo and you love and gratitude from London. I was just typing in my thoughts because I, I’m not, I don’t want to interrupt your trainer, your flow. So, uh, thank you for letting me speak and, and, and for coming up on stage. I just wanna to chime in really quickly, um, about the hot dog.

I’m not sure if that’s a real product that you are, you, are you uh, it’s not, it’s not. But uh, you know, I just, I had very humble roots got started, but, right. Ok. So, um, cuz you, Kevin doesn’t have a bio, so I don’t know what, what’s going on. Uh, so I, I was just say thinking you, you, you went down the lines of vegan products, which is really good because, uh, people would pay extra for, for vegan products today and, and people would pay extra for quality.

Um, I know. [00:30:00] There’s so much, um, propaganda about, uh, hot dogs. Um, hot dogs can also be very delicious and, and nutritious, uh, when it’s, um, when it’s produced, uh, um, selectively . So, yeah, and it’s interesting that my wife lately, Jules, my wife actually, uh, notices that if a restaurant uses the same grill and, and uh, instruments to cook the vegetarian on the meat grill, she notices that.

Yes. And I bet you every vegetarian notices that, that’s why I suggested in our mock, our mock X factor for our hotdog cart company that Kevin, myself, and you are starting together with Michele and Mimi, that we actually do a vegetarian. So if you, you have a, a vegan, particularly just a, a cart for vegan health produce, um, and, and you know, with, with a whole different branding and it, it will make a huge difference.

[00:31:00] And, you know, what’s, what’s, what’s funny, the, the cost remains the same, but the, the profit margin is incredible cause people are willing to pay extra. It’s just the way it is. And that’s the growing trend. Um, people want to be healthy now, particularly with, with the, with the homeschooling, with the, with the working from home and all of that.

And if, if you also offer delivery. Delivery services, you know, things like that. Uh, even k K ffc, McDonald’s, pizza Hut, all of them, they are now offering delivery services here. So it’s, it’s uh, it’s moving towards a different trend and we, we lived in a very blessed, sophisticated era, so, so much to be done online.

So I just, that’s just my 2 cents and I hope that brings value to everyone’s name. You bring up a, you bring up a really interesting concept around, cause I looked at your bio as well, and thank you for letting Kevin know Kevin’s brand new to Clubhouse, but we got, [00:32:00] Kevin, you gotta update your bio, your book’s not even on your bio, but, okay.

Um, that was really good. That was really good Intel. But this idea of purpose, this idea of mission and, and doing something good in the world. And if you can articulate that as an entrepreneur in your startup, but also in your scale up. And Kevin, I was, I was gonna ask you. , you know, how you think about what she’s talking about there around, you know, a purpose and a mission and a Yeah.

And doing something good and how that attracts more people to your company and also more customers to your company and, and can help you scale. Yeah. Well, Simon, Simon Sinex really strong on this, isn’t it? You know, knowing, knowing your why and communicating that, that why, and, um, yeah, I mean that’s the, that’s the foundation really of, of anything.

If you’re just going into business and, and, and your idea is just simply to make money, um, then okay, fine. But, but it’s, it’s not gonna be anything like as powerful if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a, a, a mission that you are, you are trying to, [00:33:00] trying to, trying to achieve and the, the, not only your customers, but also your employees can then get behind as, as, as well.

You know, our for, for us, the, the stat that you mentioned right at the very beginning that less than 4% of businesses scale beyond 10 employees, and in, and in fact less than 1% beyond 50 employees. That’s the stat that, that shook us. And, and our mission is to help to create more scale-ups and to move the needles on those, on those dials, um, because we know that that will give entrepreneurs a better, a, a better lifestyle than and, and what they’re, what they’re looking for.

So that’s our mission to, to get behind and support more entrepreneur entrepreneurs, to kind of create the kind of business that will give them the lifestyle that they, that they wish by moving the needles on those, on those scale up dials. And I think having, having a strong core purpose and a strong, a strong mission behind that is fundamental to really being able to.

Rally people around [00:34:00] that, around that. Cause if you like, and, and really them be, it’s, it’s your North Star. As, as, as I think Jim’s Collins refers to it as the, that is your forever. That’s why we’re ever forever driving through. But everybody can get behind it and you can work out what’s the next mountain that you’re going to climb on the way to that North Star.

I’m not mixing allergies too much, um, but it gives that real sense of purpose for everybody. And of course your customers can then buy into that as, as well, ideally. Yeah. And I also like the work that Burn did. Michele, I’ll come to you right next to Burn did around, um, burnt Harnish around, uh, culture statements.

And probably the best example is Zappos and how they came up with 10 culture statements. Mm-hmm. , but back in, in, in 2006. When the wheels were coming off the bus at one of my companies, it was a publicly traded company and, you know, we were stalling out revenue, whatnot. We brought in a, uh, a coach, a CEO coach, [00:35:00] and one of the first things we did is try to articulate our values.

And we came with four key pillars. First and foremost is respect. And I’m doing this by memory here. Okay? So don’t I, can, you know, it’s 20 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever. First and foremost, disrespect, recognize greatness. When our customers succeed, we succeed and we spend it like our own. Oh my gosh, can’t believe.

I can still remember that, but four key phrases that became the language of the office. And we hit 600 employees in this company. Mm-hmm. . And when you first start out, you’re like, okay, you know, the culture’s really just everybody around. It’s like you’re ordering pizza and you’re working late, you’re doing this.

It. , but then you got 600 employees in 12 different offices globally. How do you maintain that culture? Yeah. That when you first set out that you wanted to and how do you scale culture? And then we’ll go to you, Michele. Sorry about that, Michele. No, no problem at all. So Kevin, I, I’m thinking about your, no, sorry.

I was sort [00:36:00] of, Michele. We were talking, I was asking Kevin to sort of respond to the culture and then we’ll go to you. Oh, okay. Right. So, ah, yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Uh, a a absolutely, absolutely. Great. Great comment. Great. Great. Uh, great. Uh, great example there as, as well. And when I go back to what I was saying about giving people the intent and, and, um, getting them to be able to think in the way that, uh, that, that you would like them to, then if you ha you have to have this framework of your values and, uh, and, and ideal, ideally your purpose that people can then work to.

And as you say, if you’ve, if you’re going to scale to 600 people, they’ve got to have understood what, what those, what those are. And, and if I go back to the, if I go back to the, to the purpose side of things, I think it’s been really clear to us with businesses that we’ve worked with through the pandemic period, for example, those, that those that got a really strong sense of purpose were able to, even if they couldn’t Del carry [00:37:00] on delivering the business in the way that they were before they, they could still deliver on their core purpose.

They just had to. Adjust things a little bit and do things in a little bit of a different way. So if your core purpose, if you were a, I don’t, if you were, say running a, um, some gyms for example, and, and you could no longer in, in lockdown, you could no longer have people physically coming to your gyms.

That doesn’t mean that if your core purpose was around improving the health of the, of the nation or the fitness of, uh, of, of, of your, of of people doesn’t, you can still. Stick to that, and you will then find another way that you can deliver on that core purpose. Whereas if you haven’t got a strong core purpose, it’s like, oh, I dunno what we’re gonna do, then we do, we, do we shut the doors or do we just pivot to do something random or, or whatever else.

But you’ve gotta have that, that core purpose, that North star and that that really helps you at times that are difficult, um, to keep everybody on, on track the way you’re trying to get to. And then [00:38:00] the stronger that you’ve got that set of values that people are brought into, that then helps ’em to think in the way that, that, that you would want them to, which means that they can be more empowered to make decisions in the right way that, that you would like them to.

It’s funny, my personal trainer switched from in person to through Zoom. And even today we still keep doing the Zoom more often than in person. So it’s funny. All right, Michele, we’re ready for you now. Okay. Yes, absolutely. So, so we’ve got our purpose, we’ve got our North Star. , and you talk a lot in the book about the 90 day sprints and the planning sessions.

Mm-hmm. , could you like, you know, help our members out a little bit here, like, explain how you actually go about it and, and what is the purpose, you know, what do you wanna come out of your strategic strategic planning sessions with and how are you gonna measure it? Like, give us a, you know, a [00:39:00] little bit about the process.

So I think the, the, the first thing is for those that those people that maybe don’t, Have a 90 day planning process. I dunno, dunno what That’s, that’s about the idea here is that, um, you know, people talk, we’ve just been talking about the North Star and where, where we’re headed and that’s great, you know, that’s, but it’s very, very long term and hard to get ahead around.

In an ideal world, what we’re then doing is sort of breaking that down and saying, okay, well if that’s generally our North Star, where do we wanna be? And Jim Collins does this nicely. He calls it the, the, um, big hairy, audacious goal. Well, you know, where, where are we headed in the next 10 to 15 years? But what we then need to do is say, okay, well what’s, what’s the next three years where, what, that’s a little bit, we can do a three year plan around that.

But then okay, break that down into one year and a lot. A lot of businesses we work with will talk about doing a one year plan and having, having tho that plan for the year. But then of course, if we just work through the [00:40:00] year and without, without thinking around how are we doing against some of those critical things that we’ve said that we need to do for the, for the year, then we, we might find that we’ve gone three quarters of the year and realize that we’re off track or whatever it might be.

Whereas if we put in place a 90 day cycle, then every 90 days, basically what we’re, what we’re doing is we’re going, what’s. What’s gone well in the last 90 days against, uh, what we said we would do in, in the, in that 90 days, how are we doing against that one year plan? What, what, where are we off track?

Where we, where do we need to adjust our course a little, a little bit to get back on track, but also what’s happened in this, in this last 90 days that is new that we hadn’t really thought about or that that has come up as a challenge or an issue that we need to, we need to fix. So we’ve got that combination of keeping the, keeping the plates spinning, which is what most of us do all the time.

We get sucked back into the businesses, all about keeping the plates spinning and keeping the lights on in the business. [00:41:00] But we’re balancing that with actually, where are we headed and what’s the next big thing that we need to, um, that we need to, uh, work on to get us towards where we said we were gonna get to in the, in the year.

And it, it turns out that 90 days is a really good, really good time period because it’s. Long enough that we can achieve something reasonably significant. It’s not like saying, well, what, you know, what am I gonna achieve by tomorrow? Well, it’s only gonna be fairly tactical things, but if it’s next 90 days, we can probably chunk off a fairly big, big project to, to deliver on.

But it’s not so far away that we can’t really imagine it because if I said to people, you know, here, what, what is your business gonna look like in three years time? That’s a bit hard for us to imagine right now. We might, we might have some goals and objectives, but it’s, it’s a little bit far away to really be tangible about going, this is what it needs to look like wherever.

Whereas if I said, what does good look like in 90 days time? Um, so that would be the end of, you know, middle to end of March of next year. In [00:42:00] 90 days time, we can probably be much clearer about, oh, well I need to, this needs to happen. That needs to happen. The businesses have done, done that, and then we can work back from, work back from that to set our, you know, and review that on a, on a, on a weekly and a monthly basis to make sure that we get towards that, that 90 days.

So does that answer your question, Michele? Yeah, that’s great. And you know, I’m curious because we go back and forth on this, you know, who do you invite to those planning sessions and how, who facilitates it? Like what is best practices that you’ve seen that actually works? Um, you know, because I think we all know, if you’re not careful, you’ll get, you know, just everyone one person dominating or kind of a mind think, meaning people just following, you know, the, the leader or whoever that is.

So how do you really suss out and get people really involved in that planning process? [00:43:00] So quite, quite a, yeah, quite a, quite a few things. Quite a few things there. So the, the, the, the first is that with, with any kind of session that we’re doing, whether it’s 90 day planning or whether it’s, uh, whether, whether it’s a, a weekly session or, or or whatever, we need to have an agenda.

For it. So there’s no point in, in just saying, right, we’re gonna meet for two hours and, um, uh, and have a, have a blank kind of agenda or a very loose agenda. We need to make it nice and nice and tight, but if we want, and, and that helps people to then know, right. At this part of the agenda, we’re gonna be expected to come here with, you know, my area of responsibility was looking after the marketing side, and I’m gonna have 10 minutes where I’m gonna have to present how we did against the, the marketing aspects of the business or the, the priorities that we set within marketing.

And they, and then everybody knows that they need to come prepared with those, with, with, with that, with, with that aspect of what they’re, what they’re doing Equally, if, if one, if, if we know that there’s going to be a section on the agenda, which is to address a [00:44:00] current challenge, maybe to prioritize and, and address a current challenge, then we know, ideally that we should have prepared in advance and agreed what some of those challenges are so that that can be greed beforehand that they’re going on the agenda rather than having, I don’t know.

Uh, you know, one of the things that kills any kind of session or productivity of any session is the, any other business. Section. Um, you, you, you just don’t want that because that’s an opportunity to be derailed by somebody coming up with a pet, uh, a pet hate or a pet project, and you end off down a tangent.

So you’ve gotta keep it nice and structured, but bringing, making sure that you have sections within, within those sessions where you are making use of the fact that you’ve got some really good people in your business and that you are then harnessing the power of their thoughts, if you like. That collective, collective int intelligence.

So there’s some, there’s some basic principles as to who should be at that, at those meetings, and that [00:45:00] kind of depends on the stage of business that you are, that you are at. If you are running a business where there’s maybe three to three to five of you or something like that within the business, then you probably want the whole team at that business.

If you are running a business where you’ve got. Dozens of dozens of people within the business. Then you’re probably talking around then having the senior leadership team at those, at those meetings. Because once you get, once you get beyond five or six people, in a meeting, then you’re going to find it quite hard to keep that productive, um, and, and, and give people enough time each to be, to be involved, um, without it going off tangents and, and getting, getting very difficult to keep control of it.

So five or six people is a good, it’s a good number of people to have in, in some of the more strategic type type sessions. And of course, if you are a larger business, then you’re going to have teams. So you’re then going to probably have sessions where you’ll have the different departments or [00:46:00] the different teams that will, that will be working.

But again, it kind of comes back to those units of where people work best together and the right, the right sizes. And somewhere around about five to six people is a great working group, kind of, kind of, kind of size to be, to be working with. And we do quite a lot of mastermind type groups and we found that that’s a great.

Great number of people to have in there. It’s, it’s enough that you can get that real collective thinking and, and, and creativity and, and, and range of thought, but without being too many that you’d lose control of the, uh, of the session. Yeah, it’s interesting cuz we do a monthly meeting with myself in seven other individuals who run their own companies at something, an organization called EO Entrepreneurs Organization.

And, uh, eight seem to be the ideal number, but I like this five to 6, 7, 8. You know, I’ll tell you the other mistake I see that a lot of businesses do in their strap planning session is they all [00:47:00] come to the meeting and department number one reports on their stuff, department number two reports on their stuff.

And you know, they burn a day of just simply reporting on each other’s progress. Yeah. And I challenge, um, the companies in our incubator and the cohorts that I do and whatnot, I challenge. The companies to spend, try to get to 70% of their time on ideation. Yep. Because that, I, I can’t tell you how many breakthroughs we’ve had at our two day strategic planning sessions, how many aha moments we’ve had.

Yeah. But if we never had those ideation sessions, we never would’ve come up with this stuff. Yeah. I, I think that’s really good, in really good insight. And yeah, the anybody that’s worked in big corporate, um, you ought have been stuck in you’all, have been stuck in meetings where that exactly that happens is you do, it just goes around the room.

It just becomes, oh my goodness. You know, it’s, they’re doing their bit now and, and, [00:48:00] you know, I’m coming up in a few minutes. It’s just, it’s just pain, just painful and nothing, no decisions ever really get made or any real, real value. Those, those aha moments. I think that that’s, that’s absolutely right. And if, and it, and it comes back again to.

If you, if you’ve, if, let’s just imagine that we’ve now done this brilliantly and we’ve had our 90 day planning and we’ve identified a handful of key priorities for the business. So there maybe five or six things that the business needs to do in that next 90, 90 days. And then we’ve broken that down by the senior leaders within the business as to what are my priorities.

So, so what are Kevin? So these are the five the business needs to achieve, but what does Kevin need to do in the next, maybe what are his three real priorities that, that he must achieve in the next night is so that I must, may must achieve? And if I, if all of us have done that, and then we’ve built our little action plans on each of those priorities.

Um, and Jim Collins calls them rocks, which is a, those of you that know [00:49:00] that analogy, which, which is a, a great thing. So what are my rocks that I need to do and what’s my action plan, um, to deliver on those? That means that when we have our weekly meeting and our monthly meeting, but let’s just say our, our weekly catch up.

instead of reporting on, well, I’ve done this and I phoned them and I wrote those emails and I’ve, you know, done this thinking and whatever, instead of having that kind of thing, it’s like, right, those are my three rocks. I’m on track with those two. So I don’t need any help. I’m off track, um, with, with this one, and I either do or don’t need help and have, I don’t need help, but because I’ve got a plan to fix it, then that’s great.

Um, and we’re just on track, on track and don’t need help. Or if I’m off track, but I need some help, then that’s the bit that comes into the discussion part of the agenda later on so that we can then work together to try and help me outta the roadblock that I, that I’ve got on my priority. But if we haven’t properly set our priorities in the first place and, and worked on those, those rocks individually, then we’re just kind of rambling and we are gonna have the kind of session where it goes all over the place because [00:50:00] nobody really knows what’s important and what’s not.

And we’re just gonna report back on all sorts of things. So, so lemme try to summarize a little bit here and I maybe add a little bit extra too. I, I, , we’re, we’re pretty much in alignment on our theories around scaling. So we start with this big hair audacious goal 10 years from now, we want to be able to change the world by doing X and using smart, you know, specific, measurable, attainable.

You know, we want them to be, uh, targets that are very specific. Okay. So we’re gonna have a million customers, or we’re gonna start, let’s do startup club. Okay. That, that makes it easier. Okay. So Startup Club is now 910,000 cust members. We wanna be able to affect or change the lives of 10 million startups around the world globally in 10 years.

We’ll just go with that right now. Okay. Yeah. And then we wanna bring that down to our three year goal. So three year goal is that Startup Club wants to get to 2 million members in three years and generate [00:51:00] a positive cash flow and have whatever. So we got our three year winning moves. We got three to five winning moves next three years.

and we bring that down to our annual goals, which means, you know, next 12 months we want to generate, uh, Michele and I talked about that. We actually have specific numbers, but I won’t use them right now. But, you know, we wanna generate X amount of revenue and get to X number of members and improve engagement level.

So we have three goals for next year, and then we bring that down to our quarterly. Okay. In the next quarter we have these three goals. Then we bring that down to our weekly meetings and our weekly meetings. We talk about where we’re at. And then we also have personal goals. So we’ll have core, yeah. So we have company goals, personal goals, and then we have a daily sales huddle.

That’s what I added. That’s the burn harnish piece that I added to, to one of my prior companies. The daily sales huddle. And you can do a daily huddle on all your employees as well. But typically what I’ve done is the daily sales huddle, weekly meeting. [00:52:00] Uh, quarterly goal setting, annual goal setting, three year goal setting.

Bhag, what am I, am I on track? Or ab ab Absolutely perfectly. And that’s, um, know, e e, exactly that. So we’ve got that, right? We call that the business rhythm. So we’ve got the right rhythm within the, within the business that supports that 90 day, 90 day planning. So, um, and, and ideally, yes, you’d have the, you’d, you’d, you’d do exactly what you said with the, with the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly.

Um, and yes, you’ll have an annual, an annual planning rhythm, rhythm as well. And if you’ve worked out your key agendas for those, so your, you know, your day, your daily are gonna be really quick. Um, and not very strategic. They are, they are really about, about what’s, what needs to be done today. Um, and, and what, you know, what, what, what came up from yesterday?

What needs to be done today, um, and where does anybody need help? But then you weekly bring in a little bit more of, uh, of how we’re doing against those, those rocks as, as, as well as, [00:53:00] as well as that. And of course, you’re monthly, they’re a bit more strategic. But if we’ve got agendas for all of those and who should be at the, uh, and we also, part of that is who should be at each of those, each of those sessions.

Um, then we’ve got the right structure, the right rhythm in place. That means that we can have that ideation, those discussions. We can, we can make the most use of the fact that we’ve got good people in the business and use their brains to help solve problems as opposed to just having meetings for meetings sake.

Um, that everybody just ends up feeling why, on why on Earth am I at this meeting? Yeah, no, that’s great. Um, you know, of the three, so it’s funny cuz I guess we’ve learned from the same leaders and whatnot, but we do, yeah, we do the daily huddle and we, uh, say, you know, what was your top victory yesterday?

What are your focus today? Are you stuck? And I actually, I actually like to bring the executives into that meeting. It’s only a five minute meeting with the salespeople. And I don’t let the executives talk. Okay. Just so you know, I like to bring the executives in because we can, we wanna become a sales-driven [00:54:00] organization.

There’s nothing’s more powerful than daily sales huddle with your executive team listening in. But the most important guess which one, Kevin is the most important, most impactful of those three questions. And I know this for a reason, it’s tell me about your victory yesterday. And the reason I know that is cuz when I had to show up to these meetings, I had to come up, I was the sales acting sales manager when we didn’t have have one.

Sometimes I would have to come up with the Vic, my victory. And I would say, you know what? Yesterday I called up the present of this telecom and this location at this time, and we set up a meeting for next week. And I know it motivated me every day to do something big to prove to my team. So I would be embarrassed if I didn’t show up and, and, and sh uh, you know, I’d do my own team.

And, and so that’s definitely a question we wanna ask and then we’ll jump down to you, Ted, any other thoughts on that, Kevin, before we jump down? Yeah, no, I think that’s, I think that’s right. And we want, we want to give people a little bit of peer pressure in order and what you’ve, what you’ve just [00:55:00] described there is, you know, that, you know, you’re gonna be asked that question because it’s a very simple agenda, but you know, it’s gonna, you’re gonna, you’re gonna be asked, and it happens every, every day.

And there’s that little bit of peer pressure for you to come up with something a little bit special, the same as everybody else has got that peer pressure too. So, you know, it, it, it’s, it’s, you’re not gonna necessarily gonna get a, um, a, a real wrap over the knuckles if you haven’t, haven’t come with it.

But you have on your, you put that peer pressure on yourself to, uh, to, to come up with something, something good. And that’s something that we wanna try and build into all of the sessions that, that, that you do as well, so that everybody feels we need to, we know what we need to come with, we know we’re gonna be asked about it, and we, we need to feel that we need to come up with something good, a good contribu.

Yeah. Well, we have another scale up geek on the stage with us right now. Uh, Tej, thanks for coming on. I, I don’t know if you have some thoughts on scaling up, you wanna share with us, or maybe a question for Kevin, but we’re excited you’re, you came up on stage. Thanks for pulling me up, Colin and [00:56:00] Kevin, good to meet you.

I, uh, apologize I couldn’t get on earlier, but I was listening. Uh, very good insights. I think actually, I, I looked it up. Uh, you and I have a couple of really good friends in common, Dr. Donna Weiss and I think, uh, Trent Larson, even Wasim. So, uh, good to connect with you. Um, but hi, everyone. Tate here. Um, the thought here is, is just kind of, and you may have covered this before I jumped on, but I look at everything from a top line down.

The, the, the most, the, the underlying ethos would be working in the business versus on the business. In the business is what you do day-to-day, month to month, quarter to quarter, to make sure top lines there. It’s growing and then you’re managing ebitda, bottom line, net income, et cetera. But that is what pays the bills.

That’s important. We get lost in the sauce. You can’t see the frogs through the trees because then you have to work on the business. Mm-hmm. . So I break everything down when I teach my students for our own firm. Hey, this is good. Quarterly we are talking about in the business, but also quarterly we’ve gotta talk about on the business, right?

That is [00:57:00] five, 10 year trajectory. And really we stayed three to five, but I’m learning to think about 10 years in and outward, especially with technological advances. And that right now happening at a much more rapid rate. So in the business, most people do, they forget the on the business, which is things like, um, I think Kevin covered.

If you’re a larger company, we deal with what we call middle market companies. These are companies that, that do several hundred million in sales. They have a board of directors, which is paid, and they have an advisory board unpaid. So even if you are a small business, you’re a one-man shop, get yourself and, and one or two advisors, and that’s your board of advisors, right?

Get them. And it’s not necessarily that they think like you, you respect. And you, uh, trust what they’re saying. But a lot of times they don’t think the way I do. And I like that because they’ll bring ideas to the table that I might be complacent with. I don’t wanna make a change. And they’ll say I respect them.

So I listen to ’em and then they’ll say, you didn’t think about it this way. So anyone who’s listening, if you, even if you’re a one man child, find a key person that you [00:58:00] trust. Consider them when you’re a board of advisors. And as you grow, have a small board of advisors. You don’t have to pay them. Hence term board of advisors, right?

And you meet every so often. Take ’em out for a drink, whatever it might be, number one. Number two, that that long term structuring and thinking, you gotta reverse engineer it. So, so think about on the business, right? That’s thinking about where’s the market going, right? We’re, we’re going into a depre, not a depressed, but we’re going into recessionary time for the next year.

Most people are buckling down, thinking about cutting costs, cutting heads, whatever it might be, and getting through next year. That’s. Superb to do. But think about when things open up in 2024, going forward 2025, when things are good, how are you gonna capitalize? And you will capitalize if you focus on it in the last minute, in the last hour, in the last, uh, month of the year.

Think about it now. So when the tough times do subside, you wanna think about things like that. So I don’t wanna go on too long, but if you have a question, but that’s the way I look at things is, uh, I saw the term scale up strategies and the easiest way, [00:59:00] well not easiest, but the most basic thinking is work in the business.

That’s the immediate term, but work on the business that speaks to the scaling up when you are looking at external factors as well as what you’re doing over a 3, 4, 5 year period. Cuz that’ll show you inefficiencies in your business, uh, or profits or things ahead of the curve that you might not be thinking because you’re too busy in the business.

So hope that makes some sense. . No, absolutely. Kevin, any thoughts before we close up the show here on that? I think that was amazing te channel. Cause I I would love to do a show with you on that topic specifically, but Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s a great, uh, you know, a, a, a great, great summary.

Really, really, really chej, um, that working, working on the business rather than it course they know that, that, um, comes from, uh, you know, Mike, Michael Gerber with the, with the, with the E-myth. And, uh, and everybody talks about that, that a lot. And that’s avoiding trying, trying to. It’s part of the, the, the thinking process and uh, and, and [01:00:00] making better decisions and constantly thinking and looking, looking at looking ahead rather than just being in the, in, in the weeds of the, of the business.

And, and, and I think that’s a really good point you made as well, about having other people to bounce these ideas off of because they will have different views. They might not have all the specific knowledge that you have about something, but they’ll be asked able to ask some of those questions that maybe you didn’t even think about because you just, um, yeah.

It just, just didn’t, it didn’t, didn’t occur. And I think that’s a really, really good bit of advice is to, to make better decisions. We need a framework of which to work, which is kind of what we do with the scale up journey, but we need to also then be able to have people to bounce those ideas off so that we’re challenged and our thinking is critiqued.

Um, and improved all the, all the time from different perspectives. Yeah, it’s a, it’s, that’s great. What a, what a great show. Um, Kevin, you come on, you spend an hour with us and, and it’s, it’s your own time and we appreciate that and Tej. you as well. Um, and you know, [01:01:00] everybody who comes on stage, we really do appreciate and I’m, I’m actually thinking that it would be so cool after the book Start Scale, exit Repeat comes out on October 3rd, published by Forbes.

When that book comes out, if the three of us got on stage and did a section, a session on Scale Up, I think we could really put together an Epic show. But separately from that Taja, I also sent you a back channel on another show idea, another show topic. Um, well, you know what, the other thing in that book we talk about Under Start is looking for ideas in the next wave.

What’s the next big wave? Well, we believe it’s chat. G p T. We believe it’s ai. This thing, two weeks ago came out, someone showed me a demo of it, and then I got four or five different people. I’m seeing rooms all over Clubhouse on this. So we’re gonna run next week’s show is not gonna be held Friday at two o’clock eastern due to the holidays.

It will be [01:02:00] run next Wednesday. It’s probably gonna be a two to three hour show, so we’re gonna go extra long on this one. We’re trying to bring in experts on chat. G p T, let me tell you this, I’m going to a, I did not buy a birthday present for a friend of mine. I’m heading over there after this call and I’m having dinner with, uh, three friends of mine we’re celebrating her birthday.

I went to chat g p t in 10 seconds, typed in all her typed, typed in things about her and maybe 20 seconds. I spent 30 seconds and it wrote the most unbelievable poem. I asked her to write a poem, something that I, I couldn’t have spent months to, to, to, to create. This is a game changer. A true what?

Paradigm shift, what Jeffrey Moore calls inside the tornado AI is now, this is the one, this is the moment in time. We’re seeing AI explode and the opportunities are going to be tremendous for startups. So we’re gonna [01:03:00] talk about ways we can make money and, and how startups can use chat, G p T, this advanced AI to to change the world and make a lot of money.

So that’s next to Wednesday at two o’clock Eastern. We’re ex very excited about that show. You’ve been listening to Serial Entrepreneur Secrets Revealed, a live show and podcast. Now we’re happy to say we are on podcast and we have over, over. This is the 87th episode. And I often say if you go back and you listen to these episodes, you listen to all the authors, you listen to all the serial entrepreneurs that we’ve had on this show, you’ll have an MBA in entrepreneurship.

Last week we had on the founder of Reebok, he was 87 years old. It was a phenomenal. Show, go check it out, search on the, and we’d love for you to give us a review on that podcast as well if you liked it. Um, but search for a Serial entrepreneur Secrets revealed on your favorite podcast channel. [01:04:00] Thank you everyone.

We’ll see you next Wednesday at two o’clock Eastern. Thank you very much. Take care folks.