Which Four Layers of Process Drive Sustainable Growth with Justin Goodbread

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. And we'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. And the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne. Today, I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Justin Goodbread. Now, Justin is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold 7 companies with exits in the 7, 8, and even 9-figure range. He's a bestselling author of the book Your Baby's Ugly, which is a national— and he's a nationally recognized expert in value acceleration and a faculty member with the Exit Planning Institute. His insights have been featured in Forbes, Kiplinger, Yahoo Finance. He also holds credentials as a CFP, A CEPA, and a CVGA. Justin is one of the rare voices who has actually lived the full cycle of starting, scaling, exiting, and then even teaching others how to unlock the value inside their own business. So, I don't want to give you all of his story. I'm going to let him tell that to you himself. But Justin, welcome to the show.

Hey, Mark. Thanks for having me, man. It's gonna be a fun conversation.

Absolutely. So, I know you've got an interesting sort of twists and turns and stories, uh, to your career. Why don't you give our audience a little bit of that background?

Yeah, let me first start off by saying I'm just a country boy born and raised on a dirt road, living on a dirt road in East Tennessee. That's who I am. I'm wearing blue jeans and flip-flops and a t-shirt. That's just, that's who I am day in, day out, despite all the accolades and all the things that you read earlier. Started my first business when I was 15, and I was homeschooled. Mom and Dad brought my brother, my sister, and I out of the education system, and, um, Started homeschooling us when we were little, and they wanted to raise business owners. Mom and Dad were, they would say it this way, they grew up in dysfunctional families, hard families, hard, just a lot of pain. And they didn't want their kids to have that. And as Ed Mylett, one of my heroes of today, he often talks about be the one. They were the one that said, you know what, we're going to change our destiny for our family. And so they, I say it from stage, you may have heard me say this, we were drug kids. Like we were drug everywhere. We were drug to Zig Ziglar conferences and a lot. And, and, uh, Osman— Aug Mandino, if I can get it out. Aug Mandino and Charlie Jimenez-Jones. We were drugged to all these conferences of yesterday's salespeople and leaders and think leaders. And that led us to start our first business at 15, my brother and I. And ultimately, by the time we were 17, my brother and I were each taking home more money than mom and dad combined.

Wow.

We learned business early. We started scaling companies and we ended up selling that company whenever my wife Emily came into my life about the age of 23. Sold the first company. Moved to East Tennessee. Since then, I've started and sold an additional 6 companies. I started 5, and the company who bought out my last one, we actually— I became the president of that company and moved it from a mid-8-figure valuation to a 9-figure valuation in 18 months. And so, what I proved to myself is if a country boy born and raised on a dirt road can stay true to a particular calling, because I think business ownership is a calling. I mean, why else would us in all of our wisdom want to do the lunacy things that we do as business owners? So, if we stay true to our calling, calling and why we believe we're in business and what we believe we're going to achieve, then through all the adversity, through all the pain, through all the success, whatever it may be, we're ultimately going to achieve what we set out to achieve. And now I had the privilege, Mark, of literally, as you mentioned, speaking on stage. I love getting in front of business owners and watching the light bulbs go off and encouraging business owners. I still write books. We have a new book coming out. This will be my 3rd book. My first book was The Ultimate Sale. You mentioned Your Baby's Ugly. That one had a lot of attraction because of the name of it. My third book will be out next year. Can't wait for everybody to see that one. I can't quite let the cat out of the bag yet, but it's coming. And hopefully this will be a New York Times bestseller. But now I coach business owners. I teach business owners how to rapidly scale their companies, and we show them how to move their companies double or triple the value in as little as 18 months. And I'm having fun, man. Having fun.

That's awesome. So, you've taken all of this learning and all of this background. And condensed it into a really structured framework that you call sort of like the Deca-Millionaire Way. I don't want to deprive our audience of some of that insight. Why don't you give us a little bit of— obviously, you could spend hours on it, but give us a little bit of a snapshot of what is that approach that you've distilled from all of this experience and all this fantastic training that you've gotten over your life?

Yeah. So, before I go through the framework, we got to lay the foundation properly. And why do I use the term the Deca-Millionaire? Well, currently in the United States, there's roughly about 32 million small business owners here in the United States at this point. If we stretch it across the audience, I'm sure you may have other states, other countries in the world like Australia, there could be, you know, hundreds of millions of business owners in the small business community. Small business being they have less than about $5 to $10 million in EBITDA, depending on which study you want to read out there.

Right.

Less than 500 employees is what the SBA, the Small Business Association, would say. So, here in the United States, we have 32, 33 million small business owners. who have employees, who are striving to reach the mean. The data shows that we, as business owners, we want to achieve as a species roughly about $25,000 a month in income. So let's just round that off. Let's say it's about $250,000 in income, a little bit between $250,000 to $300,000, depending on what study you read.

Mm-hmm.

So now I know through my tax strategies and through all the tax work I've done that we have really good and savvy CPAs and we business owners, we don't wanna pay taxes. So we're gonna figure out anything we can not to pay taxes. So we do things like we rent our house out using 280AG of the Internal Revenue Code. We may put our spouse or significant other on payroll. We may hire our kids. We may go get continuing education on a trip and deduct that. We may pay for our vehicle through the business. We may put our cell phone or health insurance. And before you know it, all these strategies that we end up using in our life ends up causing our income to increase above $250,000 to actually somewhere around about $400,000 to $500,000 on average in the small business community. That's the mean number.

Okay.

Now, I realize that not every business owner has achieved that, but that is what many business owners are striving for. I also understand that there are many business owners who have excelled past that.

Correct.

But if we, if we look at this mindset that, okay, we're making $250,000, $300,000, $400,000 all in through our company and what we get to take home in a paycheck, The alarming statistic that we don't talk about even in the exit planning world, the alarming statistic is that only 4% of business owners who are successful in selling their company. So, let's just pause right there. We have roughly about $12 trillion in this great tsunami that's going to try to transact over the next 5 to 10 years.

Yeah.

Out of that data point, only about 20%, depending on which study you want to read, only about 20% will be successful. Of that 20%, which is successful, only 4% who are successful are happy, are satisfied with the exit. So, we pull this way back to the data point. Those of us who are business owners who have literally pushed through blood, sweat, and tears, we have sacrificed. We paid our employees whenever we didn't pay ourselves. We paid our vendors whenever we couldn't pay ourselves. We have the bruises, we have the scars, and you're shaking your head and everybody who's listening to me is like, yep, that's me. That's us.

Yeah.

I'm there right now, man. You know, like I used to say, we were so poor you couldn't rub 2 pennies together and get anything anything out of it. We were poor, man, when we started our business. But the reality is, is that once we do reach that level of income, the amount of money that we have to have in order to sustain that through independence, through retirement, through starting up another company is ludicrous.

Right.

So, the data point says there's a rule called Rule of 4 that says if we have $10 million in assets, we can invest that conservatively and it should give us— we basically take a $400,000 distribution and that $10 million will pretty much last us throughout our retirement, throughout the bumps and bruises of life. Now I realize that we business owners, by the way, will say, well, we're not gonna only get 4%. Friends, I've been doing this a long time. 35 years I've been consulting business owners. Here's what I do know. We're very aggressive in our business. We're very conservative in our other investments. I very seldom see business owners liquidate a company and stay aggressive in their investments. We oftentimes pull down, myself included. Okay?

Mm-hmm.

So whenever I talk about the Deca-Millionaire Way, We have to realize as business owners that our business value has to be significantly larger than we ever anticipated so that we can maintain the standard of living that we're used to living.

Yeah.

So, that's why I call it the Deca-Millionaire Way. So, what is a way that is proven? I call it a framework. What is a framework that has proven that any business owner, no matter the type, no matter the type of business, no matter NAIC code or SIC code, no matter the time in the business, you could be just a novice or you could be a seasoned veteran. What is a framework that any business owner can follow that will lead them from wherever they're at to success, whatever that success may look like? Again, I'm going to use the term deca-millionaire. So what we created after 35 years of toil, after thousands of books, after the credential, after coaching literally thousands of business owners to double and triple the value of their company, is a 5-step framework. The framework is simple, Mark. It's simple. And I wanted this to be so simple that a country boy on a dirt road could understand it. All right? So it's easy. The first thing, the very first thing is we have to understand where we're going and why we're going there. Now, we call it Relentless Foundation. When I use the term relentless a lot, because to me, we as business owners epitomize the word relentless. We'll do anything we have to do to make it happen.

Yeah.

We'll charge hell with a water pistol, as I often say, from my sticks in South Georgia. So, we want to have a relentless foundation. But what's amazing, Mark, is that ultimately we don't know who we are, where we're going, why we're going there, or what is going to be the osmos or the ethos in which we govern ourselves. So, in our framework, we begin with relentless foundation. Now, after we understand here's who we are as humans and the 8.2 billion people in the world, here's how psycho we are as business owners, and here's where we're going specifically, here's what we are attempting to achieve. Once we know that, then we go to relentless examination, number 2. Examination is twofold. See, the asset, our business, is typically 80% of our net worth.

Right.

It is a large asset that sits on our balance sheet. However, it is not who we are. So, oftentimes we think as business owners of, here's what I have to do today, but it's this chess game. The game of business is you're setting up moves now that you may not capitalize on for 5 years or 10 years from now. So, when we get to relentless examination, the very first thing we're going to talk about in our coaching program, if we work together, if anybody works through the program, and even this is what I'm writing about in my book, The Deca-Millionaire Way, is you have a personal life and oftentimes the business is the least valuable thing in your personal life. You know, the way I'll say it, Mark, is I know a ton of business owners who've made hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, but they've lost their family. Kids won't talk to them, lost their first love. They're no longer connected. They had the money and now they're like Ebenezer Scrooge on the old A Christmas Story movie.

Yeah.

That's sad. Or I know a lot of business owners that have made a lot of money, but they don't have their health. They can't enjoy it. They are dying, literally dead. Okay. Because they just don't have the health. They've lost their friends. What good is money if you don't have anybody to celebrate it with?

Right?

So, when we look at the personal side, we have to determine what, how are we going to build our life going forward, knowing that at some point we're going to leave our company?

Yeah.

Now, on the business side, I've looked, and I write about this extensively in my book, Your Baby's Ugly. There are 8 areas of business. We're going to examine the business through 286 metrics to determine, is this business valuable or not? So that's the second peer in the Deca Millionaire journey. So we have relentless foundation, relentless examination, then we go into relentless execution.

Yeah.

We as business owners, we don't put blinders on ourselves. We see shiny objects on a regular basis. And you know this, Mark, in your own success in the marketing world you've had and today, you know that you have to stay consistent over long periods of time in order to have payoff for what you're trying to achieve.

That's right.

Same is true in business. You have to execute over and over and over, and it's tiring and it's a grind. It's like you're running a marathon without knowing the finish line. That's relentless execution. Now, the 4th step is fun. That's the exit. Some people might say is you're selling your business, you're transitioning business, but it's not just about business. It may be your children are leaving the house. As a business owner, how do you deal with that? Your parents are going into an assisted living facility. You lose a parent. How do you deal with that as a business owner? This different framework is a different mindset in the relentless exit. You're transitioning things in your life. That's the 4th phase. And then finally, the last phase is freedom. Relentless freedom. I also speak about freedom because that is my word. That's the word that I want to achieve. I've sought now for 35 years, Mark, to have freedom. Freedom of time, freedom of pocketbook, freedom of resources, freedom of talent, freedom of people. Just to be able to enjoy what I believe God has equipped me to do. And that may mean that for some of us, we have to exit our company. For others of us, we may build the company where we have an asset that affords us the luxury of time. For others, it may be, you know what, we have the freedom to bring our kids in our business and nurture them and mentor them and disciple them on how a business owner works. So, when we look at the Deca Millionaire Framework, it's centered around how do we build a framework that every business owner can deploy that's deep enough that can cover all avenues of business, but also simple enough that even a country boy can understand it.

That's great. Well, and so, you hit on so many good things there. The first, we'll sort of start at the end, is you talk about that freedom that comes through that process. But I also actually think that sort of the way that you described it leads to more freedom just in the day-to-day, even before you've had that exit. You know, you talk about the sort of relentless exit as, you know, there's always transitions happening in life. And so by building— and what I like to say is, you know, systems set you free. It's those processes that create that freedom, that make that relentless execution so much less of a grind, so that as the transitions that happen in life, in business, come along, you actually have more freedom Because you've built the processes that enable that. And I know you talk a lot about processes and systems and the approaches that you work with companies. Tell us a little bit about how that concept of sort of building the processes and systems so that you can kind of delegate and elevate, how that plays into some of that relentless execution and some of those other elements.

Yeah, processes is one of those words that kind of make me want to like I just want to say that right off the bat.

Okay.

And the reason for it is, is because there are a lot of, um, certificates out there that will talk about processes all day long, but they don't understand how said processes fit into the bigger game plan. And so, I mean, they're not strategic processes.

They're tactics.

All sorts of processes, right?

Yeah.

So let's, let's talk about it in the sense of a business owner. Most business owners don't want to deal with checklist 1, checklist 2, checklist 3, checklist 4. That's not who we are. We're visionaries. Thinkers. We roll our sleeves up and we'll wrestle the bull to the ground, so to speak. And we don't want to deal with the checklist. The way I often want to say it, just get it done.

Figure it out.

Put whatever checklist you want to on the wall. And that works for business owners. So being we're talking to business owners, we talk about processes. Yes, I can get stupid granular. We can, we can talk about how EOS works and how it doesn't work. We can talk about how Verne Harnish's stuff works and it doesn't work and where it works. We can dive into the nerdy stuff. I cover that on my podcast ad nauseam. But for today, let's take us back to the playground. I'm a country boy, Mark. You and I talked about some of our roots in South Georgia and Georgia, but I'll show you my age here. We used to have this wheel of death on the playground.

It was a merry-go-round.

It was metal and you could almost see it. It was painted in different colors, right? You may have one quarter—

Wobbled a little bit as it went around.

A little bit. Yeah.

Rusty, sharp edges. Yeah.

So on my merry-go-round, there are 8 areas of business. Okay? So in every business we have planning, where are we going? How are we going to get there?

Yeah.

Leadership, how are we going to motivate our team to achieve that? Sales and marketing, you're an expert in those 2 areas and how they work. People, our team members, who's going to help us get there? Operations, people often think operations is process, and it is to some point. And then you have finance and legal. So you have 8 areas of business. The owner of a business sits in the very center of the merry-go-round. And now, whenever I was a kid, here's what we did, Mark. We would get Bubba. You may— can I almost picture Bubba? I mean, he was the center on the football team.

Yeah.

He was big, he was strong, he's a big old boy. You wanted him on your side on the football team. We would get Bubba on one side. Now, I'm a little fella compared to Bubba. There'd be 3 or 4 of us on the other side, and we'd all get going. And that way, you know, Bubba would offset us little fellas. And that we would get that thing going around so hard that you could hang on, your feet would go flying out, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Eventually we'd fall off and our parents were like, you crazy kids. And we'd fall off. And Bubba, whenever he fell off, that merry-go-round just got all jacked up. It'd start wobbling. It would just grind to a halt. Now I want you to imagine that mindset for us business owners. When we think about processes, oftentimes we're thinking about operational processes, but processes are much more broad than that. Processes are how do you, as the business owner who's sitting in the very center of that merry-go-round enjoying the You're not on the outside getting turned. You're sitting there moving around. You're watching it. You can see that Bubba's about to fall off, so you go over to help him and you get a little turbulent. You get back to the middle and we're comfortable there. That's not a process. A process is whenever you can get off the merry-go-round completely, where everything in that company can operate without you having to touch it. Okay? That's where oftentimes some of these bigger popular brands miss it. In terms of valuation, they'll talk about, well, we can have this process and we can do these things. So to me, whenever I talk about processes, I want to know how the marketing inbound leads actually affect compliance. How do they affect it? And how do I have those 2 departments or those 2 personnel working without me being in the center of it? How do I tie my sales processes, however they may be, however detailed or not detailed they may be, to my leadership within the company? How can leadership know what's happening in sales? So whenever I think about processes, I want to tie all 8 areas of the business. There are 256 little metrics beneath those 8 areas of business. I want to tie those in such a way that me, the owner, only has to look at 3 to 5, what I call critical success factors.

Yeah.

That I literally can be on the beach, Mark, if I wanted to, and have a dashboard with 3 or 4 or 5 metrics. That's it. And based on these 3 or 4 or 5 metrics, I am so in tune with what's happening in my company that I can tell you when Bubba's about to slip. That's whenever I build a process. So, in order for me to scale companies radically, everything that happens in that company, whether it be from the chief marketing person, the salesperson, the operations person, compliance person, whatever it has to be, has to come out of their head and it has to get into a structure and it has to be cross-tested across every area of the company and diluted down to 3 or 4, max 5 critical success factors. So, when I talk about processes, that's where my brain goes. Can you build it? Absolutely. It's easy to build from an outside, but for owners, myself included, we don't want to let go. We just don't want to let go.

So I love so many of the things that you said there. The first is around the idea that lots of people talk about process, but they're really talking about sort of tactical executions. Like you say, checklist. Checklist isn't a process to me. A process has to have an outcome that can be measured, that can roll up into some of these critical success factors so that you can actually see, are we achieving the thing that we expect to achieve by running through this checklist? And can then be, as you say, sort of delegated out so that someone else can sort of monitor the progress and still have a good picture there. And we see so often that folks will build Checklists and say, we've got a system. Well, you've got an execution system, but you don't have a process until you're actually tracking the results and building in a collaborative environment where you can have constant optimization and improvement against those results. And really, you know, sort of enabling the folks that own those processes to make those things and really grow it.

You know, there's 4 layers to business. You have to attract, Get new clients. You have to sell, convert them to a paying customer. You have to deliver on the sale. You have to retain the client. So, attract, convert, deliver, and retain. 4 elements of business. And in those 4 elements of business, oftentimes, whenever we're coaching our clients, we'll get to the operations phase of our merry-go-round and the checklist comes out.

Right.

Or they'll have this little workflow. That's one workflow on how to open up an IRA if they're a financial advisor, how to How to do a root canal if they're a dentist, or how to put tile on a pool if they're a pool builder. There's this little checklist, right? The problem with that is, is that we actually teach is there's 9 elements to every area of a process. There's 9 elements to every workflow, depending on what your vernacular is. I can use a lot of synonyms there in that particular movement, but ultimately, we're starting here and we're trying to go to this point, whatever this point is.

Yeah.

The reality is, is that for every major pillar, what we talk about, the Attract phase, if we're doing marketing, that's a pillar. So for every major pillar, there could be dozens of sub-pillars.

Yeah.

It could be a website as a sub-pillar. And even on that website, there's multiple different elements beneath that. So we're a workflow, a process, a standard operating procedure, whatever your term might be in your company. It's ultimately not even going to the critical success factor. It's moving it from one phase to the next so that it might build on the overall meta-narrative of the client journey.

That's right.

The easiest way to determine if your company or you as the owner, if your company is scaling properly in value is simply this. Can you articulate every step from the time the client says, yes, I wanna work with you to the time they're satisfied? Every step in your company needs to be done. Most of us can't even articulate the client journey.

We have it.

Whenever I say the client journey, it's the exact same process. So I love, I love Chipotle. I don't know how you say it out in California, but I say Chipotle in my little redneck accent right here in South Georgia. So whenever I walk in there, the very first thing they're gonna ask me is, do I want to use a paper bowl, a tortilla shell, a burrito? They're gonna ask me, what am I gonna put my stuff in? The next thing they're gonna say is, do I want protein? Then it's gonna have the little garnishes on it, and then they're gonna put it on a thing and say, do you want chips and dip? That's the process. There's like 5 or 6 different things. Now they can customize it by saying, do you want double meat? Of course I want double meat. Look at me.

I love to eat.

Give me triple meat, man. So I'll have that fun conversation with a business owner. But whenever we as business owners think about what we're delivering to our client, we'll say, well, we do this. And then I start dissecting it back and we don't even know the client journey, the high pillar steps that the client's going to actually walk through. How poor then are we as business owners that we don't even have the granular level nailed down? And what it does, here's what it does for us. Go back to that value section. We get so frustrated at our team, at our customers, at our suppliers, because we can see it in our head and we're the guy who built the product or built the service and we know all the details and we can sell it. We're the best salesperson in the company. But now, whenever we're trying to communicate this thing that we do to our team, they don't think like we do. They don't process in their minds like we do, and they're trying to understand. And now they're lost as a ball in high weeds, and we get frustrated. Well, they're just a bad employee. No, Hoss, you're a bad boss. You're a bad business owner. You're an average business owner who has most of your assets tied up in your business that will never sell. So, let's change that. So, that's the reason why we're having the conversation.

So, you hit on something so crucial there that we oftentimes see is there's actually quite an easy fix. And what you hit on is this idea of everyone having, you know, sort of reading from the same sheet music, seeing the same picture. Something, you know, something like 60% of people are primarily visual in the way that they process the world. That means they want to see things visually, not talk it out, not read it as it's been written out.

Right.

And one of the easiest fixes that we see is mapping what that customer journey, that buyer's journey looks like from how do they first become aware this is a problem that can even be solved all the way through to making the choice of, should I advocate for these people in the marketplace and tell others to, you know, to buy from them? When you map all of that up, then you start to get much better engagement from everyone. The other thing that we see that happens once you map out a process and and can put it up on a wall, it creates a much more collaborative environment where people put their arms around each other and they look at the process and they go, how do we make it better? Versus if I tell you about my process and you offer, you know, ways to make it better, then you are picking apart what I do and, and sort of criti— critiquing me. It's such a magical thing that happens once you make that visual representation of it and put it up on the wall that we see it really creates a lot more collaboration for teams. And really brings teams together on improving processes.

What's fascinating to me along that lines, Mark, is that I've worked with hundreds of EOS implementers and scaling up implementers, just worked alongside even the Six Sigma people in the manufacturing, lean manufacturing. I've seen a little, seen about everything. And we'll talk about processes, but we get lost in the detail. And me as a business owner, I'm like, Forget this. I'm paying X tens of thousands of dollars. I'm getting no result. Literally, that's what happens. We always have to connect everything that we do in the company to ultimate value increase, value increasing. Okay? So, I mean, I can, you've seen, you know me, you've heard me talk. I can dive into whatever technical level I want to go to, but for simplicity on a podcast, here's as simple as I can get it, friends. As a business owner who's listening, you have one person that you can rock their world. You have one person. That person, you should have a visual effect in your mind right now. You should see that person. Who are they? I'm going back to some Cialdini's work. You are my expert at this, Mark. You have one person, not 35.

That's right.

Not 155. You have one person. And now with AI, the cool thing is there's about 27 metrics that AI can actually dissect those down and actually, well, AI will actually start giving you referrals if you get your avatar perfect. For AI to understand it. So you have one person that you serve. That's it. You have one way in which you're going to move them. What we teach in our business is 5 Ps. The client has a pain. That pain is caused by a problem. The other day I was hiking in the Colorado Rockies. We were elk hunting and I had a pain in my foot.

It hurt.

It did not feel good. I almost had a tear come out. My little tough self. I was, Mark, I'm dying here, man. The problem was I had a thorn in my toe. Okay. So the pain was, it hurt. It hurt really bad. The problem was a thorn. So what we have to look at for that client is what is their pain? What is causing them frustration? What's keeping them up at night? Every one of us as business owners solve a pain, but the pain is not often the problem. We have to identify the problem. The business owner is often not going to agree with the problem. Now, a thorn in my foot's easy to understand, but most of the time we'll say my foot hurts and so we want to go cut it off.

Right.

That's what we do as business owners because, hey, we sell saws and because we sell saws, we can cut your foot off. Well, that doesn't make sense. So oftentimes we look for the pain, the problem. Then what the client's going to want to know is, what's your pathway? How are you going to move from where my pain is to where are you taking me? So we have a pain, we have a problem, there's a path. And then what proof do you have that you know what you're doing? What's some testimonials? What's some case studies? What's some accolades? What's some validations? You read some of mine off. What proof does Justin Goodbread have that he knows what he's doing? Okay.

Yeah.

Ultimately, what the client's journey is, is they want to know what's the payoff. If I'm going to hire you, if I'm going to buy your widget, if I'm going to buy your service, here's my pain. What is my payoff? If we can show that in the client journey, they're not worried about— now, this is business owners, not diving into the weeds. They're not worried about how they came to us as a client. They're not worried to know about what lead funnels look like. They don't care. They want to simply know what is the pain? Do you know what my root problem is? I may not agree with you, but I have, I've seen some proof and I've seen your pathway. Will it pay off? If we can identify that with that one client, that one process, then we can grow to $1 million in every particular division. Most business owners struggle to get to a million. Whenever we had a client, whenever I worked as the president of a company, we were, we were scaled pretty radically and we said, okay, we got 1, 1, 1. How do we go to 100? Okay, now we don't have to necessarily deal with more clients. We can have one client that we identify 10 problems and then we have 10 pathways and now we can scale. But it all boils down to that simple 1 1 1,000,000.

Yeah.

And we don't think that way in business. And so, whenever we're talking about value and the fact that our business is our number one asset and we've got to grow this company to where it's transferable, where somebody's wanting to pay us bank for our money so that we can be financially independent, so we can have relentless freedom. Then we have to take a step back and realize, oh my goodness, I'm the business owner on a merry-go-round. I can hire people that get into the weeds, but why am I doing this? I'm doing this to grow an asset so it can support me. I'm doing this to impact others. 1 1 1,000,000. 1 1 1,000,000. If we get that simple, then, Mark, all the other type of conversations out there become nebulous at that point.

Yeah. So, I got to double-click into something you said there because it's it lays it out so clearly. So, so many times we're working with companies that are in very crowded marketplaces where there's a lot of people that look like, you know, they do the same things. And I always try to help them get at exactly what you define, but it's, you know, what's that customer's pain? Well, what's the underlying problem? What's that pathway to success? And then, you know, what are your proof points that you're going to deliver this, you know, impact? And I can't remember what the The fourth, the last few, the payoff. Yeah. So, and just a little lesson for everyone that's listening. So many people will do actually a pretty good job of identifying that, but what they fail to do is to have their own point of view on the underlying problem that's causing that pain and the right pathway to deliver that. A whole lot of people will have proof points that they can deliver and even payoff that they deliver, and they're identifying a pain up here. But the reason why so many companies struggle to differentiate is because they don't have their own unique point of view that's, uh, you know, arguably better. And in fact, the only, uh, ones in the marketplace that deliver, uh, against that particular problem with that particular pathway to success. And that's the real way to sort of own your category and own your marketplace.

You know, what's interesting is I launched, um, now my 8th company. coaching business about a year ago. In less than a year's time, we hit 7 figures of revenue. That just, just let that one sit there for a second. Less than a year's time. So that means that something works.

Yeah.

So what we had to identify is who specifically do we serve? One person. And what is the specific pathway? What is the problem? And what we deal with is we, we never actually say the problem out loud. This is what's crazy.

Okay.

Okay. We never say the problem. We identify what the client says is the problem. We have 25 different problem words, but all the problems that the client would say, they'll say something like, Justin, I am stuck in my business. I'm stuck. I can't scale. I hit a glass ceiling. My team is frustrated. I can't get enough clients. I need new clients. It's all these different things, right?

Right.

Those are all symptoms. So the one problem we solve—

those are pains. Yeah, they're pains.

But the one problem we solve, and this is the unspoken word, so friends, I'm just going to tell you, this one doesn't sit well because I'm going to talk for a second. So I'm going to say it. Don't tune me out. The problem we solve is Pride.

Pride.

Because we know, if you've heard what I've said the whole time, I constantly say we, we, we. I don't have a mouse in my pocket, but I'm a business owner and I know this, that oftentimes there's not something that I can't solve. I know that because we would not be in business if we did not have that belief system.

Right, right.

But that very belief system that we can solve it, that I and Justin Goodbread can figure this thing out is the pride that rests beneath all my problems, and it's the very thing that holds me captive. Now, whenever I speak about that on stage, Mark, what happens is the audience does this. They fold their hands and they sit back and they feel disconnected. And then I have to pop the top and I have to stick the knife in and twist it a little bit further, and then you see the light bulbs come off. So, what we ultimately solve through our coaching program is, yes, we can teach you how to double, triple your Easy, easy. It's easy to do that. The problem we solve is to get Justin Goodbread out of his own stinking way, get him off his blessed assurance and help him move to where he can actually get off, trust a team and the people around him and the vendors and the consultants. And whenever I get my pride out of my way, man, my business scales every single time. So, we identify the problem. And so, every business has a different problem. So, ours is pride, but we never say that problem word out loud because we want to hear the client. And whenever the time comes, Slip it in there and the client goes, oh, you're right. You're right. Help me. And so, then we're able to get the business moving forward. Pro tip.

Justin, you are obviously an expert in tons of great things that we could talk about all day, but I got to be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, why don't you tell our audience that's been listening to this and thinking they need a little more Justin Goodbread in their life, what's the best way for them to engage with you? Who do you work with?

Yeah. So I love helping service-based business owners. Service-based business owners, think Chuck in a truck, think financial advisor, dentist, CPAs, people whose name is tied to the business. You can radically scale your company, and oftentimes service-based business owners have the highest multiples, so we can create extreme value for you. So I love that segment. So one of the easiest ways to learn a little bit about us is we have a podcast called Deca Millionaire Decoder. We have over 600 episodes. We're in the top 1% of podcasts. globally. It's a great podcast. Welcome to listen to the podcast. We teach you literally how to think like a deca-millionaire, how to act like a deca-millionaire. Maybe you need some coaching. Check out justingoodbread.com. We have all of our coaching programs there. But aside from all the sales stuff, just follow me on Instagram. This morning at 5:00 AM, I just got done trying to kill a fox eating the chickens in the chicken coop, and he was in there having a heyday. And my mastiff, a 220-pound slobber bucket, was nudging me as I'm trying to deal with this fox, and I ended up getting covered in slobber. That is on Instagram. So if you want to have some laugh of somebody who's just living life and just having fun and living it openly, connect me on Instagram @justingoodbread.

Awesome. Justin, thank you so much for taking the time today. I had a blast. I'm sure our audience did too.

Thanks, buddy. Thanks for having me. Been fun.

Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, Please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.