Develop Your Growth IQ: How To Achieve Your Maximum Potential with Tiffani Bova

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Scale Up Method where we teach you how to reach the next level in your business. Build your dream team and scale beyond eight figures. Too many business owners are stuck trying to do everything themselves and their businesses are suffering as a result. And I don't want you to be one of those people. I am Alison Maslin and my company, Pinnacle Global Network has helped thousands of business owners scale their companies using our framework, the Scale it method. All business owners face similar challenges when it comes to growth. So on this podcast we are delivering the tactics you need to finally reach that next level in your business. Build that dream team and scale your company beyond eight figures. Today I am talking to Tiffany Bova, thought leader and Salesforce's global global growth and innovation evangelist. Tiffany helps companies scale through innovative business models and technology. And she published her Wall Street Journal best selling book, Growth iq, which I'm excited to talk all about Today, which outlines 10 key steps to driving your company's growth. She is a top Twitter influencer in business growth, customer experience, digital transformation, and the future of work and sales. Tiffany has been named the latest Thinkers50 list of the world's top management thinkers and she has been on the list of LinkedIn's top sales expert to follow to follow her to in 2018, 2019 and 2020. So I'm excited to bring Tiffany on the show because she has an extensive experience in helping companies scale and that's like our favorite topic on this show. And she's worked with hundreds of technology companies to develop new and effective growth strategies and innovative go to market models. So super excited to have Tiffany also talk about her unique scaling strategies and wisdom in her book Growth iq. So Tiffany, welcome to the Scale it method.

Oh, I'm super excited to be here, Alison. One of my favorite topics is scaling your business.

I know it. It's just kind of this enigma for a lot of business owners. They get to a certain point and they're like, now what? You know, how do I get beyond this ceiling? And so, you know, wow, you know, one of the top 50, you know, in management marketing on the planet. That's pretty remarkable. So I'd, I want to get into the strategies, but I'd love to understand what sort of situation set your career in this direction of sales and innovation. Did your family have any background in that? You know, what, what was the. A bit of the journey at a really high level.

I always answer this question and say everything I learned about business, I learned at the carnival. People go, wait, what? So my best Friend. Growing up, her parents owned outdoor carnival, literally big top tents and games and rides, no animals. So it wasn't a circus, it was just a carnival and then had indoor arcades before everything was able to be done on a smartphone. So this is sort of in the early 80s, 1980s and it was a masterclass in how to market and sell and deal with people and you know, ordering and supply chain and breaking down and putting up a carnival that was only up for two and a half days. And it was a multimillion dollar business was just an incredible crash course in kind of what it took. And of course, when you're 15, 16, 17, 18 years old, you don't sort of understand the implications of all the things you're doing. But then, you know, you go on to college, you think you want to go into business and all of a sudden those things come flooding back where you're having a conversation, you're like, oh my God, like this is exactly what I dealt with when I couldn't figure out which plush of teddy bear because it impacted the cost of goods. And then the game would have to go up to a dollar and it couldn't be 50 cents because then we couldn't pay for those teddy bears and all of a sud. It was a master class in business.

Yeah.

So that's sort of my fun story.

I love that. Well, you know, this is kind of random, but I actually am a trapeze artist, so I have put those rigs up and down. I actually have a full size trapeze rig in my backyard. I was on there this morning. So I do know the, a little bit of what, what you're talking about here. So it's interesting too because, you know, whether it's carnivals or a restaurant or a staffing company or an engineering company, a lot of the basic premise is the same, Right?

Yeah. And so when I went on to college and then wanted to, you know, get my undergraduate and degree in business administration, my college counselor wisely said to me, I don't think business is for you, you should get a diff, choose a different career path. So I ended up not getting a BA but had I gotten a BA which is ironic on so many levels, which is, you know, probably for a different conversation, but had I gotten a B.A. i probably would have went on to get my MBA and you know, and I, and I think that I took a different path that ended up being much better for me. I'm a listen, visual do learner. I'm not a read study test kind of learner. And I. And I think school was always a little challenging for me because of that. And so, you know, after college, I went back to work for that family for a couple of years. And then I ended up in the technology space super early, like, you know, kind of 1995, 1996, and accidentally landed into selling. And then that led to something else and a little bit more responsibility. And that led to something else, a little bit more responsibility. And I got really versed and interested in the. The ability for technology to really change the way businesses engaged with their customers, as well as how they built a business themselves. You know, it was completely transform, informative at that point in time. And I felt like I was at the tip of the spear at pushing this transformation and innovation, not really understanding the role I was playing in all that. And so I think I. It was an accidental journey, if you will, from first being a seller, then running sales, then. Then I took over marketing, then I took over customer service. And. And I had this unique perspective. And I was really early in the cloud. So 2000, I was 2001, I was a Loquas beta client and Constant Contacts beta client, which now, you know, does so much for small businesses and entrepreneurs. But we were like their first client. You know, how do you do newsletters and email newsletters? Like, what's email like? People didn't have any understanding of what that was like. And so I kind of had this very serendipitous career journey in being a practitioner across sales, service and marketing in tech, which became obviously the lifeblood of everything we're doing.

Wow, that's incredible. You know, I saw that you went to asu. I actually went to ASU and I think maybe a few years before you, but. And we had. It was funny because nobody had computers then you actually took a class and went into like, borrow it, use a computer. But to. For how you were able to get into tech, into the thick of it as Internet was really just like this thing that nobody quite understood the scope of what was to be. You know.

Yeah, I bought my first. I bought my name, my domain name of my name in 1997. Literally.

Wow.

And. And it. But it was an accident, right? Having this conversation. This person was talking about this thing called the World Wide Web. And, you know, business and commerce was going to move to it. We were trying to push the yellow pages to digitize them, and people were like, well, why would we ever get rid of the yellow pages? Like, I mean, why would that ever happened? You know, there's A whole generation doesn't even know they exist. When they show up at their front door, they're like, what a waste of paper.

I know. Talk about disruption. You know, all those yellow page companies and all those ads, Remember that? Oh, my gosh. Well, we could go on and around memory lane for sure. But it's, you know, you were there at the. Just the right time. And so what do you feel that, you know, when it comes to tech and sales and, you know, innovation, because you're really like all of those things that you've been a part of. Right. And marketing, and you, you are able to work with so many different business owners. What do you see is the biggest struggle for them? Is it understanding the technology? Is it taking the risk? Where do you feel like they struggle the most?

Yeah. I would answer this two ways, actually. Pre pandemic, I would have answered it very differently that I answer it today. I think that the pandemic really exposed the lack of investment that many small businesses had chosen to not make. Right. Those investments in technology over time. And all of a sudden, if it was a restaurant and I might have a website, but I didn't have my menu on the website, why would I ever do that? Or I. I wouldn't have a deal with grubhub or Uber Eats, because people come into my restaurant. I'm not interested in doing delivery. That's not the brand I want to have. And then, boom, overnight, it was like, well, that's great. You have a restaurant, but there's nothing you can do. And delivery saved so many of those small restaurants, but they didn't have the ability to put their menus online. They didn't have the relationships with the delivery services. They didn't have the ability, by the way, let's just say that I ate at a restaurant, you know, every Tuesday. It was for every Sunday. Right. It was a family thing. And I always ordered the same thing. And when I showed up, they said, oh, Tiffany, it's so great to have you back. You know, do you want your same thing? And then all of a sudden it, right, the pandemic happens, and they know me, my name. They know what I drink and what I eat. They know what my family does. But then they don't know how to get in touch with me. So now all of a sudden, it's Sunday. They can't reach out and say, hey, it's Sunday. Do you still want your dinner? We'd love to deliver it to you, because they never captured that information. So go back to where I Started this right. Pre pandemic, it was okay. They kind of would say, I don't want to make that investment in tech because I don't really understand the return on that investment, or I have to focus on other things. And then overnight, they realized the power and the requirement and necessity of technology in every business. And every company today, in their own little way, is a tech company. If you have an app, if you do commerce online, you know, if you're doing delivery, if you have a supply chain that's all digital, that is a. That is, you know, in many ways, your own little tech company.

Yeah. You know, honestly, I never thought about it that way, but you're. You're absolutely right. You know, we have a community of business owners, and when the pandemic hit within two to three weeks, and we have a team of over 20 mentors that have all run companies, they, like, jumped in, and we were, with these business owners, like, working overtime, like, day and night, like, pivot, pivot, pivot, you know, and it was amazing. When you talk about the resistance, it was amazing how it was like, yeah, we're going to do that a year from now, or we're considering it. No, you're doing it right now. And we were able to turn their business around to, like, a whole new way of delivery within two to three weeks. It was. It was. It was almost like the universe was saying, okay, let's just. Let's just get this thing in gear. Right?

Yeah. And I'd say for all the horrible things that came out of the pandemic, this was one of the things I saw as a bright spot.

Yeah.

I saw the investments in small business, specifically entrepreneurs, those that had been, to use your term. Right. Highly resistant to a lot of the opportunity that technology actually brought them, some of which was just internal inertia. Not the way we do it here. Some of it is fear of technology. They're not really technologists. Right. So that they know how to do things on their phone. But beyond that, they. They don't want to, you know, introduce that into their business because they're worried about whatever that may do or mean either for their employees or for themselves. They had 100 reasons why not and not one reason for it or two reasons for it would be because customers actually want that from you.

Yes.

Or your employees actually want that from you. They don't want to work hard, especially if you're hiring certain generations. Where, to your point? When we were in college, we didn't have laptops. I had one at 19. I got my first laptop in college in 1985, I think. And so it was probably 85 and it was, you know, anyway. So, you know, you have generations now where expect that. And not only you now have this entire conversation around companies competing on the experience that they present and produce for their customers. And so now I could be in a completely different industry and I have this very seamless, digital, personalized experience. And then I show up in a completely, you know, different industry that happens to be your business, and you are not those things. Your similar customer, even though out of industry, brings that experience, expectation with them into your industry. So, well, it's really easy to, you know, book an appointment or order in advance my coffee, but I cannot do it digitally to do with my doctor. I have to call in, I have to fax, I have to re show my insurance card. I have to do all these things. And when my doctor's late, you know, and I sit there, why wouldn't they just like when Uber's going to be late, push to me and say, hey, do you want to change your appointment? Yeah, this doctor's running 45 minutes late. It happens with an Uber or a Lyft or a delivery, but it doesn't happen with your doctor. And so you all of the sudden bring that experience expectation from one industry to the next. And that's why I say that businesses, especially small, that continue to resist technology are really setting themselves up for a much harder growth effort than is needed and they're going to lose to those that use technology better than they do.

Yeah, I know when I figured out the Starbucks order thing and I actually walked in and realized I didn't have to go pay anyone, and it was sitting there waiting for me, I thought, this is the greatest thing.

And so then you kind of expect it elsewhere.

Yeah, it's true, right? It's like, you know, really kind of streamlining your life. You know, that's what we really want, especially in business because everybody is so busy. But yeah, it really is phenomenal to see what is coming out of this. And I think it really opened a lot of people's minds, so they're starting to think of other areas of their business this way. Now, when it comes to strategy to accelerate growth, what do you feel like some companies may be doing wrong when they're, when they're saying, okay, we've gotten here, now let's really take it to a whole other level.

Yeah, this is the big, the big challenge for small businesses. You know, getting to your first million, then getting to your source third, three and a half and then to your first five and then tier to 20 and then it's like, I just need to get to 50. And then getting, you know, to the 100 or above 100 is even more difficult. The average, I think the average now in, in the US for small businesses is sub $5 million, you know, in annual revenue. That's sort of the majority of the size of companies. You know, very few get above 25 or 50 and even less get above 100. So then the question becomes if, if you don't have that kind of revenue and you're trying to scale, how do you invest? This is where technology can really lend itself to help you scale without saying, the only way we can scale is by adding more heads. And we all know that labor is a very expensive line item yet, you know, highly important to the, you know, company. So I am not saying replace humans with technology. I'm saying it is an and play what can technology do to help your human employees? Right. Become more efficient and productive and streamline and drive out the friction. All the things we've talked about to actually help you scale. So for example, 66% of a salesperson's time is spent on non selling activities.

Yeah.

So you could, and that number, by the way, has been fairly flat over the last decade, even with all the advancements from innovation from companies like Salesforce and others. So you go, okay, well then if it's not, if the technology is available, why isn't that number going down? Right.

And I mean, what a loss though really if you think about it. Because their time should just be focused on sales. And most of them, they're not, you know, they're not admin people. Right. It's, you know, so you're, you're losing money.

Right. And so if the awful side of that coin Is. And then 52% to 54% will miss quota every year. So that also has remained fairly flat. So then, you know, you may be going, well, I don't have salespeople. Okay, well you might have, you might have a retail store and you have people who work the retail store. They're kind of a salesperson. You know, you might have delivery drivers, right. That, you know, you could have your service people. Like, you know, if you're going into someone's home and servicing, you know, an appliance, they're kind of salespeople. I mean, everybody sort of plays a little bit of a role, but in the classic role of a seller, 66% of their time is Spent on non selling. So you go, well, wouldn't you naturally assume if I could give them more time to sell, wouldn't their quota go up? Wouldn't revenue go up? So instead of adding more heads, adding more sellers, how do I make that seller become more efficient? Well, you could say the same thing for people in the call center. You could say the same thing for marketing, you could say the same thing for your product designers and developers. You could say the same thing for your warehouse people. Like all of the sudden it's understanding where are they spending their time. How can you use technology to make them more productive but not just like to dial it up to make the work more valuable more getting more joy out of the work by feeling more of a purpose behind what they do. There's all of those things as well. But if you're going to scale, it cannot be strictly a human scale business. Now if you have a construction company, then it's difficult to say, well, obviously there are certain industries where it is human oriented. But even if you think about a restaurant again and the kitchen, are there things you could be doing in the kitchen to automate? Is there things you could be doing to streamline the reservation process? Is there things you could be doing to streamline, you know, food wastage so you know what's ordered so you can get rid of things off the menu that are wasting high ticket dollar items so that you could increase profitability and decrease costs. I mean I could go on and on and on.

The construction company too, it would definitely cut cost because you're able to really, you know, maybe do more of the CAD drawings and things like that.

Sure.

Make sure you're not. Or that becomes another revenue stream.

Yeah, it's just the labor intensive. Like if it's strictly labor intensive, then the challenge is you either have to have a robot doing it or a human doing it. Right. And so I didn't want people to hear that, you know, if they are in a labor intensive business that you. There are, you know, there are outliers in what what I'm saying.

Right.

For obvious reasons. Yeah, but, but from a pure scale perspective, going back to your question about strategy, I think sometimes this is also something that's fairly abstract and overwhelming to many small business owners. What does that actually mean? Like do I have to sit down and decide where I'm going to be three to five years from now? Like I don't even know where I'm going to be a month from now. And so, you know, give yourself some grace and some Space. Right. To so look out and say, what are my short term optimization goals? So some of the things we've been talking about, what are my medium term. If I could change a couple things, I think I could really set myself up for future success and I would not have a lot of long term goals, you know, because then you're too lopsided, you're stretching for something and you may not be able to hang on long enough to have those long term goals come to fruition. I'm not saying don't have them because I think the long game is important. But you want to have a balance of short, medium and long term.

Yeah.

And those short term kinds of conversations are like what we're talking about here. Where can you really gain value from technology and give your people back time to do why you hired them to do what you hired them to do and also keep an eye on what are the changing expectations of your customers?

Yeah, I think that makes so much sense. You really have to have a balance. Right. Because if you're just focused on the long term, you're not bringing cash in now. And you need to also, not just be focused here also, you know, where are you? Where would you like to see this company go? But I, I do think that business owners get themselves in trouble sometimes when they're just only focused on either the long or the short. And that's it. So I want to hear about your book Growth iq. First of all, what was the inspiration to write a book? You know, because that's a big deal and so let's dive a little bit into that and then explaining what is a company's growth IQ and why do we need to be thinking about this?

Sure. So, you know, after my stint of running startup sales, marketing and customer service organizations in sort of Startup and Fortune 500, I ran a division of a Fortune 500 company before I got out of being a practitioner. And then I went on to be a analyst at a firm called Gartner, which is the industry's, the world's largest technology industry and analyst and consulting firm. And I was advising startup as well as the largest tech companies in the world and how to do all these things we're talking about, right. Scaling into a new market, scaling a new product that's, you know, 0 to 100 million or a billion dollars. I've, I've probably helped Kraft go to markets for, I don't know, now maybe 5 or $10 billion worth of revenue at some point over the, over the decade. But during that time, I would have conversations about 4 to 500 a year. So over a decade it was almost 5,000 conversations with businesses around the world. And lo and behold, everybody has the sort of same issues depending on size, the scale is different, cost structure, people, systems gets a little more complex as you get larger. But at the end of the day it was pretty much the same questions. And so that was really the starting point for me to identify. There were kind of 10 paths to growth, but I never had the inkling to write a book. I am a talker, not a writer. I enjoy sort of conversation versus trying to put it down on paper. And I was at an event in Boston and the lineup was spectacular. But a longtime friend of mine, Seth Godin, whom you may know, was also speaking. And Seth and I had known each other since I was at that company in the early 2000s. And he had written permission marketing and we were very early in with constant contact and permission marketing. So we had known each other. Then he wrote Purple Cow, it's still one of my favorite all time books. And so we were at the event together and he looked at me dead center in the eye and he said, it's time for you to write a book. So that's kind of how I went.

Seth Godin tells you it's time to write a book.

Time to write a book, right? And so then I said, if I write the book, then you have to endorse it. He goes, I will only endorse it if it's good. I'm like, okay. So yeah, no pressure. So anyway, he's the COVID quote on my book. So thankfully he thought it was good enough to do, do that for me. He's just a special human in my life. But anyway, I digress. So the, the, the story and the framework around growth IQ was, was really nothing new. I don't want you to feel like I've come up with something, you know, groundbreaking and, you know, never thought of before. What I did was I took strategic growth initiatives that have been around for decades, in some case, 50, 60, 70 years, and I modernize them using social, mobile, cloud, big data, AI, machine learning, the web, sort of all the things we've just been talking about. So, you know, how do you sell more to your existing client? How do you sell more to a new client? How do you sell a new product to existing, a new product to new clients? How do you sell, you know, an old product to existing at, you know, all those, it's the Ansoft matrix, those four or you know, I want to Accelerate into a new market. I want to introduce a new product. I want to strike partnerships. It was that kind of became the framework for the 10. So the paths should not be anything crazy, you know, like, I'd never thought of that. You'll probably go, I've thought of that. Or maybe you're doing it. What became unique was the one thing about growth was it's never one thing. So I used to get asked a lot, what's the one thing? Yeah, should I hire more salespeople, spend more marketing dollars or cut costs? Like, and I said, it can't only be those three.

Yeah.

So that, that put me down that journey. Right. Um, so it was the 10. It was the fact it was never one. So it was the combination. But you had to understand the context. So going back to strategy, where are you starting from? What is your product? Who is your customer? How do they like to buy? Like that very simple question, and I don't care. Buy may be too commerce oriented for you. You may feel like, well, in a restaurant or a coffee shop, they don't buy. Like, I don't sell. They don't buy in that way. I think you get what I mean. When does that transaction of money changing hands happen and how and where? And from there, you then have to say, okay, what paths am I already doing? I would be shocked. I don't think it's even possible. If, if you're listening to this and you actually find you are not on one of those 10 paths, I would love to hear from you. But if you will find that you are actually naturally already on one of them now it is, what do you combine that path with, to accelerate, to scale, to introduce new revenue opportunities. And then the third piece of it was the sequence or order in which you do things. So I'll give you an example. If, if Netflix had launched, Netflix with streaming when they launched, would they still be around today?

Yeah.

What do you think?

That's a really good question.

Well, what do you think?

Let me think about that.

So if Netflix had started when they started, when they went straight to streaming.

I don't think we had streaming them.

Right. So there was not high speed in.

Everyone'S home capacity to do it. Plus, they had, they had the opportunity to work out the kinks, get the connection with the consumer and, you know, making, you know, building that relationship with them and that trust so that by the time the streaming came along, it was an easier shift for them. That's what's going on in my head.

Yes. So if you think back to grocery.com or pets.com why did pets.com not make it? I actually stood up the infrastructure for pets.com it didn't make it. Chewy Nailed it. Why? The market is very different. The context is very different. Customers are very different. Access to technology is different. So sequence and timing has everything to do with your ability to be successful. Unless you have unlimited cash and you can hang on long enough to wait for the market to catch up to you.

But it is really about sending discs. At the time with Netflix, I remember it actually that seemed to be so innovative. Nobody was doing that even then. So that, that seemed like out of the box. Right, right.

And, and to be quite honest, most household had VHS players and not DVD players. So they were still even a little bit advanced. So it kind of started with vhs, moved itself to dvd.

Yeah.

You know, when I, when I wrote the book, so it published in 2018, there was still almost 900,000 customers that still got mail order DVDs. Still.

Wow.

And it's one of the most profitable pieces of their business which funds and fuels a lot of the, you know, unique content that they put up. So obviously over time that now in the last couple of years that has declined, but it still was a piece of the business. So you know, that timing has, has everything to do with it because Blockbuster had tried to do streaming before Netflix was even a thought, but it was the wrong timing. Just like I just said pets.com or grocery.com and chewy and then obviously everything we're doing now with grocery and delivery, so you know, it has everything to do with making sure that once again I'm going to go back, what's your product, who's your customer and how do they like to buy? And for me, strategy and growth IQ is grounded in this concept called jobs to be done. Now I don't want to, you know, overthink this, but growth is a thinking game full stop. It's outthinking your competition. You out think and use technology differently. You, you hire different kinds of people, you put your storefront on, you know, on a different corner for whatever reason. Right. You can replicate a lot of things, but you cannot replicate sort of the think right that goes into decisions that are made at your competitors companies. So jobs to be done is a concept Theodore Levitt did many years ago in the 50s, I think. And I'll give you the example that's the most famous. Do you buy a quarter inch drill bit or do you buy a quarter inch hole? Jobs to be done is you are. You're buying the hole in the wall, not the drill. Or the drill bit. I would argue Levitt didn't go far enough. Because I'm not buying a quarter inch hole either. I'm. I'm buying the ability for you to hide. You know, hang the shelf on the wall or build the desk or fix the car. That's really the job to be done. So if you think about messaging as an example, you know.

Yeah.

Thousand years ago, I'd send you smoke signals. I want to invite you over for dinner. Come over for dinner, Allison. Let's have dinner. And I'd send you a smoke signal, and you. You'd show up.

I'd answer with the mirror against the sunlight. Yeah, I'll be there.

There you go. That's how we would communicate. Okay. Or you trapeze yourself over to my, you know, my village. Right. Okay.

Yeah.

So now I want to invite you to dinner. Now, I send you a direct message. I text message you. I give you a DM on social media. The job to be done is invite you to dinner. That never changes.

Yeah.

I used to barter with sticks and fish for eggs and cattle and. You know what I mean? Or art or whatever. And I would barter with you. Today, it's bitcoin. I'm still giving you something. I'm getting something. Right. Okay. So the job to be done remains constant.

Yes.

What changes is the solution.

Yeah.

I invite you now with text message. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. And so everything is grounded in jobs to be done. So it used to be I would drive to a Blockbuster. So. So what is the job to be done in that case? When I use the Netflix example, the job to be done is not going to Blockbuster. The job to be done is entertaining my family on a Sunday night so we can have family dinner. So it's family time. Is the job to be done.

Right.

The solution used to be we, you know, hang around the pool, we played cards. Well, then we watch tv. Now we can watch a movie. Right. The solution may change. And now how I do that? I used to have to drive to Blockbuster. Oh, now I get it in the mail. Oh. Now it streams to me on my tv. Oh, now it streams to me on my phone. But the job to be done was still the same. The solution is what changed?

Yeah.

If you can get your head around that. Now the question for you all listening is, what is the job to be done that you are providing? What is it? You have to understand what it is. How are you doing it today? How might that solution change based on everything we now have at our disposal. That's pretty much technology based. Going back to what I said earlier, we're all technology companies. It's just varying degrees of that. Salesforce is a massive technology company where you may use tech in unique ways, which makes you a smaller, you know, T in technology and a smaller I in innovation. But it still means you're doing those things. If you can ground yourself there, then you can understand what paths should I be on, where should I make those investments. Now I understand how to set my strategy. I've given you a lot here in the last sort of like five minutes. But trust me when I tell you, if you hit rewind and go back to the beginning of this, really start to think through jobs to be done and then look at those growth paths and understand where are you? What are your products and services? Who are your customers? How do they want to buy? How might that solution change? Knowing what I know, what would you do differently?

Right. Yeah. It's so fascinating. I mean, this to me is the fun part of business, the most fun when you do get to use that creativity and think of different solutions. And when we. I've had this conversation before with marketers, especially marketers that have been around for many, many years, is that the premise of marketing is the same. It's still that figuring out the right product for the right market, the right offer, the right messaging, the modality, the mediums that we're using to communicate that, whether it's Facebook or texting or messenger, those have changed. The technology has changed, the delivery has changed. But the ultimately bartering the product or whatever it is, or we're having the family experience together that we still want, that it's just getting to it in a different way.

Yes. I would say the one thing about marketing that has changed significantly, because I agree with everything you just said, was I was part of the team that made the prediction when I was at Gartner as an analyst, that the chief marketing officer would spend more than the chief information officer. And I think we said by. I think it was like by 2013 or 2014, we made the prediction around 2008 or 2009 and we were within tenths of a point. We nailed it. But why we thought that was going to happen is we believed that the experience a company provides would become more important equally or more important than the products or service soldiers. So from a marketer's standpoint, just marketing a product was no longer going to be as effective that now they had to Think about experience. So I use this example. When was the last time you caught an Uber or a Lyft? Do you remember what you paid? Most people would go, I don't remember what I paid. But if I said to you, do you remember? Was the car smelly? Was the driver talkative? Was the music too loud? Were they driving aggressively? You would remember that. If you went to a really great restaurant and the food was, you know, let's say it was a Michelin star restaurant, even this probably wouldn't happen. But let's just play this out. Expensive food was great, service was terrible. Would you go back?

Yeah.

If the food was good and the service was spectacular, would you go back?

Yeah. Yes, sir.

So the experience is now the actual decision lever for a customer in B2C and in B2B. So from a marketer's perspective, now that feeling with the brand, the connection from an experience standpoint, we talked about it earlier. I can get this experience in getting my coffee. Why can't I have this experience with my doctor? Now you all of a sudden meet this doctor at a cocktail party or a friend's house and he's saying, I just launched this new thing. I now can communicate with my patients and say, I'm running 30 minutes late. Do you want to reschedule with me? Do you want, you know, do you want me to let you know 10 minutes before it's time to come in? Or, you know, I'm going to digitally send you your records. I will share, you know, all this and you're going, I want you to be my doctor.

100, right? Yeah.

And. And even though this doctor over here has been your doctor for a decade and you like them and they know you and you trust them, would you switch? Because now all of a sudden, this one, this doctor who's a doctor. Right, Doctor. Doctor. That it's the experience that swayed your decision. So if that marketer was just marketing about, I'm a doctor in your neighborhood, I'm close by. I've been in business 35 years. Here are my five star reviews. Here are all the things, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that a marketer would normally lead with. Now it is about that experience layer, which almost has nothing to do with being a doctor.

Yeah, yeah, right.

And so that is a, that was a significant shift in sort of end of the 2000s, you know, kind of 8, 9, 10, 11, and, and now we've really turned this, to this experiential marketing, you know, where it is immersive and meta. And all that is all about experience. NFTs, right. Getting a closer connection with a brand, all lending itself to the experience. Almost nothing to do with the product or service being sold. And so, you know, I don't want to overwhelm. Right. That's not the, that's not my, my intention at all. But this is where things are really starting to change. And as I said, the pandemic has accelerated spend in small and mid business, which I'm excited to see. And make no mistake, if you're smaller, you have a greater opportunity to have huge leaps in this conversation. And innovation and experience much more so than your larger competitors because they have a lot of complexity already built into the business that's hard to move.

Yeah, it's so true. Because they're so entrenched in the ways they've been doing it. It's like they have to undo to you. You're starting fresh. It's so true. I mean, just the access to have a global business now is, you know, it's just so different.

So, yeah, you know, the growth IQ is 30 stories, literally. That's how I tell the stories. Each path has three stories. Two positive use cases and a negative use case.

Can you tell us a few of the paths?

Yeah, yeah. So one of them is customer experience, which we've talked a lot about. One is optimize the way you sell, which we talked about that kind of wastage of time. One is customer base penetration. So selling more to the customers that you already have. And product diversification. Customer and product diversification. Market acceleration, partnerships, coopetition. Working with companies that you may feel you compete with but give you, you know, some benefit. One plus one on three equals three on the partnership front. But there's a couple stories, so I like to use this one. And it's Kylie Jenner. And once again, I'm going to date this. Right. This is sort of before. This is 16 and 17, 2016 and 17. And I used it very specifically because when she got to. And regardless of what you may think of the Kardashian Jenner family, stay with me on this story here. Okay? Right. That she was. I'm going to build a beachhead. I have a following on social media, which other brands would kill for, obviously. And I'm a teenager at the time, just starting to wear makeup. I'm kind of starting to find myself. I'm going to start with a lip kit and I'm going to, you know, go out and talk to my followers. Right. My peer group and Talk to them about lip kits. And you know, I am an entrepreneur, but I'm not going to go build a warehouse, you know, and create an R and D lab and create fulfillment and supply chain like past beauty companies have done. You know, I'm going to do it through a partnership. And you know, regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the number, she got to 300 or $400 million with about a 700 or 800 million dollar valuation. And since of course has sold, you know, 51%, it's either 49 or 51, I forget which one has which. But so let's say 50% of her business for like a billion bucks.

Yeah.

So whatever we may think.

Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's not too shabby.

We may think not too shabby with 12 employees.

Crazy.

Okay, so now if you think back and you look at someone like a l' Oreal or you know, anyone like that Mac makeup or it took them decades to get to their first billion and millions of dollars in investment in R and D and labs. But she said I have, right, a followership. I have a brand. I can speak directly. I know my customer because I am my customer. I was a teenage, she was a teenager at the time, I'm going to start with. And then over time, she's basically her follower. Her customer base has grown up with her on makeup and expanding that category that Kylie's empire was really built under. But she never lost focus on who her audience was and what they were looking for. She used classic scarcity models. Now, was it her, was it her mom, was it advisors? I don't care. Bottom line is the lesson there was, do I build it on my own? Do I partner? She partnered. She used social media instead of classic marketing channels and very early in doing this. So I'm not saying we all have 300 million followers. You know, that that's really not my point because I've seen many brands on social media, you never heard of them before, and then all of a sudden they're everywhere because they've found a niche, they understood the job to be done, they nailed the message and the experience to that particular audience and they made a name for themselves and they connected.

With their audience from a very real place. That's what they want. Yep. Yeah, that's, yeah.

And so then there's stories of Starbucks and John Deere and Sears. Obviously, Sears was a cautionary tale. You know, there's, there's Shake Shack, there's great stories across there. Sephora. I tried to give A mix of stories that would resonate with different readers. You know, men, women, different regions.

I can't wait to read this. I'm going to order your book today. I seriously love it. Yeah. In my book, Scale or Fail, I talk about some of these in different ways. But it's interesting that you say this, because these are. This ties in with the scale, it method, all of the things you're talking about, that, you know, partnership and thinking creative ways to reduce your cash flow but reach more people. I mean, that's really what scaling is all about. That replicating and multiplication and everything you're talking about fits within that. And there's so much to learn. I just find it fascinating. Even with Sears, there's so much to learn to dive into their history, you know.

Yeah. You know, Sears for me was a. It was a tough story. Like, you know, when I was a kid, I ordered out of the Sears catalog. That was my shopping list for Christmas. You know, we'd go to the Sears store. It was the. Yeah. And I was born and raised in Hawaii, and that was our only retail store. So kind of my whole first 10 years of my life was sort of Sears.

I was it. They were like the first Amazon. Really?

They were.

Yeah.

That well said. But, you know, if you think back, they owned appliances, they owned. They owned the home.

Yeah.

And if they had made investments on, they really should have owned the smart home. They already knew who we all were. Right. They already knew what appliances we were buying. They just. They missed that transition and said, nope, people are going to still do catalog. They're going to still come into the store. This thing called the World Wide Web is just a fad. And not every, you know, thing that gets hyped is going to happen. Who knows what will happen with the metaverse? I don't know. You know, will it become as large and big? Who knows what's going to happen with autonomous vehicles? Who knows what's going to happen with drone delivery? I mean, there's lots of things that are way on the edge, edge of what we are comfortable to do. And. And those that are early movers there, they're. They have a much higher risk quotient than other companies who are maybe like, I'm going to wait till it gets a little more mainstream. But the question you need to ask yourself is the way to avoid being a Sears or a Kodak or the millions of others that are, you know, scattered out there is when something comes to you and you kind of go, hmm, if that actually took off, it could have, you know, meaningful impact to my business, good or bad. Should you test it? Should you try it? Should you ask your customers about it? Should for sure be curious.

Right.

Don't double down and make a bet that if it goes wrong, it will. It will collapse you right underneath the weight of it. But find ways to test and to try new things. And I think failure is your best friend. And the more comfortable you can become with that, the more opportunity you're going to have to keep yourself ahead of what may catch you flat footed if you don't make those investments. Not everybody is going to be the Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs or my CEO Mark Benioff. I mean there's Richard Branson. I mean there's a handful of those. I'm not asking you to be them. What I'm asking you to do is get a little out of your comfort zone and even try the things that are tried and true that you are not doing. I mean that at a minimum. But then you have to get a little bit more daring depending on your risk quotient. All in the. All under the guise of scaling. Right. All under the guise of growing. All under the guise of making sure you are delivering what your customers want from you today and what they want from you in the future.

Yeah. That one to many opportunity in the easiest way possible. And this conversation went to a whole different level than what I thought. And it's just been. I love it. I could talk about this stuff all day long. It's so exciting.

Me too.

I know that people are going to love this episode and I'm going to go back and listen to it again. And those of you listening, you have to go get the book Growth iq. And it just, it sounds fantastic and I know that our clients in Pinnacle Global Network are going to love it.

Here's what it looks like.

Good. Good. Yes. Show it. Beautiful. It's a great accomplishment, writing.

Yeah. It's translated in nine languages as well. So if you, you know, wanted in another language and it's in audible and Kindle as well.

Very cool. Now how do people reach you, Tiffany, if they want to connect with you or learn more about you? I know you also do speaking.

Yeah. So I'm, I'm really active on social media. Follow me on LinkedIn. I think I'm full up. I can't actually have any more connections I think at this point. But. But you can follow me, Follow me there on Twitter, on Instagram. Twitter is Tiffany Underscore Bova. Instagram is Tiffany Bova. And LinkedIn is Tiffany Bova. And then I have a podcast called what's Next with Tiffany Bova. And I get to interview really amazing other thinkers that challenge me all the time on the way I approach things. You know, a lot of the conversation we just had, you know, I'd say 50% of that has come from my learnings on my own podcast, which is just an amazing opportunity. I speak a ton around the world, so, you know, if you run into me, say hi. But I'd always love to hear feedback on what you heard here today, what you thought resonated.

That's fantastic. So as we wrap up, is there anything that you want to share with our listeners today that we haven't covered?

Look, I think small businesses, entrepreneurs are the heartbeat and the lifeblood of communities around the world. You know, I am a champion for you, for your success. You know, if there was, you know, ever a time where I think that technology should be one of the first places you go to help you when you're having these conversations, especially around scale, it's now. And if for no other reason, it's for your employees to help them, you know, be more effective at their jobs that you've hired them to do, but also to make sure that you're delivering what your customers want from you. And, you know, overall, communities like this are a great way to learn from others. And so stay curious, stay open to those things that make you uncomfortable, and know that, you know, there are so many people rooting for you. You know, like I said, I am not an entrepreneur. I am not a small business owner on purpose. I live vicariously through all of you. So I just want you to know that, you know, you all inspire me to do what I do every day.

Oh, that is so beautiful. It's been my honor to have you on the show. I've learned so much. And so for those of you listening, thank you for being part of another episode of the Scale It Method. A quick reminder.

I am not a small business owner on purpose. I live vicariously through all of you. So I just want you to know that, you know, you all inspire me to do what I do every day.

Oh, that is so beautiful. It's been my honor to have you on the show. I've learned so much. And so for those of you listening, thank you for being part of another episode of the Scale It Method. A quick reminder about our free masterclass. If you want to build a scalable company that can thrive without you and have that team managed company, you're ready to get the support you need to make that happen. So to sign up for the masterclass, all you got to do is go to scalemasterclass.com podcast to secure your seat. And again, Tiffany, thank you so much for being here. And until next time, we'll see you all soon.