How to expand your business | 6 Growth Hacks | In conversation with Matt Ward |The Ask Avi Arya Show

Hey guys. This is Avi Arya, father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, now social media marketer and founder of Internet Moguls. Welcome to my channel. Let's try that one again. Hey guys, I'm Matt. I'm a serial entrepreneur with a couple small exits and ex digital nomad turned business coach for startups and businesses looking to grow, scale and change the world faster. And I help them with strategy, growth and fundraising. What's a growth company or high growth company? That's a good question. Typically high growth company is something that's defined as doing 15 to 30% month over month growth. If you're doing that when it comes to number of users, revenue, et cetera, it means you're scaling very, very quickly. How you can think about this, because not all companies can hit that over time, is really how quickly are you accelerating and creating exponential growth within your business? If you want to go with a venture capital route, that's what you're going to need to hit that 20 to 30% month over month growth. But in general, if you work on scaling your company, that's really only going to happen if you have a viral effects that make that 20 or 30% happen or if you're pouring a bunch of money into advertising. So make sure if you're building a business that's not focused on venture capital that you're doing it sustainably enough to grow and scale without having to pour all of your money into advertising. If you want some tips on how to do that, go to Matt Ward IO Viral Viral and you can download a guide that I put together for you guys. Can a company grow faster by selling to existing customers or finding new customers? It's really going to depend on the company. It's going to depend on how many customers you have and what the lifetime value is. In general, it's much easier to sell to the existing customers you have because you've already convinced them, hey guys, we're kind of awesome. They know that you don't have to acquire them, you don't have to find them, you don't have to convince them, you just have to convince them to buy something else. And that's a much, much easier sell than it is finding new customers. That said, you're never going to grow into an exponential business. You're never going to grow into something that's really venture scale. If you are just selling more to your existing customers, you're going to need to be acquiring new customers as well. The way I Like to do this is to design virality and word of mouth into the product itself so that it promotes itself, brings in more people and also builds in those organic upsells right into the product. There are a lot of different strategies that you can use to do this, but it really comes down to having the right calls to action at the right time and helping people look good in front of their friends and helping the customers and clients that you have really up level what they're doing to make more money while doing it. If you can do those two things and do it well, then you can have a business that both acquires more customers and upsells to the existing ones that you have. If you guys want a free guide on how to do that and some ways that you can kind of make your products do that again. Matt Ward IO Viral V I R A L To build more viral products and make your business kind of grow itself. So you're thinking about growing and scaling your business. You're wondering should you expand into new countries, if so, which ones? Well, that's really going to depend on the business model that you have and what your goals are for the business. Sometimes it's great just to build a business and to build it up to a certain scale. Maybe 100,000, a million, 10 million. Maybe that's something that you want to have and you want to run a business like that. But if you're looking to build something that really goes big, has the potential to raise VC funding or has the potential to really have a life changing outcome, then it's going to be something that you most likely have to scale into other countries. How to think about how to do that is a little bit of a competitive analysis of who your competitors are already in other countries. A bit of a kind of skills analysis of what competencies does your team have if you're selling. For instance, I live in Switzerland now. I probably don't have that many skills to jump into China because I don't speak Chinese. But I could go to the US and sell there because it's a massive market. Or I could try to tackle more of what we call the dock region. Germany, Austria and Switzerland where it's all German speaking. It's easier to scale up and build that way. Personally, I generally like expanding country by country and building yourself out in a bit of a blob for any of you who've ever played Risk and you conquer the world, conquering the world that way, where you go country by country and expand outward, you don't have to have full saturation in a country before moving on to the next country. I think you just have to have enough momentum going so that you're able to be the ones who win the country, so to speak. Because in a lot of markets there is that winner take all effect. And if there is a winner take all effect, you need to A get there first and B win. So make sure if you're really going for high speed, high scale growth, that you are growing very, very quickly. That's something actually I tell to some of the companies I work with here in Switzerland is you can compare Switzerland, Sweden and Israel. They're all very similar in terms of very wealthy, smallish population, 6 to 9 or 10 million, very well educated, very forward thinking when it comes to tech. The thing is, Israel and Sweden, they've had tons of tech unicorns, tons of companies worth more than a billion dollars, private companies, Switzerland's had almost none. And that comes to the thinking bigger mentality. And here's what we were talking about earlier. You need to really think bigger if you do want to build something that's able to raise money and then scale and grow exponentially quickly. And to do that, that means expanding into other countries, especially before you feel comfortable, but doing it at a rate that is physically achievable. Because if you try to go too fast, you'll kill yourself, you'll kill the business, you run out of money and then it wasn't worth it anymore. So that's a good question. Innovation. How do you design more innovation into your organization? Well, one thing that works really well or can work really well is looking at what your employees think of your employees. Customer service, the people that are working with the customers on a day to day basis, they see the challenges customers are having. How can you get them to come up with better ideas for new products, for new marketing strategies, for all of these things. Amazon had a great system that I like and I think they still do it today. And it was an award of an ugly boot, I want to say. And it's the award that's given for coming up with a really basically coming up for something that coming up with something that fails, but it's coming up with something that you try. And it's that honoring of the trying and failing culture. That's really important if you want to encourage your employees to try new things. Because most efforts don't succeed. The majority of efforts in fact aren't going to succeed. New products, new businesses, et cetera. But if you're not taking those risks and going for innovation and trying to create something new. You're not going to build a business that's ever really dynamic or grows into the future. So it's really important to try to encourage that with your employees by having that no risk culture of try things and fail. If there's too much, if there's too much pressure to be successful every time, you're never going to try new things because that's avoiding risk. And when you do that, you're ultimately going to die the dinosaur death of the, the company that gets killed by the upstart. The other way that you can try to come up with innovation is through your customers. Your customers know some of them, know what their problems are, but they, they can oftentimes come up with good ideas. Not always. It's like Henry Ford. If you'd asked people, they would have said they wanted a faster horse and carriage, not a car. Same thing with jobs and the iPhone. But a lot of times customers can, can give you really good ideas. So if you build up a relationship with your customers, be that through email marketing, be that through social media, et cetera, that can be a great place to run polls on new products that you're of launching or new features that you're thinking of adding to your, your software product. That way you get a little bit more feedback before you put in all the effort of creating the new product or service and you've got the customers kind of feeling like they own a little bit of the, the creation process that can be super helpful for you in terms of getting them bought on board and becoming larger customers or buying stuff from you. Again, how do you attract employees that have a growth and innovation mindset? The creative people? Well, getting creators and getting winners on your team is the most important thing when it comes to building a successful business. There's a quote that something to the effect of if you're the smartest person in the room, you're probably in the wrong room. And that's something I've definitely struggled with in the past. Most of my experience has been running smaller businesses as a kind of solopreneur with a remote team. And it's kind of like playing Michael Jordan with the high school squad. You're only able to build something so large and so successful if you're not relying on others to handle the things that you can't do and to really scale and create that, to create those effects that you can have at scale and exponential growth, et cetera. To do that, you need to hire smart people. And to hire smart People, you need to get people that are motivated. They've got a lot of education, you give them additional training and then they have to have that extra motivation to go the extra mile and not start the business, another business themselves. Because if you are getting the best people, they do have all the best opportunities, be that Facebook, Google or doing something on their own. So to keep people like that motivated, it's really important that you have, like I said, a no risk culture and a culture of ownership where people can take ownership of what they're doing, they can come up with new initiatives, try new things without having the boss constantly looking over the shoulder like that. No one likes the backseat driver. Everyone wants to feel a bit of independence in what they're doing. They want to feel ownership in what they're doing. So how do you give your employees the ability to feel ownership over what they're doing and where the business is headed? Maybe that's given them some equity in the business. Maybe it's doing a bit of a revenue share. If you're a bit interested in trying to. If you're interested in trying to divide up equity in your business and maybe use that as an incentive for your employees. I've got an article for that. I call it a Startup Pirate Game Theory because you're kind of trying to keep everyone on board on the ship and avoid a mutiny. But if you go to Matt Ward IO, you can find that right on there on my blog, Matt Ward IO Blog. And I've got some more details on how you can divide up the equity and how to think about that with early employees in terms of motivation and keeping people long term. Because if you don't keep people long term, your business is screwed. Anyways, I want to thank you for having me on the podcast. This has been a lot of fun. I'm glad that I got the chance to talk to you. For you guys, if you're interested, I've got a ton of free guides on my website. The 15 Steps to Acquiring and Retaining Customers Pitch deck guide. Exactly what investors want to hear. From my experience interviewing hundreds of VCs and angel investors, exactly how to structure your pitch deck. Exactly how to build that elevator pitch as well to get you the meeting. And then if you're building the product and trying to make it grow and scale faster, how to design virality into your product so they grow, market and sell themselves. You guys can get all of that and more if you go to Matt Ward IO. Free. Yes, free. F R E E. You'll get all of those guides delivered to you in your email and some other special bonuses from me. And if you guys are looking for more help to grow and scale your business, that's what I do. I'm a business coach. I help startups and businesses grow, scale, change the world faster by merging that strategy and growth with the product and bringing in the fundraising when necessary to help you hit scale and change the world. And to make something make something meaningful. I like doing it. And I like coaching as well because it means I get to meet awesome people like you guys again. That's Matt Ward IO if you guys want help with growing your business, scaling it and building it bigger, faster. Thanks guys. Cheers.