114: Tiffani Bova Discusses Strategies for Consistent Growth

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing? But you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to docs of talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxataalent.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatallent.com Bill G. Check it out. Today, growth strategy is a thinking game. Growth strategy and growth strategy is central to everything we do in the world of scaling up. So we want to help you and give you some tools today to get your growth consistent steady, restart it. If it's not going, improve it like the whole. So we're going to give you some really practical basic things from a real superstar in the world of growth strategy. So listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host, Bill Gallagher, host the show and a growth coach with Scaling Up. On the show with me today is Tiffany Bova. She's one of the speakers at our scaling up summits and she's just an all around rockstar. She's a growth and innovation evangelist worldwide for Salesforce. She's not. She's got an extraordinary background which I won't do justice to right now. If you're hearing this before Summit in October, you should definitely come and hear her. If you're, if you've just been to it, then you'll know a sense of who she is. But I'm really glad to have her here. We're going to talk about in particular about the book Growth iq. Her latest work get Smarter about the choice you make. So it's about shifting the mindset, I think here. I haven't read it yet, but we're gonna learn about it together. So welcome to the show, Tiffany.

Oh, well, thank you for having me.

Yeah. So where are you today?

I am shockingly, I am actually sitting in my home office in Los Angeles, California.

Oh, nice, nice. Well, I'm in the Oakland hills and the San Francisco Bay area, East Bay, so also in the home studio which is quieter than my regular office for recording. So before, like we get into the main points of this, right, we want to help people to develop a better growth IQ so that growth is easier.

Yeah, that's the goal.

That's the goal. Awesome. So tell our listeners how you get into this, how you became interested in this, how you developed this work. Where did this start?

Oh, I'd say. Yeah, I would say it was a complete accident. So, you know. Yeah, from a career perspective, I'd always been sort of a sales and marketer. You know, I sort of bleed sales blood, if you will. I call myself a recovering seller in many ways because I no longer carry a quota in that way. I mean, I think there's influence now as sort of what I do versus selling with a quota. Right. But I sold technology for almost 15 years, you know, through sort of my late 20s and through my 30s. And then I landed at an academic job at Gartner for a decade where I was a. I ended up as a research fellow covering sales transformation and the impact of digital marketing and digital transformation to the way companies go to market and the way that they grow. And so being a practitioner for 15 years did not prepare me for being an academic, that's for sure. And it was a really interesting transition for me. Number one, no longer carrying a quota. Number two, not selling in that way, but number three, advising companies and how they do it was very different than me trying to do it for the company I worked for. So it took me a couple years to kind of find my rhythm. And then maybe year four, I kind of started to get a groove. And year six, I started coming out with some things that the market thought was very leading, if you will, from an industry perspective. And then kind of by year eight, I really hit my stride, and I think that's where I started to find my way through it. And not that it was terrible from years one through eight. Right. But it was just you sort of have to learn how to be very intentional with advice in that way. It's a very different practitioner versus academic. And so I think one of the reasons that clients really enjoyed working with me was I had that blend where many people that they work with that advise them have never actually done the job. So it kind of gave me a unique perspective.

Well, you know, it's a little bit off topic, but let me digress for just a second because I think so many people, like, I see people of all ages and stages of careers now jumping ship every one to two years and sometimes less, especially younger. Like, how do you learn anything? I'm just still figuring out who to call and what to do a few months in it Takes some time to figure out and develop your chops in an area.

Well, I would say great question. And while you didn't know my answer to this question, it's going to probably be opposite of what you think. When I was in my selling career, I actually changed jobs every 18 months. Almost give or take I did. And there was a reason that I did it. Well, there was a reason I thought I was doing it. And then when I landed at Gartner, then I realized the reason I was doing it. But the reason I thought I was doing it was I wanted to learn more, push myself further, have more responsibility. And the place I was working was not able to sort of provide that for me. Yeah. So, you know, I always went back to my employer and said, hey, you know, what can I do? I want to do more, et cetera. And unfortunately all. But I think one said, you know, we just don't have anything for you for what you're looking for. So I had to move. And sometimes it was a lateral move, sometimes I actually stepped down to get more responsibility from a title perspective. Right. Because I was very much on this path of I wanted to continue to just. I was super curious about learning more and more and more from sales. I learned marketing from sales and marketing. I learned customer service from, you know, I mean, I just had to keep growing. When I landed at Gartner though, it served me very well because there was very little I hadn't, and I say this in huge air quotes, done. While I may not have done it in billion dollar organizations, I at least understood the role, you know, and I understood the questions. So had I not changed jobs as often as I had, I wouldn't have had experience in hardware businesses, in service businesses, in software, in consulting, in cloud, in. You know what I'm saying?

Right, right, right. No, there's a richness. There's a richness.

Yeah, there was a richness. Right. And so that's why I say that I had this very unique blend between practitioner and academia.

Yeah. Well, when I think about the career moves I made before I was working for myself and all that, the moving between companies created openings that were harder to do within the same company. So that makes sense and it's probably a good message since most of our listene run businesses, if you're not the CEO or founder, you're on the senior leadership team for the most part. It's a good thing to think about how do you stretch and move people around and what do you do especially as you grow? As our companies start to go from 50 to 100 to 500 to 1000 and thousands of employees. Do you create opportunities for people to move through that? And is that. Yeah. So anyway, there's a digression, right? It was a bad idea. But I.

No, but you know what, I'll listen, I'll tell you. But back then when I did it, people frowned upon it. Now in this generation, it's almost expected. And so I think to your point, I think there's lots of value in staying so that you get your sea legs under you. Kind of my example at Gartner, but that was much more about how to position the next phase of my career than me from a learning perspective, I think.

Well, I remember hiring a rock star woman in 2010. And I knew, I mean, this woman blew out the other candidates in the hiring process. And I knew as we hired her, I'm like, we got her for like two years and she's going to do some really great things, but we cannot hang on to her. And sure enough, like, you know, she was two years in, you could tell she was restless and all that. And. And she went on, started her own company. And she's a total kick ass, badass woman. Her name is Debbie Glassband. The company is GoldieBlox, but she's outstanding. Anyway, so back to your story, back to the growth mindset. Yeah, yeah. So tell us about that, the changing the mindset and what you learned and how it applied, how you arrived here.

Yeah, so it really came from this combination of the conversations I had had in advising so many companies over that decade, as well as my own personal experience. And I really learned that I found some commonality, regardless of where I was in the world, that people would literally say, hey, we're really struggling with growth. What's the one thing I can do to turn it around? And I'm oversimplifying, but they were looking for that silver bullet, right? That do I spend more marketing dollars? Do I hire more salespeople? Do I launch a new product right there going, what's the one thing I can do? And I saw them either continue to struggle and really from the work that you guys have done at scaling up and Vern has done that, at the end of the day, it's like, I think his stat is like 87% of companies are going to hit a gross stall at some point and a very small percentage of them are going to be able to recover. So how can I help clients and how can I help people that read growth IQ avoid the stall in the first place. And so really looking for the signals in the market was the first thing I uncovered. And people were not taking the time at analyzing the context of the market today. Not 12 months ago or 24 months ago, or 36 months ago when the plan was made, or even six months ago. What is the context of the market? And we're moving so quickly that we don't take a moment to just take a beat, pause, sharpen the blade and say, like, what has changed? If anything, are our customers different? Is technology different? Is the competitive landscape different? Like, what have I learned through the data and all the things working, capturing, like, would I make a different decision today knowing what I know that I made six months ago or 12 months ago or 18 months ago? And if you don't take those moments in time, by the time you realize there's a problem, it may be too late. Right? And so context was the first step in this journey of saying, I was not saying people, large and small companies, startups and fortune, you know, 50 companies, taking the moment. I don't mean benchmarking your competition and I don't mean analyzing the numbers from like a P and L perspective. I literally mean like the market and what's happening around them or in other industries that can be leading indicators for them. So the first thing was context. The second thing I realized was once again going back to everyone was looking for one thing, that when I saw high performers turn around a growth stall or just accelerating growth from the beginning, I realized that it wasn't one thing, it was many things. And so I realized that it was this combination of efforts people were making and that was what gave them this competitive advantage, not that one thing. So it wasn't hiring new salespeople or spending more marketing money or entering a new market. It was entering a new market with the right partnerships and the right sales model. Those three things together are what made that company, company A, far more successful with their market penetration into a new country. Let's just to make it simple versus Company B, who just launched into the new market, same market, without partnerships in place and without the right sales models in place. And they failed. But they benchmarked it, right? They went, wait a second, our competitors entered the market, we entered the market, why did they win and we didn't? Because they didn't see these combinations, activities behind it. And the third thing was timing, which I call sequence in the book, which really has an impact on, like that example I just gave. If you don't put the partnerships in place before you Enter the market. And you enter the market and then you do it after the fact. You know, you risk the fact that you may actually deliver a poor experience or, you know, not have service capabilities in a country or whatever it might be, and then the customer may never give you a second chance. So it was context, combination and sequence. And those three things are what make up growth iq.

Mm, mm, mm. So you, you had a couple of great examples, I thought. Netflix is one that immediately comes to mind that seems to speak both to context and timing. Can you tell us about that from your perspective, the growth iq?

Yeah. So I love the Netflix story because, you know, everyone uses the Blockbuster example when they say what not to do. It's like the, you know, poor blockbuster Kodak, you know, the ones that continue to get used to as examples of not what to do. But if you think about, let's just think about sequence for a second and timing. You know, had Netflix launched, let's just say they had completely bypassed mailing DVDs and went straight to streaming. When people had dial up in sort of parts of the country, not even all the country. Right. It probably would have failed. Right. Because everyone would have been like, oh my God, it's just awful. Like dial up, you can't get a sentence out before it starts to recash. You know, there's just, this is not a good, good, a good experience. So you, you think that they started with mail because of the context of the market. Right. We didn't have high speed Internet. Not everybody had it. And, and the customers had already said that they were willing to watch a dvd. But what they didn't like about Blockbuster was maybe, right, they, I have to drive there, I have to return it. All the late fees, I always forget, you know, I. All that, you know, I didn't. All that stuff. Right.

Yeah.

And so let's fix what they don't like. So let's look at the context of the market, but also anticipating what customers may want next, knowing that sort of this digital, you know, it wasn't called those things then. Right. But this sort of digital revolution was going to happen where DSL was going to hit all the homes and then it was going to become high speed. And if you were paying attention externally and then you said, we're going to capture this beachhead with mailing and we're going to move to streaming. And you might be surprised to know that there's still seven or eight hundred thousand customers that still mail DVDs. Get mailed DVDs. My mom being one of them, there's just people. That's their preference and very profitable for them and allows them, by the way, funds a lot of their content that they're producing themselves. So that's a great sequence play as an example that had they done it in a different order, it may not have been as successful, while we probably would assume it wouldn't have been as successful at all.

You know, it's funny how you get like, I think everybody can relate to this. There are different things. As you spoke about the Internet and the streaming, I can remember the moments. So one moment I can. Now, I am someone who had used dial up. I used acoustic couplers once. I was early on arpanet, so I was involved in AOL and Prodigy and lots of things like that. I worked with the Data and International Group at Sprint. So working with networked computer systems was not remotely foreign to me. But the moment that I saw a Mosaic web Browser in the 90s, I was like, oh, this changes everything. I could see instantly things were going to change. And then there was another moment. Aha. Like that. That goes exactly to the Netflix thing. And it was well ahead of. It was a CES show, the Sony booth, and they had rigged up a local area network and were streaming movies. And I saw for the first time, like, movies accessed and streamed via browser. And I went, holy crap, this is what's coming. And you could say, and it was years ahead already. At that point, I'm like, how did you do that? Like, how is this possible? In those days, we thought, like, T1 speeds were amazing, right?

Yeah, yeah. If you're not taking the time from a context perspective. And I think, you know, when I say those things on stage, you know, or I'm, you know, working with a client, it's very interesting to. I can see, you know, the theoretical wheel spinning in their head as I'm talking about this. Right. Like, I'll say, where do you think your customers are going to be six months or 12 months from now? I don't need you to be Steve Jobs and anticipate what's going to happen 10 years from now. Like, I don't need you to do that. I just need you to welcome your customers when they show up six or 12 months from now. So what is that? Right. And if you, especially now, if you don't try to stay at least that close, you know, six, 12 months, you risk someone coming on top of you and saying, look, you're 12 months behind. I'm going to give them what they want. And I Have the ability to beach head it and at least gain enough traction that I will have gotten mass of the customer base and someone will either buy me or it will allow me the opportunity to expand into other markets.

Now we have a tool and a process for thinking about trends and where the market's going there swt stuff. What do you use for looking down the road and thinking about where we need to be 12 months from now?

Yeah, I would say number one for me and a long, like a way ahead, number one. So number two for me is not as close. Number one for me is listening to the customers. And I think this is where people really get stuck. I mean, you know, I make this sort of sarcastic comment on the book that I feel like this entire process of me writing the book was a master class in Undercover Boss, flat out. Right? Because you go, I'm not sure that the CEO of whatever company's on the TV show Undercover boss needs to put on, you know, makeup and try to disguise themselves because they've never showed up on the site anywhere ever. Right. And so why are you disguising yourself? You know, you're not the CEO of Costco who walks a Costco floor every day somewhere in the world. Like, that's not what you do because you're surprised by things that are just shocking to me. Right. The fact that you don't know that this is happening and. And then you very quickly can turn things around. So I'd say that getting out of the four walls, you know, walking around to your employees, especially your frontline employees, because they know what the customers are saying. So customer service, sales, marketing, and probably in that order, you know, customer service first, sales second, marketing third. And then I would say, and then get out and talk to your customers. And I like to use Salesforce as an example, obviously, where I work. But we have 30,000 employees, and I happen to be part of a team that also has our voice of the customer group. And we're constantly, constantly talking to customers in just basic surveys where it's not face to face, face to face roundtables, advisory boards. We're testing messaging and product roadmaps and pipeline, and people will go, yes, but you're Salesforce and your multibillion dollar company, and you have 30,000 employees, and that voice of the customer team is like 12 people. Yeah. It's not thousands of people or hundreds of people. But we're committed to trying to make sure that we always keep customer success front and center for us, even if we hear things that we don't want to hear. Right. And it's not always positive, but that's the way you sort of stay ahead. And so I think that number one for me is you don't. It's not about reading reports or, you know, hiring consultants or benchmarking what your competitors are doing. Like that's very inwardly looking. It's kind of inside out. I need people, right. From a growth IQ perspective to go outside in. And that is not a new concept. But when I frame it like that with people, it's interesting to watch them go because I'll literally say, when was the last time you went and met with a customer? I mean like face to face. Yeah, like just, I'm going to go meet with some customers or I'm going to go walk the customer service floor or I'm going to listen in on customer service calls or I'm going to go on a sales call and you know, they, they struggle. I don't have any time. I'm like, well, if you don't have any time to meet with customers, you're going to have a lot of time on your hands pretty quick.

Yeah, yeah. There's something about prioritizing. Look, if you spend your time chasing fires, then you're working in the business and not on the business. If you're so busy operationally with all the people things, you're not meeting with customers, it's a problem. People familiar with the broader scaling up work already will know things like 4Q questions from Bain. They'll know attribute mapping from uncommon Service, they'll know brand promise work from inside Advantage. And all of those things benefit and are greatly improved from actually talking to customers instead of brainstorming them around the leadership table. And it, when you're doing that in the off site, if you haven't spent some time and actually visited people, I mean, phone is sort of the first step and then meeting in a restaurant is the next step. But when you walk around somebody's office and you go, oh, that's what you're doing. Right. Walk around somebody's store with my stuff.

With my stuff. With my stuff. Right?

Yeah.

And when I started this out, I said, look, I sort of bleed sales blood. And one of my very fun talks is when I just completely pick on marketing. Like it's one of my favorite things to do. But I do it in, in, you know, with humor. I don't do it maliciously. But for me, you know, it's this, this tussle between salespeople saying marketing gives me crappy leads. I'M oversimplifying. Right. And marketing says salespeople never follow up with leads. So then, you know, I push back and I tell the marketer, I go, well, you know, you think the leads aren't good? I go, well, when was the last time you actually went on a sales call and watched one of your sales reps deliver that beautifully glossy PowerPoint and handout that you worked six months on and spent all this money on? When have you actually seen it delivered in person and actually heard the customer say, I don't want to see a PowerPoint, or that doesn't make any sense to me, or don't leave those leads behind. And then you blame it on sales that we're not using it, or we fix it, or we reorder it, or we kill seven slides or we, you know what I mean, we touch it. And I said, but I don't want you to go as a marketer. I actually want you to go as a new hire sales rep, just shadowing a seller. Because the moment you tell the customer you're a marketer, their entire personality, if you will, changes and you get a very different result than if you were a new hire salesperson.

Yeah. They want to start to influence your product strategy and your pricing and things like that.

Right. And so when I ask that question in a room full of marketers, literally, and I'll go, how many of you this quarter have gone and visited a customer? And like, you have, there's 50 people in the room, 500 people in the room, 1,000 people in the room. You know, you get about 5 or 10% will raise their hand. So I say to the other 90%, what are you doing? Like, you know, reading a benchmarking report is not the same as Meeting with 10. 10. Meeting with 10 customers in a given week will give you far more insight than any report you could, you know, pay to get your hands on. And I don't mean that. It's not. It's a balance of both. You know, it's the, it's the hardcore research that you need to purchase and consume, but then balance that with your own, once again, your own market context.

I love when people go and visit and they not only look at the conversation about the product or service, but then they also look like what's going on in the environment around them. What is this person? Like they start to profile and think about the holistic view of that person's world.

Absolutely. Or they'll see someone use something that they sell and go, God, I never thought to See them use it that way. Right, right. And that's why I say that, you know, one of the other things in growth IQ I really found and, you know, just also through just my travels around the world over the last 13 or 14 years, is that people really don't wake up every morning and go, I'm just going to focus inside all day. It's just what happens that you made the comment a minute or two ago about prioritization and you have to make customers or going on listening on the. On the customer service floor, listening in on sales call, or walking around. If you're a manager, you know, Tom Peters famous, you know, management by walking around or wandering around. Like, if you're just not out talking and listening and you're just in this constant cycle of meetings, you don't have a minute to think that sort of sharpen the blade. Right? You and I are going to compete on chopping down trees. We have six hours. We both have an axe. You start chopping, I sit down and start sharpening my blade. Because in about three hours, you'll be tired, your blade will be totally dull, and I'll start chopping down trees.

Yeah, I think there's something to be said for that. Like that doing it first or being proactive and booking it and reserving the time. I see time and again in a planning session with a client and they're like, okay, we're going to get out and visit customers this week or this quarter and we're going to visit this many and I'm going to step up to this mini. And then they put that as a metric, but they don't actually reserve the time. They're going to happen Thursday afternoons or they're going to happen whenever. They don't actually book in when they're going to do them. And then it ends up. I mean, this is really just practical execution kinds of things. But it's treating that time as sacred and valuable. I think that makes.

Yeah. I tell you this, that if you're looking to make any of these changes that you hear on this podcast today or at the Scaling up event or anything else you're doing reading growth iq, whatever it might be, the first thing you have to do is be willing to sort of disrupt yourself. And so I always use myself as an example. I don't mean New year's resolutions. So January 1st, I'm going to go to the gym and January 10th, you.

You forgot where you've been in. I'm going to be thin and great.

Amazing, right? So, because That's a little drastic, right? Or I've never worked out and I'm going to go do the Ironman on the Big island of Hawaii. That's probably not a good goal. I mean, it's a good long term goal after you get up twice and run. Right. But if you've never done anything, so, you know, I like to say that we have to, even if it's a small pivot. So something like when you're driving to work, drive in a different, Take a different route. If you always go get coffee one place, go get coffee somewhere else. If you normally listen to music in the morning, maybe listen to a podcast, maybe that's the moment you let yourself think because you know you're going to be in the car 20 minutes, 40 minutes. If you live in LA, it's, you know, nine hours to go anywhere. But you know, ultimately take a little bit of that time to just think. Yeah, just quietly think. And it could be. When I say quietly, I just mean just not the. I'm in the same grind, I'm doing the same thing, I'm doing it over and over. So I'd say that even change meeting days, you always have your staff meetings on Monday. Have them on Wednesday. Invite someone to your staff meeting who isn't part of your team. Have a rotation of people coming in from other organizations so people in your team get out of group think so that they can get a new perspective. Invite a customer to your team meeting. It's just one little thing. One little thing. And by the time you look back, six months goes by, you've done 10, 15 little things that have added up to a good momentum for you.

You know, I hear two things there. I hear one, something that shifts the approach. And I've done this in the past before. Put my watch on the other wrist, sleep on the other side of the bed, take a different route to work, run my same route, but in the opposite direction. All of these things can shift the way you view the world. Your perspective changes. Then the actions and things that you see naturally occur, your performance, your results, all change. Could be good, could be worse, but you've shifted something up and allowed something new to come in. But then the other thing I hear what you're saying is sustain small changes over time and see how they add up versus look for one big moment of whatever. There's a moment of shift when you introduce something new, but it's that little thing sustained over time, time that. That pays the huge dividend.

Yeah, yeah. And I would tell you that, you know, I could speak for myself. Like my grandfather used to say to me all the time when I was a little kid, patience is a virtue. And he unfortunately passed when I was like, you know, 14 or 15 years old. But there's a day that goes by that I don't hear him on my head saying, patience is a virtue. And I'm 52 and I still haven't figured it out. Yeah, but this has everything to do with patience. So yeah, you just have to, you just have to. It's like a good wine, you just need to let it breathe for a second and we just pop the cork, pour the glass, drink it and you go, well, that wine was kind of okay. It's like, yeah, if you just let it sit for, you know, 20 minutes, let it breathe for, it would, it would have really been much more full bodied or whatever, you know. Yeah. And so, so what I see companies unfortunately make the mistake on is they try to do the one thing which I've already said is not one thing, whatever they try to do, they give it like you know, a week. Well, we ran this campaign or we tried this promotion, or we tried this new sales model and it didn't work. It's been two weeks, it's been a month. And so we're going to pull the plug on it. And I've seen many organizations where I will literally say to them, look, if you're going to transfer, just giving an example, you know, you're going to transform your coverage model of your, of your sales organization. You're going to go from geographic to vertical, using that as an example, right. I will say to them, it's probably going to take you 18 months to 24 months to let that settle in. You know, everybody systems, processes, lead distribution, marketing material, you know, like everything that has to, right. In combination and in sequence. All these things have to happen sort of 18 to 24 months like it said, you know, month 12. And I get that, you know, I go back in and they go, we're pulling the plug on vertical. We're going back to geography. It just hasn't worked. And I'm like, you just got to hang on just a little bit longer. Like you are starting to see momentum. So then they kill it. Six months goes by, we're going to go back to vertical. Geography isn't working. They're like, oh my God, now we got to start again, right? The clock has to start again. So you know, the trick is, and one of the chapters in the book is knowing when to jump Right. So knowing when to go to the next growth path, because I've identified 10. But you say when to go to the next growth path or when is too long to wait or too short. That is something you're going to have to learn in the organization. But you just, I guess going back to what we were just saying, you have to give it a moment to take hold or to just fail. And you have to set up the right key performance indicators and signals to make sure that you're keeping an eye on what's happening. But just because you're losing patience, that's not it. That's not a great reason to kill it, you know?

So for folks trying to figure out the timing, a peer group, a board, a coach, any number of other perspectives can help you to think through when to give it more time. This podcast alone ran for a full year before we really started to notice the response and the traction, the following out there. It was probably 18 months in before it felt like this is really working. So that can make all the difference. And we started with a luminary in our first show. So I think that makes a big difference. To do that and find that perspectives, use some other source. I mean, one of the things that we have to do with new CEOs, if you're an early CEO, one of the things you have to learn is to shut up, say, throw something out there, a question, or then shut up and give people time to think and grapple with something. Right. You started to talk about the partnerships, and you mentioned that earlier as well. And I know you got something to say about how Kylie Jenner built that. Tell us about getting the partnerships, getting the multiple elements all coming together for growth.

Yeah, When I was working on the book, I tried to be really conscious of there's 30 case studies basically in the book. And as I said, There's 10 growth paths. And each growth path has two stories of companies where they reached a fork in the road to make a decision. And then what decision did they make? Either to accelerate growth or to recover from a growth stall or whatever it might be. And I used a moment in Time as an example. So each one of those stories is very short. And then I have a cautionary tale. So there's three stories basically per path. And so one of the stories was Kylie Jenner. But I was trying to, you know, balance it out of big company, small company, known brand, unknown brand here. I mean, like startup, you know, in certain industries, so that people could. I didn't want them. I want them to see themselves in the examples. And Kylie Jenner is one where, you know, book has been out for a couple of weeks where everyone asks that question. Because I think that if you, you know, and I say this in the beginning of this chapter and in that case study is I say, regardless of what you may think of the family and whatever they do, like, I just don't care. What I care about is you have a woman, you know, who started a lip kit company, and two and a half years later, it's valued at somewhere around 650 or $700 million with less than 20 employees.

Yeah.

And so you say, okay, yes, she has a massive fan base and, you know, she's one of the top 10 social media people, you know, on the planet. Yes. And so that goes back to the combination, Right. Like, if she didn't have that massive platform, she would not have a $650 million business. But just because she has a massive platform and she had a product didn't mean it was going to do anything. I mean, there's many celebrities that have big platforms where it fails. So what made it successful? She leaned into partnering with people who knew that business. She had a vision of, look, I want my, you know, fans or the people who follow me, who are mostly in my age group to grow up with me. And they're learning and trying to find what growing up and going from being a teenager to being a woman, what that means from a makeup and you know what I mean, like, all those things. So let me take them with me. Me. And they were all like, we're in, we're in. And so you watch a brand, you know, some of the largest and most well known brands in the world that are in, you know, fashion and makeup, took them decades to cross a billion dollars. And people are expecting that she's going to get there within probably three and a half or four years. So what makes it accelerate? So that was the aha for me in the story. And it was really about the partner she chose for distribution, for manufacturing, and then the decisions that she made to stay very focused on what it is that she is and stay away from what it is she isn't. Right. So, like being very pure to who the brand is and what the brand is, and then a little bit of scarcity in there where it runs out. I mean, she's used classic marketing tactics, but that doesn't mean, like I said, that it will be successful. So I think her winning combination was the fact that she struck the right partnerships. Her team was very smart. On trying to plan out what she was going to sell. And then she took advantage of the fact that she had this massive platform by which she could build the business on.

Yeah, it's really great. She looks, she says, I have all these people who follow me, who want to be like me, who want to be me. I could give them something. But then working the partnerships out so that you do that for. Just a reminder for a past show, Tim Danley's story about developing this wastewater recovery business up to hundreds of millions of dollars with four employees is a great similar kind of example where somebody took the basic principles of scaling up and then just with a handful of employees, but a lot of partnerships all over the world has built a huge business that's doing really cool things. The world. So.

Right. And, and, and let me tell you, partnerships. The other one that was Path eight, Path nine is coopetition, which is another kind of partnerships where you see that happening. For example, where Sears just had some. Some good announcements and everyone's saying, well, they're getting this bump now from the things they're selling with Amazon. And you go, well, wait a minute. Like, everyone's blaming Amazon for Sears trouble now. Sears made a decision that, you know, we're going to sell tires through Amazon. And then what Amazon did was they sell the tires. The customers actually want to have them installed and their tires balanced. So push it back to a Sears location. And so they're getting it on both sides. We're meeting customers where they want to be. So that's kind of coopetition, or Nike being on Amazon or Amazon actually working with Kohl's as a, you know, locker and distribution and return facility, well, you could argue that they compete. But if you. Once again, going back to the question you asked a little bit ago, like, what's the one way that you can try to stay ahead of what's happening? Listen to your customers, even if it puts you in a situation where you feel like, wait a minute, should I be partnering with someone I view as a horrible competitor of mine? You know what I mean? If it will serve our joint customers better together. And I'm not sharing the secrets in there. I'm not talking about giving away IP and giving. I'm talking about sales, models, supply chain. Going back to the Kylie story, right? Distribution, like those things that you're either gonna. She could have went and said, you know what? I'm gonna start a lip kit, I'm gonna build a lab. I'm gonna go and make my own stuff. And then I'm gonna build warehouses around the world and I'm gonna ship out of that. And, you know, she could have done that or why would you do that? And this is the 21st century. She's just proven you can become almost a billion dollar brand with 20 employees.

And take the case that all that stuff already exists, all there. Use somebody else, leverage off somebody else who's looking for the next compelling brand or whatever. And I think, like, I can see it in the channel, in the competitive environment. I can also see it in the obvious things. Vern likes to talk about. IKEA and TaskRabbit joining up. Right. And the obvious thing there, like, look, the one thing people have about this is they have to schlep at home and they have to put it together. Well, we've got. Maybe there's somebody who could do that.

Absolutely. But that goes back to if you're not taking a moment. So context of the market is shifting what's happening in industries around. So people are going to go, well, I am nothing like Kylie Jenner. My business is nothing like Kylie Jenner. And I go, probably not. I'm going to bet that that's a true statement. And then I'm going to say, but where are you manufacturing? Like, what? How is your distribution handled? You're doing it all in house now. Do you need to keep doing that? Could you improve your profitability if you outsource that? Could you get greater scale? Going back to scaling up, could you scale faster? Could you get more orders out the door? Could you become more efficient? Yes, I get it that for the past 25 years, you've always done it in house and there's pride behind it. I'm not telling you to give up quality for outsourcing. And outsourcing sometimes is a dirty word. Right. But I think we need to be willing to. If you take the time to go talk to customers and they go, gosh, I really wanted to buy 100, but you guys only had 50 on hand. And I had to wait three weeks for the other 50. I had to go to some other brand. And you go, geez, I talked to five customers this week who want to buy more from us. I didn't realize we had a, you know, manufacturing problem or supply problem. So you go back in and then your plant manager says, we just can't produce anymore. We're running three shifts. We're a small business. Light bulbs should go off and go. There has to be a better way.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've covered a lot of stuff. Let me go. So the first thing that I think that I hear is that growth is less complicated. You want to break it down into some specific paths. You're looking first at the overall context, the environment, where things are going like that. You're listening to customers, customers. You're looking for partners to work with and figuring out then what to use, where to use, what combination, what sequence. By looking freshly at the business, mixing up that it sounds like there's just a load of stuff, over 30 things in the book. You'll be a speaker at our thing. I think we've given folks enough stuff to start with. You probably should go out and get the book Growth iq. Get smarter about the choices that will make or break your business or right. Our listeners are always hungry for new ideas and new approaches and I know your book's got plenty of that and I look forward to seeing you in person there. If you want to also know more about Tiffany, you can go to tiffanybova.com and you'll get your full world there as well. You can follow her on Twitter, et cetera. And we'll see you at the summit. Thanks so much for being on the show with us today.

Well, thank you so much for having me and I'm so looking forward to going to the event. I read Scaling Up a number of years ago and it's always one of those go to's that when people are saying I really need something to help me scale my business, I'm like this is the book for you. So I'm really excited to spend time with everybody.

Awesome. So reminder to our listeners, we're here every week with another author, speaker, entrepreneur, coach, etc with a story about growing your business and the challenges that we face and how to overcome along the way. So find us here every week wherever you get your podcasts or go to scalingcoach.com and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks. I want to give special thanks to our original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Niobaid and audio production is done by Podfly Productions. Audio editing by Albert Burge, show notes by Ayn Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of our show today, please share it with somebody else and let us know know what parts you loved. Thanks again for listening and keep Scaling up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software powered by Align, it's the official software for Scaling Up With Scoreboard. You'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.