The Key to Startup & Business Success | Webinar

Good afternoon or good morning. Welcome to this new series of CINDA Academy webinars. We're really glad that you're joining us today for a very important, nice, and different subject. So Kim is going to be introducing our speaker today. I just wanted to say hi, welcome to the CINDA Academy.

Hello.

We're really glad that you're joining us, and if you want more information about our webinars, please go to CINDA Academy page on Facebook or to cinda.org. I just wanted to give also a few housekeeping information. So we're gonna have the questions at the end, so if you have questions, please type them into your question box in the control panel, and Kimberly and I will, will ask the questions to Greg directly at the end of the session. Everybody's muted, of course. If you have any technical questions, you can also message us in the control panel. Please make sure you message only the organizers. So that being said, just handing over to Kim to do the intro for today's webinar.

Well, we're very lucky today to welcome Greg Shepard. He's the CEO of Boss Capital Partners, and he's a serial entrepreneur, a speaker on the Forbes Council, an angel investor, and he has a lot of badges behind him, including Tech Deal of the Year for over $250 million, Private Equity Deal of the Year for over $500 million, and Cross-Border Deal of the Year for over $500 million to $1 billion. And he's taken the time out of his busy schedule to come talk to our members at CINDA. And welcome, Greg. Thank you so much for this. And this is really interesting to have you share your experience with us today. So with that, I hand the presentation over to you.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here and work with everybody, and hopefully I can add value to people's lives. So we'll start off with a little bit of me. So I write for Entrepreneur, Forbes, Fortune, Huffington Post, pretty much most of the publications out there. I'm a Forbes contributor or Forbes author and a Forbes radio podcast host, as well as the amount of work and energy I've put into universities, teaching the, the BOSS process to universities. I've done 12 startups with 12 exits of my own plus my investments. And, uh, and that's pretty much me. So what is the BOSS methodology? BOSS stands for Business Operating Support System, and it's a proven system that is designed and intended primarily to help entrepreneurs get from You know, a startup stage, so series seed all the way up into exit. But normally, when Boss functions, it function functions a very certain way. So in this in this specific situation, we have developed a post-crisis market process to help you out with post and pre-crisis marketing operations and overall business. The crisis has changed things. So normally the emphasis that we have on BOSS is speed and thoroughness, a lot of thoroughness, being very specific about what you do, when you do it, how you do it, how you document it. But in this scenario we're in right now, it's speed over thoroughness, which is a little different. So the focus is on surviving the crisis and seizing new opportunities that come out of the crisis. And identifying what post-crisis market will look like. So the way the market looks now versus the way it's going to look tomorrow. So the agenda we're going to go through is why startups succeed. So the 5 principles of BOSS, how do I identify a potential winner, and how can a crisis impact the startup ecosystem? What is BOSS? The 5 phases of BOSS. So finding your North Star, Aligning the roadmap to the North Star, which is your strategy. The longest, biggest road— this is the where the rubber meets the road— execution, finding normalcy. This is just getting to standardization and kaizen, which just means continuous improvement. So what's different about using BOSS in a crisis? Speed over thoroughness. And surviving the crisis, again, seizing new opportunities. So why don't we talk about why in BOSS startups succeed? So the first thing is doing the right thing over doing the wrong thing. You can do the wrong thing right, and you can do the right thing wrong. So one of the keys with BOSS and the North Star and also in the crisis management process is to make sure you're doing the right thing first, and then that you're doing the right thing right. And BOSS is laid out that way. The second piece, moving over here to the right, is setting people up for success. So this is where you think about what's coming into you and what you're sending off to the next person. So all businesses have a journey, a customer journey. There's multiple different journeys. So you have this journey that people are going through, which means that there's always something at the front of the journey and something at the end of the journey. If everybody along that path is thinking about setting people up for success, then you have a much better business. You have to remember who's serving who along the lines of setting people up for success. You as an executive, and most executives misunderstand this, you serve them because you're accountable not for what you get done, for what the people that work for you get done. And if that's the case, then you have to serve them. You have to make sure that you're setting them up for success. And then there's fast and slow. So you want to fail fast, and then you want to succeed. Now, if you fail slow, then you learn slow. If you fail fast, then you learn fast. Now, in a crisis like this, it's all about failing fast. Just get out there and do something. Move, move, move, move, and iterate. In business, generally speaking, a lot of people misunderstand failures, and failures are a good thing. They are necessary. They have to happen. This doesn't mean fail on purpose, obviously. This means go the best strategy you can, take that path, figure out whether or not it's going to work or not, and then iterate and try it again. Challenge the status quo means everybody seems to be zigging and you're zagging. That's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, a lot of people build a competitive advantage because they go after a direction that everybody else has missed. Just because nobody is doing something doesn't necessarily mean it's not a good thing to try. So challenge the status quo. Principle over position. So this goes along the lines with fast and slow and who's serving who, setting people up for success, doing the right thing, and challenging the status quo. All of these things sort of come together when you look at principle over position. Now, what I mean by this is the principle of what it is that you're trying to accomplish is way more important than the position, meaning how you choose for that to happen. So staying on the business outcome, as Agile says, is where you look at an idea— maybe it's your idea— and then you put it in a capsule, you set it on the table, and everybody judges it as if it's, uh, not their idea. And that includes you. So you sit down, you put it in a capsule, you look at it, and you decide Is this an idea? Is this not an idea? How, you know, you just go through your thought process, your 5 Whys, and that sort of thing to figure out whether this idea is a good idea and separate principle over position. And these are the BOSS principles. So these are the things that you remember as you go through BOSS, including in crisis management. They're like, think of them as laws or rules. So why do startups succeed? Well, I can tell you from an investor's perspective and from somebody who has built 12 of my own startups, the identification of a good winner is when you bet on the horse, not the jockey. Everybody says, oh, bet on the management team, and that's the jockey. But most of the time, the jockey doesn't have the experience to run the business. They understand their subject matter expertise, and they understand how to get it from you know ideation to where they are because they've had experience doing that. But what's in front of them most of the time startup entrepreneurs don't have. Now there is some times where you have an entrepreneur that has done a bunch of startups and. And they know what to do. But most of the time they don't. And so investors, I find, that bet on the jockey, they're let down because the jockey's never ridden a horse. And now you go have this beautiful horse, that's the product or the business, and then you put this jockey on it that's never ridden a horse. The jockey falls off and the investors are frustrated, like, what's happening? And the jockey's also frustrated with what's happening. So It's really important that you bet on the business, you know, the value of the business, and can it stand alone from all perspectives. So one of the things that I do is I bet on the horse, but I want to know that the jockey is coachable, that I can work with them and help them turn into somebody that can ride this horse, meaning run this business. There's saving money and making money. So when you look at 2 types of businesses, when I'm looking at businesses in a bull market, meaning a really good market, you can look at businesses that make money. And these are mainly businesses that take advantage of opportunities. And in a bear market like we're in now with a recession or market corrections or anything like that, you look for businesses that save money. So these are businesses that solve a problem. And so when you're in this situation, like we've done with some of our portfolio companies, is even if the company was a making money type company, so a bull market company, because things have changed, we identify that and we start finding ways to sell our company and its products and services as a saving money opportunity. So solving a problem. Now you can do this even if you think you can't. We had a real estate platform that was a making money proposition, meaning you would go out there and you would say, listen, if you buy this, you're going to be able to sell more real estate, list more houses, so on and so forth, and it's going to go really, really well, Mr. Real Estate Agent Broker. And we turned it around to say, hey, listen, if you use this, you don't need as much manpower because it automates the process, and at the same time, It's going to make it so efficient that you don't need to have these other tools. You can cancel those other tools and just use this software. So we completely changed the go-to-market messaging, the narrative that we had going along with this to accommodate for the mood that people are in. People are thinking about saving money right now. They're not thinking about making money. After the market starts to change, then they're gonna start thinking about making money. So you have to be willing to move your business To whatever's happening at that moment. So what's happening at that moment? Well, you have the pre-crisis scenario and you have the during the crisis scenario. And the pre-crisis scenario, the circle of concern that you have, it means that you have no control. So these are features or factors that you have no control of that has to do with your business. Then you have the circle of influence. The circle of influence are factors you can control, and you can see pre-crisis, the circle of influence circle is is a lot bigger than over here because there's so many unknowns. The circle of concern is huge, and the circle of influence is very small. So obviously, you have to figure out how to change these odds in your favor. So the first thing you do is you sit down and you make a list. Of the of the items in your circle of influence. So these are the factors you can control. This is a list that we actually made, so you can see what we did for one of our portfolio companies. And we had to make some hard decisions like internal salaries, you know any new hires? Do we need any new hires? Do we actually need them? What priorities in the product backlog? Deal triage, the go-to-market strategy. I mean, these are very fundamental things. Staffing, what do we need? Support strategy. These are very fundamental things that you need to have. Once you get that together, you're able to sort of return back to BOSS. Now let me explain what the North Star is. So the 5 phases of BOSS are built for the 5 levels of organizations. So you have level 1 company, 2, 3, 4, 5. And each one of those is about a year. It should be about a year. So when you get to level 3, you should be about the area where you can exit the business. Now, this is from Series Seed. So from your Series Seed to level 3, level 4 should be 3, 4 years. And that means you're getting ready to be able to go for an exit. The North Star, what I'm talking about here with the North Star is, you know, having a directionally correct, place that you're going with the business. Now, a lot of people don't understand that you have to know this from the very beginning. They think that you can put it together at the end. You can't do that. I'll explain that in a minute. Once you do that, you align the roadmap with this North Star, which creates your strategy. And a strategy, all a strategy is, is a plan. Once you have your plan, you have to move into execution. So this is where you actually start acting on the plan. So when you look at this, for example, it's like North Star. I want to lose, let's say, 50 pounds or, you know, 2 stones. And that's the North Star. And I want to do this in a certain amount of time. So the North Star is what do you— what is your goal? What is your business? Why? Who, when, time horizon, everything is in there, right? So that's your diet plan. I'm gonna lose this weight. And your strategy is how you're going to do that, right? And so everybody knows they're gonna say diet and exercise. Well, you have to outline specifically what diet and exercise. Then execution. This is where a lot of people drop the ball. You get here and then you have a donut cross across, you know, across your desk, or somebody offers you to go out to dinner and, you know, you don't go for the salad, right? So execution is a big deal. And then finding some sense of normalcy. So this is where you actually standardize things. Now, this is really important. If you think about it, all textbooks, when you go to school, all that stuff is documenting intellectual information. So property knowledge that we get over time, tribal knowledge, and it's documented so it's easier for the next person. That's what standardization does, and it's really good when you get into an Exit 2, and I'll explain that. Kaizen just means continuous improvement. So this is the idea that when you get to all these stages down here, you don't just stop there. You take Kaizen and you circle back around. You review the strategy, the execution, and the standardization. You take improvements from the standardization. Now you have it documented. You build them back into a strategy. You execute on them. And that's why I call this the Kaizen loop. So here's another way of looking at this. The North Star aligns your company to the end goal. So you start with your business desired outcomes and plan for that result. And so what, why, who, who is your ideal customer? And I'll walk through this a little bit more, but you have to make 4 functional areas. Now, in my experience, I found that every business can have 4 functional areas. So product and tech, shared service, service delivery, and sales and marketing. Those different companies, those different functional areas allow you to delegate things to specific place. So strategy is the next thing, and this is the roadmap to the exit. And you start with a SWOT, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And then you build it into a MOCOM. This is a tool that we made, which stands for missions, objectives, key results, and measures. And then you prioritize these things. Now, once you prioritize these things, you have to delegate them because all this does is create a giant list. Not all things are created equal, so you have to prioritize. Once you do that, you have to delegate. Then you go into execution, which includes a sprint, a burndown, a daily Scrum meeting, and an email update. This holds people accountable. When you get into standardization, you create a knowledge base. The knowledge base has the organizational chart, the execution triggers. This is when, when something is supposed to happen. Accountabilities. This is who is supposed to be doing it. And the best practice. This is how that thing gets done. Then you get into the kaizen where you find your friction points, find your inefficiencies, create new missions, and then go back into KPIs and tracking like I said earlier. So let's talk about the North Star. So the first thing is, and you do this for your product and for your business, what is your business and what is your product? That's just description, feature, and benefit. The next thing you do is why. So why would somebody wanna buy your business and why would somebody buy your product? Problem, solution, and impact. Who? So the ideal customer, for your business, your product that you're selling, and the ideal buyer for your entire business. This helps you identify who you're selling to. So when you look at selling your business and you look at the who, your ideal buyer profiles, your IBP, when you're building that out, you have to remember something. All along the path that you're doing this, you have to make sure that you're building a business for another business. And that's because the best, highest multiples are businesses that are acquiring another business to enhance customers they already have. So Business A, your buyer, has 25,000 customers and you have 150 customers. They don't care about your 150 customers. They just wanna make sure that those 150 customers prove growth margin and retention numbers for their customer base. They've already absorbed the CAC cost for that. So the customer acquisition cost they've already paid for. And what they're trying to do is monetize. They're trying to make more money on the investment they already had. So the majority of the big multiple acquisitions are you selling your product, aka your business, to that other business. Basically, your entire business is just a product to them. So if that's the case, and not having an ideal profile, and not having an ideal buyer profile would be like not having an ideal customer profile. In other words, Why would you build a business without a customer? Why would you build a business without a buyer? Everybody's in it to sell their business. That's the, that's the main format here. Even if you're not and you're building a lifestyle business, you still want to have an ideal customer. Identify who it is that you're selling to so you understand what to build for them. And the ideal buyer is the outcome. So if it's a lifestyle business, it's what do you want? Do you want to work less? Do you want to work at home? Home, whatever it is there. Then you want to figure out how much. Now, when I think about this, I think most of the time in terms of the entrepreneur, because you can sell a business for $100 million and the entrepreneur can make $5, or you can sell a business for $50 million and the entrepreneur can make $10. So what I do is I ask the entrepreneur, how much do you actually want to make on this business? And then I back into it and I'm going to show you how all these things add up And it's so critical. The next thing you figure out is when. So what is your time horizon? When do you think you'll be ready to sell your business? So typically, we try to sell businesses in 3 years from the point that we make an investment, which is like Series Seed. So if you look at the journey, you have the ideation stage, and that's Pre-Seed capital. And then you go through proof of concept, that's Seed capital. And then you go through Series Seed capital, which is right before growth and right after you have proof of concept and market and buyer validation. Now, when you look at these 3 things, what you're looking at is you're looking at how to design your business the most effective way for when an acquisition happens. And I'll give you some examples. If your what, you know, what your product is and what your business is, description, feature, benefit, don't attach to that ideal buyer and that ideal customer, you have a problem. When you think about it and you think of why would somebody wanna buy your business and why would somebody buy your product, again, if that doesn't attach to the ideal buyer and the ideal customer, you have a problem. Now, the reason why is because you could be raising capital On an ongoing basis, and the reason why you're raising capital is just to get you to the why, right? So you can't sit there and say, "Okay, I'm going to raise five million dollars. I'm going to work on customers for like the next three years. Three years later, say, 'Okay, I'm ready to sell,' and then you turn around and say, 'Uh oh, my buyer, my ideal buyer, does not have the same customer as I have.' And now you just wasted all of that time, and you have to go find a buyer instead of." building for that from the beginning. If your how much and your timeline are off from what you initially thought, or if you didn't even think about it at all, then down the line you've been raising capital not thinking about when you're going to exit. This is really important. I see a lot of businesses fail because when I did the study especially, a ton of businesses fail because they raise too much capital, their valuations are too high at the beginning, and And they don't think about the timeline going out. Meaning, let's say that the timeline in total is 5 years. They start out the valuation at $5 million. They raise a round for $5 million. The company's already at $10 million for that valuation without having to do a down round. And they still have 5 years left to go. And if you look at the business and you really think about how much the buyers are willing to pay, you realize that they already have more value than they need. And they're gonna have to do a down round down the line because the investors aren't gonna pay $20 million for a company generating $1 million in top-line revenue. Things have changed. Used to be during the dot-com, you could do things like that. And before these recent IPOs, you could do things like that. The business doesn't work that way anymore. So you have what, this tells you what your business and what your product is, description, feature, benefit. Why, why is problem, solution, and impact. Who, who is your ideal customer and ideal buyer of your business? How much will your ideal buyer pay for your product and, or your ideal customer pay for your product? And how much will your ideal buyer pay for your business? And then when, how long will it take you to get to that point? And this gives you a roadmap. Think of it like a GPS. If you were to cross from one place to another and you didn't even know where you were going, you could drive around circles forever. So this gives you a map that tells you where you are. Now you can track yourself along that map. If you don't do that, think about if you were trying to cross the ocean and you had a compass and you were one degree off, you would end up in a different continent, and by then it's too late. So this gives you those coordinates. So the strategy phase—the strategy phase—is making sure that there's alignment to the North Star. So once you decide, I want to go to this place, I want to get there this way. I want to sell for this much in this much time, and this is who we're marketing to. And you identify who you are. Then you can start on your strategy. The strategy is the actual plan that aligns everything. So you take the strategy step first is your mission. So your mission is from X to Y by date. So I want to go from this To that by date. And so this and that can be either a dollar, a percentage, or a number. So I want to go from 100 to 500, from 20% to 50%, from 20,000 to 50,000, whatever it is. And that's a high-level mission. And those missions are done by functional area. So you have one of those for sales and marketing, one of those for product and tech. You have one of those for shared services. Shared services is, you know, operations. And then you have one of those things for sales and marketing. Sales and marketing is sales and marketing. Shared services, like I said before, is things like operational things. Service delivery is customer service and things like that. Product and tech is product and engineering. So now you have a mission for every functional area. Underneath that mission, you do an objective. So most of the time we do between 3 and 5. By limiting the number, you force people to only choose good objectives. If those 3 to 5 objectives are accomplished, then the mission is accomplished. Then you do key results. Key results sit underneath the objective. These things ladder up and down. The key results are the actual tasks that happen. So if you look at the mission, the mission goes with the functional area leader. The FAL, that's the functional area leader. The objective goes with middle management. And I'm trying to write this, but it's difficult. And the key result goes to the team. So, the team could be the team leaders. It could be management, some level of management. But that's how that works. And now you have an actual accountability for each one of these folks, right? The functional area leaders, so this is your C-suite, say, listen, I want to accomplish this. And then the middle management says, okay, well, in order to accomplish that, I need to accomplish these things. And then down here, they both work to create a list of key results that they have to work on and to accomplish that as a team. And then they have to measure it. And measurement is just KPIs. How are you performing up against your goal? Now, execution, execution is actually getting things done. And so we've all been in situations where we want to lose weight, start exercising, or some New Year's goal, and you put it together, and then you get into execution, and then everything starts to fall down. So there's a level of accountability that happens here. Now, there's a lot of meetings, but the problem is not in, in the hidden history. The problem is that not the number of meetings, it's the productivity of those meetings. Nobody objects when they have a meeting and it's effective, short, and to the point. They have a problem when the meetings don't have a point. So in these meetings, you have a sprint. A sprint is where you get on the phone in the morning and you say, these are the things I want to accomplish. So if we go back to this slide, we go back to the strategy slide. A sprint takes this list of things that need to get done and put a time-date requirement around them. So now you have a sprint and you say, okay, I'm going to accomplish this by this date. Remember, we put that in there, right? From X to Y by date. Every morning you have a Scrum meeting to talk about the sprint that you're working on. And in that Scrum meeting, all you're saying is, what did I do today? What'd I do yesterday? Do I have any blockers? And then a burndown that just shows the, the list of things starting to be burned down, meaning checked off. And the list starts to get smaller. And then every night you have an email update. The email update is what you just— what you talk about in the following day's Scrum meeting. And that's the execution stage. Now you get into standardization. So it's, it's a fact that the average business, when they onboard new people, spend about 30% to 33% of that person's initial salary. Getting them onboarded. So the cost of new growth. So if you think about it, any company that goes into growth, they put a lot of money and time into headcount. If you're paying $100,000 per $100,000, it's costing you between $30,000 and $33,000 of that headcount in order to manage those people to usability. So 90-95% usability. So think about that. You're hiring 5 people at a time You got $120,000 used up in just hiring those initial people. So getting that cost down is really essential. So what you do is you document, and I'm not talking about a big book, it's very simple. The trigger is when something gets done, the accountability is who gets it done, what functional area gets it done, and the best practice, which is how it's done. And I'm— when I say how it's done, I mean literally instructions, human-written instructions. Open this browser, type this in, you'll see this button, click on that, so on and so forth. When somebody goes through the initial, uh, BOSS training, what I call boot camp, you're teaching them BOSS. They choose their subject matter experts and learn those things when they get into the job. But BOSS works the same everywhere. And once they learn how to use BOSS, instead of disrupting everybody, the person who they're asking a question to can just send a link to the best practice. This keeps not only everybody stable and doing the consistently, doing things consistently the same way, but it makes it a lot easier when you're trying to measure things. If you're trying to measure things and 3 people, all 3 of them are doing things differently, you're gonna get a measurement that's gonna be deeply flawed. So you have reducing your cost on growth, you have making sure that everybody is doing things the same way so you can duplicate without diluting things. And at the same time, you can measure things, really measure things the way that they're actually happening, because people are doing things the same way. The Kaizen loop just takes everything from what you have done and it loops it back around. So you go back through, if you're, if you're looking at your best practices, this is where best practices also come in handy big time, is where you go back through and you read who is doing what and how they're doing it. And inside of that, you will find a lot of efficiencies. I mean, I had, I think I dropped my efficiencies from inefficiencies I tracked at around 65% down to about 12%. So what do I mean by that? So it's very easy. You can actually put a number on it. Let's say that you have an individual person and they do a task that takes 3 minutes every time it's done, but it's done 15 times a day by 15 people, and each one of those people makes $100,000 a year. Well, it's very easy to break that down to minutes, and you can see how much money is being burned up. So if you were able to create that thing more efficiently, then you could literally save your business X amount of dollars or X amount of pounds or euro. So that is the, that is the key to the Kaizen, is finding these efficiencies by looking at the best practices And the processes and cycling them back through as a strategy, and that's when you're saying I'm going to change this from that to that by this date. So from X to Y by date is simply creating these efficiencies. So what's different about using Boss in a crisis? This is where we get down to where we are today. First of all, you have to do initial assessment. So this is where you're looking at damage control. Now this process I got from the United States military. Most of them use it in different ways. The Navy SEALs, whom I've spoken with, the Air Force, whom I spoke with, and the Navy destroyers, which I spoke with too. And the initial assessment in damage control is, what are the immediate and potential long-term impacts of your business, of this crisis to your business and the market in general? And then what can you do to slow this damage? And then what do you need help from, from your team, stakeholders, and who should you consult? And that's the first thing is like just assessing the damage control, figuring out what you're dealing with. The second thing is stabilizing and crossing over to a pivot, right? Where you change your business to accommodate for this, for the damages that you're looking at in this initial assessment. So how can you extend your runway? How can you make the money that you have last longer is a good example of that. What part of your existing business is still valuable in the crisis? And then what part is after the crisis? So you can see if your business model that you're currently using is even gonna be there after the crisis, and if it's gonna work during the crisis. And how can you use existing assets that you have, so people and software and whatever, to address this new market that has come out that will be here during and after the crisis? Or are you looking at something that's gonna help you pivot just in the crisis and then after the crisis go back to business as usual? So you need to figure that out. How long can you adapt the new technology? So how much time is it gonna take you to adapt whatever it is technology-wise, or services-wise to address this pivot. So to get to this standardization piece. So seizing the op— now that you're all set, right? So you've got an initial assessment, you've figured out how you're gonna stabilize and move into this new market, and either during or after or both in the crisis, you've got your pivot all set up, and now you can move into seizing the opportunity. So seizing the opportunity is what aspects of your business, market, or sector are likely to see permanent change. Meaning, so now you're sitting there and you're saying, okay, this part of what I'm— what I've assessed during the initial assessment and what I know I need to stabilize myself and pivot to is going to be here after and during this crisis. And how do you become a market leader in that new world? So, you know, a lot of people look at this and, oh, it's horrible, it's horrible. But in these situations, this is where some real winners surface. So there are opportunities in every fire. In this scenario, there are definitely opportunities being established and people taking advantage of them. And they're going to be the winners on the outset. So what new pain points has the crisis created for customers that you can personally solve? That list of things and gives you some ideas on how you think about seizing this opportunity that you realized in 2, stabilizing, and in 1, you have to pivot to in order to address the systematic changes that have happened when you assess damage control and everything along that path. So you look at it and you go, okay, this is the problem I'm dealing with. This is what I need to do. To do something about that in order to pivot. Now I'm going to go and seize the opportunity. Once you seize the opportunity, then you can return back to deliberate operations. So now you have this new business, this new product, you have this new direction, whatever it is, and then you go back to the business model you had before, which is one of the benefits of BOSS. You can pivot and immediately adapt. And so now you say, all right, what are the conditions that must be met in order for this, in order for us to exit the crisis? So What you want to do is you want to graduate yourself out of the crisis. So you have to document what does that look like. So just like in business, you ask, what does success look like? What does business outcome look like? Well, what does exiting the crisis look like? Then how will you assess the new normal? How are you going to say that you have now, after exited, you've adjusted to the new normal for the business or the market? And this, now you sort of look at the situation like, okay, I have a new business that's adopted to this stuff and now I have the ability to pivot. And this is what it looks like when I'm successful, when I go into that pivot. So these are the conclusions. So I was talking about the levels earlier. So level 1 is North Star, putting together your North Star. And in level 1, most companies are in level 1 when I meet them. You know, they're reactive versus proactive. There's a bunch of different individual things, but usually there's a need for some cleanup and turnaround in the business. You move through that and then you move into level 2, which is where you establish your strategy. Now you're directionally correct, you know where you're going, you've fixed up all these loose ends so that you're bossified, what I call bossified, and then you go into level 2 strategy, Which is where you look at what you're gonna do to shift into more of a growth stage. And so as you can see, in this initial stage, you're making sure that your business is ready and you're building out product and finance so that you have everything lined up. And then you move into focusing more on sales and marketing. Your money moves that way too. So the money is poured into here and then it moves into here. This also prevents you from having to raise as much capital. Then you go into level 3, which is execution. Now you're ready to actually make something happen. So standardize and scale the business. And so this is where you start to say, okay, and you can see the funnel here, right? So you're ready to go. Here's my product. Sales and marketing starts to drive it. And where does that funnel to? Service delivery. Service delivery has to focus on retention. You drive into that level once you have growth margin and retention, which are the big value drivers. Remember, Growth says people like what you're doing. Margin says you can do it at scale. And retention says people continue to like what you're doing. Very, very important. And then you're ready to look into exit. And so when you've cleaned up this first stage, basically is the crisis management. You're going back through and sort of looping into this to make sure that your business and your product can adapt to this new market condition. I want to thank everybody so much for the time that I've been able to spend. My focus is to help more entrepreneurs and by doing so help with wealth distribution. And I'm hoping this was helpful. I'm willing to and happy to take any questions.

Okay, so I'm gonna put my— show my webcam back on. I think Stephanie and I— Greg, that was fantastic. And I have— I do have a couple questions for you. And since they've been coming in kind of as you went through the presentation, I'll start with the first one. In one slide you said you bet on the horse and not the jockey, but the jockey has to be coachable. When you're assessing a business, how— because we have some people in this webinar here who are also acquiring smaller businesses or startups— how do you know that that jockey is, is coachable?

I ask certain questions. So when I do my first call with entrepreneurs, The first thing I ask them is I say, "Can you tell me about your background?" And in that process, what they're telling me is how long they've been on previous projects. And then I ask them deeper questions like, "Who did you work with? How did you work with them?" So you can field sort of review. You know what what they say, how they say it. So sometimes you can get them to say something. Well, yeah. You know, I started this business, but, you know, it didn't work out. Why didn't it work out? Oh, there was a problem with the founder, the co-founder, right? And then you're like, okay, well, you know, 50/50 on that one, right? I was sort of digging that. And the next thing I asked them is I say, how did you get the idea? So what I'm looking for is, are they going to take credit for the entire idea or are they going to say, you know, maybe I learned this from other people? You know, I learned this from, I was working with so-and-so and somebody told me this and somebody told me that. And it kind of gives you an idea of the level of humility they have. Mm-hmm. And then the other thing I do is I say, okay, now that I understand your background and how you got the idea, tell me in 30 seconds or 60 seconds an elevator pitch of your business. And then they tell me it and then I critique it. You know, I intentionally will interrupt them and critique it because I wanna know, That I don't have a lot of time when I get on the phone with one of my portfolio companies. I want to know that as they're talking, I can say, "Hold on, what about this? What about that?" And they're not going to get frustrated, and I can ask them and question decisions they've made or products that they have. And I know that they have principle over position because the way that they answer the question is sort of the way that they would answer it had it been somebody else's idea, not their idea. Right? So if somebody answers the question, and the way that they answer it is sort of like, well, you know, because that's the best way, or, you know, we've, you know, versus they say, well, the idea was tabled and we've tried it 40 different ways, and, you know, we all voted and worked together and this seemed to be the best way, or the customer told me that this is the best way and this is the process we went through to get the customer's advice. So when you, you know, it's very rare. I mean, there are some occasions where you get a You know, an entrepreneur that has succeeded more than once. But most of the time, in my experience, entrepreneurs that are asking for money are asking for money because they don't have any. And if they don't have any, it means they haven't been successful in the past. And if they haven't been successful in the past, you probably shouldn't bet on that jockey because they've never ridden the horse before. Otherwise they wouldn't be, you know, asking for money to buy the horse, you know?

Understood. Great. Moving on a little bit, I hope that answered the question from Greg. Moving on, you're talking about adjustment and speed and in the crisis. I'm just trying to read this. So when you talk about speed and you're talking, relating that to strategy, especially in a crisis, how fast Do you have to change that strategy? And does that all mean your North Star still stays the same?

So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in BOSS, you— I have a term I call a draft. So if you're, if you're familiar with the military, the military can draft a civilian, put them into the military, do a whole different job. When they come back to civilian life, they go back the way things were before. Their job was the same. You know, it's supposed to be right. Their job will be the same, everything like that. So when you have a North Star, your North Star stays the same. If you chose your North Star correctly, it should stay the same. And then you draft yourself, you change to this new direction, and then after the crisis is over, you go back to the North Star. Now, if you you've noticed that you know during crisis and pre-crisis. And post-crisis. So the whole path, including after the crisis, things will be different. And what you have in your North Star won't work anymore. Then you go back and change your North Star. But you can't do that until after you've done the crisis pivot, because you don't know enough. You don't have enough information. So, you know, for example, I'll give you an example. You know, for what I do, which is, you know, my business is trying to help entrepreneurs succeed. So I said, okay, I'm gonna change right now. I'm gonna put all the focus on crisis management. And then after crisis management is over, I'm gonna use that new module that I've built, this crisis management module, as something that you could just pull away from and use as a toolset inside of BOSS, like you would SWAT or a RACI or a MOCOM or anything like that. You know, so it allows you to sort of do that. Now, if your North Star is changing, so you go through the whole process and your North Star actually changes, that's okay. You just alter it and go through, but you have to make sure you have a North Star. It's really, really important. You know, it's like having no direct— it's ready, aim, fire, not ready, fire, aim, you know? So that really makes a big difference.

Steph, you have questions also? Yeah.

Yeah, I had a question about the serving who point, because you made the point very important that you need to know who you're serving. And I think for some of our listeners today on the phone, they kind of sit in the middle because they are serving customers, but they are also serving small businesses who are serving customers themselves. So How important is your positioning, you know, in the middle of the chain? Is it different if you're serving 2 different elements, you know, the customers and the small businesses, or do you have different approaches if you're targeting directly to B2C? I don't know if you see my point, but is it different in B2B and B2C? This is the major question, right?

Yeah, that, that who's serving who is supposed to be universal. So if you are a C-suite CEO, you're serving your C-suite, right? The rest of the people that work in those functional areas. So your functional area leaders, and your functional area leaders are serving your middle management. Your middle management is serving the rank and file, you know, the teams, right? The actual employees. But everybody is serving the The customer. Everybody is there to service the customer, and without the customer, you will fail. So when I talk about the ideal customer profile and who's serving who, it's identifying those 2 tracks, like understanding what it is that the person underneath me and above me wants and how do I set them up for success, right? How do I understand who I'm serving and what I'm supposed to be doing for them? And that's one piece of it. On the customer side, it's what are their problems that I'm trying to solve, right? So a lot of times I go through a process where I'll ask myself a question like, what would the customer do on their own at this price? And how low or high do I have to make the price for them to be willing to hand it off to be done by somebody else?

Mm-hmm.

Right? That's one thing. What are they willing to pay more for? What are they willing to pay less for? What are they willing to do for themselves? Where am I going to excel? Where am I going to do really well? And where am I going to cede to my competitors? So where am I going to let my competitors win? So for example, Apple lets everybody win on price. They don't care about that, but they put a lot of energy into the product itself, the efficiency of the product, and the branding. So they don't let anybody beat them there, but they let people beat them in price. So they'll let Samsung beat people in price and their What's called in ICP, they don't care about anybody that buys a Samsung because that to them that's not their customer. Their customer is somebody that is willing to pay the cost of an Apple product, and that's just how it is. And that's the same with all large brands, you know. So some somebody wants a Louis Vuitton bag. Louis Vuitton doesn't care if they buy a Kate Spade. You know, that's just that's not their customer. So you have to identify. who your customer is, and that's who you serve.

Okay. Okay. And I think we have time for one more question. I'm going to take this loaded question that we got through. Greg, why is it that so many businesses and startups fail on execution?

Usually, oddly, it's not because they can't execute. It's because they—they're not executing. It's not really execution. I mean, like I've looked into this a lot. You know, I've done like 1,200 interviews, and what I found is that if you take somebody from the military and you have them execute, they execute amazingly. Right? If you take somebody outside of the military, they can't execute, and that's because of the instructions they have. So that's when you talk about setting somebody up for success. Most of the time when people fail on execution, it's because they don't know. What they're supposed to execute on, and they don't know how, and they don't know what success looks like, right? So if you put in the groundwork, you put in the energy to make sure that the folks that are out there executing know exactly what they're supposed to be doing, when it's supposed to happen, that's from X to Y by date, right? You give them a time restraint and an expectation. I find that most of the time this fixes it. Sometimes you get somebody that is lazy, but it's really rare. I mean, most— I mean, most of the time when I dig into these things and really look into the problem, it's because the person's distracted. They don't know what they're supposed to do. Somebody upstream or downstream, uh, they're not setting them up for success. So somebody above them isn't setting them up for success, or the person below them is complaining, not able to achieve their execution goals, and it's because this person is So usually, I mean, business is a team sport and most people don't realize this is a team sport. And if you watch soccer, you can see the team at work. Those are functional areas, just like business. The goalie's not there and the ball moves downfield. Guess what happens? So you have to build your business and you have to think about the execution requirements. How, how do you make sure that the person who needs to execute is ready for that? How do you make sure that the ball is where it needs to be for that, for that player to line up and hit the ball in the net? Right? Where is it going to be? How does it need— who's supposed to be there? It's a team sport, and a lot of people forget that. So a lot of the problems I see, most of the problems, I mean, 99% of the problems are not because people don't know how to execute. They just don't know what they're supposed to execute on and what success looks like.

Well, we're just about out of time, Greg, and I just want to, from Cinda, thank you. We had a few board members listening today, and this has been absolutely fantastic. We're going to be inviting you to Cinda and hope to see you here in Europe, and very excited to continue communication with you and working with you.

Thank you.

The BOSS system is fantastic. Steph, on the Academy?

I think it's really resonating and it can help everybody, you know, at different stages of the business. And I think I really like the idea of having a cooperation with you on, you know, explaining the BOSS system further and talking to some of our people who are at different stages stages in business or acquiring new businesses and seeding small businesses, I think this is really going to help a lot. So thanks a lot for taking the time, Greg.

Yeah, we have all kinds of templates and tools and so much. I mean, we're going to build software for it, but we're trying not to. We're trying to use existing platforms to try to make them work for us so we don't have to build software for it. But we do have all these templates and stuff that we give people. So we're gonna be releasing more sort of instructional videos, like something where you can say, all right, here's the spreadsheet, you put this in here, all those things that I talked about, there's templates for them.

That's great.

You know, and this is how we actually run our portfolios. So it's, you know, it also, it gets them their board deck, it prepares them for their board deck. Like everything inside of there is what they need to put in their board deck. So it makes daily, you know, monthly updates to the shareholders easier. It makes the board deck easier to come across. I mean, you guys are going to find it is very useful, very helpful.

And I just got a few last comments as we sign off, Greg, from a couple members, and I'll just pick one out here from one of our members, Renato Bottinui, our Italian-British combination there. We know him quite well and said brilliant session and thank you very much.

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I really do. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be able to help and contribute.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you so much. And we'll see you at Cinda.

All right.

Yeah. Thank you. And take care. And thanks for taking your time today. And we hope to see every one of you in the next series of the Cinda webinar too. So check the Academy page and the website. Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Kim. Have a very good day, everybody. Bye-bye.

Bye. Okay, we're good, right?

Yeah, yeah, I think, uh, yep, Greg, I'll just call you back on Skype.

I have a call in 5 minutes.

Okay, well, thank you very much. It was fantastic. Okay, okay, all right, take care. Bye-bye. All right, thank you.