Activity Kills Growth: The Truth About Growing Any Company with Ajit Nawalkha at Joe Polish's Genius Network - I Love Marketing Episode #348
22 Apr 2019 · 2 min
Ajit Nawalkha argues that too much activity kills growth. He uses Mindvalley's shift to a single domain and faster product launches as proof that consolidating operations and finding high-leverage 80/20 solutions inside your business beats adding more outside activities.
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And one of the key things that I found, especially with companies who are led by entrepreneurs who want to get a lot of success, is it has a lot of activities. And what I found is activities are usually the reason why the growth of the company is stunted or is not at the level that it needs to be. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and.
This is the I Love Marketing podcast.
Ajit Nawaka builds businesses. After failing a startup, struggling through failed partnerships, and going from the ranks of an intern to a co founder, he found business is a lot more about emotional, spiritual, physical and mental resilience than and not as much about strategy. His mission and purpose is to impact a million lives directly. Over the past decade, he has helped educational companies increase their revenue, reach and impact. He has helped build Mindvalley and co founded Evercoach, an online platform for the world's leading teachers and coaches. Evercoach helps create programs and experiences that ignite massive change, enhance their practice, and drives better results and helps them expand their business. Ajit talks about how to grow your business and work even less, all while having positive impact in the world. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today. More information can be found@ilovemarketing.com subscribe if you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network annual event, go to geniusnetworkevents.com if you'd like access to the show notes or the exercise to help you take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 348.
Okay, here's a few loaded questions for you. How many of you would like to grow your business dramatically this year, have an even greater positive impact on the world, Work even less in doing it? Imagine if there was a simple way to do just that. Grow your business, have a positive impact on the world and work even less. That would mean you'd have even more time for family and friends. Be a world changer, earn more money and be a lot happier. That's what Ajit Nawalka is an expert in. For over a decade, he's helped educational companies grow their revenues, their reach and their impact. After working with Ajit, companies report growth of anywhere between 30% to 100%. Ajit also helped build Mindvalley, one of the leading brands creating positive impact in the world. Just three years ago, he co founded Evercoach, an online platform which currently helps coaches be better at what they do, creating results with their clients and growing their businesses. He already has over 100,000 coaches on his list of followers. Growth has been the focus of his life since he was a little boy. Growing up in a house of 23 in India, he dreamed of a different kind of life, which got him to travel around the world across 35 countries. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Nita. Ajit's title is Activity kills Growth. Please welcome Ajit Nawaka.
My title is the title of the presentation. It is very hard to pick a topic for a 10 minute talk. And you would imagine that considering all of you have phenomenal experiences in life, you must have, like, if I have to pick one topic, what do I talk about? What is that one thing that I can talk about? So it was a struggle for me. I talked for days sometimes with my tribe and so I talk strategies, structures and so forth. And to pick a topic for 10 minute talk, it was really, really hard because first I did like, I'll cram in all the strategies that everybody can take and take it home and then can use it. And then eventually I settled. But what is that one thing that seems to have always gotten the results for companies on a consistent basis, irrespective of the size of the company that I work with. And one of the key things that I've found, especially with companies who are led by entrepreneurs who want to get a lot of success, is it has a lot of activities. And what I found is activities are usually the reason why the growth of the company is stunted or is not at the level that it needs to be. How many of us do quarterly meetings? How many of us does annual meetings? Annual planning meetings, strategy meetings? Yes. Do we end up with a big list of projects that we need to execute? If you want to get the 30% to 100% growth year on year, what happens often is in quarterly meetings and annual meetings, we end up with a lot of projects. And I want to tell you a little story of a company, a little company at that time, when I joined it called Mindvalley about seven years ago, I joined this little then little company called Mindvalley. And I would say that was at that time mindvalley was a company with many heads. So imagine this, it was a company that right now you think mindvalley or Mindvalley Academy is this one single domain, right? Mindvalley is just one company which has one big vision, one big mission, and they're trying to achieve that mission. When I joined Mindvalley seven years ago, it was a company which had many different websites. So every different product would be a different Website mindvalley was a mission still at that point. But if you would try to find mindvalley or you open the website, you would not be able to gauge what the heck does the company do, right? Because it was basically a combination of many different website and different products that were out there. As I joined the company, one of the things that we realized is as much as we were working really hard and we really wanted to grow and we were growing as a company, it seemed like the return on effort was not nearly as much. The return on effort that we were putting in the company was not nearly as much. We started to question as to why the heck are we not getting the return that we should be getting for the amount of, we think, intelligence that we bring to the table or the kind of products that we bring to the table. Why is it that our growth percentage doesn't really match the outcome that we really or the effort that we put into it. The realization that came to us, if you look through under the hood of the company, was that every single time we had to introduce a product to market, what would happen is we would have to launch a whole new website. A whole new website. And that was the name of the game at that time. Everybody was doing that. Everybody was like, all right, a new product meant a new website. That's just how everybody operated at that point in the digital marketing world. And it would seem that we were doing the right thing from the outside. And you would think, oh, wow, so you're doing the right thing. But it would take us sometimes six to nine months to put a product out. In the education space, if it takes six to nine months to put a product out, it is an insane amount of timing, insane amount of time to put out one product. But we were doing that because, well, still it served the purpose. And yes, it grew the company. Until we asked the question of saying, why do we have to launch a new website every single time we have to launch a product? Why? There was no logical reason. And that gave birth to the first time that mindvalley was seen as one company. Because we launched something that was called at mindvalleyacademy.com, which now you know as mindvalley.com, which is one platform that allows all the integration that that is there possible with the company. How many of you know product launch formula? That was the second thing. So we said, okay, fine, so now we are on one domain, mindvalleyacademy.com, one domain, yes, we should cut down the time. Still Takes about three months to put a product out. Why? Anybody who has done a product launch with a product launch formula knows it takes six months, at least three to six months to put together a product launch formula sequence. Right? Agree. Yes. Yes. Right. That's the amount of time that it takes. So we're like, okay, that's what we do. And that's what we were doing, right? Every single time. Launch a product. How do you launch it? Well, Jeff Walker's God, so let's launch it. The product launch formula, right? Jeff Walker knows it all. And so we were doing the product launch formula, same problem. If it takes three months to put together a product launch, you can't grow the company at a pace that you want to grow. It's insane. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. So we again ask the question as to why the heck do we have to do a product launch formula every single time if we are introducing a product to the market? All we really need to do is to tell the right audience that here is your problem. Here's the solution to that problem. And that gave birth to, to what is now called the Mindvalley Masterclass. At that time it was an online cellist seminar type of setup or webinar type of setup, which now is called the Mindvalley Masterclass. Now we are known for that stuff. The point that I'm trying to make is that most of the time what we do in the company that we think is how we work or how we operate or what is the truth about a company is often not really the truth. There's something under that that actually makes it all work. There's a client of mine that recently came, I do intensives. I sit together with companies for two days, three days straight and we go deep into and we find ideas like Mindvalley Academy and Mindvalley Masterclass type of ideas with other companies. There was a client that came in and usually it's clarity based projects like, okay, you come in two days later, you get tremendous amount of clarity, focus and you go right in intensity and find solutions for your companies, right? So there's this client that comes in and says, ajit, I already know all the answers. I need to launch nine products next year, need to do these three events, so on, so forth. And I was like, holy shit, this is not going to work out for sure. They wanted to grow at 100% that year itself. We sat down and we realized again, same challenge, what you think is how you get a client is the Truth of how you actually get the client. It's not. It's not usually, and this is kind of a known thing to some degree to everybody, but it's something that we don't tend to do enough. Right? We all know the 8020 principle. We all know 8020 your work, and we do 8020 of our work. Right? But where the real truth lies is when you do the 8020 off your 20. So do the 8020 off the 20% is where you really find what is that truth about the company? What is that secret sauce? What is that less that you have to do that will give you exponentially more results? Less is more. And we know this intellectually, but we tend to not implement it in our companies. We tend to not try to find what is it and why is it that we are doing what we are doing? What is it that we are really doing? What's the real outcome that we are trying to get? My invitation to everybody here is if we could ask ourselves the question on what is that activity? What is that activity that we do right now in our company that we feel is the absolute truth about the company? That's the way the company works. That's the thing. And how can we look at that activity and see how do we eliminate that activity? Right. The way you think you get clients, what if you eliminated that? What is the new way or the more structured, more refined way for you to be able to create a more refined process for your business? We look for ideas outside. Usually you'll come to a meeting like this and we'll look for ideas outside. But most powerful ideas that will create transformative returns for your company, have you work much, much because it's so refined and so specific to your company and get to you. 30 to 100% growth, year on year are inside out, not outside in. We often focus on ideas that are outside in. So we look outside, we go, maybe that's the idea. That's not where the idea is. The idea is usually inside out. It's already in your company. If you're in this room, your company already has that idea. You just have to find it. Thank you.
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