Part 3 - How To Scale Your Business From $10M To $1B

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

Now I'm gonna probably get pushed back if I don't get a couple of comments about, from the king of scaling about when you come into a situation, you talked about it earlier in general terms, but when you come in and if you're going to come into any of our businesses and what size business are we talking about?

Now it is rare for me to join a company that's not already at $10 million a year in revenue. I will join some smaller, a part of a smaller one right now. But the opportunity is so massive, we're literally talking a billion dollars a year in reven.

And how many moving parts would they have? The company that you're, you know, the minimum company, how many minimum moving parts would they have? Because you said, you know, you go in and you can see the pieces there. What are the big pieces that you usually see?

They're always going to have a lot of big parts, but it may not be necessarily a lot of people or at least not full time. It's amazing how easy it is to get to a $5 million, $10 million a year reoccurring technology company now with just a handful, you know, five to ten full time employees because you can work with contractors and we can work with VAs overseas and whatnot. For me, the bigger pieces I'm always gonna end up separating into is marketing. Marketing is a big umbrella. We can talk about the pure sales, the closing of deals, but to me marketing is this bigger, is this bigger piece which actually encompasses sales and product. Because marketing is to me anything from somebody has never heard of your brand or what you offer to all the way until they've been a happy customer for like 10 years. Which means everything from setting expectations to the closing of the deal to the product that they're using, the product they were trained on and that they continue to repay for. And so I'm going to start to look at those individual segments and then there's the back office pieces which frankly often needs a lot of help, but I try not to get involved in a lot of that too much. I mean there's, There are fractional CFOs and controllers and accountants that help so much more with that. But the bigger pieces I'm going to come in are going to be probably the bigger moving pieces of marketing, sales and product with a heavy focus on the pure marketing lead gen all the way through closing.

Yeah, the salesforce, the delivery.

The delivery. Very often I find so many companies while sales has to, in many companies they feel like they have to own customer success. Forbes event has quoted me in three or four articles this last year talking about. I often advise companies to move customer success under marketing because sales often doesn't want them. That great sales leader often wants the next deal and they don't care so much about renewing or upselling. And that customer success team, the person that takes you through your pipe drive or Salesforce CRM and teaches your people how to use it and does their support tickets and trains them to use more of it so that they now bring on more users and they get more value. Well, that's a function sales usually doesn't want. They need it for revenue. But we can deal with the revenue piece of it. But that's the most valuable place to get insights to what your customers and potential customers are actually doing, not just with your product. If you want to grow a company, I need to know so much and be able to repeat so much about what your life is in your job as the decision maker that I can repeat back to you everything you're doing, not just a little piece that I saw. And you go, that's right. How did you know me that well?

Yeah. And how do you find that out? You talk about the CRM, the client relationship system and all that, the feedback. How do you go into a company and get the information that allows you to start moving pieces around or making suggestions.

If it's an industry like in real estate where I'm at right now, and I know both on the consumer side and the business side, we work with local agents and realtors. I'll usually come in with my documented assumptions and then use that as the to test what you actually think and the product teams think. And then we'll build off of that. If it's an industry I haven't been in before, which I think the best high performers can step into any industry and do, this is I will come in and I will sit down with everybody in the company from individual contributors to the CEO and get them to tell us everything about the problems that customers having, what our product actually does, what parts of the product or service the customers actually use or see value in, I then will call 15 to 20 people who have said no to the company or who have canceled the product because that's who I care most about. Because what I'm looking for from all those conversations is to document to some degree, I am just trying to get what is reality like for our customers. But what you have to do to get that and to bring the rest of the company with is identify all the hidden assumptions. The CEO wants to believe that their product is the best, but is it? So you've got to bring them reality about what customers actually believe and what does that actually solve. And we built this product that does 13 different things. But does anybody, including the product team, know that customers only use two of those 13 things? That's an important thing. Maybe you do need to build all 13 to sell it, but you need to know what they're actually using. And so I'm going to come in and help document all of that as quickly as possible. And then we're going to build the strategy to actually do that one on.

One, or you do that in group setting, or.

Or both, usually one on one for the conversations, as much as I can up front. And then as we start rolling out what I believe I've heard, I'll do groups for those, especially with the C Suite. The C suite needs to react together, I find to be like. Because, I mean, when you put out something that's completely contrary to what the chief Product officer thinks and that they've been spending dollars on, they're going to stand up. And it doesn't mean that I'm right, but what happens in that interaction is going to be hugely beneficial for everybody to hear.

Now, see if you agree with what I'm going to be saying here, because I'm going to be talking to people, listening now. And if you're thinking about your situation, what you should hear from this is reality. Really the only thing that will prompt change. Change is reality. Arguments do not make people change their, you know, their religion, their political preferences or their opinion, you know, you know, scream at each other just louder, louder. But it's. You get face to face with reality. That's when change happens. And when, when I hear you going in and people like, how can I do this? What should I be doing? Because, you know, even if you're going to bring in, you know, a person like Kurt to help you, you can kind of lay the groundwork by getting the. What's missing is the facts and, you know, the real facts and there's a disc. Would you say that it's true that there's a disconnect in the facts that people and the assumptions and your job, your first thing is like, let's get the picture clear picture on the table and see what that tells us reality really is in this company.

Absolutely. And I mean, and even it's so much more so, especially when the founders came from the industry, that the company is a company solving a problem for, because they've often built things for themselves and they think they know. And the one thing is, I don't care what role somebody is that's listening. Whether they're, they work for themselves, they're the CEO or they're the front office manager, they are wrong about two to three major things in their job right now and they don't know it. I mean, at the most basic level, my job and everybody's job at a leadership level is to understand what we think we're right about today that we're actually wrong about. It could be a core belief about what our product does or what the problem is our customer has, or it could be that thinking that how we're doing this one process is the best way to do it and therefore we stop looking for ways to improve that. But I'm wrong about something today, that is a year. I'll figure it out. If I walk in the door every day today and I go, I'm wrong about a few things, you're wrong about a few things. Our job is interacting together is to help each other and ourselves identify not in 12 months what we're wrong about, but what we're wrong about today or within the next two months, as opposed to waiting 12 months. That's how companies go faster, is when you can get to reality and go, holy. We thought we've been trying to sell this way and it's not connecting. And we just keep trying to put more salespeople on it and tell them they got to make more cold calls and do more follow ups. And the reality is there's these three other things. And if we do these three other things, deals are easy.

Yeah. You know, when Jamie Dimon came out of Harvard, his father worked for, had worked his entire career with Sandy Weil. And Sandy was with American Express back then. And they threw him. They, they didn't make him president, they threw him out, gave him a big buyout. He made more million dollar earners while he was a vice president, American Express during the 90s than anybody in history up to that time. And so for a year, Jamie and Sandy looked at opportunities and they started in 90 with, yeah, in the 80s he did it in the 80s he worked with Amex. But in the 90s they started and they got this little commercial credit Finance company out of Baltimore, Maryland. They started with that and then they started acquiring and they put a super team together, you know, like people out of financial, the financial world. The best people they had known. And what they would do is once a month they would get together and they would get, and they started adding companies to it and Smith Barney got in there and different ones. But so over 10 years they would have a monthly planning meeting and once a month they would go and they would have 24 hours summit meeting and everybody would lay the facts on the table for those companies and they would say, you know, what needed to be done and everybody would show how they're delivering. And, and at the end of 10 years, he had the number one company in the world, which was Citigroup, that, you know, at that time, and this is before Apple took over and this, it was before they put an accountant in charge. I forget his name right now. But he greatly led the stock price for $50 down to $0.50. But after Sandy Weil was forced to retire because of age. But anyway, during that march up there, we were the marketing engine for Citigroup. And so they would come to our annual convention. I remember getting ready to walk on stage about 50, 60,000 people and Jamie Dimon's right next to me. And so I said, well, I'll take the chance, you know, I'll find out something from Jamie. And I said, Jamie, when you have those planning meetings once a month, what do you guys, what do you guys talk about? He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world. And he said, the facts. We look at the facts. And that's, you know, the idea was the facts tell them what decisions they needed to make that month. And if you just look at the facts, the facts will speak to you. And that's kind of, would you say that's a part of the story that you go into is you try and get the facts on there and rather than wait for God to give you an inspiration from heaven about how to.

Reorganize things, the facts, or at least the concrete perceptions. So it's like, yeah, perception, yeah. Well, I say that in terms of, I think there is there in any role, especially as you move up the ladder and more knowledge work. There's time that I need to be spent. I call it, you know, looking out the window time. I need to not be looking at my computer. I need to not have anything that, you know, music playing. I need to just stare at a wall and think maybe, you know, I might have my whiteboard over here, and I might be working on there, but I need to work through a problem, but that's rare. Usually that's much more of me organizing thoughts that have come through there. So they're either facts or, as I mentioned, it's the perceptions. From talking to customers and understanding what's going on, it's hugely valuable to know, hey, this problem really exists with our customer, and we solve it better than anybody else, and they'll pay us for it. But if that's only 1% of the job for our customers, well, we need to know that because we need to know what else is going on in their lives. Because, I mean, if I've got a problem that if I've got a solution that solves 15% or 50% of your problems, you'll take my call. But if it's a. Like, at any day that I call you and be like, hey, I have something that's better. But if I've got a solution that solves, like this little thing for your office or your bar or your technology company, that's a perception of the customer that I need to know. And is that a fact? It could be a fact. It's at least something that's documented to go, this is what it's at. And so. And to be able to work through it. So either way, things have to be written down. We all have to agree on it. That's the biggest thing I find is too often, and when I step into a company, especially if they've been pretty successful and they've kind of started to hit that slump, they're at 25, 30 million dollars a year, and they got ahead a really good run getting up there and then kind of cooled off when I go in and start to talk to people. Everybody in the C suite has a very different view of who the customer is, what the customer's job is, what the problem, what the product actually does, what parts of the product the customer actually use. And when I put that down on paper and I. I unanimize it in most cases, and I'm like, I. I went to ask and, like, come to, like, eight big categories. And here's what y' all told me. Here's what I believe on there. I'm the only person I usually will document stuff from. And people are like, no, that's like, like, because people help themselves. They'll be like, I'm number four. That's the one. That's right. You made those other things up. And I'm like, see, this is the Problem is that like we don't have when you grow or when things are on fire. People are just trying to get by day to day and they're not documenting what is either what every. We're not finding agreement on things. We're just saying I'm right and when I believe I'm right, I'm usually wrong.

Yeah. You know, the thing is to, to remember when you're growing. You know, if you're running a company and the company's growing, it's either going to be growing more together or it's going to be start to be growing apart. And you can usually keep. I used to tell our team there's nothing that can stop us as long as we stay together. We're on the same wavelength. We're still committed. We don't let any kind of personal things come in and you know, we feel good about each other. We're still motivated. Nothing can stop us. But as soon as that starts to fade, we, our growth is going to go down.

Yeah. And it's the humbleness of heart. It's both the humbleness of heart to admit to know that you might be wrong, but also to seek to understand and make sure. Like when I say a term and you say a term, do we mean the same thing? So we talked about I'm really good at modern marketing. That's what I why I help companies scale. Well, I was running marketing for a public company and the CEO had done exceptional marketing up until about 10 to 12 years before I got into the role of working for him and he CEO of the public company. Well, he generally believed he was right and the smartest person in the room always on marketing. Well, that was a problem because we could have had some great discussions on SEO because some of the concepts are still very similar and because he had a foundation from 12 and 15 years ago, we could have brought him along to what's discussing today, but he just believed that how he did things 15 years ago were how they should be done today. Fast forward to a CEO I'm working with today. Brilliant marketer, brilliant sales gut, feel for about how to respond and messaging. Spot on. But almost always defaults to Kurt, I trust your opinion, sometimes to the fault of not even asking me to explain it. You know, I'm like, let's walk this through because like there's certain things I'm a hundred percent certain on because it's my wheelhouse. There's other things that says there's a couple of options here. Let's make sure we agree on the risk profile we want to choose because I'm going to put some money in. And so I love that humbleness of heart of the second CEO I gave the example to because still just as knowledgeable in the background but is always willing to say I might be wrong. Let's talk about it.

Yeah.

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When you go, you've done keynotes. You'll be doing more keynotes because you know your brand's expanding. You're going to continue to do well. You're not going to all of a sudden wake up tomorrow and start to get dumber and lazier. You're going to stay on track and good things are going to happen. So you'll be in front of people and you have been in front of groups and it's a wide variety. You know, you can't speak to a certain one subject or another. How do you go in there? How do you try and connect with them? What do you try and leave them with? What are the main things you try and leave your group groups with when you're doing a keynote?

And whether it's a keynote or I do a fair number of virtual corporate talks right now for both divisions and sometimes full companies in all cases. I know there are people that do really well having their their keynote that if you listen to 20 of their keynotes, it's almost the same talk just 20 times over. And I don't fault that. It fits very well with their book and their niche. I much rather take the time up front to understand what are they trying to accomplish with their conference with their team and their division. And hey, you came to me because I talk about creating high performing teams and companies, usually through servant leadership, but I don't even have to use those terms. Tell me what problems you're going through or that you think if it's an industry conference, what problems are you trying to solve for Your people in this conference and what do you want the takeaways to be from the whole conference for them? And. And then I'll come back to them and go, I think I should adapt my talk to be in these areas with them. And then can I have two or three intros to two or three people that are the perfect Persona that's coming, that I can actually talk with them and interview them so that I can adapt my talks with them and I'll do that same thing. Also, I do keynotes. But on more and more, a lot of my talks have been guided fireside chats. It's amazing. I didn't know until I got into it how many fireside chats are actually entirely scripted beforehand, at least the questions. But I love the thing where it says, look, I could get up there and pontificate, but I'm happy to have a third of the time set aside for questions. But let's go through two thirds of the time for questions that your people might submit ahead of time, even that you curate and that we can guide through a conversation to make it more entertaining for that.

Yeah, I love that because I never thought to do it. Now I like the idea of. Although some people, it worked for them, they're good, they do the same talk. It's just like the Pope blessing the talking, speaking to the masses at the Vatican and, you know, God bless them and they'll connect with people. They've got their jokes and their, their routines down and it works, you know, you can't argue with success. However, I've always thought when I went in, first of all, I bore too quickly to do that. And I mainly, when I speak, I'm mainly going to try and keep myself entertained with the idea. If I can keep myself entertained, I could probably keep everybody else interested because you can't keep them interested. It doesn't matter, you know, because they're, they're not going to remember anything you said. So what I found that to perk things up is I would always talk to the people who invited me. You know, the leaders of the groups are like, what's going on? What's been the successes? What's been the problem areas? What's, what's the areas of improvement? What things do you think would be some good themes that would help get things moving or whatever. But I never thought to call and ask them to go down a layer to speak to people below them who could give me some additional insight.

That.

That seems like a very, very insightful approach.

It gives a lot more information to me, but it allows me to tailor my talk that much more to something that, that people are going to remember is going to be meaningful. It's like nowadays there's, you know, corporations have so much money to bring in speakers and trainers and. And it's like. So I spoke to a large division of a public company and their SVP had reached out to me originally to want me to talk about servant leadership. And we had a discussion about remuneration. And like, it was all okay. And she was like, so are we good to go? And I was like, I'm not sure. And so. And then there was some hesitancy and I was like, like, the dollars are all okay, but like, I haven't heard enough of like, concrete problems. Like, I'm not a motivational speaker. You've given me a couple things that I want to ask more questions on. So she and I did talk through some of that more, but it was. I took. Took 20 minutes with three of her direct reports to confirm what I was sensing, what might be some problems. And then I came back to her and said, here's what I'm hearing, here's what I think I should talk about. And so like healthy conflicts was some of those and people feeling like that they could actually try things and fail and not worry about getting fired. And so we literally made like almost the entire talk about how not the individual contributors, but how people that are managing people need to speak up on their own failures and facilitate talking about things that they're wrong about and how the individual contributors should start to expect this change to happen because everybody wants to get to this outcome. I got like a dozen emails afterwards, one from the woman who brought me in initially, but from people on her team. They're like, this was perhaps career changing. And I'm like, it was only career changing because she was open to allowing me to talk to some people on her team and us tailor something that was going to be meaningful and not just dollars. Like, I don't need dollars from her to talk. I need. I want it to be impactful. I'm not going to do it. Do a gig.

You have contradicted yourself. You do give motivational speeches. That is, that was a motivational speech. It wasn't a rah.

I mean, motivation works for like 30 minutes and then you got to get back to work.

It wasn't a rah rah speech, but it was. You changed your career. That's the kind of motivation you want. Now I will say this one. I suspect that for a Lot of people, maybe you're not making the impact you could in your speeches because most people really love speakers that have had tough times because you, you know, it seems like the more popular your talk is going to be is the more things you tell them that you've had to overcome. Because most people think whoever's speaking, they've had the easy life, everything comes to them easy. And the more they can find out that you've got stuck in the mud along the way and had to, you know, fallen in the ditch many times, like I did when my 8 years old and my mother gave me this new gorgeous yellow sweatshirt. And I chose that afternoon to see if I could ride in my bicycle across a 6 inch plank across a mud ditch. It went right in. Nice. And so the more they, you know, people find out that you've gotten yourself into some situations either of your own making or just life, it seems that they can relate to you. But it seems like, how would you let people know that it hasn't been an easy ride for the young? Kurt?

That's often comes out as one of the reasons that I like talking with people, because I don't know what's, what are my failure stories to bring up until I know them. A little bit years ago, gosh, it's probably been like nine years ago, I spoke at the leadership conference for the performance products industry, the swag industry, what people put brands on, I know nothing about. I knew nothing about that industry before my talk. And so I got referred into it. I'm like, I needed to talk to the people that were running those companies to know what would be meaningful because half of my stories, 90% of my failure stories or things that I might bring up would not be relevant to them. I needed to understand them. So it's a little bit of a crutch. I mean, it's a lot easier to know what antidotes to bring up and stories from the past or from people and companies that I've coached. When you get to know what's actually going on in people's lives, I mean, I. Same thing. I, I spoke at rcaf, that's the basically independent Ranch Beef and Lamb Ranchers of America.

Okay.

I'm a carnivore, so I've got that. But other than that, I know nothing about the life of a rancher, you know, and so I needed to talk with people ahead of time so that I, I could bring a good story to them.

Yeah. So what did you wind up with in that case?

I came to them much More with they had a great message and they kept struggling with marketing and how to get it out. And so we kind of, we went through with more of a messaging about how they may want to think as an organization and members about competing with a Made in America movement.

Yeah, but have you ever had problems in that area, learning that yourself?

Not so much there. I mean, some of the same that the issues where they'd been trying to take the same approach for marketing and positioning, that just wasn't working. I've had those problems before and was able to give some of those examples, but they're from different industries. And so I think it's good to be able to say, like, hey, I've tried doing the same thing for 10 years in a row and it wasn't a good path.

Right.

You don't want to take another two, three years to get there. Let's agree it's not a good path. Here's some other options, right?

Yeah, let's let people know lifestyle because I think a lot of times you just don't think about it and you don't know it's a possibility, but they don't know that the possibility exists for some of the lifestyle things that you and I enjoy, which for me, I go three months between for a long time, raising the family, running the business up in North Carolina, you know, I was stuck in a spot. But then when you move to different stages in your life, and now I'm able to go from Palm Beach, I don't like to go to resorts, I like to live at resorts and I like to be there all the time. And so the thing is, with remote work, you can be working and be in great environments. And that's why three months in Palm beach, three months in Aspen, summer, winter, Aspen and the off seasons in Palm Beach. Now, you and most people don't think it's like a wild, crazy dream, but no, there's a lot of people that have different homes. You know, they got a place in Maine and they've got, you know, they might be in, have a residence in New York City because they like the, the culture there or something, or they're in the Hamptons. But you can have, if you think about your life now, about where you'd like it to be five or ten years from now, maybe you can, you know, because when I first came, Kirk, when I first came to Aspen, I got invited to speak at a convention and a friend said, you know, he had moved out here from Atlanta and he said, why don't you move out here. And I said, if you lost your mind, how would I do that? Well, five years later I had a place here because it dawned on me, I learned I didn't have to live here permanently. I could be here part time. You know, at the time I wasn't even thinking about that. And so your lifestyle, do you mind sharing some of your lifestyle and how you came to make that happen for yourself? Because you've been able to have the quality and the quantity in terms of business productivity without sacrificing the quality of family life.

For me, I think both for myself, but also with people that I'm hiring, I'm trying to be as high performance as I can be personally because I get joy from that. But I'm also wanting my teams to be as high performant and which means like I don't need them to waste time. Like there are times to bring people together in office. There are jobs and companies where they have to be in the office. That's not most things nowadays. And not only that, there's a lot of people that are really, really capable at their jobs and are some of the top performers. But you could not pay them enough money to ever come into an office to because of a family dynamic. They may have a special needs child, they may have a spouse going through cancer or something else. They may be in elder care. They may get thrust into that, you know, even though you have them in the office initially right now, well, if your company is requiring somebody to come into the office all the time, none of those people could ever work for you. It also means that people are always having to trade off and I would have to trade off. That says, well, if I want to go pick up my son after school or camp one day, well, I have to take off of work. Well, instead I can just adjust one of my breaks that I have that says I've got a 30 minute break, that I'm going to go pick him up. And so I built a productivity career myself focused on output. And that's what people come to expect when they work with me. But that's what I expect when I hire people as well. There are certain roles that I might need somebody in front of a camera or a phone or a computer, customer support. I need you at certain hours to make sure people are responding in shifts. But if there's not a lot of things like that, we care about output much more than anything. When you make that shift, not only can I now go decide, I'm going to start picking up my, I have a five year old, I'm trying to teach them how to jump rope. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, by far is teaching a five year old how to jump rope. Well, I can take just 10 minutes every afternoon in the middle of a work day and go teach him how to jump rope so that it doesn't mentally tire him out in some marathon sessions. And it's actually more productive for me when I come back to work for the next couple hours because I've had a mental break. Well, that's the same thing I expect where I have somebody that works for me that got thrust into elder care and he's like, I'm going to not be so productive for the next 30 days while I figure this out. So not only have I built my career around that, that's what I expect out of the teams. And I tell people that's why I'm hiring them. I expect you to work more than you probably have ever worked before. I expect you to find great joy in that too. But I care about the output, not the hours.

Yeah, absolutely fantastic. And I've kept you too long, but I appreciate your time. We always have so much fun talking together.

Well, we got tens of thousands of listens last time, so I think this conversation is going to go well too. I think it will.

And I want to give you the last word, any last one comment you would have for the people that have stayed with us so much.

I mean, I kind of seen from some of your things is just like kind of trying to figure out how to just win over time and be that serial winner. And I think that's the mentality people need to have because, like, we always overestimate what we can do in the short term, but we drastically underestimate what we can do in the long term. So you may not win this week or this year, but just keep at it and keep trying.

Yeah, yeah, that's great. Great advice. And Bill Gates gives that advice quite frequently as well. So thank you very much. Look forward to the next time.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Larry.

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