Lesson 11: Growth Platform

Hey everybody, welcome to the show. My name is Sean Everett. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the Everett Growth Platform today, and here's our little nice tagline: the pinnacle of higher performance business dashboards. So interesting little graphic here. We'll get to this a little bit more in detail, but that's what I'm about to explain. That's what the platform is and does. North Star metric drivers, NPS, CSAT, customer referral rates, how these all drive growth exponentially. So here we go. Okay, some of the symptoms we solve. If some of your executives or board members or even team members have been saying a few of these quotes, that's how you know it might be for you. I built this after a couple decades advising and operating early-stage startups all the way to the global Fortune 500, up to the boardroom of the Fortune 1. And in almost every case, these symptoms, these quotes, is what we hear that's an underlying problem that needs to be solved. A lot of it has to do with misalignment of people, folks not knowing what actions to take, working on the wrong metrics, focusing on the wrong things, and ultimately growth is dampened as a result of that. And by growth, we mean revenue growth, profitable growth, cash flow growth, employee growth, whatever you need to be, customer demand. So let's get into it. So a little bit of an overview, then we'll get into what we mean by growth and then some of the details. Okay, so overview. First of all, about us. I founded this firm a little over 7 years ago. We're primarily advisors and operators, particular expertise in product management, strategy, growth, experiential brand, enterprise, and consumer markets. And we built this platform after essentially implementing the same thing over and over again in high-growth businesses and doing a lot of diligence on M&A transactions and noticing A lot of the mid-market companies that are growing really well, have low competition, still could be growing even further, and they're not using these particular things. So it's one of the first things we do when we go into a company as part of our assessment and operational excellence. And then some folks that we've worked with in the past who trust us. So let's keep going here. So let's talk a little bit about the competition. We're in the data analytics metrics tracking world. You got to figure out how your performance is being measured and handled before you can start to supercharge that performance. So there's stuff in the market you've heard of— Google Analytics. If you're in the product management space, maybe Mixpanel, Amplitude on the software side. A lot of big businesses have heard of Tableau. Google acquired Looker a few years back. OpenAI is the new hotness. And the one thing you don't hear a lot of is just growth. So where's the platform for growth? It's us. It's something we've been focused on for a long time. This isn't marketing. This isn't sales. This isn't product management. This isn't customer success. This is growth. And every— we believe everything is a subset of growth. Everything a company does, everything investors want, everything the board wants, it's really all about growth. So that's where we're different. Let's keep going here really quickly. So we operate over the top of some of these other services. We work in tandem with them. If you've got a different one, not a problem. We can manage it, work with it, no impact to the price, no impact to the time period. All we really need is just a login and we can get going. Okay. So differentiators, how we're different, how we're better, standard sort of stuff. But a couple things I want to just point out is one, we're not a dashboard where we're going to give you every single metric under the sun. It doesn't matter. This already exists out in the world. You can have the best dashboards in the world, thousands of metrics. And the key question, you go to your team and it's like, Okay, how does this metric connect to that one? Which one drives that one? How sensitive is it to driving that one? What are your top 5 metrics? What are your top 15? Who is the owner assigned to each metric? How long have they been in the seat? How long or how much growth have they been able to achieve within each one of those metrics? And which level of the organization are they operating? Business unit level, management level, execution layer? Are they engaging the customer? So that's a key one. And then the other piece is we're not VC-backed. We're not PE-backed. We're not backed by a family office. We don't have investors. We operate this thing based on what actually works and what matters. We're not trying to appease anybody but you as the customer. And then the last piece is because of that, we don't have to have these lofty, insane growth goals for ourselves, which means we need to capture everybody in the world. Rather, we would rather have one, maybe two clients in an industry because this is a tool That's going to separate you from the rest of the pack. So if you are the category king or you want to become one, this is the tool that you're going to have to use. Doesn't exist anywhere else. What's our business model? Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. We don't charge on a per-user basis. That's legacy thinking. No setup fees, no onboarding fees, legacy thinking. It's very simple. How many business units do you have that you want to use this thing for to supercharge growth? We charge a flat fee based on that per month. The end. Are you a startup? Are you in the mid-market? The end. And then choose some of your customizations. How many metrics do you have? 15, 30. You know, how often do you want the data to be updated? Daily, weekly, monthly. This should align with your standup or review cadence with your leadership or management teams. And then what kind of features are you looking for, which we'll get into in a second. So what do we mean by growth? Not to bury the lead here, but I've got 3 different slides that I want to show you. 1, 2, 3, and I'll go through each one. Everett Growth Platform, that's the thing that we're offering to you today. And this is really about understanding what the North Star metric of your business is. This could be annual recurring revenue growth. This could be free cash flow growth if you're Amazon, for instance. This could be profits, whatever it is, return on assets if you're a financial services company, ROE perhaps. In the public sector, you will see executive compensation, pay-for-performance plans tied to this for bonus and long-term incentive plans. There's a hint there on how you also get people focused on the right things. And then underneath each one of these are the submetrics that actually drive this metric. So you just keep breaking this down further and further. And then at the core of this, which is what drives $0 marketing, referrals, word of mouth, Net Promoter Score, CSAT, et cetera. Okay, so that's the core engine that helps drive growth. What happens when this occurs? Well, you generate a cash generation engine, for lack of a better term. And ideally, if your business model is set up correctly, your costs will grow linearly. So that's sort of a standard line while your revenue grows exponentially, which means over time, the cash that you generate becomes greater and greater and greater by doing the same things over and over again. I lived close to Warren Buffett in Berkshire growing up, so, you know, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree here. And this gets us into our 3rd point, capital allocation flywheel. Now that you've got all this cash, what do you do with it? You got to pick the one with the right risk-adjusted return. That could be in your business, could be share buybacks, could be hiring a 3rd party, could be yada yada, don't even know. R&D, invent a new product. So ultimately, this is the flywheel that sort of keeps growth going. Okay, so here's that growth pyramid that we looked at here as a conceptual framework. Here it is built out a little bit more. This is proprietary to us. We've built and designed this. This doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. This is not an OKR dashboard. This is very different. This is some powerful, powerful stuff. So up here you can— this is just an example. Or an illustration, by the way. So here's supply, here's demand, here's your MRR, monthly recurring revenue. Cash flow is the metric. On the supply side, this means these are the people that are building the product, selling the product, yada yada. On this side, this is the demand side. Those are your customers. How many have been invoiced? Weekly active users. How many have they invited? Metrics, yada yada. This is an example of like the product we use our own product for ourselves, right? So this is kind of like how we manage this business. And then you know if you have a large company, many different divisions, let's say you just individual product lines like let's say you're Procter and Gamble, you could literally have one of these for each product, right? And each one of these would be a little bit different and how this breaks down. And this This map here, this pyramid, growth pyramid, is different for every industry and unique for each business. So that's just part of the like setup time that we do to help do some discovery, understand what that is, map this out and get rid of all the other noise. So your people can focus on each one of these things. And then you've got some other metrics like monetization, engagement, retention. So then what happens is this is what the actual product looks like right now. This is a client example, but you can see individual charts along the left side. But here's our growth pyramid at the top, which maps to something like this. This is a client example, and you can see how these things are connected. So let's look at this one right here, leads versus agreement signed. Your leads were growing, growing, growing. Your number of signed engagements were flat. So what's going on between these 2 things? Are they bad leads, low-quality leads? Is someone just not closing the deal at the end? And then, you know, it's the start of a new month, so it dropped off a little bit. So this is a startup, you know, this is some of their customizations, some of the levels. And then here's another example of, let's say, ads is a key component of your business, you're a consumer brand. Product e-com, let's say, and we can track, set up the scorecard, and this would be one sub-dashboard of the major dashboard. So like this would be one of these line items under the growth pyramid. You zoom in, you click on it, and you see this. So that's an example of how you can manage this stuff as cascading performance indicators. Okay, let's get into some more of the details here. So how do we customize this for your business? Well, in the beginning, you can see there's a lead, this is us, and then your team, obviously, we need some information from them. But it's a 3-step process: inspect, strategize, launch. Initially, we do some discovery, we understand your business, we do some phone calls, we do some data requests, all confidential and proprietary. Of course, we don't Share this stuff broadly. Once we figure out what drives your business, then we create your growth pyramid. So it would look something like this, different for every company. And then basically you use that with your team to iterate and grow. So what are you doing every week? You check in on this. What were the actions? Who owns it? We saw growth. We didn't see growth. What hypothesis tests were performed? Which one paid off? Okay, that one worked, this one didn't. And every week you check in and over time you start to see that the whole organization is running like a well-oiled machine and growth starts ramping exponentially. So it's some pretty powerful stuff. And then that's the piece where if you need help on the execution, we can help if you want. But most of the time your team should be the ones executing it. If they're not able to execute appropriately, then maybe they're not the right people in the seat. So that's how you separate the role, the impact, the performance from the person. Okay. And then this is just a little bit about the 2 core features. So the first piece is just set up the growth pyramid. The second piece is use it to drive growth. And so if we have this one correct, most of the time we get this correct right out of the gate, you know, maybe some tweaks every week, every month, something like that, change a metric out or 2. But for the most part, the metrics, the growth pyramid shouldn't change. And then what are you doing? What are the hypothesis tests that you're running? Which one is most sensitive to impact the North Star metric? So if we go back here, so down here, maybe it's this one. Some small change here drives huge increase or impact there. You want to spend more attention here. Over time, the world changes, business change, markets change, geopolitics change, climate change, everything changes. So this will change over time. But it's a way to keep a standardized framework and structure such that you can manage that change without discombobulating your team. That's it. That's me at the end. I know I talk fast. That's why I did a video. Push pause, rewind, fast forward, whatever you need to do. Okay, great. Thanks for spending some time with me. Thanks, Sean.