Business Mastery With Bill Prater
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If you want to excel in business, don’t think like the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Joining John Livesay in today’s episode is Bill Prater, a business owner, entrepreneur, publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. Bill is best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers, rapidly reach their current dreams, and embark on a journey of business mastery. Today, Bill shares some insights on how you can think like an elite performer and dominate your market. Enjoy the episode.
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Listen to the podcast here
Business Mastery With Bill Prater
Our guest on the show is Bill Prater, who’s an expert at Business Mastery. He tells people not to use the same approach for all problems. He’s got some insights on how to dominate your market and how to think like an elite performer. Finally, he says, “Always be ignorant. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and stay curious.” Enjoy the episode.
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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Bill Prater, who’s a business owner, an entrepreneur, a publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. He’s best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers so they can rapidly reach their dreams and embark on this journey of Business Mastery. His own story was that he was excelling in sales, sales training, and sales management at IBM in the computer division as a national sales manager and a partner in the country’s largest oil and gas securities firm. He raised more than $750 million of equity capital in eight years. He recruited, trained, and led more than 100 sales professionals and achieving average revenue growth of 100% annually. I know how hard that is. Bill, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, John. Let’s make this happen.
One of the things I want to ask about having sold multimillion-dollar mainframe computers myself earlier in my career is your own story about that. We can start the story before IBM. If you’d like, you can start with school, college, or wherever you got this passion for connecting and sales.
The connecting and sales lineage started back with me being a full-ride football guy at a university. I got a scholarship. I got hurt before the season started. After the first year was over, I had to figure out how to go to school on my own. I ended up working in the land surveying civil engineering field and made pretty good money that I thought, “Why bother going to school?” That’s my first relationship with the value of money. I ended up flunking out of school. I went back and saw the Dean of Men at the University of Washington. I said, “I like to come back into school because I’m a good guy,” and I went through my whole spiel. He said, “No. Why would I let a flunk out in the school when I have these eager young freshmen that want to come into school?”
Business Mastery: If you think you know the answer to something, go ahead and ask anyway. You never really know what you don’t know until you ask.
That was an excellent point. He vented. What he said is, “I’ll let you into night school if you get straight A’s, then I’ll let you go into the day school.” I said, “How do I get straight A’s?” He says, “I don’t know. Ask the professors.” He needs to know I’m dead serious. “Think this through. What kind of students asked the professor how to get an A?” I said, “Probably A-students.” He said, “You got it.” That was my first major learning about effectively, the art of asking questions or, better yet, asking for help. You and I have a sales background, sales management background. You’re stuck with it. I’m still in it, even though I don’t claim I’m a sales guy.
A big major lesson that I got early on is always to be ignorant. By that, I mean, even if you think you might know the answer to something, then go ahead and ask anyway. You’ll never know what you don’t know until you ask. Fast forward, I did ask the professors how to get A’s. I ended up getting straight A’s for the rest of my college career and graduating on the Dean’s List. It’s all because of that simple question, which I asked over and over again. It was amazing the kinds of things these people would do to help me get an A.
They know you’re that committed. What I love about what you said, “Always be ignorant. Ask anyway,” as opposed to assuming you know what the answers are going to be. I’ve helped some people when they’re interviewing for a job ask a question. At the end of every interview, people say, “Do you have any questions for us?” Unfortunately, a lot of the younger people might say, “When’s my vacation start?” I tell them to ask this question, “What would it look like if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” It is another way of saying, “What do I need to do to get straight A’s?” Most people never ask a future employer that question, nor do they ask a professor that question.
When people are reading this, they can start to think, “What question am I not asking that I could ask that my competition is probably not asking? What set me apart?” Once you have that momentum going in any conversation, whether it’s a sales conversation or trying to get your team motivated to grow and scale, which is your expertise, it completely shifts in the box traditional way of solving things. Also, what I love about that story is your resilience. A lot of people would have given up. “You got a good point. Why should you give it to me when you got all these hungry freshmen? That’s too high a bar. Straight A’s? Forget it.”
[bctt tweet=”Allow yourself to be ignorant and ask questions anyway.” via=”no”]
There are lots of things that come out of that story that starts to give me a little more color and texture, almost like a painting coming to life. I know how hard it was to get a job at IBM. They would test everybody. If you think getting into college was tough, getting a job at IBM was tough. It was the best of the best. You just didn’t get a job. You thrive there. I’m sure there’s a little more context. I specifically want to know when you were at IBM, this premise of scaling 100% out of 100%, there are two things that come up all the time when I’m talking to people who are entrepreneurs, salespeople, or both. One is fear of rejection. The other one is, “I had my best year ever. How am I going to top myself?” That’s where the superstars like you shine, is the consistent growth, not just, “I have a great year. Don’t ask me about next year.” How do you start to help people with that mindset and strategy?
That’s exactly what it is. It’s the mindset. What it is that all of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious. Since it’s in our subconscious, we’re able to deal with a bunch of stuff. We don’t have to think, “What color is that light? What color is red?” You know red means stop the car. You don’t process that through. A couple of points about mindset is that it had happened at IBM that I realized what my programming was.
When I was young, I remember vividly that when something would happen in the house where my grandmother lived with us, she’d say, “Billy, do something about that.” I didn’t have any idea what it was all about. I jumped up and took action. I didn’t think. I just responded. That’s lesson number one. I realized that in a company like IBM, there’s a lot of telling you what to do going on all the time. I decided, “No. I’m going to think this through, not be reactive and figure out how can I reduce the amount of time it takes to get something done?” If you remember IBM, they used to be greedy good at giving you performance appraisals.
I was a systems engineer to start with. I get in performance appraisal. My boss, his name is Dave, said to me, “Your score is outstanding.” I said, “That’s great. I’m outstanding. Now what?” He said, “What do you mean now what?” I said, “If I’m already at the top, what’s next to your point?” He flounders around a little bit, frankly. I got him in a box because I was outstanding. I said to him, “If I’m your number one systems engineer, am I the highest-paid systems engineer?” They don’t like to answer that question, but he did, unfortunately, and said, “No.” I said, “I don’t understand how I could be rated number one and not being the number one paid?”
Business Mastery: Most of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious.
He went through. He got the old chart out. You’ve seen the charts of how many years and what your score is. The maximum raise you can get. It’s all a Mathematical model. He said, “The only way to get paid what you’re worth in IBM is to be a sales guy.” I said, “Okay, sold.” He said, “No, not so fast. You’re my number one systems engineer. I don’t want to let you go.” I said, “Dave, that is not a good answer. You’ve got it.” He says, “I’ll let you go to sales school if you finish in the top three.” I go, “Okay.”
I got the challenge of finishing the top three. I ended up finishing at the top one. I was number one in sales school. I came back, and I walked into his office. The school ends on a Friday, and I’m back at work on Monday. He doesn’t know anything about what happened. He said, “How did it go?” I said, “It went pretty well. When’s my sales job?” He said, “What do you mean?” I pull out my gold cross pen that has IBM on it and I hand it to Dave, and he uttered a nasty word. I said, “It’s time for sales.” He said, “You don’t want to go now. This is September. You’d have to have a whole half year’s quota.” I said, “Fine.” He says, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You got three months to do a full half-year.” I said, “I want to go now. You’re barking was if I did this, I get there.”
I ended up doing pretty well. I bought myself a Porsche in the whole deal because I completely shut it out. I shut the lights out. You and I talked before we got into our interview about cold calling. I figured I might as well go cold calling people. I don’t know anything else about what to do. I go. One of the very first people I banged on the door of, I walked in, and the receptionist said, “You’re with who?” I said, “IBM.” She said, “I’m sure that David wants to see you. We’re looking for a computer.” That was it.
Once you got into sales management, how did you keep the momentum going when your team would have a good year and the quotas would go up accordingly? This is why I was excited to have you on the show is we can go into this subconscious mindset. I feel from my observations that a lot of salespeople think when they’ve had a great year, it’s a fluke. Therefore, when you were asked to repeat it or exceed it, it’s the same thing for the business leaders you deal with, a new council. They don’t have a plan or a roadmap in place.
[bctt tweet=”Be curious to get insights.” via=”no”]
They say, “Everything started lined up as a perfect storm.” They had a big knee. They had a budget that they’ll never have again. “I can’t possibly find another client like that. With these numbers, I’ll never make it.” You take the mindset and the strategy. It’s not just one or alone. I wanted to get a sense from you when you work with companies. Companies hire you to pick this expertise and give them the scalability issue that you’re great at. Not just growth but dynamic growth. What is it that you do that helps people overcome their initial negative self-talk that they can’t possibly exceed the best year they’ve ever had in terms of mindset? What are they missing strategy-wise?
I’m going to finish up with mindset and then we’ll jump into strategy or positioning. A lot of what you asked me and a lot of the answers I deal with is the notion that we’re originally programmed or taught that we need to deal with the environment we’re put in or the hand that you’re dealt. You’re given a certain quota, a crappy sales territory, a sales team, but half of them are rookies. We can continue to list all of that. All of that, in general for all of us, you and I and the people that are reading, if you think about a bell curve, most salespeople, sales managers, business owners think of themselves as in the middle. In the middle is what’s called the standards or the averages. That’s the way you measure the middle of any industry.
The people that end up looking at the environment through the prism of being in the middle of the bell curve are going to stay in the middle of the bell curve. What you need to do mindset-wise, I found is you’ve got to figure out what the elite players in your niche. If you’re 1 of 140 salespeople, they’re not all performing equally. You don’t think the revenue of the company, divide by 140, and everybody does that Math thing. Instead, there are some super laggards. There’s the mass unwashed middle, and then there are the superstars. What are the superstars doing? One, they’re not waiting until they get their quota in the middle of January. They’re starting day one, minute one. Second, you remember this with IBM, every year, they had a different sales plan. The sales plan was designed to benefit the company called IBM.
They wanted you to sell certain things. They wanted you to add certain kinds of software and a variety of it. They put all that stuff in the sales plan. Step one, minute one, don’t deal with all that stuff, go figure out what the fastest path to the cash is, and go do that. It’s usually a machine they want you to sell etc. Number one is don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche, instead figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Their mindset is one of mastery, dominance, excellence or extraordinary. Emulate that. Strategy is an entirely different thing than tactics, but a lot of people get that stuff mixed up. For example, a tactical thing to do is to make cold calls on the phone or send out cold emails.
Business Mastery: Once you’ve got the goal and assembled your resources, the next step is to execute.
The question is, why are you doing that? What’s the strategy? What’s the higher-order bid? What’s the reason that you have to go down the road you’re going down? Once you’ve figured out your reason or your strategy, then you can start doing tactics. Maybe cold calling is a perfect fit, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe, instead, what you want to do is go and interview your last year’s customers and have them tell you, for example, here’s the question, “Sir, I enjoyed working with you last year. How could I have served you better?” That’s the question I taught my people to ask. We went and interviewed all of our customers the previous year, ask them how we could do better, how we could serve them better. We got this huge list. We got our whole tactical plan from asking people, “How do I get an A?”
Were there many surprises? Were those things you knew you could do better and didn’t have the resources to do, or was it, “I had no idea that was something people wanted, so we weren’t doing it?”
Mostly surprises. Companies like IBM or Transamerica are large organizations. The senior executives don’t have a clue what’s happening on the street. The people that know what’s happening on the streets are the people that are on the street. Just because the sales plan or the missive from on high says, “X, Y, Z,” that doesn’t mean that something like, “P, R, Q,” is what you should be doing. The only way you can find that out is to ask people that are your customers. Prospects are going to give you the answers too, but they don’t have much context because they haven’t seen what you’ve done in the past.
This Business Mastery system that you’ve been doing for many years, helping companies, small and large, figure out a killer strategy, makes a lot of sense in that context. One of the things you have on here is this wonderful blog about What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?, as opposed to, “I’m going to try, be like a baseball player, and hit a certain percentage.” You’ve got four beautiful colored circles, things. Would you walk us through what those are? We’ve touched on them. I want to intrigue them to read this blog. If you described what the four things are and how they all keep going round and round to keep growing, it might be a light bulb moment for some people saying, “No wonder I’m missing this key part while I’m doing 3 of the 4.”
[bctt tweet=”Don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them.” via=”no”]
Even using baseball or softball, either one analogy is a good place to start. Nobody told you that you had to have a good batting average. Your coach didn’t say that. Nobody said that. That’s not baseball. That’s not what it is. If you’re up for batting, what is the first thing you’re supposed to do? It’s not hit the ball. The first thing to do is get on base. How can you get on base? The ball can hit you then you go on base. You can hit the ball and have nobody catch it or throw you out at first. You’re then good on base, or you can walk. There are at least three different ways.
The point of it is to figure out how to get on base. That’s back to that comment about a tactic versus the strategy. The individual player, the job of the batter, is to get on first. They do have a term in baseball and softball called on-base percentage. That’s much more important than a batting average. It’s the same thing as though in business. What I discovered of a variety of things and I won’t go in order because frankly, John’s describing, it is a cycle, number one, and it fits for any size company in any niche privately held and republic he held but even more magically if it’s in every department in every company. Even more magically, it fits in every team in every department, in every company. It makes my life easier.
Those of us that are in sales is a practical matter. We’re a business owner. We have a geographical territory, some product niche, or specialty. All of that is an entrepreneur’s or business owner’s jive. We already talked about this concept of the environment. The environment is where all your resources are. That’s where you have your tools and potentially some team members. Most people operate their business, territory, job from the standpoint of whatever they have from a resource standpoint. For example, if you’re physically in San Francisco and an opportunity comes for you to service somebody in, let’s say, Baltimore, and you say in your mind, “I’m in San Francisco.” That would be resource restrictive that you’ve allowed yourself to be contained by your environment.
Instead, what you wanted to say in your mind is, “How can I service somebody in Baltimore at a high-quality level?” That’s one of these four phases, which is effective alignment, but most people put that a front of planning. It should be behind plan. Your plan should be the pick of the year. “I’m going to be 300% of quota this year. I’m going to grow my business by 300%. I get 300% more new customers.” That would be effectively an annual goal. Once you’ve got that, it’s time to look at what resources you do need. Not the other way around, make your decision about what you want to do first, then find the resources. For example, we could cold call. We could figure out a way to get a bunch of referrals. We could survey all of our existing customers and all of those.
Business Mastery: Dominate Your Market: How to Quadruple Revenue in Four Steps (Business Mastery Series Book 1)
The temptation a lot of people might have is they’ll hear an idea like that, and they’ll put it in action. It may or may not be a good idea. The way to do it is to do it after you’ve figured out what your goal, objective, or strategy is for the year. Once you’ve got the goal, and you’ve assembled your resources, next is to execute or go get into action and do stuff. Instead of being like, “I did with my grandma jumping up immediately when she told me to.” Think, gather your resources, then execute. The fourth phase is to figure out what in the world happened.
The answers are either red and you fell on your face. Green, you exceeded whatever heck you’re after doing. The third is some Amber or a yellow, meaning you’re just about okay. The cycle is to analyze your situation, figure out a new plan, gather the resources you need, execute. After you execute, analyze the result, adjust your plan, find new resources if you need to, then execute. It’s a cycle. All businesses, departments, projects, individuals with a sales territory, all people with some project that they’re managing, you should run them through that four-phase cycle I gave you.
When we clarify something, we’re not limiting ourselves to one answer, and you zero in on what do we want to focus on first. The thing that I love about this Business Mastery system you’ve created is the alignment. Not just executing without other people’s agreement, understanding. That’s crucial to what you’re doing that makes this fly so much. I did also want to touch on this wonderful quote of yours, which is, “Don’t use the same approach for all problems.” If you go to sales training like, “You get this objection, here’s the answer regardless of who’s saying it or what the situation is.” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I tell people, “You’ve got to think of your brain like a jukebox with multiple stories ready to go depending on what the problem or the challenge is.” The fact that you talked about this is another wonderful blog about how you bring results to people. Give us a little taste of what this means in terms of some things that require more finesse etc.
Objections are problems. However, most of them are disguised. What I mean by that is most people that you’re having a sales conversation with are not very skilled at giving you quality objections. They may say something, but they’re hoping you’re going to go away. They’ll make a comment to see what you’re going to do. If you say, “I’d give up,” then mission accomplished. What teed up in my mind is whatever you hear from anybody is likely not a well-thought-out response. Sometimes it could be, but you simply need to practice this art of ignorance and say, “Could you elaborate more on what you mean by that? Would you flash that out more?”
[bctt tweet=”What’s stopping us from getting better results is almost always not asking questions or for help. ” via=”no”]
I don’t believe in a Rolodex type of thing where you get a certain question. You need to find that answer and deliver it. That’s what you get when you have a chatbot or something like that running on a robot. All you have to do is be genuinely curious. “I’m surprised you said that. Where did that come from? What’s the backstory of that?” That’s the key. The key is to be ignorant, don’t act like you’ve heard that before because maybe it isn’t quite the same and ask, “Tell me more. May I ask for more? Can you help me out here? I don’t quite get it,” things like that.
Are there any last thoughts? You have this wonderful book that people can get. It’s called Dynamic Growth.
In GetBillsNewBook.com, and you’ll get a chance to get the pre-publication version. It will give you a book form. It will encapsulate a lot of what we’ve been talking about here.
It’s called Dynamic Growth: How to position your business as a 24/7 cash-producing ATM. Who doesn’t want that? Bill, thank you so much for sharing your gifts, including this wonderful book, and more importantly, this awareness that when we’re curious and when we’re not pretending we know something, no matter how much experience we have, get our mindset and our strategy in place, there’s nothing that we can’t do together. Thanks again for being on the show. I’m looking forward to having all kinds of feedback on how many people are going to be giving me insight going, “That was a great episode. Thanks so much for having Bill on.” Nothing makes me happier than to have guests like you that have so much wisdom and a heartfelt passion for what you do.
Thanks, John. I appreciate it very much.
Important Links
- Bill Prater
- What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?
- GetBillsNewBook.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Resilience in the Rain
Posted by John Livesay in blog | 0 comments
In October 2020, I decided to put money down on a lot where new homes were being built just south of the Austin airport.
Little did I know, this decision would start a journey of testing my resilience, patience, and organizational skills.
After I picked my lot, I then had to decide what I wanted the house to look like. Normally this entails going to a design studio, but during a pandemic, most of it had to be done on Zoom.
There’s a book called The Paradox of Choice. It says that when we have too many choices, it is overwhelming and can even be depressing.
Luckily for me, my friend Phillip Sherman is a professional interior designer, and he was able to help me.
Decisions can get overwhelming.
There are big decisions like what kind of stone and brick you want on the outside of your house to small ones such as what color should the gutters be painted, what color do you want the grout in your shower to be, and what type of toilet paper holder do you want.
The goal was to have the house done by the end of February. What was unforeseen was a shortage of lumber on top of a freeze in Austin that was unprecedented, which caused the house not to be finished until the end of May.
Not knowing when you’re going to move is very stressful. Some of the concerns I had was whether or not I could extend the lease on the condo I was renting and when I should order the movers.
While it was a lot of fun to visit the house on a regular basis and see the progress, there were also mini twists and turns along the way, including light fixtures being on backorder, the driveway needing to be repaired, and the washer/dryer not being available due to the pandemic of shortages.
If you ever applied for a loan, you know that can be incredibly stressful. Trying to convince a bank that being a speaker during a pandemic with no live events should still qualify me for a loan was challenging, to say the least.
While juggling the many back-and-forth requests with the loan office, I was also scheduling an inspector to come to the house while getting my real estate agent to go with me on something called a blue tape walk-through. This is when you get to walk-through and put blue tape everywhere they have missed a spot that needs to be touched up or on a mirror that has a dent in it. Once the city inspectors sign off on everything, then I got to go to the title company.
In this case, they were so busy I had to wait over an hour before someone could see me.
Not much has changed in this industry, and I still had to manually sign many pages. On top of that, the keys they gave me were not cut properly and didn’t work. I had to wait until the next day to get the right keys from the builder. The combination of having to wait that long and then getting the wrong keys also added to the list of things I could choose to be stressed out about.
I recently read the book The Energy Bus, and there’s a line in it that says, “I’m too blessed to be stressed.”
I chose to use it as my mantra.
Are you starting to see and feel how all these things could start to chip away at the joy of getting a new home?
Instead of resisting what is happening or complaining about it or losing my temper or getting frustrated, I decided I was going to tell myself a different story.
Let’s look at all the wonderful things that they got right and let’s be grateful that the interest rates are so low right now. That’s the story I chose to focus on.
The night before the movers were scheduled to come, I picked up my friend Phillip at the airport, and we went right to the new home with keys that let us in. It happened to be in the middle of a huge lightning storm, with a lot of wind. After only being in the house for 10 minutes, we started to see water coming through the electrical light fixture in the kitchen ceiling, and quickly place a bucket underneath to save the brand new floors.
I chose to see this as a little bit of drama. I decided that “big drama” would be if the ceiling collapsed.
I texted the builders and they sent roofers first thing the next morning to fix the problem. This was happening concurrently while the movers were coming to pack my things into the truck.
One of the things that I had bought during the pandemic was a motorized standup desk that allowed me to stand up and have my computer go up and down depending on whether I wanted to stand or sit. When the movers came to me and said they were sorry but they had broken the desk, I was numb to bad news. I just simply said, “Send me the pictures and I’ll file a report to get reimbursed later.”
After the movers unpacked the last box and left, my friend Philip and I were exhausted, but we decided to go out and treat ourselves to a nice meal at a nearby restaurant.
This whole thing is a metaphor, I thought to myself. We are all always going to have some rain in our life.
How do we stay resilient in the rain? Whether it’s a leaking roof or waiting on other people, we always have the choice of deciding whether something is going to knock us down and keep us down or just be a temporary bump in the road.
I’m now happy to say that my first weekend has been filled with gratitude and creativity as I decided with my friend Philip where to hang art.
(Have you ever noticed how things that have been hanging in your house for a long time are suddenly seen in a new way when they’re in a different space?)
I think the same is true of our life. We can take relationships for granted. We can take many things for granted until we don’t have them.
Remember that you are the movie director of your own life, and if you don’t like what you’re saying or thinking, you can say cut at any time and tell yourself a different story.
Email me at [email protected] and let me know your own story of resilience!
Strategy Sprints For SaaS With Simon Severino
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Do you want to know the secret to becoming irresistible to your clients? John Livesay’s guest might just have the thing for you. In this episode, John talks with the man who created the Strategy Sprints method, Simon Severino. Simon talks about how strategy sprints work, and how they help improve businesses. Simon and John discuss business strategies that can help double revenue. Simon shares his insights on using strategy sprints to help run your business smoother. Join in and get a few pointers on improving your business profits.
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Listen to the podcast here
Strategy Sprints For SaaS With Simon Severino
Our guest is Simon Severino who is the Founder of Strategy Sprints. He helps companies focus on what they need to do and how to do it to get their business to scale. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Simon Severino. He helps business owners run their company smoother and improve sales. He created the Strategy Sprints Method that doubles revenue in 90 days. He is the CEO of Strategy Sprints. He’s also a Forbes Business Council Member, a contributor to Entrepreneur Magazine, and a member of Duke Corporate Education. Simon is the Founder of Strategy Sprints, which is a global team of certified Strategy Sprints coaches helping business owners run their company smoother and doubling their revenue in 90 days. Simon, welcome to the show.
It’s so cool to be here, John.
You and I have become friends. I have seen your strategy in action. I have seen some of the ability to get people to focus and not be overwhelmed or as one person once said to me, “Many entrepreneurs try to boil the ocean and instead of being known for one thing.” Of course, we remember that Amazon just sold books and yet people forget that. They think, “I want to be Amazon, sell and do everything.” I think what you are doing is smart. Also, there are sports analogy there, obviously with sprinting. Let’s go back to when you were a young lad, childhood school, wherever you want, give us a flavor of some of the things you learned from your parents and how you’ve got to have this wonderful focus.
Back in school, Rome, the ‘80s, I was a nerd. I was the guy where you go, “What did he say? What?” You could say a philosopher. I was thinking fancy, very far away, somewhere in the universe, while my colleagues were playing sports. I was like, “I don’t get this thing with sports. I like books.” That’s what I was. The question was, “What is eternal and what is ephemeral?” For me, it was always about, “What’s this whole thing?” Before I do one thing like I become an engineer or a doctor or one of these boring things in here, “What’s the whole thing? What is a human being? How did we get here? Where did we go to? Does anybody have a clue? If I don’t have a clue, I don’t want to become an engineer or a doctor. I want to get the whole thing first. What is this?” That’s how I was, very strange.
I know you had a Philosophy and a Psychology background in school. You then went to MIT Design Thinking. This is not something that you just did on a whim but it was very strategic. I’m sure we can weave in as we discover more of what you are doing now, the importance of having a sense of self and a sense of purpose that gives you the focus. Would that be accurate?
It was a long road up to here what I’m just focused on one thing and it works on a global scale. The journey was super complicated, long with a ton of twists. The first part was studying Psychology and becoming a Psychotherapist. In between, I studied Philosophy because I was searching for this answer. “What is this thing? What is the whole thing and what are the parts?” I did find some answers in philosophy. They then sent me to psychology. They said, “What you were asking, you have to ask these Freud guys there. It’s the other department.” I went to the other department. I started that stuff and I liked it a lot, but it was everything backward. I said, “Beautiful. This department has taught me a lot but where is the forward part of that?” Individuals have their history but what about the future? How do we shape the future? What’s next? They then said, “You then have to talk to the other department. These are the coaches and so I landed with the coaches.
This is where I belong because coaching, I love it. It transforms stuff. You don’t take things as a given, but you break through and it’s always forwards. This is where I found my place. I am a coach. I belong in this world. I am thriving in this world and I love it. I am now certifying coaches on a global scale and we meet every Monday. We have a great time. We are helping people by having more cash and more time, which is a great act of service. What is more important and what makes more fulfillment than serving somebody?
You talk about helping people become irresistible to clients, which is you are singing my song. That’s what I love to do as well through storytelling. How do you do it through Strategy Sprints? What is it that allows people to become irresistible once they have this method in place?
Week one of the sprint, which is always twelve weeks. We have found that you need around twenty days to break current patterns and you take around 80 to 90 days to install new patterns. That’s why 90 days is the minimum chunk and this is our cycle, 90 days which is 12 sprints of 1 week. Week one is always the equalizer. Equalizer means find your niche. Do your Blue Ocean Strategy. What does that mean? Look around yourself. You are swimming in that direction. Who else is swimming there? You could call it, technically, it’s competitive analysis. Where are they swimming? Where’s the next thing that you need to swim around?
[bctt tweet=”Have a vivid vision. Get a unique niche.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This is the equalizer, which asks the question, what’s your uniqueness? This is important because if you just do what others do, you have to swim out of competition. There is only one John. There is only one Simon. What makes you, you? The equalizer helps you get that on a numerical level. It asks first and I’m happy to share it at the end of this episode with the people to share my real equalizer that we do every month for half an hour because it’s such a great tool.
For half an hour, you ask five questions. The first is, “What’s your competitive arena? What are your top three competitors plus what else can the customer do?” That’s why it’s a competitive arena and not just the list of top three competitors. It’s because your customer can not only go to another supplier, they can also have behavioral alternatives themselves. They can say, “If I don’t buy from you, I have Mike, the intern does it.” That’s a behavior alternative. That’s what they compare you to.
“If I don’t buy from you, I can hire somebody and do it internally, I can make a robot do it, I can just do nothing.” These are real alternatives that they are comparing. You make a list of the real alternatives, then you make a list of the features. What they are looking for? You rate from 1 to 10 if you are winning or if competitors are winning. Now, the equalizer does it for you because it’s a smart spreadsheet that creates three clusters. One cluster is where you are winning and the other cluster, is where you are losing.
You are taking a concept that’s intuitive and putting a numeric around it. What you are doing is so smart because you are allowing people to get their focus off of themselves and put their empathy hat on and say, “Where do people see me? Not just between me and my competitors but what else do I have to do?” For example, before Uber came, people could either walk in the rain, drive in the rain, rent a car or get a cab. Those were still other choices when they decide not to get an Uber. That’s an example of what other behavior they could do besides Uber versus Lyft, let’s say. Being able to understand your customer’s choices besides you and your competitors, is smart. I have never heard anyone else say that. Assigning then a number to it is even another level of sophistication.
As a speaker, I have done this exercise where I list about 7 to 8 qualities that speakers have, again putting myself in the shoes of an event planner or a client hiring a speaker, for example, how famous am I compared to other speakers? I’m not Steve Wozniak and yet I’m not unknown completely. I have been on TV. There’s a level of what that number is and then you look at what’s my marketing materials on a scale of 1 to 10. You go down each of those things and then you start to get a little scorecard for yourself. Of course, when you start doing that plus analyzing where your competitors are, again you are putting that lens on of, “Here’s where I can improve and here’s where my standing is.” What I think you are doing is giving people not just a roadmap, but here’s where you are on the map.
That’s a unique distinction, Simon. I want to say hats off to you for taking it another level beyond, “Here’s the roadmap of all your choices now, but where are you on this roadmap?” I haven’t heard of anybody else doing that analytically for people because when that happens, then I can see now where you are able to deliver on one of your promises, which is to be immune to competition. What a fascinating choice of words that is. This equalizer is just the first of many twelve weeks of sprinting and getting that in. Let’s face it, if you are an athlete, as a former swimmer we just didn’t jump in the pool and started swimming laps we had, “When are we going to swim? What’s the timeframe?” Many of us in the entrepreneur world without this awareness just start swimming and hope for the best. Of course, that’s why they flounder.
If you think of a swimmer, a swimmer will think a lot about what distance they compete in, when they compete and then the training plan will be on many levels. You have sleeping, eating and not-drinking and not going out plan. You have periodization of your training, where the cycles get more intensive the nearer you get to the race, which is a simulation of the intensity. Before you will build up in cycles the intensity of what you do and this is exactly the Strategy Sprints Method. You’ve got the point well because every single 1 of the 274 templates does exactly this. It’s a GPS that helps you locate yourself where you are in the context of your competitors and your clients. It helps you empathize, see yourself from the client’s needs, perspective and then define the one next thing that you will improve or fix, which is the next bottleneck.
You know where you are. You know where you want to go. You know what’s needed, not just what your team geeks out but what people want to get or grab from you because they need it. They want it. It’s a real problem that you are solving. Now, you define the one thing that you will improve by 1% this week. Sprint by sprint, week by week, that’s why it works. Everybody asks, “How can you double revenue?” We go, “We have twelve times the chance to the course is correct.” Even if you screw up six weeks, you have still six times the chance to course-correct.
Here’s an analogy for you. Imagine if the Titanic captain had twelve weeks to go through your course, correct and make decisions of how fast they were going in the dark and make that decision to turn before the iceberg scraped the side of the ship. If your company is the Titanic and you were full speed ahead in the dark and it’s too late to turn because you can’t turn fast enough and you still have leaks happening in this case, maybe it’s cashflow or whatever, so that Titanic analogy holds up for you. You know me, I love visual to go on a story, to go with what you are doing.
The other question I have for you is on your Strategy Sprints’ website. You talk about your core values and nobody loves an alliteration more than I do. You have focused, freedom and flow, then three Hs, Humble, Hungry and Happy. I’m curious to ask when you work with clients on their sprints and what makes them unique, do you get into helping them define values like this so that again, it laser focuses them and lets people know who it’s for who it’s not for?
Strategy Sprints: Being humble is when you see somebody and say, “Oh, he can be my teacher about this. I can learn from this person.”
Yes, because its core. Culture is key. It’s maybe the most vital part of a business. You wouldn’t expect this from somebody who calls his company, Strategy Sprints but culture is where the magic happens. The only thing is there is no direct button to change the culture because you change culture via structures, processes and strategy. The way you do it every day creates the culture. This is important because we help in improving the tool vital things which are more time, more cash. Now, how do you do it?
First, you need to get the founder out of the weeds. Usually, the people who founded it out of love, of passion and nerding out are now the bottleneck. You need to get them out of the weeds, create space for them to work on the business, not in the business. We do this in week two by mapping out the key components, the marketing, sales and operational activities. We map them out. We ride them down. We pull the single people out of that because now the process can do it. People can come in and out of the process. You can easily hire people in other countries to do it. Now, we have pulled out of the weeds, the founder.
To make sure I heard you right because I love this phrase. It will be a great tweet. “You help people work on the business, not in it.” Is that correct?
Exactly. You have to work on the business of business. This is our operating model, the business of business, improving, form, fit and function of the marketing, sales and delivery system. To do that, when you get the founders out of the weeds, now they are working on the business, what is this on business? It’s growth and culture, creating activities, growth-related activities, joint ventures, bigger leveraged corporations. The list of Dream 100 clients, the vivid vision on five pages of how it feels, smells and tastes. This is important and hiring and firing. The next thing is culture. That’s defining the values and what is important to you.
Let’s talk about what your values are here. You are helping people focus and get freedom. When all that happens, things happen and their businesses are inflow. They are not starting and stopping. I think that is my understanding and observation of what you are doing. The concept is staying humble, hungry and ultimately being happy, which ties into the freedom aspect of it as well, whether you are not overwhelmed and so stressed out. I think we know what it means to stay hungry and not get lax but a lot of people don’t talk about humble being a value. What does humble mean to you and how do you incorporate that into your values and culture?
We can always learn and we are always 1% worse the next week and 1% better than last week. When we meet somebody, we see them as a teacher. I can learn from John. The first time I saw you, your superpower and what amazing transformative power you have. Immediately, I asked you to come into my mastermind and teach it to the whole community. Bring your superpowers.
Just to be clear, I’m not Superman. My superpower is helping people fix their elevator stories for those people who don’t know what you were referring to. Like, “What is he doing?”
Being humble is you see somebody and say, “He can be my teacher about this. I can learn from this person this.” The opposite would be, I see somebody and say, “I am the expert here. I am the big speaker.” Everybody is great at something. When you see somebody, do you come from a place of, “I can learn from you or do you go into a competition?” This is humble. I can always learn from people I need.
“Do I learn from you or do I see you as a competitor?” If you have that mindset of, “I’m going to learn from you,” then that’s where the collaboration and the growth come as you talk about these partnerships that can happen. I want to ask you two questions. One, who’s the ideal client for this Strategy Sprints program because I’m guessing it’s not somebody who just has an idea or probably maybe I’m wrong. It’s not a Fortune 500 company like Coca-Cola either. There’s probably something in between.
We have a very specific ideal client. It is a SaaS or service business. Typically, it’s a consulting company, marketing company, with 1 to 10 people on staff doing above $35,000 revenue per month and the owner is still in the weeds.
[bctt tweet=”Culture may be the most vital part in any business.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That couldn’t be clear. In terms of the coaches that you have, what is that ideal background that somebody becomes a certified Strategy Sprints coach?
I was talking about this with Gino Wickman, who has a similar model of certified coaches. I asked him because he has more years in this, “What do you look for in a coach?” I was validated that we have the same approach. We say there are some skills that we can teach and some skills that you just need to have because we cannot teach them. The entrepreneurial skills are what they need to have because you either have them or you don’t.
These are things like responsibility, passion, problem-solving, thinking on your feet, finding stuff out and the capability to endure. If you don’t know something, you Google it. You don’t re-delegate it. That’s what an entrepreneur does. “I don’t know. I have to find out.” Always curious, always moving forward trying out stuff and also always responsible. You will never come with excuses and say, “I didn’t have the time or the resources or this wasn’t working.” You make sure it works.
I want to underline this. I want to circle it, highlight it and put it in a sky banner. If someone can hear what you said, “Emphasize this and stop using excuses,” especially the excuses, “I’m so busy.” I can’t tell you how many people tell me, “I didn’t get to that because I’m so busy. My life is hectic and busy.” After a while, when 10 to 12 people a week are saying that to you, I want to zoom out and think to myself, “Do you think you were the only one that’s busy? Does it imply that you were busier than everyone else? Does it somehow make me think that you’ve got great time management skills? Do you think it’s an impressive thing to brag about?”
I think so many people are unaware of how often they are saying it and what it comes across as, it doesn’t impress me. It does the opposite. I think, “You’ve got to get your act together and not be in the weeds.” You are always implying that your time is more important than mine because you are too busy to do any research or take a minute to just be present. That constant frenetic behavior of overwhelm and stress to somehow make it seem like you are important, I think has the opposite effect. I have never had this conversation with anybody else but you are the perfect person to have it with because this isn’t an unexpected outcome in addition to doubling revenue.
We started from the superficial discussion. Some skills like the coaching skills, we teach them. Other skills, the entrepreneurial, they need to bring them. Why? After years of experience in hiring and firing, I concluded. I do three interviews at the beginning and I have one-month probation and in this phase, I observe exactly this, how do they deal with failure and with stress? If I see that somebody has a pattern that together we cannot flexibilize and not overcome, then this is a reason to quit working together because it doesn’t fit our values. What do I do to be a role model for my kids, for myself and to live it every day?
I have two boys and it’s the same thing. I also am under continuous scrutiny on how I deal with life, the pandemic, the weather and setbacks. My wife and my kids, are watching me and I’m watching myself. Even if I am quite an intentional and disciplined person, I’m a triathlete so I am used to endurance and staying accountable to myself but I have just started a 75 days’ mental toughness challenge because I see that it is continuous work to spot that. When you do this mental thing with yourself and say, “I’m so busy,” I want to spot that and I want to have the strength to say, “I will now decide not to go into that pattern. I will now decide to go into another pattern,” but you need a certain level of energy to do that and that’s what I’m working on every day.
Disrupt the pattern. That’s the takeaway, almost like a needle on a record. Remember it used to scratch? You need to wake yourself up because you are almost in a hypnotic trance. Where’s your go-to excuse? It may be considered socially acceptable to say, “I’m so busy. I didn’t get to that. I’m working hard.” That’s always happening for you. It’s not a limited sprint. Your life is like that because you are trying to boil the ocean, for lack of a better analogy there.
If someone says, “I think I would want to be potential certified a Strategy Sprints coach,” we have a sense of those skills that you can teach and those that you can’t, do they have to have been in business for a while or had any expertise? You have these amazing coaches on your website where you get to see these niches. That’s what I love. You’ve got someone who has got an expertise in automotive and then someone else is an expert in pharma.
Imagine your ideal client saying, “We are a consultant in a marketing agency. We’ve gotten people. Our revenues are 35K a month. I’m still in the weeds but I’m in this industry.” You were like, “No problem. We’ve got Javier on the line, who can help you get this equalizer targeted because that’s this industry.” I thought that was a very smart decision on your part to have not just Strategy Sprints coaches but within different expertise. I’m sure that’s not an accident.
Strategy Sprints: We are always 1% worse the next week and 1% better than last week.
This comes back to what we have talked about before. When I go humble through the world, I see superpowers everywhere. Of course, I have a limited set of superpowers. I can do just 1 to 2 things may be quite good and that’s it. I’m a good super-connector and initiator. That’s what I do. I initiate, I super connect. Now, everything else, I need other experts. I go around. I like people and I like interaction. I make friends and I say, ‘This guy, he was running Google in that country. Now, he’s a management advisor.” I talked to this guy and say, “This is my platform. This is what I do. Who is your ideal client? What do you like to change in their life and their business?” If there is a fit, I invite them into our world. This is how we started the certification program. Now, we have in every time zone, in every country. We have Shanghai, San Francisco, Los Angeles and London. We have different verticals and they have different backgrounds from being the salesperson of Coca-Cola to running a big marketing agency. I can bring together the right project and the right skills.
How do people find you? Is it usually hearing you on a podcast or hearing your own podcast? Is it referrals? What’s your strategy on how people find you?
In terms of sales strategy, we do both. We have an inbound team doing many inbound activities. We have an outbound team doing many outbound activities. I run a daily podcast, which I enjoy a lot and meet a lot of people. I hang out in our community, which is a Facebook group of around 800 people. It’s called Entrepreneurship in Sprints. They help each other and challenge each other. It’s beautiful to be there. The easiest way to find us is StrategySprints.com.
What’s the name of your podcast for people who might want to listen?
I love the consistent branding. Kudos to you for that. Any last thoughts or ideas that you want to share with us?
I would like to share one thing. If people at the beginning were thinking, “I would like to do this equalizer thing, which shows me my uniqueness and in half an hour, I can cut costs and double down on where I’m winning.” If you have half an hour, go to StrategySprints.com/equalizer. You can grab the real template that I use. It’s a spreadsheet. There is a thirteen minutes’ video where I show how I use the spreadsheet. You then put in half an hour with your team there. You will find out where you are currently winning, where you are not winning and it will make some proposals where you should invest more in and where you cut your costs so that you can reinvest in where you are currently winning.
Simon, thank you so much for sharing your passion, your values come across, your happiness, your humbleness, your focus and ultimately the freedom that you are giving people and taking this because you are now in Austria, global. It’s an inspiration to all of us and I just want to thank you for figuring out what your superpower is and making the world better because of it.
Thank you for the chance to share my journey with your beautiful community, John.
Important Links
- Strategy Sprints
- Forbes Business Council Member
- Entrepreneur Magazine
- Duke Corporate Education
- Entrepreneurship in Sprints – Facebook Group
- The Strategy Sprints Podcast
- StrategySprints.com/equalizer
- Blue Ocean Strategy
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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