Strategy Sprints For SaaS With Simon Severino

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 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.

—

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.

—

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?

The Strategy Sprints Podcast.

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

Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?

Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help

Purchase John’s new book

The Sale Is in the Tale

John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer

Share The Show

Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!

• Click this link
• Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
• Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
• Click on ‘Write a Review’

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join The Successful Pitch community today:

• JohnLivesay.com
• John Livesay Facebook
• John Livesay Twitter
• John Livesay LinkedIn
• John Livesay YouTube