The Growth Framework Business Leaders Need to Succeed

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today we are talking about one of my favorite topics growth.

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Who doesn't love growth?

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And we have a great guest, bill Flynn.

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He's been working at growth companies for over two decades.

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He's had some amazing exits, a few IPOs.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey, eric, thank you, Glad to be here so why don't we start off by you just sharing a couple minutes background about who you are and what?

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you do Sure Love to.

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So there have been two arcs to my career, if you will, or two sections.

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The first section was what you said already.

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I did 10 startups over about 25 years, all in the high-tech area here in the Boston and New England region, and so did a lot of cool stuff with speech recognition in the 90s and e-commerce in 95.

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Online data backup in the early 2000s so not quite bleeding edge, but just before things got really big Love doing that.

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My role started off in sales and then I became the head of sales and head of marketing and then the COO, gm kind of thing.

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But to my background it's mostly been in operations, so the doing of stuff.

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And then about eight or so years ago I said do I want to do an 11th startup?

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And the answer was yes, if I could find the right founder.

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And I had a trouble.

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I was technically five for 10, which is still pretty good in terms of my startups, but the last four were pretty bad.

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I should have stopped.

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I was five for six.

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I could have stopped there, but I didn't.

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So I said do I want to do that?

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And I decided that I would if I could find it.

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But I wasn't.

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I was having trouble finding a good founder and I had a really good experience between startup five and six, where I became this coach and I learned about operating systems and business operating systems and such and I really liked that.

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I decided to give that a try and I've been doing that ever since.

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So I started with something called scaling up, which, which is a relatively well-known business operating system.

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There are dozens of business operating systems out there.

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I have found out later and I've done a few others and I've mingled things together and it's my own, but it's not really my own.

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It's just a smattering of different things that made sense to me with my experience, etc.

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So I've been doing that as a business growth coach for about eight years now.

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I love doing it.

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It's a wonderful way to make a living, so growth is what gets you out of bed excited every day.

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And helping people achieve growth through having the right systems and processes Is that a fair summary?

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Yeah, cause I've I've been studying business for about 30 years, and really intensely in the last eight or 10.

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And I found that it's really a shame that a lot of terrific ideas and businesses and people struggle or those businesses die for completely preventable reasons.

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There is a science to doing business which most people don't follow.

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We follow sort of our intuition or conventional wisdom, and intuition is great, but you should also make sure that it attract as well.

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So that's what I teach people.

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I call myself a coach, or people call me a coach, but I'm really a teacher.

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I teach a growth framework to people that allows them to, in essence, fire themselves from the day to day so they have more time to really do what they're supposed to do, which is predict the future or really create the future of the business.

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And we just don't have time.

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We get sucked into the day to day too much, and that's my job is to convince people that's not their job anymore, especially at the top.

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Their job is really to really keep looking out into the future, and you can't do both at the same time.

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It's basically impossible.

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So I talk to people often they're like oh, I had this idea a couple years ago, but it turns out that just having an idea and actually implementing it and implementing a growth framework against it are two very different things right Very much.

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Yeah, ideas are great and I wouldn't want to in any way poo them.

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I'm not an idea guy.

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I come up with one good idea, maybe a year.

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So I really value and appreciate people who have those kinds of minds who just come up with these great ideas.

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But what I've seen is when to go from idea to success, you really have to be disciplined about it and you have to usually go deep, and most people aren't willing to do that, especially if you have ideas all the time you want to go on to the next one or your thinking is oh, we can do that, it's really easy.

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We used to have this joke in software called SMOP, s-m-o-p.

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Small matter of programming, so we could do anything you want.

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But that's not usually what success breeds.

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Success is bred through really understanding the problem and the customer.

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As opposed to convincing people how great your idea is.

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And that's often what happens is we come up with an idea and it's probably a pretty good one.

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You know people only really care if your idea makes their life better.

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So you really have to fall in love with the problem, not with the idea, and that's what most founders do they fall in love with their idea which with the problem, not with the idea, and that's what most founders do.

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They follow up with their idea, which is often their downfall, in my opinion.

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Yeah, I agree, and can you give an example of one of the big benefits of the growth framework that you teach people?

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I'm curious if you can just share a good example of what that really means.

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Yeah, as I've been doing my research, as I said, I've been thinking about business and why businesses succeed more than they fail, and certainly they succeed a lot less than they fail or struggle, and the data backs it up.

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There's data from the Small Business Administration, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that most businesses die.

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So 50% of businesses will die in about five years.

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And then, as you move down the timescale, when you get to 25 years, it's 16%, I think, are still left.

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So you'd think that we'd get better at it.

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Right, if you do it longer, you get better at it.

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But what happens is that the data doesn't show that we actually continually get worse.

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We get worse at a slower rate and I don't really know why that happens, because there are so many reasons why businesses die.

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But what I have found is that my theory is that what happens is we do a lot of things wrong, but we don't do them completely wrong, we just do them a little wrong.

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So we do like meetings wrong and feedback wrong and strategy wrong and other things wrong, and what happens is, as we add more and more to the business, we get bigger, that those mistakes, those tiny mistakes, add up and the business, if you will, gets heavier.

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And most leaders move the business forward through force of will, luck, timing and enthusiasm, if you will, but eventually those things run out of steam.

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Right, that doesn't scale very well.

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The bigger you get, it's harder for you and the business gets heavier.

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But I think what happens is things just slow down.

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They slow down naturally anyway, but they slow down because of that we do it to ourselves.

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Things just slow down.

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They slow down naturally anyway, but they slow down because of that we do it to ourselves.

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So my big idea or my big advice to leaders, especially the head of the company, is first of all, what you need to do is fire yourself from the day to day as much as possible.

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Find those few things that really matter to you.

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The advice I offer a lot of my leaders is write down all the decisions you make in a day or a week or a month, whatever it is, and then pick the top two or three that you absolutely have to make, that you're the one who should be making these decisions, and then all the other ones find ways to get rid of them.

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Have either stopped making the decision or teach people other people how to make that decision, and your job really should be focusing on those few things, and the things I put in my book are how do you create a great team, craft, build craft, attract craft and grow a great team?

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How do you really make sure your strategy is a winning one, meaning that you're creating white space around you and for your customers?

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You're really the only option.

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And then focus on cash as your main financial metric is.

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What are the things that we're doing to drive cash into the business?

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Because cash does two things.

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One is it gives you a safety net for when things go wrong, and they do go wrong.

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Every six to eight years, something happens.

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So far in this century, we've had 9-11, 2008 and COVID, but if you look back a hundred years, there's always something that happens.

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And then the other thing is it's fuel.

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If you want to grow, you have to put money into the business, and it's typically in front of growth.

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So in order to be able to have time to do all those things, you really have to fire yourself from the day to day as much as possible.

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I think that makes a lot of sense.

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So we're ready to be inspired a story about some of the marketing that you have worked in recent years with some of your clients on that you think drove remarkable growth for their businesses.

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Yeah, and I want to make sure we understand marketing, because everyone has their own sort of definition of marketing Marketing as a function.

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So marketing as a function to me is different than marketing as a department or marketing as a tool, if you will.

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Most people, when they talk about marketing, talk about it as a tool.

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It's about I call it demand generation or driving people to your business, which is you must have that.

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It's really important.

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But if you solve that problem, you're really solving and you get good at that.

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You're solving the problem in the middle.

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So I always like to go.

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I'm a first principle thinker.

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So the first thing in terms of marketing a lot of people call it product marketing, and that is a little bit we touched on already is what are the things that you're doing?

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That makes everything else easier.

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So are you actually doing good marketing Meaning are you making, are you doing the thinking and the research, et cetera, to make sure that your idea that you came up with is a good one?

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So the best idea, the best story I have around that line, is I was actually at a company it's a while ago.

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I was at a company called LiveVol and they were doing online data backup, and this was early, this was 2005 or something like that.

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So it was pretty early on.

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Now it's a standard thing, but it wasn't.

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Tape was big then.

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Right, you had those big reels of tape or you had VCR tapes or whatever you had to store data on.

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And I started with the company.

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They had been around a while and they were looking to do some new things that I had done in the past.

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So the person that I had already worked with or brought me in and I said the first thing I want to do is I want to interview some of our best customers so I can learn faster.

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And when I did that, I asked one question which was recommended to me at the time, which is what is the most valuable thing that you got from using our service?

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And I, before I went and asked all these folks, I I asked the ceo and the head of marketing and the product manager and I said so what do you think is the reason that people buy from us?

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What's the valuable thing that they get?

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And everyone said the same thing, which was insurance.

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They're buying us because they're giving us a little bit of money every month, so if something bad happens and they lose their data or they have some business continuity problem, we can get their data back quickly almost the entire amount and so that's why they buy from us.

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That's the main reason and I said great.

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So I went and I asked.

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I actually ended up asking 17 different customers a series of questions, but that was the one that I focused on, and what I heard was very interesting and it was different than what we said.

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The main reason, the most valuable thing, was and I heard this from 12 out of the 17 people, the exact same words, which were set it and forget it.

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So these were busy small to medium business people.

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They knew that they had to back their data up because it was important for their business, just in case, but they hated doing it.

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It was a pain in the ass, it was so many things you had to do, so many things you had to think about, et cetera.

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And they said so, if I use your system, I just have to click a few buttons, set it all up and I never have to think about it ever again.

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And they were like how much does that cost?

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So the lesson I learned is that if you really talk to your customers in a way, so you understand what are the functional, social and emotional reasons why they buy from you.

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It'll make things so much easier when you move forward.

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So one is you're only building what you need to build to solve for that, and often we overbuild our products.

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Do you understand what messaging that you can give to people?

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What do they care about?

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So what we did is I told my salespeople, I said whenever you're on a phone call with a new client, say these five words and say our best customers love us because we just said it and forget it Super easy, et cetera.

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Did they think insurance was important?

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Sure, but it wasn't their top reason.

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And about nine months actually probably about 15 months later, we were bought for 10x revenue by one of our partners, iron mountain, because our growth we had figured out, we had been struggling for a while.

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Then we just figured it out wasn't the only reason.

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There were a bunch of other things that we did.

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But I think if you really go back to the first principle and say what is the problem if we're having problem in sales?

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What is having a problem in sales?

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What is causing that problem in sales?

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Okay, what is that problem?

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What is solving what is causing that problem?

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If you keep going back and asking that question, you'll find that most of your problems, from acquisition and acquisition standpoint stand, stem from you're not doing the work upfront to really understand the problem.

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Fall in love with the problem and the customer really understand the problem.

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Fall in love with the problem and the customer not the idea or the product.

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So I love this getting insights from the customer on what your messaging and your positioning should be, because in your example the product did the same thing, but the way they were thinking about it internally was very different messaging and positioning from how customers were thinking about it.

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And just by talking to customers, getting the right positioning, you could have the right message that really resonates a lot more and drives the growth.

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I think that's a great formula for companies to go after, instead of sitting in the ivory tower and trying to define the messaging that they think will resonate with customers, like I think being customer driven or customer obsessed in that way is like Amazon would preach, for example, is the right way to think about it?

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A hundred percent.

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Exactly.

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And there are stories about Jeff Bezos and he is like two years, but he was two years ahead.

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You know he used to say people come up to me when I meet them and say, oh hey, congratulations on a great quarter, and he's oh yeah, that was baked a year and a half ago.

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We already knew that was going to happen.

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He's always looking out.

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That's an extreme example.

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That shows you that if you carve out that space and time for yourself dream example.

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That shows you that if you carve out that space and time for yourself, you you have the ability to do these things.

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That will make it easier for you to carve your space and time.

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It is this interesting circle that you have to have.

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Right, I'm so busy I don't have time to do that because I'm so busy running my business.

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But if I actually took a little time to do that, it would be.

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My business would be easier and easier to run.

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Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

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So in this moment that we're in today, it's a challenging market for a lot of companies to get growth.

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There's definitely some economic headwinds, there's inflation.

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There's a variety of issues out there.

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What are a couple of the biggest thematic things that you are encouraging your clients to do to get growth today?

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encouraging your clients to do to get growth today.

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Yes, there's this process, this sort of wheel that Vern Harnish, who is a guy who did scaling up, put together.

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Which I which I it really resonated with me in my experience is that if you think of this large wheel as people at the top or really team at the top, in my opinion and then strategy, execution and then cash, and they move in that direction, from people to strategy, execution and then cash, and they move in that direction from people to strategy execution and cash is one of the one of the things that I've learned.

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I used to be a Vistage speaker, which is a sort of peer to peer advisory, worldwide peer to peer advisory company, and so I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of CEOs and I generally did the same sort of workshop and I did it as a little mini research thing and I would ask a bunch of questions and I would ask them one what is strategy?

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And I would get a whole bunch of different answers from these people.

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And they're running huge companies, right, hundreds of millions of dollars, so billions of dollar companies and smaller, but these are some what people would consider successful, and they would all have different definitions of what strategy was, and, and they would all have different definitions of what strategy was, and they were markedly different.

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And then I said, okay, so what is your strategy?

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And they would tell me their strategy is about themselves more often than anything, and your strategy should be how you can be successful, but it's also tied to how you make your customers successful.

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And what I learned was most people don't really either have a strategy or it's not really a very good one.

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And they're again.

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They're just surviving on force of force of effort, force of will, effort, luck, timing, et cetera.

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And one of the main reasons that I don't have a good strategy is they don't have a really good team.

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So the team is where I focus most of my time and energy, and I asked a question that I've gotten from one of the people that I've read is would you enthusiastically rehire everyone on your team now that you know who they are?

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And I've asked this question hundreds of times and the answer is almost always no and I said, okay.

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So one of the reasons you might not have a really good strategy is because you don't have the right people around you helping you form it and come up with it.

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So what you have to do is surround yourself with A players, especially at the top, and the way to do that is to make sure that you are hiring early, and hiring really well is about fit right.

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So you have to have a vision for the organization that isn't just a sentence, but it's really a picture that you can paint for people as if it already happened.

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And this is going to attract the people who believe what you believe to you.

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And then you have to hire the right people who have those skills that you don't have in in great abundance.

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So you might be really good at marketing, but there's probably someone who's much, much better at you than marketing, and if they believe what you believe and you bring them in, they can help you.

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And same thing with sales or engineering or whatever.

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You want to surround yourself in your first circle, but also in your, maybe, board of advisors, et cetera.

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You want to surround yourself with people who are better at what you're not good at and have already done the things that you are hoping your company will do.

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So that's what I teach them is focus on that team first.

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It's just make sure that team is the right team.

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They're the right fit for the organization and they are better at that team.

00:18:30.385 --> 00:18:36.566
First it's just make sure that team is the right team, they're the right fit for the organization and they are better at that particular function than you are.

00:18:37.400 --> 00:18:46.365
And then the hard part is really getting all of these spiky and idiosyncratic people to work together as one team, right A well-rounded team.

00:18:46.365 --> 00:18:49.366
What I'd like to say is there's no such thing as well-rounded people.

00:18:49.366 --> 00:18:54.852
We're all spiky, we're all have, we're all really good at one or two things and suck it or average it at a bunch of other stuff.

00:18:54.852 --> 00:19:00.587
And it's that combination of things within the team and that goes also for the teams underneath.

00:19:00.587 --> 00:19:01.819
That's the.

00:19:01.819 --> 00:19:04.262
I think that's the most fun and that's.

00:19:04.262 --> 00:19:07.946
If you do that, then a lot of the other stuff will be easier because it'll help you drive your strategy.

00:19:07.946 --> 00:19:14.634
They'll work together, the execution will go well, that will drive cash in your business, which will allow you to pay them better and do more things for them and keep them happy, etc.

00:19:14.634 --> 00:19:16.556
This nice virtual circle.

00:19:22.468 --> 00:19:24.719
So the team is what I focus on as a primary thing with my clients.

00:19:24.719 --> 00:19:27.323
Yeah, if you don't have the right team, I think you're going nowhere fast.

00:19:27.323 --> 00:19:27.563
For sure.

00:19:27.563 --> 00:19:28.664
You're not going to get the right strategy.

00:19:28.664 --> 00:19:33.692
You're definitely not going to get cash if you don't, if you don't have the right team and sometimes that's hard.

00:19:33.692 --> 00:19:38.287
So I think that's pretty great advice Do you have?

00:19:38.287 --> 00:19:40.932
Can you share a little bit about your book?

00:19:40.932 --> 00:19:43.203
You have a book right when you have a lot of your advice in it.

00:19:43.243 --> 00:19:52.964
Yeah, so yeah, so what I've found over time is, as I said, I'm a first principle thinker and first principles really help drive a lot of what I do.

00:19:52.964 --> 00:19:53.546
There's a lot of.

00:19:53.546 --> 00:19:56.772
There are a lot of methods in coaching and systems.

00:19:56.772 --> 00:20:06.561
There's scaling up, there's EOS, there's value builder, there's strategic coaches, action coach there's all these different things and there are methods and there's there's a saying that all methods are wrong and some are useful.

00:20:06.561 --> 00:20:16.740
But if you have the first principle, which you really focus on, then you can pick and choose which of these things are closest to helping you get what you want.

00:20:16.859 --> 00:20:23.643
And to me, one of the primary first principles that I work from is the 80-20 rule or the Pareto principle.

00:20:23.643 --> 00:20:39.630
And if you look at businesses, if you break them down let's say you break down your businesses by profit and by customer you'll find that about 80 to 90% of your profit comes from 10 to 20% of your customers.

00:20:39.630 --> 00:20:48.093
So what that means if it's 80, 20, is that one customer that is the right customer, the core customer, who values what you do.

00:20:48.093 --> 00:20:49.554
They love you, you love them, et cetera.

00:20:49.554 --> 00:20:54.635
It's 16 times more valuable to you than all the other customers.

00:20:54.635 --> 00:21:01.538
So what that means, if you can figure out who they are and you get one more of those, the equivalent of getting 16.

00:21:01.538 --> 00:21:06.061
So that's what I mean.

00:21:06.061 --> 00:21:06.623
We work too hard, right?

00:21:06.623 --> 00:21:07.925
So what we're doing is we're just taking all customers.

00:21:07.925 --> 00:21:09.789
We're taking whatever revenue they want to give us, and not all customers are the same.

00:21:09.789 --> 00:21:20.788
There are some customers that that cost you money, that that the more, the longer you have them, the more money that they take from you, cause they're highly, they want lots of stuff, they're difficult to support, et cetera.

00:21:20.788 --> 00:21:24.423
If you look at the 80, 20 rule across your business, you'll see it everywhere.

00:21:25.344 --> 00:21:41.077
And one of the things that I love to say I can't remember who I stole this from, but what you want to understand is that few things truly matter in business and in life as well, but those that do matter tremendously, they are outsized in terms of.

00:21:41.077 --> 00:21:44.019
So your job as a leader is to figure out what are the few things that really matter.

00:21:44.019 --> 00:21:50.759
As we said in LiveAlt, insurance was something that mattered, but what mattered even more was set it and forget it.

00:21:50.759 --> 00:22:10.367
It was time right, we were selling insurance, they were buying time, and we don't take enough time as leaders to figure out what are the really the truly things that matter to your two biggest constituencies, your customers and really your best customers, and your team right, your employees, the people who work for you.

00:22:10.367 --> 00:22:16.108
If you can make sure that you make those lives better, your life gets a lot easier if you do that.

00:22:16.559 --> 00:22:18.106
But we don't do that right.

00:22:18.106 --> 00:22:19.204
We're too busy in meetings.

00:22:19.204 --> 00:22:31.680
I was in a Visage meeting and one of the guys was talking about what he was doing and he was asked someone had a birthday and he was asked what cake should we get them Like?

00:22:31.680 --> 00:22:38.707
That is not a decision that you should be involved in any way, shape or form, regardless of the size of your company, unless there's only two of you and you're the one buying the cake.

00:22:38.707 --> 00:22:45.271
So we get sucked into these sort of inane and useless, not important nor significant decisions.

00:22:45.271 --> 00:22:48.941
Uh, and we should just keep trying to get rid of those.

00:22:48.941 --> 00:22:52.545
We like them because it feels good, we feel like we're helping, it feels good like we're solving problems.

00:22:52.545 --> 00:22:57.050
But your job isn't to solve a problem, it's to avoid problems.

00:22:57.050 --> 00:23:00.556
Your job is to think about things before they happen.

00:23:00.556 --> 00:23:03.827
As I said, solve the problem that's causing the problem that's in front of you.

00:23:03.827 --> 00:23:16.666
If you keep solving the problem that's causing the problem in front of you, you get to the first principle you get to the root and that's really the 80-20 rule.

00:23:16.686 --> 00:23:17.387
is that main one that I love?

00:23:17.387 --> 00:23:17.868
I liked that a lot.

00:23:17.868 --> 00:23:18.229
Great advice.

00:23:18.229 --> 00:23:19.530
Any final thoughts before we wrap it up?

00:23:19.530 --> 00:23:21.554
Anything I didn't ask that you wanted to share.

00:23:26.339 --> 00:23:26.941
Fire yourself the day-to-day.

00:23:26.941 --> 00:23:33.270
Focus on creating the future of your business, not running it from day-to-day, and just find those few things that truly matter to your team and to your customers, and your life is so much easier.

00:23:33.270 --> 00:23:33.771
Amen.

00:23:34.554 --> 00:23:40.270
Thank you very much for being with us today, for sharing your stories and these insights.

00:23:40.270 --> 00:23:46.833
I'm going to link to your website so that if people want to learn more, they can check it out there and get in touch.

00:23:46.833 --> 00:23:48.202
We appreciate you being with us today.

00:23:48.202 --> 00:23:49.788
Thank you, thanks, eric.

00:23:49.788 --> 00:23:50.529
Thanks for having me on.

The Growth Framework Business Leaders Need to Succeed

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