If you are an entrepreneur and you want to know how to grow your business to 6, 7 even 8 figures
in the shortest time possible, then in this video I want to share with you one of my top strategies
to successfully scale ANY business fast and PREDICTABLY increase your profit margins.
Now, if this is the first time your seeing one of my videos, my name is Chris Guerriero
and I’ve built four 8-figure businesses, successfully sold several businesses,
and I also invest in growing companies – and all of that gives me a unique insight into strategies
that grow businesses EVERY TIME they’re used – not matter what size your company is today, or
what industry you’re in, or what the economy is… And I want to detail one of the best strategies
we’ve used to scale companies fast – and it COSTS far less and takes far less TIME that most of the
OLD TACTICS you read about in books. But before I do that, please Subscribe
and Turn On the notifications so you’re notified whenever I post a new video.
Now one of the simplest ways to scale ANY company is using a process called Lateral
Expansion. It’s not EASY, but it’s simple – meaning that if you follow
a proven system like what I’ll show you here – you WILL get results.
And when we’re talking about Lateral Expansion – those results could collapse time frames
and help you scale more in one quarter than most companies scale in a decade.
Tell me in the comments if you’ve ever heard of lateral expansion – because most people
in small business have never heard of it – and the ones I meet who say they have –
most of the time they get it wrong… And I think the easiest way to define
LATERAL EXPANSION – is to start by defining VERTICAL EXPANSION.
Because they’re two totally different ways to grow a company.
VERTICAL EXPANSION is the basic price of entry in business, and it’s what almost
every business focuses on when they want to grow – they focus on increasing prospects, and increasing
sales, and increasing LTV of customers. And all those things are vital pieces of
scaling a company, but they all cost a lot of money and take a lot of time to test…
LATERAL EXPANSION – on the other hand - is thinking outside the box and using
tools that most businesses either don’t know about, or don’t believe
are possible, or just plain forget to use. It’s kind of like… VERTICAL expansion is the
firewood that you need to keep throwing on a fire (over and over again) to keep it lit (meaning: you
always have to keep marketing for mew customers to stay alive in business), and LATERAL expansion
is like throwing gas on your fire and experiencing dramatic growth in a shorter period of time.
Like scaling from $1M to $2M and $2M to $10M and $10M to $3MM… And if you do it right – and
back that growth up with systems – then that new level of revenue is your new low revenue number.
So, to scale at the rate needed in today’s world – and to maximize profits - we
need to use BOTH Vertical and Lateral Expansion. And there’s several ways we’ve used Lateral
Expansion to scale companies in my portfolio over the years – the 3 most common for us are:
1. Acquisitions – and if you want to know How To Grow Your Business using acquisitions - we
shot a video not too long ago showing you step-by-step how we acquire companies and exactly
how to handle the negotiations to acquire those companies for FAR LESS up-front cost. If you
haven’t seen that video, just do a search for my “acquisition video” after you watch
this one. But there’s 2 other very important forms of this that you need to know about.
2. The second form of Lateral Expansion is building a complimentary company that grows
your current company – and I haven’t shot a video on that one yet but let me know in the comments if
you want that information – and if enough people say they want it in the comments I’ll shoot one,
and show you the paperwork we use and post it here. But basically – we literally segmented a
department out of a company – making it its own entity and leveraging both companies to
scale each other. So, in the end instead of having one profitable, successful company,
after 12-18 months you have 2 even more profitable successful companies because
they both support the growth of the other. 3. Now when talking about how to grow your
business - The third most common form of Lateral Expansion we use - is adding a BRANDING ASSET that
massively increases our “reach”. So instead of reaching thousands of people a day with
our message – we might reach MILLIONS A DAY for a week or a month or even a whole a quarter.
And that’s what I want to focus on today – and I think the fastest way for you to REALLY GET
how to do this in your company is if I walk you through a real-life
example of one of the times we’ve done this: So what I’m going to share is how (and why) we
used NASCAR to grow our company - for FREE! And I absolutely understand that you might
not think you’re in a position to leverage NASCAR but I have never been in an industry
where there weren’t GIGANTIC, unbelievably big opportunities that people were just passing by
because they weren’t thinking outside the box. So keep your mind open and my guess is that
in a few minutes you’ll think about at least one way to leverage this concept
to scale your company THIS QUARTER. Several years ago I was a partner in a
social community called HealthLife – and one of our main products was a paid online community,
and I remember sitting in a meeting with our leadership team and looking at the company targets
and brainstorming on ways to hit those targets. One of which was a target of having 20,000
new members in our paid community … and we had very little in the budget to make that happen.
But every person at that meeting knew that if we reached that target it would mean several hundred
thousand dollars in NEW REVENUE for the company EVERY MONTH – but since we had hardly any money
budgeted – we had to get creative. So we went through a LONG meeting
listing any assets we could leverage to get the company that kind of growth,
and I remember asking the analytics team to send me the results of the
latest survey we did with our current members – because BEFORE I throw any time or money at
ANY marketing tactic I want to know as much as I can about my CURRENT target audience.
And that survey showed us 3 main things: 1. 41% of our current members were engaged
in some form of personal development 2. 56% were single
3. 32% liked NASCAR (which I just kind of pushed aside because,
let’s be honest - NASCAR fans were not our target demographic for a health community).
But after (I don’t know) --- like hours – one of our leadership team said – “Hey,
so a few years ago, before you became a partner in the company, we created a partnership with a
NASCAR team – do you think we can use that?” And I sat there thinking “why the heck is
this the first time this is coming up?” Long story short – the way they described
it to me, was that we owned a lot of aspects surrounding this deal, including a technology for
wrapping the car so the entire car was wrapped in one big sticker that included all the sponsor
logos and the car number and everything. So we could change the wrapper to include
ANYTHING we wanted including putting our company logo on the car during a race.
Now the GOOD NEWS was that NASCAR fans are historically super loyal
buyers to companies that sponsor cars – BUT… … the PROBLEM (like I said before) – was that
our target audience was NOT NASCAR fans. Yes – some of our current members said
they “liked” Nascar but that didn’t mean other Nascar fans would buy a membership
into a health community like ours. NASCAR fans buy things like beer, and tires
and motor oil and things related to cars. Now - there’s a few outliers who have been
successful sponsoring cars that don’t fit that model, but we didn’t have the budget
to run our car for a year before we gained brand exposure and began to profit, so I put together
everything I knew about our target audience. And that’s the first step in Lateral
Expansion – know your CURRENT best audience and find new ways put your message in
front of much larger numbers of them. Here’s what I knew that I could leverage:
41% of our current members liked personal development– AND I happen to
be friends with several of the LARGEST personal development icons around.
I could leverage that. And 56% of our current members were single – and
I ALSO happen to have a friend who owned one of the largest singles websites at the time.
I could leverage that too. So I put a list together of 8
large brands that I had a strong relationship with – either they were good friends of mine
OR they were clients inside of my advisory firm – either way, they had a strong level of confidence
in me because they’ve seen me CONSISTENTLY grow companies by thinking outside the box.
And although I knew NASCAR fans were not my target audience, so I probably wouldn’t get
20,000 new members into our community just by putting our logo on our car during one race.
But what I did know was that if I could get some of these personal development friends of mine
to mail their massive database and promote our community – I could easily reach that goal.
So I went to all 8 of them and told them I wanted them to send 3 emails to their list,
using naked links (meaning they would NOT get a commission for anyone who joined our
community – they were just promoting our community as a favor to me).
And they all kinda just looked at me like I was crazy – because that’s a BIG ask.
But I told them that if they did that for me - I’d have their photo and name put onto
our NASCAR during the Daytona 500 Qualification race, and if they wanted… they could even come
to the race and have their picture taken next to the car with their photo on it – and I even got
some of them hard passes so they could join me ON THE TRACK – which was also pretty darn cool.
Because from that day forward – they would be the only person in almost ANY room they ever walked
into who could say their photo was on a NASCAR. That’s pretty cool bragging rights and something
they could NEVER have achieved without me. 7 of those 8 people said YES!
Now, if you don’t know anything about NASCAR - the Dayton track can hold almost 170k people,
plus that year about 17MM people watched the race on TV – and out of ALL those :) I doubt we sold
more than a dozen memberships to our community – because NASCAR fans were not our target audience.
BUT… With seven large databases mailing
for us and millions of emails promoting us – what do you think? Do you think we hit our target?
And by the way – we also built a LARGE database from that promotion. A database that we were able
to advertise all of our other product to - and ALSO products that we didn’t own but that we
received a commission for referring a sale to. So we used an asset that we already had access to,
and we created a win-win for some key relationship in my life… and with no money out of pocket – and
we exceeded our expectations by adding a branding asset (the NASCAR) that massively increased our
“REACH” and put our message in front of a far larger audience that didn’t know us before… not
Nascar fans, but rather all the loyal followers of our personal development friends who promoted us.
Like I mentioned earlier - I have never been in an industry where there weren’t GIGANTIC,
unbelievably big opportunities that people were just passing by.
It might be your receptionists, sister’s college roommate is now a celebrity who
might endorse your product, or one of your kids best friends who has a BIG YouTube following
who would love an extra few buck to mention your product online.
Lateral Expansion begins with thinking outside the box and opening your mind to
the possibilities that are - right around you. Remember – I had not clue we had access to a
NASCAR until I dug deep during a team meeting. And we’ve done this kind of out of the box
marketing – this Lateral Expansion, many times in every industry I’ve been in – and
done right – it’s always like throwing gas on the fire and accelerating our growth.
So think about how to grow YOUR business – what’s one big opportunity, or asset,
or relationship you can leverage to put your message in front of a massive audience.
Get creative – and share your ideas with me below…
And then look at what others are sharing, and help them think bigger by plussing on their ideas.
And be open when someone else adds to your ideas in the comments too – because the more people you
brainstorm with – the bigger your idea will get, and heck – we have a GREAT community
here - someone in the comments might introduce you to a big name who might endorse your product.
We have some big movers and shakers who watch these videos, some amazingly big CEO’s,
pro-athletes, actors… and most understand that THEY GROW by HELPING OTHERS.
So share your idea and then take a minute to comment on someone else’s idea.
Also – if you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet – do it now because we’re
going to be giving away a $5k BUSINESS STRATEGY meeting with me – but you have
to be subscribed to be in the drawing. Subscribe now and then share your insight
on how you too can leverage Lateral Expansion to grow your company.
Then check out the description for a link to more tools to help you think outside the box and grow.