- Too many.
Are these lights higher than normal?
(upbeat music)
The scaling credo.
Maybe you're frustrated because
you have too many options to focus on growth.
Your team keeps doing things, but there's no progress.
Or you don't feel like you have
a clear strategy for growing your business.
I wanna show you a different way of doing it.
One that brings you crystal clarity in your business,
creates predictable revenue
and even more importantly, happy customers.
Crazy idea.
I learned this a long time ago
from a friend of mine, Clay Collins.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the company Leadpages.
A lot of people use them, multi-million dollar company.
And I had the crazy fortunate circumstance
to get a call from Clay one day, on my platform Clarity.
So I built this company called Clarity,
which was a marketplace to get advice
from other entrepreneurs over the phone.
And I get a request from Clay.
So I'm on the call, talking to Clay,
and he's asking me for advice around scaling his company.
Or no, it was actually around should I raise or not.
You know, he had a few investors that he was talking to.
They had created a significant amount
of monthly recurring revenue, and he wanted my advice.
But what was really neat was just asking him
how he grew the business, and how he scaled it.
And trying to figure out what were the patterns
that he applied that allowed him
to get to that level of growth.
And it wasn't 'til many years later,
that I heard my buddy Taki Moore talking about like ...
Something like the five traits of growth,
or something like that.
And I took that, these five,
and I'm gonna teach you them in this video.
And at the end I'm gonna talk about a myth,
because a lot of people get this wrong,
so stay right 'til the end.
But Taki talked about the five that he extracted
from Clay in building Leadpages.
So I wanna walk you through those real quick.
The first one is to pick one that target market.
I think that too often when we're building a business,
we know that there's three, or four, or five
different types of customers that we could go after.
But it's literally the discipline of nailing a niche.
One target customer.
One ideal core focused customer,
that you can add the most value to.
I know that there could be like,
"Well, we could also do it for x, y and z."
Those are the moments where, as a founder,
you have to have the discipline and say,
"You know what, we're not even saturated
"in this one customer."
So the first thing you need to nail,
is just one target market.
The second thing is, one product, okay?
And when I say this, and it's funny, 'cause you're like,
"Well, I only have one product,
"what do you mean by that?"
It's if you're building a software,
and all of a sudden you start
with the freemium consumer version,
and you know there's this enterprise version
of your product that you could build.
I'm talking about one product.
Maybe it's one price, one plan, one focus, and just do that.
Too often, startups in the early days
are trying to focus on pricing optimization,
and feature segmentation
for the different plans, and their features.
I think that that's just a bunch of wasted time.
At the end of the day, you have one target market,
one core product, that you're just focused on.
That'll let you learn faster
than trying to do too many things, for too many people.
The third thing you need to absolutely nail,
is one conversion tool.
So, in the software space, there's really three
different types of ways to get somebody onto your product.
There's a free trial, so freemium to paid.
There's an inbound sales process,
where you do a demo and get somebody on board.
Or you do a more involved enterprise sale,
and you're presenting, and competing
against other solutions.
And you have territory sales reps, etc.
That's probably not for most of you guys.
But regardless of the process, have one conversion tool.
One path where you take your
target customer in a focused product,
and get them in to becoming a customer.
Buying with a credit card on file.
So the fourth thing is, you need
to have one channel for traffic or growth.
So what I mean by this, is some people they go,
"Well, I want to do inbound marketing,
"I want to do Facebook ads, I want to do social media.
"I want to do YouTube videos, I want to do LinkedIn,
"I want to do whatever.
"I want to go to events, I want to be on stage,
"I want to speak."
And you think that that's a good idea,
of doing all these different traffic channels.
But what happens is, you don't
really know which one's working.
You don't focus on it.
Many people are like, "Okay, we're gonna start the blog,
"the blog's started, blog post done."
But you don't actually revisit it.
You don't go and say, "Hey, are these blog posts
"actually getting distribution, or anybody reading them?
"Are they getting engagement on social media?
"Are they good? Would I want to read them?"
And that's the pain of not focusing
on one traffic channel to grow.
Finally, the fifth thing you need to consider,
the scaling credo is one year.
One year of focus on the items above.
Just one, 12-month period of saying,
"You know what, I believe this is our core customer,
"we're gonna go deep on those things."
So focusing one year, and putting all your energy,
all that power,
all those resources behind those strategies
is really gonna get this thing to move forward.
So, real quick recap.
One, you have to pick one target market.
Second, be sure to have one product.
Don't try to split it up into four different plans,
focus on one product.
Third, make sure that you pick one conversion tool
that gets somebody from new, signed up for your product,
and becomes a customer.
Fourth, you want one channel of traffic or growth.
And that can be paid, that could be free,
that could be P.R., or whatever it is for you,
that feels natural to you.
Pick one.
And fifth, focus on it for one year.
Now here is the myth that I wanna share with you guys,
is most founders think they die
or don't succeed because of starvation.
Meaning they don't have enough ideas,
or they don't have enough
opportunities to grow their business.
And what I've discovered over coaching
hundreds of entrepreneurs personally.
Done-ing 1,300 Clarity calls,
talking to entrepreneurs one on one, on the phone.
Is that most of them die from indigestion.
They take on too many things, have too many projects,
they have too many ideas, too many features to build.
Too many customers to serve.
And not focus on the core of the business.
So that's why it's called the scaling credo.
Those five areas of focus.
I hope this video finds you well.
Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
And I'll see you next Monday.
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