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Lights that spark Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Being Boss. Today, we'll be breaking down the three levers to double your revenue, to drop these value bombs. I brought Simon Severino into EOFire studios. Simon helps business owners and SAAS and services run their company more effectively, which results in sales that soar. He created the Strategy Sprints™ Method that doubles revenue in 90 days, by getting owners out of the weeds. Simon is a TEDx speaker contributor to Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine and member of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society.

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And today Fire Nation, will talk about how to take those bottlenecks in your life and break them and just eight minutes. And then we'll talk about the three habits all successful CEOs have. Then we'll also be talking about speed versus velocity and what to fix next and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors, looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs increase profitability by an average of 804% annually, all for less money than it would cost to hire one minimum wage employee all on a month to month basis. Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark, a former SBA entrepreneur of the year at ThrivetimeShow.com/fire.

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The My First Million podcast features famous guests, discusses how companies made their first million and brainstorm new business ideas based on the hottest trends and opportunities in the marketplace. One recent app was all about how venture capitalists make money. Listen to My First Million, wherever you get your podcasts. Simon say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful. That most people disagree with.

1 (1m 52s):
Fire Nation. Hey brothers. So cool to be here again. One thing that I believe and the most people disagree is I think when you have your to-do list, you have to cut it in half and then you have to cut it in half again, cause

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Less is more Fire Nation. You're actually going to see, this is kind of a theme throughout our entire episode today, as we're talking about not one, not two but three levers to double your revenue. Now let's be honest with ourselves, Simon and also with Fire Nation. Our listeners, of course, we all have bottlenecks in our lives. I have bottlenecks. You have bottlenecks. However, you have a great system for number one, how we can identify our bottlenecks in just eight minutes and then potentially start breaking down those bottlenecks. So what's that system.

1 (2m 44s):
I'm happy to unpack the system. And I will also give you the tools at the end of this episode. And I have to tell you something, John, last time I was here, I shared one tool and then somebody called me a listener of yours called me and said, Simon, let's do this let's sprint. They are in North Carolina. And they said, I want to double as I'm not sure if we can double it because you are building houses. And so if you sell double the houses, how are you going to deliver double houses? And they went well, let's find out. So within sprint 90 days and they quadrupled their sales just with that one tool that you shared.

1 (3m 25s):
So, and that started really with the bottleneck. The bottleneck is don't do everything at once. Don't have projects that improve marketing, that improve sales, that improve operations all at once. And maybe you are also hiring identify the one thing that you need to solve right now, because if you solve that part, the overall throughput, the overall outcome for your business will be higher. And that's the bottleneck in the theory of constraints. Now manufacturing knows as well.

1 (4m 4s):
And most of us, we need a little help or some tools to identify the bottleneck, but it's easier than most of us think. And the way we start in identifying well, first of all, people can go onto our website strategies, prince.com, and they will find an eight minutes bottleneck analysis that they can do on their own. But let me tell you how we do it. So if you start working with us, we will help you go strategy first, before we go into any tactic, because we have 274 templates and tactics, but the full with the tool is still a fool.

1 (4m 46s):
We need to find right now the three strategies that will move the needle forward. And then we will really, de-select all activities and projects that do not contribute to this to be things. So first we go over your business, we simplified and then we check the three strategies. The first one, how can we improve by 25%, the frequency of your saints, meaning shorter sales cycle and more systemized upsells, also better retainment second strategy. How can we increase the conversion rate by 25%? That is sales technique.

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How do you close in during the close conversation and that's technique? And we get the recording from our clients and we give them feedback. And that improves by 25% and the third piece, the third strategy, how can we increase your price by 25%? Mostly we find that by doing eight positioning things, and then you are more niche down and you are better positioned, then you can increase the price by up to 25%. And if you're doing these three things, 25% more conversions, 25% higher frequency, 25% higher price. Now you have doubled your revenue because it's cumulates to 99%.

0 (6m 9s):
And this is incredible how these things build off of one, another 25, 25, 25. Now they're building off each other. Now you've just doubled your revenue. And I love that phrase. And I know you picked up on a Fire Nation, a fool with a tool is still a fool. You need to think about that and realize that because the truth is just screaming out of that sentence. So number one, better retainment, number two, better closing techniques and better three. How can you increase price? Now? One thing that I love about you, Simon is your habits are spectacular and they're huge for sustained success for really everybody that wants to achieve success in their life. You have really identified three CEO habits that we all need in our lives.

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Break these down for us,

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Especially in this kind of times that we're living right now, where everything is changing so fast. And we have so many moving parts. What is really in control? If we are honest, 95% is not in our control. Our sales is not in our control. The markets are not in our control, not even my stocks and my bonds are in my control anymore. Nothing is in control if we are really honest. So what are the 5% that we can really control? And this is the process. The only process that I can always rely on, whatever happens outside with the markets, I can rely on these three things. If the market is bearish, if the market is bullish, these three things, I can always rely upon daily habit, weekly habit, monthly habit.

1 (7m 43s):
And this is exactly what I do. And this is exactly what we implement with our clients daily habit. How do you allocate your time? Write it down. And in the evening, before you write the flow of the next day, you ask yourself two questions, which of the tasks that I do today will tomorrow. Somebody else do better than me. The delegation question. This is how you identify what to systemize delegate. Next. The second question, if I would leave more freely and more intentionally, what would I do tomorrow? This is how you remind yourself to think bigger, not just solving the next incremental problem which you are doing anyways about, Hey, I wanted to write a book, Ooh, let me start this project.

1 (8m 32s):
And this is by the way, exactly how I started writing my book. And IBM, that will tell you about my book, which is coming out right now on Amazon. It's called strategy sprints. And it describes exactly the three habits and the three strategies, how to really implement them nitty gritty. And so you ask yourself what to delegate next. And you remind yourself of the bigger things that you to achieve. That's the daily habit, how you allocate your time and doing it better. The weekly habit, get your three numbers, right? Get every seven days, your marketing numbers, sales numbers, and operations numbers, marketing numbers are things like how many people were on our website.

1 (9m 14s):
How many people want to talk to us? How many people jumped on our call? Sales numbers are how many closed deals, how many follow-ups, how many upsells operational numbers are? What's the NPS of this a week? How many customer complaints did we catch in less than eight hours. These are really important numbers. Pick the few numbers, but get them every seven days, we get three numbers every seven days. And now we have a simple real-time dashboard. And this is super important because you want to have the weak signals. If something is working 2% less, you want to know it right now and not in three months, because imagine you were playing angry birds and you shoot the bird and it says 500 points.

1 (10m 5s):
And then you shoot it again. It says 600 points, and then you shoot it again. And it says, I will send you a report in three months, right? Nobody wants that. That's not how you create flow in a team. That's not how you manage performance debts. That's not how your team stays on task and motivated. And so why are your reporting systems that way that HubSpot gives you this information after one month or even three months, you want it to read. Now that's the weekly habit. Get these three numbers every seven days. And then there is the monthly habit. Once a month, you check strategy, are we swimming in the right direction at the right pace, short competitive analysis. What are our three competitors doing?

1 (10m 46s):
Do we need to change something? Where do we stand out? How do we budget our uniqueness, cutting, where we are losing against our competitors, 20%, 25% of the costs and reinvesting them where we are winning. That's what we call sprint budgeting. And that's the monthly habit. These three things, time or location, the right numbers and strategic budgeting. These are the three, the only three things that are really in our control. And if we do them right, we, we are set up for success because we can quickly react to stuff coming up and stuff will come up.

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Now, Fire Nation, people are always asking me what books I'm reading. And I can tell you strategy. Sprints is going to be a book that I am reading as soon as this comes out, because you can just hear how Simon breaks things down, verbally picture what he's being able to do on a whole book. When he has the opportunity to sit down and write everything out in detail, with examples, with specific strategies, et cetera. So make sure this is on your to-do list. And we have a lot to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors, your customer's experiences, everything. When it comes to building and scaling your business and with multiple customers on board, your marketing team likely has conflicting priorities to juggle.

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Unfortunately, this means that customer oriented tasks can often fall through the cracks. But what if you had a system that allowed you to bring your customer's experiences to the forefront so that your marketing team isn't stuck in the weeds of operations and can instead focus on building targeted, meaningful campaigns, start giving your customers what they deserve. Campaigns built in a scalable way with responsive designs and a little extra TLC with a HubSpot CRM platform, a HubSpot CRM platform helps you tackle the most challenging part of creating content scalability with intuitive visual workflows and bot builders. You can create robust, automated campaigns across email, social media, web, and customer chats, and using new design tools. You can seamlessly adapt your content for multiple device types.

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So your customers have a great experience, no matter where they're viewing from. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM platform at hubspot.com. Looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs increase profitability by an average of 104% annually, all for less money than would cost to hire one minimum wage employee all on a month to month basis. Fire Nation meet Clay Clark. Clay has been coaching businesses since 2006. Yep. Even through the great recession and he does it for less money than it would cost to hire a minimum wage employee Inc magazine reports that by default 96% of businesses will fail within 10 years. Yet Clay's clients grow by an average of 104% annually.

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How's the team of possible Clay only takes on 160 clients. So he personally designed your business plan. Plus Clay's team helps you execute that plan with access to graphic designers, Google certified search engine, optimizers, web developers, ad managers, videographers, workflow, mappers and accounting coaches visit ThrivetimeShow.com/fire to watch thousands of testimonials from real entrepreneurs who Clay's helped over the years. Do your research. If you thousands of documented success stories from real people like you. ThrivetimeShow.com/fire then schedule your free consultation with Clay himself to see how he can help you with proven business coaching on a month to month commitment basis, ThrivetimeShow.com/fire.

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Simon, our businesses can either be agile or rigid. Talk to us about the differences between these two and which one do we want to be, and how do we become that type of company?

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Agile team and agile company can react quickly to changes. Originally. One cannot because their planning system are bulky and you need more time replanning then you can really do into executing. So rigid teams have meetings and reporting system and planning system that take too much time can change. And they cannot take decisions quickly because they don't get, as we discussed these few in real time. So some of it we did already installed with the weekly habit, because if, if you have the weekly habit, you get these things reported in real time, basically latest.

1 (15m 2s):
Every seven days, you have this simple dashboard and you know, what's going on. Then you are agile and rigid means it takes you too long to first realize that something is changing and then to act upon it. For example, today I was buying Bitcoin again for people listening to this later, Bitcoin was at 61,000, and this is something that's changing every couple hours. Now I need an investment system. And at this decision-making system, that that's helps me scan that number. No, that number, no. When it is low, no one to buy the dip. No, when not to buy and quickly informs me without me spending hours per day, right?

1 (15m 45s):
And the same thing we need in our business, I need to know when sales is going down and I want to notice really quickly, that's an agile company because now we can directly go to our masterminds, go to our clients, go to our colleagues and say, Hey, what's going on? Let's have a look. Let's investigate. I'm here exactly for this. I do not expect things to go always up. We are here for when things are hard. So just tell me what's not working and, and let's fix it.

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So Fire Nation, when you're hearing Simon and break down the differences between an agile company or rigid company, which one you actually want to be in, how you become that, believe me, this is from time tested principles. He's worked with so many people, so many companies that he really understands how to implement and insert these type of strategies to go forward, to make this happen. And then this kind of leads into speed versus velocity. I mean, in a lot of ways, those words are pretty similar, but there's obviously some differences here. So talk to us about your thoughts on speed versus velocity.

1 (16m 55s):
When you talk to a friend speed and velocity are used similarly, and, and speed has a positive connotation, right? But imagine you are running a marathon and you are running fast, but you are running in the wrong direction. How cool is that? Not so much. And so velocity is speed plus direction. And that ties back to what we talked at the beginning. If I had one tip, it's cut in half the amount of projects of activities of to-dos that you have, because you need to identify the right ones. And, and even if I run a company called strategy sprints, and I have created this method called strategy sprints, a sprint is really not running all the time.

1 (17m 40s):
That will be a marathon. A sprint is really be intentional with the training plan. We be intentional with how you carry yourself, be intentional with short bursts of high intensity activities. And then again, a low intensity. So when you go all in, you go all in it's like water, water finds a rock, it gripe. Now it moves around the rock. It doesn't stop and think and plan and have a meeting. It goes all in around the rock. And then there is no rock. It goes just Olin. That's what water does. And this is how we want our teams to be. So velocity is really speed and direction.

1 (18m 22s):
And that's why we want the weekly habit of getting the numbers. This is where we get a velocity. So how many discovery calls are we getting per day? 2, 3, 4, 5. Are they going up? How much? What's the, what's the average of the last four weeks of the sorry of the what's the running average of the current four weeks. What's the running average of the previous four weeks. This is what you want to know to know speed, but then you also want to know velocity. Are we selling to the right people at the right place, at the right price? And are we solving the right problem? These are velocity questions in teams and teams do not talk enough about that because naturally you look at the current numbers and improve discovery calls from two per day to three per day.

1 (19m 12s):
But from time to time, you have also to check velocity. Are we talking to the right people about the right pain points at the right pricing point? Because if you don't do that, then you just have more sales calls with the wrong people about the wrong solutions.

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There's a lot that early wants you to be taking away Fire Nation. Number one is your finger on the pulse? Like, is your finger actually on the pulse of your business, meaning that you are understanding the right metrics, the correct metrics. I mean, you could be measuring a million metrics in your business, but if all of them are the wrong metrics, you're going to be like that person running a marathon in the wrong direction. I mean, that's not the kind of person you want to be. Are you asking the right questions? Because if you're not, you won't get the right answers. And that's why Simon is just somebody who is breaking down the right questions and then showing you the systems to implement, to make your business rock and roll.

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Now there's always Simon next, how do we know what to fix next?

1 (20m 15s):
So when we run a business, it's full of moving parts, right? And so, and they keep moving and they keep moving. And then there is this opportunity and that opportunity, and we could go on clubhouse and we could do webinars, but we could do also PBC or maybe SEO. What is the one thing that we really should do right now? This is an important question. And I would really like to help people find out what's the one thing that we should solve next. And we call it the bottleneck. And that's why we have created an eight minutes bottleneck analysis. So if people are listening right now, wanna check their bottleneck on their own, go to strategy, sprints.com, click on the eight minutes bottleneck analysis.

1 (20m 56s):
And you can identify right now in eight minutes, what fix next? And then just fix that thing for one week. If you need more, do a second week on that. And after you have solved that you move to the next bottleneck, don't run 10 projects at once solve one thing in your value chain and then move to the next.

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What I really like about this process, Fire Nation is it's one step at a time. It's not this overwhelming. Oh my God. Like I'm so freaking out because there's 15 leaks in my business. I need to plug them all at once. Now. You only have one ability to tackle one problem. One at a time, start with the most pressing one, the most important one, and then move down the list. Now, Simon, you have a book coming out. I want to talk a little bit about that. Share some details, some dates, et cetera. And then also really the key takeaway you want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our entire conversation today. That major call to action you have for us. And then we'll say goodbye.

1 (21m 59s):
The book is right now on Amazon freshly printed, and it's called Strategist Prints: 12 ways to accelerate growth or an agile business. And it's exactly about these things, but I go really need a graded 60,000 words. I shared all my checklists from lead gen checklist, sales call checklist sales script. How do we do sales workflows? And even my hiring templates and my hiring checklists. So this is really a ton of bang for your buck. And I wish I had this book 20 years ago when I started and because I didn't have it, I wrote it now.

1 (22m 40s):
So that's the book. And also because I love Fire Nation and I told you, this has given me so much inspiration and every time I'm here, I can help so many people in the last time these people quadrupled. So I want to do this again. I will give again, the first 15 people who go to strategysprints.com/fire and book a time with me. They will have a one hour free coaching. So we do the bottleneck analysis together. I create a game plan for you together. You go and implemented and rock the next 90 days.

0 (23m 16s):
Fire Nation. If you didn't just hit the pause button and head over to strategysprints.com/fire to hopefully, hopefully be one of those first 15. What are you doing? I mean, an hour one-on-one with Simon's brain on your business. Priceless. I mean, I literally can't stress that enough and I, and I'm really disappointed that he can't do more of these. I mean, it's already unbelievably generous of his time. I mean, 15 hour calls and consultations, be one of those people, Fire Nation, press pause, strategysprints.com/fire. Any other final call to action Simon before we say goodbye,

1 (23m 56s):
Whatever you think right now, even if it's hard, just keep rolling. Just keep rolling. It's not about winning the game all the time. It's about staying in the game learning and keep rolling. So thank you, Fire Nation. Thank you, John.

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Keep rolling Fire Nation. You can't win if you're not in the game. And you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with SS and JLD today. So keep up the heat, head over to EOFire.com type Simon in the search bar in the show notes page will pop up for this episode, with everything we talked about. Plus past episodes with Simon and listen, everyone has been a gold mine. So check them out, listen to them. And again, strategysprints.com/fire for all that awesome opportunity that we talked about. His book Strategy Sprints is available in Amazon to pre-order or depending on when you're listening to this at your ready to order and Simon, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today.

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For that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you,

1 (24m 59s):
John.

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Hey, Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by Simon and Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That's why I created the freedom journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in a hundred days, and we're talking, step-by-step visit the freedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side, looking for a business coach who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs increase profitability by an average of 104% annually, all for less money than it would cost to hire one minimum wage employee all on a month to month basis. Schedule your free consultation today with Clay Clark, a former SBA entrepreneur of the year at ThrivetimeShow.com/fire.

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The My First Million podcast features famous guests discusses how companies made their first million embraced storms, new business ideas based on the hottest trends and opportunities in the marketplace. One recent app was all about how venture capitalists make money. Listen to My First Million, wherever you get your podcasts.