Your business can only grow as big as the way you think about it.
If what you've been doing until now is thinking of it as a bunch of technical things you have to hook together, that's only going to take you so far.
And the self-honesty required to admit this is where you’re really at...that's unfortunately rare.
“I'm making (some) money!” cries the coach.
Yeah, but…
If you want to level up, doing more of the same is NOT what's going to get you there.
Growth Attempts Ending In The Valley Of Death
The diagram below shows you quantities and revenue sizes of companies in the United States. Perhaps, as I was, you'll be surprised at just how few there are at the higher end.
(Scaling Up, Verne Harnish)
See the Valley of Death between each plateau?
That’s where you learn, adapt, change your thinking...or die.
This is why so many people try to grow, yet fail, collapse and fall back to the old plateau and say, “That didn't work.”
I've been around a long time. Been running my own business since 2012, after a 15 year corporate executive career. I've seen it all.
In the first several years of my business, until around 2016 when I worked for a full year with my main client being a Change Management consultant who only took care of companies of 1000+ staff, I talked “newbie talk.”
Meaning I shared tactics good for newbies. How to bring in your best prospect. How to qualify them. How to turn them into buyers. What to say. How to set up your sales page. What to write. The thing to say in the video sales letter.
All that stuff is still out there, in forum posts, videos and right here in blog entries. It's free.
No More Newbie Talk
Since then, as I scaled up in business, I moved on from “newbie talk.”
The things newbies struggle with don’t interest me anymore.
Instead, what I've been looking for over the past year or so are new ways of thinking.
People struggling with their business often find the treasures I bring back from this search “boring” and “philosophical.” That’s their mistake. And it’s entirely because of their billiard ball, “Newtonian Universe” point of view...that success is a matter of putting the right pieces together in the right order. That is simply not the case. That’s what newbies believe and what they concentrate on.
So anything else sounds like nonsense.
I admit it’s a bit frustrating. But occasionally someone comes along, someone usually with a lot of experience, who “gets it.”
One of the treasures I brought back--I went and Snagit-recorded about 25 minutes of this lecture--was a talk about how Germany, the Soviets, and the USA produced tanks in World War II.
Now what does that have to do with MY business, you say?
Well, it's an example of different THINKING.
Different Thinking About The Same Problem Leads To Different Results
The Germans built these fantastically-engineered war machines. High specifications. Many options. Very expensive...many times the cost of their enemies'. Long turnaround to complete production in factories with work stations rather than a single production line--much like a Boeing airplane today.
(German tank production station, rather than automotive-style assembly line)
The Americans, lead by an amazing architect named Albert Kahn, designed single-line factories that made inexpensive, zero options, long production run vehicles to good tolerances.
The Soviets? Well, first of all they borrowed Albert Kahn. They were US allies at the time, seeing as Hitler was invading the heck out of the USSR. And they did a study. How long did a Soviet tank survive in the field?
They found out it was six months, and in combat 14 hours. So why build things to exacting tolerances?
The Soviets made factories that practically spat out good tanks. Made to acceptable tolerances, because who cares--they were going to be dead in six months or less. They focused on lowering costs, and boy did they lower them.
The end result was the USSR and USA churned out a ton of tanks and overwhelmed Germany’s production. The finely engineered tanks Germany produced ended up filled with unexpected road dust and out of commission half the time in the war in the east.
Can you see the differences in THINKING about their work here?
Can you see the TRAP Germany caught itself in with the desire for high tolerance, beautiful war machines?
Can you see how these modes of thinking might be overlaid on YOUR business...and which approach you might have been unconsciously using until now?
Say you're a coach. Have you been, without really thinking about it, running a:
A) highly customized, long deliverable, exacting program?
B) well designed but affordable, easy to fulfill program?
C) "gets the job done" (barely?), low cost, quick and dirty program?
Is this approach you've unconsciously taken on the right one to get you to the next level?
Are you ready to be self-honest, admit where you're at, see reality as it is...and adapt your way out of the plateau you've been hung up on, so you can move to the higher plateau you’ve been imagining?
>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist and conversion expert. To book a consultation with Jason, click here. <<
