The Elite Business Growth Method: Episode One, With Brett Gilliland

Welcome to our episode. I’ve been reflecting. We launched the show in September 2019 and it’s been great. I want to thank all of our readers. I also want to thank all of the guests who’ve been on our show. Even if I have all the insight, experience and answers that you all are looking for or even the ones you need but aren’t necessarily looking for, it’s much more interesting and impactful to hear those lessons from a variety of perspectives.

I think all of the business owners and experts who’ve been so graciously giving of their time and providing valuable lessons from their experiences. It would get a little old if it were just me. Having said that, I’ve decided to deviate from our normal programming, and you guys can hang in there with me, to air a special four-part mini-series.

We’re producing episodes to give all of you a gift and I mean that. This gift will be especially meaningful to you if you’re experiencing seven-figure growth challenges. If you’re not quite at $1 million in revenue or you’re just starting on your entrepreneurial journey, the gift that I’m going to give over the next four episodes will not be as impactful. If you have been at $1 million plus, especially if you’ve been stuck there for some time, what I’m going to share with you may be the thing you’ve been looking for and didn’t know it.

After the four-episode mini-series is over, we’ll resume airing the normal business owner and expert interviews that you’ve all become accustomed to and love. I’ll do an occasional solo cast from time to time. This mini-series is meant to be a gift for all of you, especially if you are in that seven-figure range or you’ve hit a ceiling of some sort and you aren’t sure why. I’m going to tell you why and give you some ideas about how to move forward.

Running A Business Is Tough

With that intro, let’s acknowledge it’s tough to own and run a business. Believe me. I know not only because I am a business owner myself but I’ve spent the last several years helping hundreds of business owners like you. If I weren’t so picky about precision in my language, I’m guessing it’s thousands but I’m going to stick with hundreds. Let me prove it to you and describe some of the things that you may have thought, felt or experienced as a business owner. Play along with me here.

First, you feel the weight of the world on your shoulders. Employees clock in and clock out but you’re never truly off. Even if you have a physical workplace or an office and you turn off the lights at the end of the day and lock up the doors, get in your car and drive home, maybe your body left the business but you didn’t leave it and it never leaves you. It’s always with you. That full weight of responsibility and ownership rests on your shoulders completely. You might even feel that you’re the only one who cares as much about the business as you or your customers do.

You feel that the brand or the image of the company is an extension of your personal identity. I’ve felt that. If something goes wrong with a customer experience or we put a message out that’s strange, all of that feels like a personal reflection on me. I can’t stand it if it’s anything less than great. You may feel something like that. It’s no wonder that you get protective of how things get done. You want them to be done just so and just right.

You might even feel like you’ve built a business that’s like a house of cards. One gust of wind or tremor and the whole thing might come crashing down. You might see yourself as an imposter thinking, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what I’m doing. Everybody’s looking to me for the answers but I’m not sure that I have the answers.”

How about this one? If you’re like me, you’re constantly aware of the financial health of the business. When things get a little tight in my business, I have a strong urge to check that bank account way too often. In some of those more challenging times, it’s the first thing that I want to do in the morning. I wake up and I want to see the bank balance and the refresh from overnight. I want to see if any more revenues come in or if we’re going to make it right.

There are the people issues. Why does having employees have to be so hard? Why can’t you ever seem to hire just the right fit? Even when you hire good people, more employees usually translate to the potential for more people issues, miscommunication, mishaps, missteps in quality, dropped balls, people pulling in different directions or just not getting along.

All of those things come or the potential is constantly there when you have people, especially as you have more people. Some business owners think that having more people equals inviting more headaches. More people, more headaches. There’s a better way and I want to share that with you. We’ve shared it successfully with hundreds of business owners like you. Please stick with me.

Let me say it this way. Most business owners I know like the idea of having time and money freedom. We all want that. That’s often what drove us to start our businesses in the first place. As the business grows, there seems to be less freedom. The personal financial picture is not getting any better either. Some of us begin to wonder, “Is it worth it? It seemed like business was easier and I was taking home more money when we were smaller. Why would I take on all the headaches, stress and chaos of a growing business when I don’t have any more time freedom and I’m not taking any more money home than I used to?”

Another thought that happens for us as business owners is that it’s hard to grow a business to $1 million or more but it’s even more challenging to run a seven-figure business if we do it the same way. We have dreams of doing it a better way but we don’t know a better way. We try to do it with the same people, processes and systems that got us to $1 million in the first place only to find that those things that we knew and learned to get us to $1 million don’t seem to be the things that will enable us to keep going.

Finally, you’ve always known the need for spending more time working on the business. You’ve known that’s a need and you’ve even liked that idea but you’re so busy and consumed working in the business now. The real-time fires the whirlwind of the business that you can’t imagine having the luxury to spend dedicated time working on the business. Some of us wouldn’t know where to start, even if we somehow miraculously found the time to do it.

If I’ve spoken to you at all in a way that says, “I get you,” I hope that you’ll read because I do have a gift for you over the next four episodes. This one plus three, I’m going to be giving you some very valuable information about how to break out of some of those thoughts, feelings and the reality that you have as a business owner, especially if you’ve grown to $1 million plus.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

If you desire to keep growing your seven-figure business, you must realize that what got you to this point in your growth is necessary but insufficient if you want to keep growing or even if you want to learn a better way to manage what you already have with much less chaos and much more time and money freedom. Marshall Goldsmith famously said it this way, “What got you here won’t get you there.” That is true.

You’ve experienced this to some extent already, even if you haven’t fully been able to put words to it. Let me explain. Not all small businesses are dealing with the same challenges. What do I mean? If you ask the US government what the definition of small business is, it could be anybody from a solopreneur up to 500 employees. It’s ridiculous how big a small business can get in the government’s small business definition.

The Stages Of Small Business Success

At least I hope most of you were reading this is going to be in that $1 million to $10 million range, which typically means you would have somewhere between 6, 8 or 10 employees up to maybe 100 on the high end but you’re experiencing different things than people who have 2 employees. You’re experiencing different things than people who have 500 employees. I want to call out that there are different stages. I’m going to give a summary here. I’ll highlight some high points but I did a full interview with Keap CEO Clate Mask. He’s a good friend of mine. We’ve worked together for ten years. He is the inventor of these stages of small business success or small business growth that I’m going to share with you briefly.

I’m only doing it to set up a bigger problem that then I want to give you the gift for. If you want a deeper dive, go back to Episode 2, not this mini-series but back to the very first real episode that I did. It was an interview with Clate Mask on the stages of small business growth. If you want a deeper dive into the topic that I’m about to share with you, go there. Here’s the overview. There are two key takeaways that I want you to understand about the stages. The first takeaway is that the stage changes happen on the 1s and 3s of revenue.

What I mean by that is as you go from $0 to $100,000, it is a stage. $100,000 to $300,000, the 1s and 3s, $300,000 to $1 million. $1 million to $3 million, $3 million to $10 million. The stages keep going, $10 million to $30 million, $30 million to $100 million and so on. The reason why that is that’s roughly a tripling of the business. Every time you have a change on the 1s and 3s, your business roughly tripled and what got you here won’t get you there. The things that worked to get you to this point aren’t going to be sufficient to get you to the next stage.

The other key takeaway that I want you to have about the stages is that they are predictable. Not just that it happens on the 1s and 3s of revenue but there are predictable challenges and corresponding keys to success to grow to the next stage. The path is known and the solutions are proven. I want you to know that because we have the answers and we’ve been through these stages so we can share them with you.

Business Growth: There are predictable challenges and corresponding keys to success to grow to the next stage.

Let me explain. As you grow from $0 to $100,000 in annual revenue, there’s a sub-stage in there we call side hustle but that’s the solopreneur stage, stage 1. At first, it might be a part-time side hustle until you grow to about $30,000 in revenue. You then might take the full-time leap into, “This is my whole job or employment.” From $0 to $100,000 in annual revenue is stage 1.

The key success factors for getting through that stage are to be able to manage your time and have enough leads to provide a living for yourself. Learn how to manage your time so you can leave the side hustle and make it your full-time thing. You got to grow it to a point where you can do that. You’ve then got to have enough leads and opportunities coming in. You got to find enough business to make a living for yourself.

Stage 2 is we’re going from $100,000 to $300,000 in revenue. The key success factor there is that you have to figure out how you will sell. You have to learn how to sell. You might say, “Didn’t you already say that in stage one?” In stage one, you have to get enough business to keep yourself living. You have to provide a living for yourself. If you want to go to $300,000 in revenue, you do have to figure out how to sell your product or service or hire someone to do it. The sales muscle becomes important in stage two.

Stage 3 is the revenue path from $300,000 to $1 million in revenue. None of this is perfect but it’s close. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. It’s based on US Census Bureau data. There’s a lot of effort and time to get a clear picture of this. If you’re interested, there is a visual you can get to the stages document. There’s an infographic and you can text the word STAGES to 72-000. You can opt-in for the stages document in a video with Clate Mask, explaining and teaching it. If you’re interested in some of this, you can get the visual that goes with it.

In stage 3, from $300,000 to $1 million, the key success factor is that you have consistent customer acquisition and consistent fulfillment. In other words, you have consistent delivery of your product or service. You’re becoming a steady operation, which is the name that we give to this stage, $300,000 to $1 million. Once you’ve grown to $1 million, you know what it takes to get a customer. You’ve learned how to deliver that expectation that you sold consistently. You’ve got a consistent customer acquisition machine and a consistent fulfillment machine at the million-dollar level. You’re into new territory.

The fun begins in stages 4 and 5. From $1 million to $3 million and then $3 million to $10 million, that’s where the fun begins. Not like it wasn’t fun before but because I am super passionate and fully dedicated to the seven-figure growth journey, this is where all of our expertise comes into play. That $1 million to $10 million space is leading up to it. After $10 million, we have some knowledge that’s relevant and we can help. Our sweet spot, the people that we serve well, better than anyone else, is $1 million to $10 million.

Those business-building challenges are known and there is a proven path. There’s a playbook, a method and examples. We have those to share with you. Only 3% to 5% of all businesses that ever start in the United States make it to that million-dollar mark. Think of that. If you are in that spot, you’re in that top 3% to 5% of all businesses that ever start and you make it to $1 million in revenue, you are elite. This isn’t a celebration moment but let me at least acknowledge that you are an elite entrepreneur. That is why we call our business Elite Entrepreneurs because you are the people who we serve and the people who we love to help on that journey.

If you want to keep growing your seven-figure business without going crazy, you’re running yourself into the ground, you will need to begin to engage in business-building activities that have little to do with sales or marketing. In other words, the key success factors that got you to $1 million. Learn how to sell, market and systematize your fulfillment well enough to provide a consistent, exceptional experience to your customers. Those things are still necessary but they’re insufficient if you want to keep growing past the million-dollar mark. Some businesses can push that limit a little further. They might get to $2 million or $3 million but they’re not going to get much further than that. Many settle back into the place where their business is designed to deliver value.

The good news here is there is a way. It’s proven and practical. Anybody can do this but you have to know what it is. We want to help you make the transition from a scrappy, superhuman entrepreneur who put this business on your back and willed it forward to $1 million in revenue, dealing with some new growth challenges. We want to help you make the transition from that to a very capable seven-figure business builder. Somebody who’s a leader and who knows how to align people, set a vision, help people take targeted, coordinated action and turn the bigger picture into results. We want to bring people together.

The Elite Business Growth Method

Leadership, culture, strategy, turning vision into reality, and all the people, processes and systems that you have to build to continue to scale a seven-figure business are the things that we teach. We put a name to it and there’s no magic to it but we call it The Elite Business Growth Method. All of you could figure this stuff out on your own. It would just take you years and years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment to get the lessons learned that we learned when we grew our seven-figure business.

The reason I mentioned Clate Mask, who’s the CEO of Keap, is that his business used to be called Infusionsoft. This Elite Entrepreneurs business was born inside Infusionsoft. We learned to grow our business to $10 million, $30 million and then to $100 million with an amazing culture, great people and a consistent and disciplined rhythm around strategy, planning and execution. We did the business-building work that I’m inviting you to do if you want to continue to grow your business or run it in a better way so you get more time, more money and freedom without a bunch of chaos and craziness.

The Vision Setting: Purpose, Values, Mission

For the duration of this episode and then the next three episodes, I’m going to outline and introduce the major sections of The Elite Business Growth Method so that you have a roadmap or way. The first part of this method is what we call Set the Vision. Setting the vision is your number one responsibility as a leader. I know you wear lots of hats and I acknowledge that you wear many hats. In your mind, it may be simplistic to say, “This hat is the most important one.” I’m telling you from experience and working with hundreds of other business owners like you that the most important role and hat you have as the leader of the business is to set the vision.

Business Growth: The vision is your number one responsibility as a leader. The most important role you have as the leader of the business is to set the vision.

What do I mean by that? Setting the vision does not mean coming up with some bland, boring, lengthy vision statement that nobody ever pays attention to, has no real impact on the business and is a waste of time and money. They do not create a big vision statement. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about setting the vision in the context that Jim Collins teaches in a book called Beyond Entrepreneurship. It’s a lesser-known book than any of his writings. It’s a fantastic book but especially chapter two teaches this concept of setting the vision. I’m going to share with you the main components but if you would like to read more, get that book Beyond Entrepreneurship.

Setting the vision is three separate components. The first component is purpose. The purpose is all about the why of your business. What is the meaning of your business? What is the impact that you have on the world? Sometimes I refer to this as why your business deserves to have a life. At the beginning of your business, it might have been to provide a living for yourself or all the freedom and money that you had anticipated and dreamed of in the beginning. That may have been the purpose in the beginning but now that the business is $1 million plus, it’s working. It’s there and it’s real. It’s an entity. It has life. Why does it deserve to continue to have a life?

As long as that business relies on you and is tied to your identity, it will not get to have a life of its own. It needs to serve you as the business owner but it needs to also separate from you. You need to be able to set a vision that is in line with your personal goals and vision but separate from it. The purpose is all about giving meaning to your business. The business owners who do this have a much more meaningful business that they’re excited about and their people get excited about. It unlocks a whole new level of engagement, excitement and attraction. Attraction for the right talent, right partners and right investors, if need be. It starts with this core why. Why does the business exist? That is the purpose and it’s the first element of setting the vision properly.

Our purpose is to help elite entrepreneurs build meaningful businesses. That’s it. There’s a label there. It’s succinct. We help elite entrepreneurs build meaningful businesses. To us, meaningful means something full of purpose but it also means meaningful in its size, scope and ability to have an impact on the world. Every reason for our company’s existence is to help elite entrepreneurs like you build meaningful businesses. That’s it.

When I was at Infusionsoft for ten years, our purpose was to help small businesses succeed. That was our why. That is why I got up on Monday mornings and was excited to go into the office. That is why on Friday, when I went home, it didn’t feel like, “I finally get to go home.” I can leave the drudgery of work behind. I didn’t feel that way. It was always exciting to be part of the cause of helping small businesses succeed. That was a perfect fit for me from a purpose standpoint.

What you have to do with your purpose is enroll the right group of people on your team to put words to the reason your business deserves to have life. What is the meaning? What is the impact? What is the purpose? What is the why? That’s the first element of setting a vision. The second element is values. We start with purpose or why. We then go to values. The values have a two-part explanation. The main part is how we operate with one another. That infers a second part, the who. It’s the who and the how.

It’s the people involved and their core beliefs or core values that they share as to how we should talk to and treat one another, whether that’s a peer at work, a colleague, a team member, a partner, a customer or a prospect. It doesn’t matter who we are talking to. This is our way of being. Here’s how you would observe us talking and behaving day in and day out without much thought being given to what we were doing. It would be our natural way of being.

When you get the values right and you hire lead and fire to the values, you eliminate a bunch of people’s problems. Why? It’s not because there are no differences. We want to have diverse perspectives, backgrounds, preferences and tastes but at the center of why we’re doing what we’re doing and how we do things with one another and others, that needs to be the same. There needs to be unity and oneness around purpose and values. We would hire lead and fire to the purpose and the values.

Get clear on the why and this who and how around core values. Not all values that we have need to be shared but on the core ones, maybe the 5 to 7 things that are the same about how we operate around here. If you were to blend up your values in a wonderful mix, it would be a smoothie and the smoothie would be the flavor of your company. That’s the way these values work. They don’t work in isolation. They work in a wonderful mixture or symphony if you will. It’s a blended sound, taste or flavor. That is how we all act around here and it’s magnetic. It draws in the right people and repels the wrong ones.

Once you get purpose and values dialed in, we’re ready to attract the right people to the cause who are going to get along with one another and behave in a way that we can run fast together towards a shared objective. That’s the third part of setting a vision, mission or shared objective. It’s a destination-oriented mission, not a bland, generic, plug-and-play mission statement that hangs on the wall that nobody ever references. It’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a very articulated destination. It’s a destination of your creating and choosing.

Pull the team together in a powerful way to put words to your purpose and values. Together you articulate the thing that you’re up to over the next 3 years, 4 years, 5 years or some defined timeframe. It’s a specific destination in a specific timeframe. We have the magic that is setting the vision. There’s no vision statement. There are three components to vision, its purpose, values and mission. When you get those three things articulated, you have the recipe for building a great company and business.

You can build a seven-figure business without doing this work. It helps if you’ve done it sooner than getting to that million-dollar mark but it is one of the things that will keep you from going further. If you don’t do this foundational vision-setting work, it will be hard to keep pulling the business forward. Remember, what got you to $1 million will not get you further. Setting the vision is one of the key things that you must do as a leader.

You’re going to transition from entrepreneur to superhuman. Throw it on your back. Wheel it forward like a founder or business owner. You’re going to move from that to a leader of people. At $1 million plus, you’re going to have a growing team. You have to have something that energizes them and something that directs their attention in the same area together that gives focus. That destination-oriented mission with clear or accompanying mission goals will set the path. It’ll say, “That’s where we’re going.”

When we achieve that mission, we’ll put a flag on the ground. I like to use an Everest analogy. Let’s say your mission was to scale Everest metaphorically. You get to the top and you’ve done it. You stake that claim or that flag in the ground that says, “We accomplished the mission.” You then set out on the next mission and say, “Our next mission is this.” You go climb another mountain, go to the moon or whatever the next mission is but it’s destination-oriented. Once you achieve it, it’s done. You then name the next one.

Those three components, purpose, values, mission, the why, the how, the what, that magical combination is the clarity you must help your people get if you want to build a business. If you want to scale a 7-figure business up into the higher end of 7 figures or to $10 million and beyond or you want to run a good business at the current size and you want to have more time back and have better money freedom, then you must learn to lead people in this way. It will engage them on a whole new level and give you a lot more production than you’re getting now.

Business Growth: The purpose, values, and mission—the why, how, and what—that magical combination is the clarity you must help your people get.

It’ll be more fun, productive and profitable. Everything benefits when you get clear as a leader on purpose, values and mission. Not by yourself but by enrolling the team in the process to get that clarity, you have something meaningful that you can drive forward and you can work together as a team to do. The purpose is never accomplished. It’s like a guiding star. It’s always there but it’s separate from you. It’s consistent with your personal purpose, dreams and aspirations as a business owner but it belongs to the business. It’s the business’s identity, not yours. You can decouple yourself from it. You can begin to enroll others to go own and champion this the way that you would.

Overview Of The Next Three Episodes

The values are like our code of conduct. “Here’s how we operate around here.” We have a very clear destination. I get excited talking about that. I got way repetitive but I hope that that helps you capture the ideas of what you must do if you want to grow your business past the seven-figure mark. That is set the vision. That is the first component or the foundational piece of The Elite Business Growth Method. Over the next 3 episodes, I’m going to teach you 3 more major components.

In episode two, we’ll talk about strategic progress or the longer-term focus. We’ll start to get into how you take a destination-oriented mission and start to break that down into work that we can do to make strategic progress. We’re going to go from the bigger picture to execution on the strategic stuff. That’s episode two in this mini-series. The third episode in this mini-series is going to be what I’ll call operational excellence. It’s more the short-term focus. Do this now. It’s running the business that is now only.

I want to teach you some things about how to do that in a less chaotic fashion, more intentionality. We’ll talk about organizing the work with a future org chart, something we call Big 3 and the concept we call higher lead and fire to the vision. That’ll be around the operational excellence or the short-term. Episodes 2 and 3 are a little bit of the yin and yang of The Elite Business Growth Method. It’s the longer-term focus of strategic progress and the shorter-term focus of operational excellence. How do we keep the lights on and deliver the goals of now while we make strategic progress? It’s that balancing act between the two.

Episode four is on a meeting rhythm. How do we bring it all together? How do we do both the long-term and the short-term? How do we work on the business and in the business? How do we align our teams to take targeted, coordinated action in both the long-term and the short-term, both the strategic progress and the operational excellence? In episode four, we’ll bring it all together with a meeting rhythm to maintain proper attention on both the long-term and the short-term.

Remember, the goal with The Elite Business Growth Method is to go from you having to keep your arms around everything and being bogged down by the business because the weight of the world is on your shoulders and all the other pains that we talked about in the front of this episode. Go from that reality to a new reality where you can begin to relinquish control, organize work, give ownership with accountability to other people, lift the burden off of you and have more of a shared ownership and responsibility across the team.

We want you to get the time and money freedom that you always wanted when you started the business. There is a way. We call it The Elite Business Growth Method. We’re going to teach you every single step of the way how you do this so that you can start to grow without running yourself into the ground. You are extremely smart people. You didn’t get to this place without being able to learn things, figure things out and have the grit and tenacity to keep going. All of those great qualities that you have that got you here will still be necessary to get you further in your journey but you must learn some new things.

We can help you. We’ve seen this over and over again. It doesn’t matter what business model or what geography you live in. If you have a product-based business or a service-based business, it doesn’t matter. All of the principles we’re going to teach you apply to every business that gets to that seven-figure mark. You got to figure out how to do these things. We know the path. It’s known. The challenges that you’ll go through are very predictable. We’ve heard them over and over again in the interviews on our previous episodes. You’ll hear them some more in the future when we interview more people.

What we’re going to share with you will pay off for years and years to come. Please enjoy the rest of this mini-series. It is our gift to you. It is my personal gift to you. I want to see you succeed. We’re giving you the components and the path that The Elite Business Growth Method is made up of. It will give you everything you need. This is the way to grow without going crazy. The best time to plant a shade tree was many years ago. The next best time is today.

If you haven’t done any of this work, no problem. Let’s start doing it now. We know how and we can help you do it. Please tune in for the rest of our mini-series, the next three episodes. If you have questions, you can reach out to us at Info@GrowWithElite.com or go to our website, GrowWithElite.com and find out more about The Elite Business Growth Method there. We love serving you as seven-figure business owners. We can’t wait to help you along your path in the seven-figure growth journey.

Important Links

• Clate Mask – Past Episode
• The Elite Business Growth Method
• Beyond Entrepreneurship
• Info@GrowWithElite.com