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

This is the third episode in a four-part mini-series on the Elite Business Growth Method. If I haven’t made it abundantly clear in the prior episodes, every aspect of the Elite Business Growth Method is useful to any size business, but the things I’m sharing in this mini-series are especially relevant for seven-figure business owners. We see time and time again that an entrepreneur will successfully grow a business to $1 million or $1.5 million in revenue and get stuck. Some even push their business a little further before hitting that plateau. What I’m sharing with you from the Elite Business Growth Method are the keys to running and growing a successful seven-figure business.

If you found yourself getting stuck usually somewhere around $1 million to $1.2 million in revenue, maybe up to $1.5 million or even $2 million, what I’m sharing with you through this mini-series of this Elite Business Growth Method is exactly the work that you have to do if you want to get unstuck. Even if you’re okay with the revenue where it is, what I’m teaching you will enable you to enjoy a much higher quality of life as a business owner, a much more enjoyable business, where the team is happy, and where everything is going well. You’ll experience much more flow and control. Not the white-knuckle gripping type of control, but the measured control where you know what’s going on and you’ve got a good handle on things.

Let’s keep going here. In episode one, we covered the stages of small business growth and discussed some of the challenges that are common among seven-figure businesses. I’m not going to repeat those here. You can go back to episode one if you want to know those again. I then introduced the foundational piece of the Elite Business Growth Method, which we call Setting the Vision.

In episode two, we talked about what the longer-term strategic progress work in your business should look like. I shared some structure for translating your mission strategies into work you must do this quarter in order to be on track to accomplish your mission goals in the desired timeframe. If all of that sounds foreign to you, you may have missed episode two or you might need a refresher. You can go back and tune in to that.

As promised, in this episode, we’re going to shift gears and focus on the shorter-term, what I call the operational excellence side of your business. Before we go any further, let’s talk about a question that may be on your mind. What is the right mix between long-term and short-term focus? How much time should I be spending working in the business? How much time should I be spending working on the business?

I’m guessing intuitively for you, you realize it’s not 50/50. There’s a reason we all spend the vast majority of our time working in the business or making sure that the operations are going. We got to keep the lights on. We got to pay the bills. We got to make payroll. All of the must-do of the day-to-day is what we normally get caught up in. It’s not 50/50. It’s not like half your time should be on running the business and half the time should be on strategic progress.

The problem of course is that if we don’t intentionally create some time and space to work on the longer-term strategic progress side of the business, we’ll always get pulled into that shorter-term operations focus. That’s inevitable. The default position for all of us is to spend 100% of our time working in the business, fighting fires, in the weeds, and stuck in the mud. We get pulled into that very naturally.

Business Growth: If we don’t intentionally create some time and space to work on the longer-term strategic progress side of the business, we’ll always get pulled into that shorter-term operations focus.

In the mix that I’m going to introduce to you, I want you to think of this more like a rule of thumb, not a hard and fast rule. It’s not a precise formula. The rule of thumb is this. If you could spend as a collective team, in other words, if you took all of your resources and pooled them and you could spend 80% of the collective time, energy, and focus of the entire team on running the current business, doing the thing that you guys do, keeping the lights on, paying the bills, serving customers. About 80% on the whole, if you could spend your time doing that, that would give you about 20% of your time, energy, focus, and resources across the entire team to be spent enabling the future business. If you can get an 80/20 mix, I think that’s about right.

Now, 90/10 is better than 100% in the business and never working on the business. That might mean that most of your team would still spend the vast majority of their time on short-term business needs while a smaller number of the team, including you as the owner, would focus much more of your time on future enabling work. It doesn’t mean that everyone is spending 80% in the business and 20% on the business. It means as a whole, about 80% of the collective resources are spent or invested working in the business where about 20% on the whole would be spent on the business.

If you’re a solopreneur, then you can split it up. Four days a week in the business and one day on. If that’s too clean-cut for you, I recognize it’s a little messier than that. You can’t just say, “One day a week, I’m not going to run the business.” You got to be in the business. You could get maybe an hour or 90 minutes a day to work on the business. At first, you start where you can, but the ideal is to get to that 80/20 rule of thumb, 80% in the business, 20% on the business as a collective whole, taking into consideration the full resources on your team.

Operational Excellence

Just because you’re naturally very comfortable in the shorter-term operations side of the business, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it very effectively. This episode is all about helping you on the shorter-term operational excellence side of the business. We’ve seen many businesses dramatically improve their performance when they put into place the Elite Business Growth Method.

I’m talking about increased sales, better retention, higher quality, healthier culture, and more profit. Whatever measure you might use to determine your business’ success, all of those things can improve if you utilize the Elite Business Growth Method in this shorter-term operational side of the business as well. Imagine if you could do some work on the short-term side of your business, that would yield significant improvements to the performance of the business. How would that impact your team? What would it do for your business? What would it do for your life? That’s one of my favorite questions for the business owners. What would it do for your life if we could crank up the production and the fun? You get better results and higher morale. That’s a pretty good combination.

Just like the strategic progress side of the business, starts with orienting to your mission, your mission goals, and your mission strategies. The operational goals and focus will also need to align with mission goals and mission strategies as well. It’s not one or the other. The mission gives direction to both sides of your business. The mission goals inform both sides of your business, but the mission goals actually inform the shorter-term operational piece much more than the strategic progress side of your business. Of course, anything we’re doing day-to-day should align with mission strategies or we’re not serious about those being the things that we think will lead to the outcomes we want.

Let’s keep rolling here. On the strategic progress side of the business, I taught you about creating annual priorities, quarterly priorities, and smarts to do future enabling work like building new capabilities or further differentiating your business from the competition. On the operational excellence side of the business, you need to plan how the business will perform throughout the year. Some of you I know are guilty of this. You don’t always put together a plan. You have a plan in your head, wing it, or manage things by making sure you have more money coming in than is going out.

Business By Design

You really should create an annual plan, complete with annual, quarterly, and monthly performance goals. In many instances, you may need to break down some of those goals into weekly and daily goals that must be achieved in order to stay on track to hit those monthly, quarterly, and annual goals that you’ve set. Often, business owners we meet have run their businesses in a way where they take whatever comes their way instead of getting intentional about what they want to create. They take more of a business-by-default approach instead of a business-by-design approach. The Elite Business Growth Method is going to help you create that business by design.

If I described you, meaning many businesses take more of that business-by-default approach, don’t worry, it’s not too late. We can recover. We can go from business-by-default to business-by-design. In fact, it’s not uncommon for businesses who work with us to double or even triple in revenue in 18 to 24 months. This is possible for you. I’ve seen it over and over again. Ironically, if you want to get a better handle or more control over your business’s future, you must learn to relinquish control in the short-term operational excellence side of the business.

That sounds different. If I want more control, I got to give up more control. Let me explain that. If you do this right, you’ll be able to loosen up that white-knuckle grip that you’ve always had on the steering wheel, only if you’re able to give A-player team members ownership with accountability. Let me explain what I mean by that or let me explain how. First, you have to have great team members. I believe something Jim Collins teaches. That is setting the vision is the number one responsibility of every great leader. If that’s not abundantly cleared by now and now that we’re into episode three, then I haven’t spoken very well or I’ve been misunderstood because, from the start, I talked about the importance of setting the vision.

The other two responsibilities you have as a leader are to build the team to go accomplish that mission and to secure fuel for growth. Some people refer to that as, “Don’t run out of money.” In other words, you have to make sure there are enough financial resources to enable the company to achieve the mission. I’m not going to be fully addressing that whole secure fuel for growth responsibility. I’m not going to touch on that at all really much in the mini-series, but there will be one more brief mention of it when I talk about dashboards.

Most of you are already highly attuned to the financial well-being of your business, so you probably don’t need my help with that. I’m choosing to not talk about it. If you are having challenges securing fuel for growth, there is help to be had. You can get help with that. It’s just not covered well in this mini-series. Back to building a winning team, which is that second responsibility.

After setting the vision, you got to go build a team to go achieve the mission. You won’t want to settle. For good measure, one more never settle for someone based on them being able to do the job. Even if they’re highly qualified to do the job, don’t settle for that. You have to ensure that they’re the right fit for the role, but you also have to make sure they’re the right fit with the team. Some people call that fit with values or fit with the culture. They must fit the way of being around here, which is why setting the vision is so important. The purpose and the values inform tremendously if the people that you bring in are going to be a good fit around here.

If they’re not passionate about the purpose that you guys have identified for your business, they’re not going to be a good fit. If their behaviors, tendencies, and preferences aren’t in line with those core values or behaviors that go with the core beliefs represented in your values, they’re not going to be a good fit around here. You have to hire to purpose, values, and the skillset needed to achieve the mission.

How To Hire, Lead, And Fire To The Purpose, Values, And Mission

One of the things we teach as part of the Elite Business Growth Method is how to hire, lead, and fire to the purpose, values, and mission. I want you to think about this. If you’ve hired more than 2 or 3 people in your life, chances are, you know how painful it is and how significant the costs are of hiring the wrong person. Not only is it a huge waste of time and money, but it can create problems for your team, hurt the customer experience, and even damage important partner relationships. Everything is on the line. I typically will say, every single hire you make either strengthens your company or weakens your company. Every hire you make strengthens your culture or weakens your culture. There’s no exception. You either got stronger with that hire or weaker.

One of the absolute highlights of my working life was spending two half-day sessions with Jim Collins in his lab in Boulder, Colorado. One of the things he taught our leadership team, I was there with a leadership team, was that spending time with B-players. In other words, anyone who’s not an A-player. Spending time with B-players takes time away from the people you love to be with and takes time away from the things you love to do.

Let’s think about that for a second. It’s so true. Any time you aren’t working with A-players, you’re dealing with people who are taking time, energy, focus, and attention away from the people or the things that you love. You have to get the people right. Build a winning team, that’s your job. Once you’re confident that you have the right people on the team, you need to learn to give ownership with accountability. In order to do that, if you’re going to give full ownership with accountability to someone, you have to get better at organizing the work.

Most business owners say they want to be able to hold people accountable. They tell me that all the time. “I need to get better at holding people accountable. I wish I could hold people accountable.” However, they don’t know how to structure the work for clear ownership with accountability. You cannot hold someone more accountable without giving them full ownership of something.

Business Growth: Most business owners say they want to be able to hold people accountable, but they don’t really know how to structure the work for clear ownership.

We must get better at organizing work so that we can break a piece of work off of the thing that’s been on our shoulders and hand it to somebody else who now owns the role. “Here’s a chunk of work that I’m going to call sales rep, account executive, product person, or software developer.” You name it. “Here’s a chunk of work. I put a name to it. That’s the role. You now own it. I’m hiring you to own this piece of work. I’m giving you full accountability with that ownership.”

Quick Tools You Can Use To Better Organize The Work: The Future Org Chart

I want to give you two quick tools you can use to better organize the work so that you can intentionally build the short-term operational excellence side of the business. The two tools I want to talk about are these. The Future Org Chart and the Big Three. Let me talk about Future Org Chart. What I want you to do with this tool or this little process I’m going to describe for you is to visualize or teleport yourself or time travel to the point where your mission is accomplished. That mission we talked about back in episode one, that destination-oriented thing that you said, “We will arrive at this destination by Y timeframe by the end of 2022.”

That mission, when you get super clear on it, I want you to put yourself at that place and time or that moment when you’ve accomplished the mission. I want you to look around at what the business must look like at that point. What the organization would need to look like to support that level of business. What the team would look like.

I want you to picture every single unique role that you will have when you accomplish the mission and I want you to name it. For example, maybe you have one sales rep. I want you to exclude names. Don’t include Sally’s name. Don’t include Johnny’s name. Just the roles. When we achieve the mission, I think we’ll need five sales reps. It helps if you use those Post-it notes. Write “sales rep, five.” You don’t have to write 5 different Post-it notes for 5 different sales reps. You can write “sales reps, five” and put that up on the wall.

What other roles might you need? It might help if you start with the leadership of the business. You might put yourself in there. You can call yourself president, CEO, owner, or founder, and then put each of your direct reports so the leaders that would be reporting to you. Maybe there’s a sales and marketing leader or two separate leaders. One over marketing and one over sales. Maybe there’s a product leader, a customer service leader, a financial leader, or a back-office support leader.

Whatever you think the team might look like at that point. Again, no names. Do not try to take the team or the people and project them into the Future Org Chart. Don’t do that. Just come up with every single unique role you think will need to be in place in order for you to achieve the mission. Once you’ve arrived at the mission, it’s the after picture. This org structure is before. This org structure I’m having you create is the after picture. Once we’ve arrived, this is what the team will look like and the roles that we’ll have in place.

Business Growth: Do not try to take today’s people and project them into the future organizational structure. Just come up with every single unique role you think will need to be in place in order for you to achieve the mission.

By the way, this doesn’t have to be perfect, but can you sense how much more intentionality is going into how you’re going to build this business over time? By simply putting together a simple org chart that shows every role that you’ll need to have, and approximately how many of each of those roles you’ll have in the business at that time. It’s beginning with the end of mind as Stephen Covey would say. You have a starting point of the present but you can see a future what that business might look like.

We’re in creation mode. What do I think the future business will need to look like from an org chart standpoint or from a roles standpoint? Once you have that, now we can come back to the present. We can see Johnny. We can see Sally. We can see that your name is in several boxes because you’re wearing all these hats. You can start to ask yourself the question, “Which would be my next key hire? What hire would be my first stepping point towards that future organization structure when we achieve the mission?” You can get really strategic about it when you begin with an end in mind. Organizing the work better starts with having a better idea of what the future team needs to look like. That’s tool or process number one.

Quick Tools You Can Use To Better Organize The Work: The Big Three

The second one that I mentioned is called Big Three. What we want to do with Big Three is that for each of the roles that we’ve created, we want to identify what are the key three responsibilities of that role. We’re not going to do the Big Three on that Future Org Chart. The Future gives us the point that we’re aiming towards as we build the team that we have now. We’re going to use the Big Three on the current team. The Big Three is simply the agreement between a leader and the team member. They have to see eye to eye on these three things. They have to see eye to eye on what’s expected, how it’s going to be measured, and how it aligns with company goals. Every role or position in your business has to have their Big Three and they need to be measurable.

For example, if I was creating the Big Three for a sales rep, it might look something like this. Sales rep should have sales. Maybe there’s a measurement on the number of new customers or instead of new customers, it’s a measurement of the total sales dollars or the revenue that they’re bringing in. Those would be results or outcome-based measures.

You can also have activity-based measures like the number of dials that that salesperson makes. The number of proposals that he or she submits. The number of demos that they give to prospects. The amount of talk time. If you know that they talk so many hours a day on average, that will yield the results you’re looking for. You’re going to use some combination of results-based measures and activity-based measures to create the Big Three for every role in your company.

I went to a sales example because those are usually easier to explain and we don’t have a lot of time via a one-way conversation in an episode, so I grabbed that. When you go to create Big Three in your company, you need to start with you. You need to start at the top because when you get clear on your most important priorities and your Big Three in your day-to-day responsibilities, then the natural thing is to cascade objectives or Big Three down to everybody on the team.

Here’s how that works. If your number one Big Three is growth, you’re like, “We need X amount of revenue this quarter.” Let’s say that’s your current Big Three. X amount of revenue this quarter or X percent growth this quarter. However you want to measure that growth or financial measure, that’s probably one of your key responsibilities. You put that in place and it’s clearly measurable. You then go to one of your direct reports and you say, “I have a marketing person or a marketing leader. What do I need from this role in order for me to hit this revenue or growth number that I have in my Big Three?” For the marketing person, that might mean, “I need a certain number of leads every week or during the quarter.”

Whatever it is that you measure that person on, they have to deliver that or you’re less likely to hit your goal. Now if you’re looking at a sales role, I already gave you some examples, but you would ask yourself the question, “If my number one Big Three is revenue” or if you choose growth percentage, “then what do I need from the sales role in order to achieve that?” You can see how you want to do some cascading. It should line up. Not all Big Three are created equal. You want the number 1 of the Big Three, you want the number 2, and you want the number 3.

The reason that we’re simplifying this down into the three key measurements for every role in the company is that everyone is having to prioritize where they spend their time every single day. The whirlwind is raging. We’ve talked about how everybody gets sucked into the day-to-day. The only way they’re going to know where to spend their time, where to spend their energy, and what the priority focus should be for them is if they’re clear on what matters most in their role and it has to be measurable.

When you get that kind of clarity and alignment, they see that their work aligns with their leader’s work. Sometimes that’s directly to you. Sometimes that’s to a leader and that leader is now aligning their work to you. When they see that line of sight from their role to the company goals or objectives, that’s alignment. When they know exactly what’s expected, how it’s going to be measured, and how it aligns with those company goals, that’s clarity. When they have clarity and alignment, they have confidence. When you see that people are confidently and competently owning the work that you organized, you can fully let go of most of the day-to-day running of the business and focus more on the longer-term strategic progress work that will enable your company’s future success.

I teach this concept of the Big Three to people and it’s a full hour of teaching. I can’t do it justice here, but I hope I’ve given you a flavor of how you have to organize ownership. You have to be clear, “You team member and me leader, here’s how we both know that you’re killing it week in and week out. You’ve fully owned the responsibility and you’re accountable to it because we know exactly how to measure it.”

Reporting Or Visibility

The last thing I’m going to share with you to help you with the shorter-term operational excellence side of the business is reporting or visibility. You need to be able to see what is happening with the daily and weekly numbers that matter in your business. For the company as a whole, you should develop a dashboard of some sort that helps you see the key numbers every single week. You can’t make good decisions for your business if you can’t tell what’s happening or if the information that you do get is so lagging. It’s so after the fact that it’s too late to be helpful.

I know it’s hard to put in systems that provide real-time data anytime you ask for it. If you have that luxury already, then congratulations. For the rest of us, we probably won’t have that luxury in the near future. That’s why it’s imperative that we know the most important measures and that we do whatever it takes in the short-term to get visibility to that every single week until we can develop more reporting muscles.

In fact, not to switch over too much, but maybe some of the priority work on the strategic progress or longer-term capability-building side of the business might be around reporting capability. It might be around developing reporting muscle and dashboards that allow you to see and navigate better. Whether or not it makes it in the priority space, you can still do simple things that give you more visibility than you might have now.

For the company as a whole, you need to develop a dashboard. As for the visibility into team members’ individual performance, you could have them self-report on their Big Three every single week. In fact, I strongly recommend that. Once you’re clear, you and that team member are clear on what’s expected, how it will be measured, and how it aligns with the company goals for their top three responsibilities.

Once they’re clear on that, they should self-report on that every single week. It should not be a burden on you to go around and figure out how to keep score. They need to come back to you as a true owner of that role and say, “We agreed that I own these things and that these would be the measurements of success. I’m reporting back to you every week on how that’s going.” You then both know. When they are consistently nailing it on their Big Three, they can go home on Friday afternoon or Friday evening and know, “I’m killing it. I’m doing great.” They don’t have to wonder.

Even good people with good intentions who are working their tails off can sometimes wonder, “Am I doing it? How am I doing?” We’re not very good sometimes at giving feedback on performance. Big Three provides the visibility for you and it provides the confidence for them that they are doing it. If they’re not doing it, you’re not the bad guy. The number is telling them. The number is giving the feedback, “We’re not doing it.” They can come to you and report, “We’re falling behind here. I could use some support.” You can ask them what’s in the way or what’s keeping them from delivering.

You can start to problem-solve that way, but you get to be more of a mentor or a coach. Not the bad guy or the judge because you’re “holding someone accountable.” Of course, we’re going to hold people accountable, but they’re holding themselves accountable through the measurement and the self-reporting because you’ve given clear ownership and you both agreed on it.

Now that you’ve organized the work correctly and you have the right team full of A-players, everyone should be consistently delivering their Big Three. Because the big three should all line up to support the most important measures for the company, you should be hitting the weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual financial and operational goals for the business. This all ties up when you organize this work in such a way that everybody knows exactly what has to happen to add up to the end results, you’re winning. Especially if you get really good at hiring A-players and you have people who fit on the team, now we’re running together.

Business Growth: Organize work in such a way that everybody knows exactly what has to happen to add up to the end results.

Whether or not you learn to focus very well on the longer-term strategic progress side of the business, the stuff that I’ve shared with you in this episode will dramatically improve your performance on the operational excellence side of the business. You will see a lift. If you’re able to see the lift on the operational side and you’re able to start to build in some longer-term focus on the strategic progress side of the business, now we’re starting to move and see momentum. You’re going to separate yourselves from your former capped performance but also from competition and others. You’re going to start to excel.

That’s it for now. You won’t want to miss the fourth and final episode of this mini-series. I’ll tell you that right now. If you feel like you’ve got enough, it’s not the best for last. All of these things I’ve been sharing are essential, but this last piece brings it all together. Don’t miss out on the last piece. I’ll share with you the key to keeping enough focus on the longer-term strategic progress side of your business while you’re keeping the daily operations humming.

Remember, targeted, coordinated action by a team of A-players is the goal. You can totally do this. I’ve seen it over and over again, especially if you get the right help. You can go to our website, GrowthElite.com to learn more about the Elite Business Growth Method. Not only can we teach you all the concepts you’ll need to learn, but we have tons of resources to help you do it without starting from scratch.

We figured it all out. We did it in a business successfully. I’m confident you could figure it all out if you dedicated the time and energy that we did. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in our proverbial 10,000 hours of mastery to figure this stuff out. We did it in a really practical way that is shareable. our members enjoy access to all of the systems, processes, tools, and examples that they need to do and everything that I’ve been sharing with you in this mini-series. You can have access to those same things if you choose to not go it alone and get some help.

Again, check it out on the website, GrowthElite.com. You can also email us at Info@GrowthElite.com if you have any questions, whatsoever. Finally, we love getting your feedback and having you share this with others. Please rate. Please review. Please share this show with all the business owners. I look forward to sharing the last piece of the Elite Business Growth Method with you in the next episode.

Important Links

• Info@GrowthElite.com