Episode 03: Conquering Plateaus And Managing The Complexity Of Growth, With Stephen Woessner

Stephen Woessner is the Founder and CEO of Predictive ROI and the host of the Onward Nation podcast, a top-rated podcast for learning how business owners think, act, and achieve success. Onward Nation is listened to in more than 120 countries around the world. He is the author of three bestselling books including the Amazon #1 Bestseller Profitable Podcasting. He is also a speaker, trainer, and his digital marketing insights have been featured in SUCCESS, Entrepreneur, The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, and other media.

What the podcast will teach you:

  • Stephen shares his background, history and experience that led him to be an entrepreneur and to his current role as the CEO of Predictive ROI
  • How the Onward Nation podcast grew over the course of more than four years and almost 1000 episodes, and how it is now listened to in more than 120 countries
  • How, at the age of 8, Stephen’s grandfather was forced to become the man of the house, and how that sparked his family’s tradition of entrepreneurship
  • How Predictive ROI recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, and how Predictive overcame the challenges of reaching plateaus at $100k, $300k, and $1M+ in revenue
  • How having a roadmap for future growth challenges helps Stephen plan ahead to navigate those challenges and identify resources to overcome them
  • Stephen shares one of the true low points he and his partner encountered when they lost one of their largest clients, and why it led to a change in their business model
  • What advice Stephen would offer business leaders whose businesses rely too much on a few big clients or who have reached a revenue plateau
  • What more recent challenges Stephen’s business has faced now that they’ve crossed $1M in revenue, and why growing a business is never painless
  • Why hiring more people often creates short-term pain points for the business and increased complexity

Resources:

Welcome, everybody, to this episode of the show. I’m super excited to have Stephen Woessner here with me. He is the CEO of Predictive ROI. What I’ve gotten to know about Stephen and the reason I’m excited to have him here with you is that he is an absolute expert in helping people get their message out there, being heard and found, and sharing their message, content and expertise. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with him and his team for a few weeks. I am thrilled to have all of you get to know him better. Let’s get to know you a little bit better. Would you please give us a brief introduction to who you are, your background, and the things that led to this point that we’re talking about?

First of all, thanks very much for the invitation to join you on your show. This is super exciting. I’m looking forward to our conversation. This is not only going to be a lot of fun, but I’m also hoping that I can share some insights with your audience that are helpful to them. On a day-to-day basis, I’m the CEO of Predictive ROI. We help business owners build their thought leadership and then monetize their content.

We focus on business-to-business and professional services firms as well as real estate investors. That’s our tribe. Behind the curtain, I’m the grandson of Greek immigrants. My grandparents immigrated here from Istanbul, Turkey, and off the coast of Athens, Greece on a small little island called Evia. My grandfather came here in 1920 when he was eighteen years old. He had $10 in his pocket and couldn’t even speak the language.

Six years later, he had saved enough money after working night shift at a downtown Canton, Ohio restaurant washing dishes and cleaning lettuce. After six years, he had saved enough money to own a restaurant, and that was in 1926. It was probably not the best time to open a brand new business since they went into The Great Depression a few years later, but he gave away more soup than he ever sold during the depression.

His business plan was simple. You take care of your customers and they will take care of you. That business plan served him well for 42 years as a restauranteur. It’s because of the sacrifices that my pop made that we, the ten grandchildren, have this amazing privilege and honor to be entrepreneurs now. I grew up as an entrepreneur. Predictive ROI is the fifth company that I’ve owned. It truly is in my DNA.

I’m looking forward to our conversation here. I also have the opportunity of hosting my own podcast called Onward Nation, where I get to sit down with some inspiring business owners who have hacked it out of the wilderness and created something special. They said no to the naysayers and did it anyway. I love stories like that. It’s a great privilege to be able to serve this community.

I’m honored to have you here. I can’t believe that it took me having to invite you to be a guest on my show to hear that story. That was an awesome story about your grandfather. What an amazingly cool story. Now I know why it runs deep in you, and I assume in some of your other family members as well. Here’s the thing I want to dive into. You mentioned the Onward Nation podcast. I had intended to share that with our audience because it’s a tremendous resource. Before we even get into your story and your experience as a business owner, which we will get to, I would love to have you share a little bit more about that podcast. I have some specific questions. First of all, how long has that been running?

We started on June 13th, 2015 to be exact. That’s when our first episode aired. We’ve aired over 900 episodes. We’ve got close to 1,000 in the can that’s recorded waiting to be aired. We’re recorded out through May of 2020, which is exciting to see. What turned out to be almost like a last-ditch effort for business development a few years ago completely changed the course and direction of our business. We went from thinking, “I hope somebody will listen,” to being able to serve business owners in over 120 countries.

We’ve built this incredible community on LinkedIn and this amazing email distribution list. It doesn’t have anything to do with us or me as the host. It’s because we’ve had the honor of interviewing some amazing business owners, yourself included. You’ve been a guest of ours twice, and thank you for that. Clate Mask, the CEO and Co-founder of Infusionsoft and Keap, has been a guest of ours a couple of times. This amazing community of guests who come onto the show with the whole goal of being helpful to our audience is why this show has been successful. Our audience cares and wants to share that message with other business owners. It has been wonderful to have been a part of that. It’s a joy.

EEP 3 Stephen | Complexity Of Growth

Complexity Of Growth: You either diversify your revenue into a new service offering or get a consistent business development program in place to acquire new clients.

 

That’s impressive by anybody’s counts, but let me review a few things. You have people who are tuning in to this podcast in 120 countries. Did I get that right?

Yes.

That’s amazing. You’ve aired over 900 episodes, but you’ve recorded nearly 1,000. There’s a rich heritage that you shared about your grandfather who’s a pioneer in immigrating over here to the United States in the 1920s. I dare say that you’re somewhat of a pioneer in the world of podcasting. I know that world is older than four years, but what you’ve done in a four-year period with your podcasts is super impressive, so congratulations on that.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Let’s go back to my pop for a second. We lost him in 1986. He was one of my most influential mentors in business and in life even though he passed away when I was a freshman in high school. This lesson of grit and tenacity that he taught us that served him so well through The Great Depression is a lesson that he learned at the ripe old age of eight.

This was a time when it wasn’t awesome to be a Greek male in Istanbul, Turkey. The reason being is that the Turkish government sanctioned ethnic cleansing. The killing of Greek males was an everyday thing. Somebody might leave his family and go off to work and not come home that day because he got hung in a public square for public viewing. That was the world that my great-grandfather lived in, and that’s what happened to him. One day, he didn’t come home.

My grandfather at the ripe old age of eight had to drop out of the third grade in order to become the man of the house and take care of his mom and his two younger siblings. I firmly believe that it was in that day and that moment that the DNA of our family changed when we all became entrepreneurs because of circumstance. My grandfather’s four kids, which are my mom, my uncle, my two aunts, and then us ten grandkids have all been business owners. It was at that moment that the entire course or the entire trajectory of our family changed in an instant.

There is a ripple that goes on through generations, and that story right there is the perfect illustration of that. That was one of the unexpected gems from our time. Thank you for sharing. To my readers, Stephen is the one doing the interviewing in his podcasts. He probably doesn’t get to share that story very often in his own podcast, but you got to know it here. I’m honored that you would share that. My point in saying that is the podcast, Onward Nation, is a treasure trove of real entrepreneurs sharing their stories. I can only hope that this show becomes something similar.

Our whole aim with this show is to help you to learn the mindsets, skillsets and toolsets to grow as far as you want to grow as seven-figure business owners, and certainly be able to grow to $10 million and beyond. We can help you do that. The guests that I bring will be top-notch like Stephen is. Thank you again for sharing about your podcast. I highly recommend you go to it. How do they find it? Where do they go?

Go to PredictiveROI.com. In the menu, we’ve got a section that reads Podcast. Click on that and then you’ll find our full list of past episodes, as well as the current episodes. Everything is there.

Take care of your customers and they will take care of you. Click To Tweet

Thank you. If I’m a new listener of Onward Nation, do I start from the beginning? Do I start from the most recent? Do I skim through the archives until I see something that catches my eye? How do I consume almost 1,000 episodes?

It’s a substantial library or resource, for sure. I would suggest starting to digest it in a couple of ways. One, listen to the most current episode and then get a feel of our guest and my particular style as a host. Hopefully, you’ll like it. Whatever that episode is, hopefully, you’ll find that helpful. I don’t mean to sound braggadocious, but our guest list does read who’s who in the business community.

Search for somebody who you want to know. Maybe they’ve been a guest because you want to listen to their episode. Use our search bar for that. You can also search on a particular topic, whether it’s business financing, building and scaling, HR issues, or employee retention. I’m sure you’ll find several guests, if not many guests, under that particular category. You could sure do a keyword search too.

That sounds great and very easy for the audience to go figure out. Let’s shift gears. All of that was bonus material for me. Thank you. I want to talk to you as the owner of Predictive ROI. I don’t want to talk to you as the Onward Nation Podcast host anymore. I want to talk to you as the owner. The podcast has been going on for a few years. How long have you been working on growing Predictive ROI?

August of 2019 was our tenth year in business. That’s our first decade under the belt and we’re moving onto decade number two. We’ve been running the business for many years.

Congratulations on one decade down. That’s amazing. By your pop’s standard, you’re only 1/4 of the way there. You got to keep going. In our early episode for this show, our audience would have known that Clate Mask and I talked about The Stages of Small Business Growth. You and I have talked about this before. The pattern is very predictable on the 1s and 3s of revenue. Roughly every time you triple in revenue, you’re hitting a new stage and you’re bumping up into a new ceiling. Unless you put together the right combination of people, processes and systems that will enable you to break through that ceiling and move into the next stage, you get stuck.

Without assuming too much, I’m guessing you’ve had your own version of that story as you went from $100,000 to $300,000 to $1 million-plus in revenue. Let’s talk about that journey a little bit and have you share what that was like to hit some of those speed bumps or ceilings. Did you experience any of those moments in time where it felt like the business was stalling or things got especially hard?

It’s exactly as you described, which is why the 1s and 3s as guideposts can be so helpful to business owners and their teams as they’re thinking about building and scaling. It’s 100% on point. Did we experience hitting $100,000 and then trying to move from $100,000 to $300,000? Absolutely. I was teaching as part of faculty and academic staff at the University of Wisconsin at the La Crosse campus. La Crosse Wisconsin has a campus for UW.

I was a full-time member of faculty and academic staff when I originally started Predictive. It then got to the point where I was like, “I need to make a choice and a decision. I want to avoid any conflicts of interest. I’m going to leave the university.” I quickly built the business to be about $100,000 or so a year. Things were fine for a little while and then it became, “I need to get some help.”

EEP 3 Stephen | Complexity Of Growth

Complexity Of Growth: Sometimes, business owners can be a little bit too cavalier. They need to participate in mastermind groups and seek out the knowledge of experienced people.

 

I recruited a couple of people, and one of those members of our team is Erik Jensen who has gone on to become my business partner here at Predictive. In those early stages, it was Erik, Wendy, and then a few unpaid interns doing everything we possibly could to get to that $300,000 mark. That was before I knew about the 1s and 3s. We certainly felt the pain and the pressure going from $100,000 to about $300,000. After that, it has been, “How do we now take this and reach $1 million?”

Over the last several years, we rebuilt our system, onboarded new team members, worked on client avatars, made sure we onboarded the right clients, adjusted pricing strategy, launched a podcast, and did all of those different things. We’re getting serious about our own thought leadership, as well as the process systems, teammates, culture, mission, vision and values. We were getting that dialed in to get us over that hump and now we’re pursuing the $3 million mark. When you first shared the 1s and 3s with me, I thought, “That’s interesting,” because I quickly digested it and reflected back on my own path. I was like, “What an incredible resource. I wish I would’ve known that ten years ago,” because it is so on point and accurate.

Having that as a you-are-here map, what does that do for you as a business owner to think about the ways to go from where you are now to where you want to go?

It sets expectations properly. If any of your audience is ready to hit the $3 million mark, or maybe they’re beyond that and maybe they’re close to tripling again and getting to the $10 million mark, what it does is it is an actual roadmap. It also gives you a sanity check for like, “I’m not the only one who has ever experienced this before. Who else can I learn from? Who else could mentor me? Who should I reach out to? What are the resources?”

I know that when I hit $3 million, or maybe it was $2.5 million, $2.75 million or $3.2 million, but somewhere in there, there is going to be a lot of pain and suffering. If I know that and if I can expect that, maybe I can be better prepared to either minimize it or help my team come through there a bit more unscathed. I’m probably not going to eliminate it altogether, but can I develop a plan? Having a plan matching the expectations is a whole lot better than running into it like a brick wall and then losing your business as a result.

Even if you don’t lose your business, what we’ve found is that people will hit that point or maybe even spike above it. They’ll find that their system, combination of people, process system, and all that stuff that goes into their business is only set up for something less than that. They’ll revert back to the place that their current system can support. You bounced up against greatness. You hit this high point and then you recede back to where your organization can support it long-term. That’s very fascinating. It’s fun that you reflect on your own journey and say, “That maps nicely to what we were describing.”

Enough about that whole stages of small business thing. If you’re tuning into our show for the first time, you can check out the very first episode that I did with Clate Mask. We went through all of that in detail. You can get all of that if you want to go back to that episode. It’s super helpful. I want to dive into some of your pain. I didn’t warn you about this, so I hope you don’t mind. I don’t want to bring back any nervous hicks or twitches.

You already alluded to the fact that you felt the difference when you were transitioning through those stages. In one instance, you even said that things were pretty rough when you went to launch this podcast. You said it might have been a last-ditch effort. Tell us about the lowest point. Sometimes, we call this the dark side of entrepreneurship. Tell us about one of those moments before we talk about getting through that. Let’s sit in that for a moment. What was that like?

Unfortunately, there are a number of different stories that I could choose from, but this is probably the most painful one, although there’s probably competition for that title as well. The podcast was birthed back in May of 2015. Erik and I came back from meeting with one of our clients. We were on-site for a few days with them. Candidly, that meeting did not go well. We come home licking our wounds. The result was we lost, if not our largest client, but certainly one of the biggest.

There is the misperception that growing a business is pain-free. You cannot achieve success without pain and failure. Click To Tweet

Here we were, losing a big chunk of our revenue and overstaffed. We had too many people based on the new size of the business. The pragmatic and smart thing to do would have been to let a few people go. We ended up shrinking the team a little bit, and we were helpful in moving a couple of people off of our team. That was a dark period in time because we realized the business model needed to change. It wasn’t just about going out and finding another new client to replace that client. We knew that systemically, there was something wrong with the business model. It was too complicated to implement. There was too much risk for Predictive. There were too many opportunities for things to go wrong.

Erik and I had to look at one another and say, “What are we going to do? We need to do something different.” The strategy to save the business was we need more clients. This was before we figured out how to pivot the business. We were like, “We need more clients. How are we going to do that? I know. I’m going to launch a daily podcast. I’m going to call it Onward Nation. I’m going to interview the smartest business owners that I can find. The listeners are going to be so enamored by those conversations that they’re going to pick up the phone and they’re going to want to hire us to do their digital marketing.” That was the grand strategy behind Onward Nation at the beginning. It was clearly not much of a strategy, but that was it.

We launched the daily show and it was awesome. A couple of months in, one of our guests said to me, “Could you do that for me?” I’m like, “Do what for you?” He was like, “Seriously, could you launch me a podcast? Your show is great. Could you do that for me?” I was like, “Yes, we can.” I was the typical entrepreneur. Erik and I started thinking, “That was interesting.” We did that project and made some money. We were like, “Let’s get back to business.” Even then, still, we didn’t see the pivot.

A couple of months after that, that same client came to us and said, “The podcast you do for us is awesome. Yours is awesome. Why aren’t you doing that for more people?” I was like, “Who would we do this for?” He was like, “You’ve interviewed some amazing people who are open to podcasting. Maybe they would like to have their own. Why don’t you ask them?” I did. In November 2015, I sent out 23 emails. Sixteen people got back to me and said, “Sure, I’ll have a conversation with you.”

We sold $250,000 for the podcasting services in six weeks. I thought, “Holy bananas, Erik,” and then we made a huge pivot right there. We began to focus more on things beyond just podcasting, but it was more holistic thought leadership. It was that moment of having a bad experience with an existing client, losing that business, and then six months later, completely pivoting the direction of the company.

Nothing like necessity being the mother of invention or innovation, or however that phrase goes. It’s a wonderful story. It’s probably not too dissimilar from the thousands of untold stories out there of people who figured out, “The thing that got us to where we are today is not the thing that will take us to where we’re trying to go.”

Everything is so dynamic. Everything is so competitive, or in your case, you were relying so much on one or maybe a few larger customers. Your infrastructure and business finance was tied to that level of revenue. To have that go away, you guys moved fast. Now, you’ve got something that you can be proud of. Good work.

Thank you.

You did share some of these insights about how you got out of that situation. You guys got scrappy and got some customers in the short-term, and then you started to change the way that you thought about offerings you could give to people. What would you recommend to people who have hit a point where their revenue is peaking or is flat year over year? In the situation that you described where maybe a large chunk of that revenue is resting with one or relatively a few customers, what would you have to say about that situation given your experience?

EEP 3 Stephen | Complexity Of Growth

Complexity Of Growth: Adding more people to your team is actually harder, at least initially. You have to get the right rhythm the more complex the communication channels become.

 

It’s a dangerous situation. Alluding to that in your question, having too few clients or having what we’d like to say in our industry, a gorilla client, where that gorilla client represents more than 20% to 30% of your revenue, is dangerous. You either have to diversify your revenue into new service offerings, upsell existing clients, or get a consistent business development program in place to be able to acquire new clients.

Most business owners tend to have a feast or famine mentality around business development that is not running consistently in their business all the time. It’s like, “We lost a client. We need to get 2 or 3 more clients.” That is a typical business development strategy, which is poor. You need to acknowledge the fact that that needs to change. You need to diversify away from any gorilla clients that you have. When you need more clients, you need a consistent business development process in place. That’s all well and good to say, but how are you going to do it? My suggestion would be to find a mentor or several mentors who have done that before.

Whether they’re in your industry or not in your industry, find 2 or 3 people who have done exactly what it is that you want to do. Find those people and then be their mentee. When they share their insight and wisdom from years of experience in your industry or a different industry, do and implement what it is that they suggest. Sometimes, business owners can be a little bit too cavalier about, “I’m going to get these books. I’m going to study and read it and I’m going to do it all myself.” That is silly because there are plenty of people who have blazed that trail. Reach out to those people. Participate in mastermind groups. Go out and seek the knowledge. It is there. Being in the trenches with other experienced people who have done it before is such a compressed learning curve. It’s a gift waiting to be given.

I’m going to risk messing up everything you shared, but I want to call out a few key points that I heard. I’m going to attempt to recap here. What I was seeing as you talked was the very common thing we see for businesses that are trying to go from 300,000 to $1 million. The key hurdle in that stage is systematizing your marketing.

You used the term business development. We could use the term customer acquisition, but you need to have predictable customer acquisition and consistent fulfillment. It is some way to get customers that’s consistent and some way to fulfill those customers consistently. I heard you describe that in other words, but that’s what I was seeing.

You said, “You don’t have to figure it out on your own. There are people who have done this. Go get help.” I love that advice. It can happen in a mastermind. It can happen in an online course. Maybe it’s a book. Find people who have been through that journey. You need to make the transition that you’re making from reliance on a few big customers to a predictable customer acquisition machine.

Once you get there, then you can get into that seven-figure range, which is $1 million-plus. When you’re in the million-plus range, your challenges start to shift away from predictable customer acquisition and consistent fulfillment that keeps your customers happy to a new set of challenges. Would you be willing to bear some of those new challenges that you guys have started to face maybe more recently?

We did put that predictable, repeatable, and measurable business development or marketing system into place. It is a throttling of, “Too many customers have onboarded there. There is not enough production capacity. We need to hire a couple of additional people. Let’s turn that back on again and test the process. Wait a minute. We’ve got these holes in the process in the communication flow and the workflow. We need to get that fixed. Let’s turn business development back on again. Wait a minute, guys. We need to go into our project management system because we’re noticing some gaps and some steps in our communication path and follow-through. We need to make sure that we get that buttoned up.”

Is there still some throttling back and forth with the gas pedal and the brake pedal? Of course. As we get to the green zone or the sweet spot, we slam the foot back down on the gas and let it run because we think we’ve got that dialed in again. Once you onboard the next 20 or 30 clients, will it break again? Sure. It is going to because you have more load. You have more stress. You have to train up new teammates and get them all familiar with the process, culture, vision and mission. I don’t think that ever ends, but going back to your earlier point, that’s the beauty of the 1s and 3s. You can anticipate when it’s going to happen.

A bountiful harvest takes toil, struggle, and hard work. It takes backbreaking word to do that because it is the predictable law of nature. Click To Tweet

You can anticipate and you can do some things looking forward to that. You could do some things that will make that transition smoother. It won’t make it pain-free. It won’t make it easy, but you can do some things that will make it smoother and keep it from being a mission-ending experience.

One thing about that is sometimes, I wish that business owners would have it front and center. Sometimes there’s the misperception that the growth of a business somehow should be pain-free if you do it right. That is so not the case. In fact, to think that it’s pain-free is to ignore one of the laws of nature. To think that you’re going to be able to build a successful business without pain or without failure is to ignore one of the laws of nature.

When we go to the gym, we expect that exercise is going to be painful. We expect that we’re going to be sore the next day. We expect that if we’re going to plant seeds in the spring and summer, that’s going to take a lot of toil, sweat and work through the growing season in order to have a bountiful harvest in the fall. This is a predictable law of nature.

It takes toil, sweat, struggle and hard work. It takes backbreaking work to do things like that because the law of the harvest requires it. It is a fact, and yet business owners think, “I should be able to build a seven-figure business overnight. Isn’t that the Facebook funnel that I saw the other day?” No. It takes pain and suffering to be able to do it. It is staggering that that is the perception now.

The overnight success thing at Infusionsoft was ten years. You talked about your ten-year anniversary as well. It’s overnight success in ten years, and there’s a lot of work, pain and toil along the way. I love that you called that out very straight there. I want to ask you something as we will wrap up here in the next few minutes. I was thinking about the transition. You described beautifully the throttling that happens as you get enough customers where you’ve got to work on your fulfillment.

It’s a little bit of a seesaw thing that happens back and forth between customer acquisition and fulfillment or production capacity. You go back and forth trying to get that right as it grows as an ongoing balancing act there. What was it like as the team is growing in size or as you’re transitioning from somebody who did a lot of the stuff to leading more people that maybe you don’t even know very well outside of the hiring process? What does that transition like for you? What are some of the challenges, if any, in that transition?

There are a lot of challenges. For context for your audience, Predictive ROI is a team of seventeen people. As we added more teammates, the impression within our team was, “We’re going to hire three more people as we did a few months ago. Things are going to get easier.” Conceptually, it should get easier because there are more people in the kitchen and there are more people to do stuff. Therefore, theoretically, it should be easier.

The reality is it gets harder, at least initially. It gets harder because you got new people trying to figure out the roles, culture, mission, vision and values. They’re figuring out how to be a great teammate, how to be helpful to their teammates, and how to be helpful to clients. There’s a rhythm to have to get into. The more people, the more complex the communication channels become.

Erik, myself, and Katherine as members of the leadership team have to think about that. Because there are more teammates, the channels of communication become more complex. It means we need to communicate even more consistently and on the same page in order to keep everybody singing the same sheet of music out of the same hymnal.

EEP 3 Stephen | Complexity Of Growth

Conquering the Chaos in Your Mind: Finding Freedom from Tormenting and Anxious Thoughts

Adding more people to the team doesn’t make things easier. Eventually, it will, assuming that the onboarding is smooth. Initially, it creates short-term pain, but all of that is a great opportunity to get that smoothed out. Things start running smoothly once everybody is fully onboarded and in the right seat. There’s a misconception thinking, “I’m going to have more people, and then it’s going to be easy,” when the reality is it’s the reverse of that.

The growth brings complexity, and that complexity tends to bring some additional chaos. Your role starts to be, “How do I align a growing group of people in the same direction so that we’re serving customers the best that we can and continuing to achieve our goals?” Those are wonderful insights. This show is touted to be one that’s very practitioner-oriented. It’s very practical. This is my last question to you as we wrap this up. What is a favorite resource or tool, or something that has been super practical for you as you’ve been on this growth journey for your business? What is something that the audience can take away, check out, and be grateful that you recommended it?

It is a book. This is going to seem biased because we were talking about Clate a little bit ago, but it’s Clate’s book, Conquer The Chaos. Here’s why I think it’s excellent. It’s super transparent and takes you behind the curtain of what it’s like to be a CEO and a cofounder in a business. He was super transparent about what it was like in the early days of Infusionsoft, which was awesome to be able to read that story. I learned a lot because I didn’t know most of that until reading the book.

Also, he’s super transparent about the big pivot that they had to make from being a coding shop, building stuff in order to put food on the table to, “We need to become a software company. We need to become a CRM. We need to take all this custom programming into the jobs that we’re doing to make ends meet. We need to turn it into a product” That was a huge pivot for the business. True to form, they were conquering the chaos of all the myriad things that came up along the way.

I love the transparency in talking about the early days. He talked about how they got this great contract and they go back out to their office to hop into the truck to drive away from the client’s office and the truck won’t start. They were rubbing two nickels together. They were poor like mice and yet built something incredible. I know that you were a part of that in building something incredible with Infusionsoft. I love that book. I would highly recommend your audience to get a copy of it and study it because it is a perfect blueprint.

Thank you. Stephen, it has been a sincere pleasure to have you on my show. It was fun to be a guest a couple of times on yours. I consider you a pioneer in these podcasts. I got over my nervousness in interviewing the pops of podcasting here. I appreciate you taking the time and sharing some of your journeys, the story about your grandfather, what you guys have gone through at Predictive ROI, the lessons you’ve learned, and the things you’ve done. It was super helpful for our audience. Thank you again for making time.

Thank you very much for the invitation. I enjoyed being here with you. Thank you.

One more time, what’s the best way for them to connect with you and what you have to offer for small business owners out there?

Thanks for that. PredictiveROI.com is our website. You can hit me up on LinkedIn as well. Either of those or both of those would be awesome.

On this show, we are going to continue to bring guests like Stephen who are sharing real experiences, and more importantly, the things that help them get through those tough times and those lessons for growing and scaling their business. Thanks for tuning in. We look forward to sharing with you again in future episodes.

 

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