Dan Martell - Ask These Questions to Grow Your Business

00:00:00.200 The more you pull back, the more people are going to say, well, it's not the same.

00:00:04.400 It's not the way it used to be, but here's the deal.

00:00:20.120 Kevin Wood. It's good to see you. Same to you. It's been a while.

00:00:23.320 I'm pumped to be chatting.

00:00:26.600 Tell me about your business and how can I help?

00:00:30.000 Sure. So I've been in business now for 13 years. I run CrossFit Moncton, one of the original

00:00:36.220 CrossFits in not only the Maritimes, but almost in Canada. So happy to have weathered the COVID

00:00:43.540 storm and we're coming out the other end now. Yeah, never satisfied with the status quo and

00:00:50.940 always wanting to improve, even though we've been at this for so long. And, you know, we have a good

00:00:55.400 product and good service um but never satisfied so what what got you into crossfit in the early

00:01:01.620 days and i wore this shirt just for you obviously pete every day crossfit motto um yeah what got

00:01:09.340 you into it i used to be a school teacher i was a phys ed teacher for five years so um one of the

00:01:15.100 parents did crossfit on his own he was a rcp officer and told me i should try crossfit with

00:01:19.800 my students uh obviously there's a fitness component to physical education so i looked at

00:01:25.100 website tried it myself couldn't walk for a week and then uh it kind of snowballed from there into

00:01:30.460 a business just a bit of a snowball well it's great to see you uh you know being involved with

00:01:36.700 with the community for so long um how can i help um i guess i struggle with mostly prioritizing

00:01:44.540 what's most important i'm kind of like a squirrel and i go after the shiny things and they may not

00:01:49.900 be the best things to go after at that time so interesting so when you say um what are examples

00:01:58.140 of you doing this in the past to give me more context what are examples of things you've

00:02:02.380 pursued that maybe you thought after the fact you maybe shouldn't have sure understand more yeah

00:02:08.220 i'll go current um one example um i pulled my members and i thought maybe it would be a good

00:02:14.380 idea to start a podcast i don't know if that's a great priority right now if that's something that

00:02:19.740 that I should be investing my effort, my time into,

00:02:23.500 but it's something that interests me and I don't know.

00:02:26.980 So that's kind of one example.

00:02:30.220 We're just programs that we've run at the gym.

00:02:34.320 We've considered running March break camps.

00:02:36.860 I don't know if that's a great idea

00:02:38.040 because we don't really have the time slots

00:02:39.940 and whatnot for that.

00:02:41.240 So I don't know, those are kind of two recent examples.

00:02:45.960 Got it.

00:02:46.800 Well, the fun part about being an entrepreneur

00:02:49.080 that we're creators okay so i if i'm in a crowd of entrepreneurs i literally get them to repeat

00:02:55.320 i'm a creator okay and because they're creators complexity is actually easy so it's it's easy for

00:03:03.320 us to because that's what made us start the business in the first place there's got to be

00:03:07.000 a better way so we start a company we start a business we we see we see something broken in

00:03:11.880 the world i would argue that the world's advancement if you think of it doesn't matter

00:03:16.360 if it's a lawn care service to you know a technology or a financial service like every

00:03:23.240 business exists because it's trying to do something better right if it didn't they wouldn't be in

00:03:28.600 business because markets reward better faster easier right so the challenge with being a creator

00:03:35.880 though is we need to understand what we're optimizing for because if we optimize for

00:03:41.000 creating with no purpose, then essentially, we're artists, which is fine. But then understand that

00:03:46.840 that's what we are. We're artists. And if we want to create art, which is through our business,

00:03:51.480 without economic success or without customer success or without our team feeling like they're

00:03:58.120 part of a great culture or some destination where they have a career path, that's fine.

00:04:01.960 But if you want those things, a business that's successful, that might have enterprise value,

00:04:07.160 you could sell in the future, a team that, you know, loves to work there and they can see how

00:04:12.040 they're going to progress, you know, in their career or customers that continuously coming back

00:04:17.220 and love what you're creating and value and you're not the lowest cost leader and all those other

00:04:22.460 things, then it requires us to be a little bit more strategic. So one of the things I would

00:04:28.620 say as it comes to like, how do we know we're making the right decisions today for the future?

00:04:38.120 is asking yourself what does this look like when you're successful so if you fast forward to

00:04:43.800 whatever time period that you might want to choose and you say i've made it what is that time frame

00:04:50.360 and what does that look like yeah it's a good question it's so it's kind of like the the perfect

00:04:55.480 day kind of uh exercise and that's that changes that's the hard part is because it's it's kind of

00:05:01.880 like a moving target so if you would have asked me 10 years ago um what it would have been then

00:05:07.560 it would have been in five years ago that's what it was and i reached it so it's kind of a moving

00:05:12.440 target so if you ask me now it's looks a lot different than what it was even just a couple

00:05:17.720 years ago so um i guess time so the cool part about that kevin is you're allowed to change your

00:05:24.520 mind every year right that's my my time horizon is like i plan my life in five-year increments

00:05:30.360 because it's enough time to not waste my time and enough time to give me time to do stuff i plan

00:05:35.560 business decision in decades right i like the 10-year window and with new information every

00:05:41.080 year i give my per self permission to change the target um and i just call it new information like

00:05:47.480 i got new information this year i didn't know so i get to change the target but what i would

00:05:51.560 recommend is we always need to know what that is that's the thing if we don't know what it is in

00:05:57.000 the moment then that's where it's hard for us to make decisions today with a line with an outcome

00:06:01.000 so i'm giving you permission to change it in a year but from today's point of view 10 years from

00:06:05.960 now what does that look like uh just i guess the time time to be able you know time is freedom so

00:06:13.160 being able to choose where i spend my time i guess as opposed to being forced let's get specific

00:06:21.000 sure uh be able to take four weeks away from the gym without having to touch it

00:06:26.120 four weeks in a row yep cool and not touch it meaning that nothing breaks and you don't get

00:06:31.880 called back in well if we want to go next level it would be the gym would still grow without me

00:06:37.560 going there ah see how specificity changes the target as soon as you say the gym grows without

00:06:43.560 you being involved all of a sudden the optionality of your decisions have to change because you can

00:06:49.000 then weed out stuff that's not going to support that so even that little nuance is important so

00:06:54.200 So, four weeks off, gym grows.

00:06:56.940 How big is the gym?

00:06:58.560 Is it one location, multi-location?

00:07:00.440 10 years from now, what do you want it to look like?

00:07:03.280 One location, it would be nice to own my own building.

00:07:07.800 Okay, what kind of revenue would you like to do

00:07:09.800 on an annual basis in a decade?

00:07:14.740 Man, 10 years.

00:07:16.680 See, I never thought we'd be where we are now,

00:07:18.320 so it's hard to even think about.

00:07:19.660 Again, that's why I give you permission

00:07:21.300 to change your mind every year,

00:07:22.420 is you're gonna have new information right let's say in 10 years it'll double so half a million

00:07:28.180 cool so 10 years from now half a million in revenue um you know ideally 15 to 20 in profit

00:07:35.060 so that kind of gives you an idea of like 100 000 a year in profit that's after you

00:07:38.900 take some kind of salary for managing the business because you need to take your own

00:07:43.380 salary out of that um so that starts to give you a sense of kind of member size and also

00:07:50.500 should give you a sense of revenue per member the thing with a physical location um tiffany's

00:07:57.140 apple they're the world's standard for revenue per square foot right like as a retailer so

00:08:03.220 understanding that that's the the game because like the way i think about business that i think

00:08:08.260 is unique is um i'm really clear what game i'm playing doesn't matter what business i'm in

00:08:12.740 doesn't matter if it's a crossfit gym or a home building company or a software company i need to

00:08:17.700 know what the rules of engagement are because if i jump on a soccer field and i think i'm playing

00:08:23.460 football i'm going to obviously make bad decisions right and i think that's what happens is we don't

00:08:29.060 know what game we're playing so you're in this market it's really important between now and

00:08:35.540 the next few years for you to educate yourself enough to know what is the tiffany's and apple

00:08:41.140 of the industry and where you're at and and understand what's different about what does

00:08:46.580 Apple and Tiffany's do different that allow them to produce some of the highest revenue per square

00:08:52.500 foot? Lululemon's another one, right? It'd be like Apple, Tiffany's, Lululemon. Like in the retail

00:08:57.300 space, what's the equivalent? In the software space, what's the revenue or reoccurring revenue

00:09:01.700 per employee? Who's got the highest? What does that look like? Oh, Facebook's got 5 million revenue

00:09:07.460 per employees. What's true about their business? What can I learn from that? So if we know where

00:09:12.020 we want to go, we know what the economics need to look like, and you've already set some filters for

00:09:15.940 the life side which is four weeks a year off and the business grows then you got to ask yourself

00:09:22.180 how do you get there so if i ask you that question what needs to change for you to enable that what

00:09:29.140 are some of the projects and action items that things that come to mind right off the bat

00:09:33.620 so we do metrics like crazy so we kind of know everything on the back end we know that our

00:09:38.660 average revenue per member uh i just ran my numbers for last month is 183 dollars per member

00:09:44.180 on a monthly basis yeah which is almost double of what it was i say two years ago so it's it's

00:09:51.740 already growing our length of engagement is uh 53 months so four and a half years is the average

00:09:58.760 amount of time that a member will stay with us so our average lifetime value of a member

00:10:04.800 is around nine thousand dollars so if we have somebody walk through the door we know that we

00:10:10.220 can get roughly $9,000 out of them when they sign up. So I don't think we can change our length

00:10:20.040 of engagement with our members. The ones that stick, stick around for a long time. We have

00:10:24.920 some of the longest retention in the world for gyms. It would have to come from increasing our

00:10:30.440 average revenue per member. Yep. So there's three ways we make money. We can increase the amount

00:10:37.500 customers that we get every month we can decrease the amount of customers we lose every month and

00:10:41.820 we can increase the amount of revenue per customers we make every month those are like

00:10:45.660 that's business 101 right because if we lose 10 of our customers every month it doesn't really hurt

00:10:53.100 until we get to 100 customers that we have because if i'm adding 10 when i get to 100 10 is 10.

00:11:02.540 meaning that what happens is you hit this churn flatline. And that may be where you're at today,

00:11:08.620 at a quarter million in revenue, where the amount of members that leave every month,

00:11:12.860 even though it's high retention, you still have 2%, 3%, 4%, 5% monthly churn. People move,

00:11:18.620 they get jobs, they change workout protocol. And your ability to add new customers could be

00:11:25.820 plateaued right so then the question is is what's the capacity right do you have more capacity

00:11:32.380 available at your gym yep cool so you have more capacity then it's how many customers are we adding

00:11:38.940 versus losing you want to make sure that revenue is hot there that the number of customers higher

00:11:43.740 than the ones you lose what's the marketing program to do that like if i ask you what's the

00:11:49.580 repeatable marketing process that you have to get customers in the door and buying every month

00:11:56.140 what is that today so physical members through the door we do it through private training so

00:12:01.500 they take three private sessions to come through the door to get started

00:12:04.380 how do you get them to get on those private trainings uh it's mostly through affinity

00:12:08.620 marketing so it's all it's mostly word of mouth yep the challenge with word of mouth is that it's

00:12:14.700 It's not repeatable.

00:12:18.340 You can't force word of mouth.

00:12:21.560 We've been doing it for 13 years.

00:12:24.040 But I get to take this.

00:12:25.220 But it has a cap.

00:12:27.020 Yeah, like it has a cap.

00:12:28.440 You can't spend a dollar to increase affinity.

00:12:31.680 Nobody's, the word of mouth marketing only works

00:12:34.940 if the business has more people exposed to it

00:12:37.440 because then you have more word of mouth,

00:12:38.660 if that makes sense.

00:12:39.660 Yeah.

00:12:40.720 So that would be a big opportunity for you

00:12:43.800 is to figure out where can you invest money?

00:12:46.800 It doesn't have to be like paid ads or whatever.

00:12:49.100 It's just, where can you invest money in a 30 day window

00:12:53.260 that you can clearly correlate that investment

00:12:55.920 to increase number of members that come into your world?

00:12:58.980 Yep.

00:12:59.820 Have you ever tried anything in the past that worked?

00:13:03.140 Yes, so that's the issue,

00:13:05.140 is it works for the short term, but not for the long term.

00:13:08.640 So we've done paid marketing through Facebook and Instagram.

00:13:13.160 got a lot of leads it got a lot of members through the door but then none of them stuck around

00:13:18.760 because it was it was that little thing that just got them in versus marketing we have really high

00:13:25.080 quality leads so anybody that walks through the door we have a 90 close rate it's shocking when

00:13:31.400 somebody doesn't purchase if they walk through the door for just a we do a no sweat intro where

00:13:37.400 right yeah so i mean the reality of it is is every channel has a different performance throughout

00:13:42.840 the business model. So anybody that does any referral-based marketing, affinity marketing,

00:13:49.720 knows that that's your highest quality, highest caliber, sticks longer, uses the most. It's a

00:13:57.000 no-brainer. But the challenge with that is that it doesn't allow you to invest in it. There's only

00:14:03.320 so much where it's optimized and it's going to grow. And every channel, it doesn't matter if

00:14:06.600 it's Facebook, partnerships, affiliates, they all have a ceiling, a maturity level where they

00:14:14.120 peter out, even with Facebook ads. Essentially, your responsibility as the owner is to figure out

00:14:23.800 which one can you do and how do you optimize it so they do stick around. So even if you get cheap

00:14:29.240 leads, that's great. Maybe there's a way to add more of a hurdle so that the people that do come 0.99

00:14:34.520 in show up that are higher qualified. Maybe you make them apply. Maybe you say only if you know

00:14:42.340 somebody in our gym and they vouch for you that you can even have the no sweat intro. Like you

00:14:46.480 can decide a whole bunch of stuff that if the economics work, you can kind of, um, I call these

00:14:52.240 funnel filters. You can increase the filter so that the people that do come through will, will

00:14:58.920 have good economics. Cause you're right. If you spend $300 to acquire a customer and they

00:15:04.400 stick around for two months and they only pay you 180 bucks,

00:15:08.220 you're essentially a wash, right?

00:15:09.980 You paid $300 to get, you know, $360 in revenue

00:15:14.980 or $260 in revenue, is that right?

00:15:17.760 183, no, 360.

00:15:20.260 Great person.

00:15:21.580 Yeah, then the revenue doesn't, it doesn't make sense, right?

00:15:26.260 Cause that's not even gross margin,

00:15:27.420 that's just top line revenue, right?

00:15:28.860 You have all the costs associated with that.

00:15:30.480 They pay everybody to do the fundamentals and whatnot.

00:15:32.440 So yeah.

00:15:33.280 But that doesn't mean that everybody that came through that funnel looked like that, right?

00:15:39.600 So if out of 10, there was two that did stick around, I would want to know what's true about those two.

00:15:46.240 Right.

00:15:46.880 And so we've tried to run those demographics to figure that out.

00:15:49.740 So we looked at our last two years of the people that have quit and averaged out when it was that they actually dropped off.

00:15:58.780 And it's the three-month mark.

00:16:00.280 That is very consistent.

00:16:02.220 it's 91 days so what are you doing to ensure that people don't drop off at the 91 day mark

00:16:08.640 so that's at the three month mark uh we do a check-in so i have a csm hired and she books 0.77

00:16:15.700 them she keeps in contact with them leading up to it so we have check-ins after day one five 30

00:16:22.180 45 and 60 and usually at after their 60th class it's about the three month mark and that's when

00:16:29.700 they come in and they meet with our CSM to kind of go over, have we met your goals? If not,

00:16:36.220 what can we do different? And if we have, then what's next? Is this a new thing, Kevin, or is

00:16:41.640 this going on for a while? Well, we just started, I guess, pre-pandemic and then we kind of got

00:16:47.600 shut down. So it kind of threw into everything, right? I mean, this is the thing is I think you're

00:16:51.520 on the right path and it's just having it work through a cycle, right? And say, okay, 90 day

00:16:56.560 window that's your window how did that work for this cohort how did this work for the second

00:17:00.960 core and i call it the three iteration test sometimes it takes us whatever the initiative

00:17:05.120 we need to do it three times to see yeah you just you need to give it like i mean as you know

00:17:11.600 imagine somebody can't do a muscle up the first time they try and they're like i give up well no

00:17:16.400 yeah like now go do some some some training and build that muscle and then try again and okay now

00:17:22.800 we see where we're at and we're going to do some stuff. To me, it's the same way for any

00:17:27.120 business improvement. But at the end of the day, our job as entrepreneurs is to say,

00:17:34.320 if our goal is freedom, so our goal is to get four weeks free a year, double the size of our

00:17:41.680 business and grow while I'm away. So if that's the case, you need to figure out how to design over

00:17:48.080 the next 10 years, a repeatable process that you can hire somebody that can follow that goes through

00:17:54.960 the motions. It'd be the marketing activities, the first call, the no sweat intro, et cetera,

00:17:59.040 that's not you because it has to operate while you're on vacation so that when they come back,

00:18:05.520 and again, the reality of growth is an interesting one because you may just hit the next natural

00:18:11.520 churn ceiling in 10 years, which is half a million in revenue. There's only so much capacity that

00:18:17.680 your gym can support right yes yeah and you can do yeah and then you can do like nutritional

00:18:25.120 programming that doesn't require square footage and do online there's other ways to amplify your

00:18:30.480 business unit for revenue generation but in regards to just pure crossfit maybe some pt

00:18:36.800 there's a certain amount of capacity so once you figure out that max capacity maybe that's

00:18:42.240 half a million a year then if you went away for four weeks and if all it did was not decline

00:18:50.480 that would be a huge win because if you have this natural ceiling and you're already bouncing

00:18:55.760 against it because of your churn and your new customers per month and you go away and the

00:19:00.720 team is able to execute for four weeks to get the new customers replenish the ones that might

00:19:05.440 have cancelled in that 38 period that's still a huge win we're getting closer to that so i ran my

00:19:11.120 numbers and i think i'm in the business uh coaching the classes roughly anywhere from 30 35

00:19:18.480 of the classes that are that are offered right now so way better than it was um two years ago

00:19:24.320 where it was closer to 60 or 70 and i couldn't do it all right so yeah it was better bringing people

00:19:30.560 in the right people in putting them in the right seats and making sure that they enjoyed it so

00:19:35.120 yeah i mean being there's a difference between being self-employed and being an owner right

00:19:40.080 Self-employed means that we essentially operate in our business and take a salary from doing the

00:19:45.440 work, which is coaching or whatever the service is. Owning means that our responsibility is to

00:19:51.360 support the team, to monitor, to lead, to coach, to support the team, to deliver on the promise

00:19:57.840 that we make in the market, right? And the challenge with a lot of service-based businesses

00:20:03.920 is the entrepreneur has a really hard time disconnecting because they're worried that

00:20:10.480 the experience is going to be impacted the customers are going to be resentful they're

00:20:15.600 going to expect a certain level of service that doesn't get done and all those things are true

00:20:20.400 like that's the reality like the more you pull back the more people are going to say well it's

00:20:25.440 not the same it's not the way it used to be but here's the deal you're not going to keep doing it

00:20:31.680 If the business doesn't support you, like, that's what I know.

00:20:35.560 No business to complain about.

00:20:37.900 Yeah.

00:20:38.280 And you have, you literally talented enough to go do any other business and be successful.

00:20:42.660 So if you want to be in this business, own your own building and do this for the next decade, it's almost mandatory that you figure out how to work your way out of the business.

00:20:53.920 And I call this the buyback principle, right?

00:20:55.780 The buyback principle is a simple concept that every free dollar, every amount of cash you can kind of reinvest in the business, it shouldn't be designed to hire people for capacity.

00:21:07.160 It should be invested to hire, to buy back time out of your calendar.

00:21:12.020 So if that creates capacity, that's a double win.

00:21:16.160 But if it doesn't, that's fine.

00:21:18.080 Right.

00:21:18.300 So really auditing your calendar over a two week period and looking at these big swaths of time for you, maybe it's coaching, maybe it's, you know, managing the other coaches, maybe it's doing sales calls, maybe it's doing marketing, whatever it is, it's everybody is different, it's unique.

00:21:34.200 I mean, it's like a fingerprint, but at least if you have this process of saying every two weeks, I'm going to look at my calendar and I'm going to look at these big chunks of time and I'm going to stack them up.

00:21:42.960 These are the activities I'm doing on a two week period.

00:21:45.600 And then you rank order and based on least energetic, meaning that they take energy from you and lowest value,

00:21:53.000 meaning you could pay somebody else to do this for way less than you would have to pay yourself.

00:21:57.840 Yep. Those are the opportunities to hire somebody to buy that time back.

00:22:03.080 Then with that free time, you invested in strategic things like working on the business, designing a marketing program that's repeatable,

00:22:09.960 scalable building standard operating procedures that your team can execute um maybe doing just

00:22:15.960 sales consults and nothing else because that's where the biggest roi is for you today but

00:22:20.520 eventually as you look at your calendar you'll go geez i'm spending 40 50 of my time doing sales now

00:22:26.200 it's time for me to buy back that time by hiring a salesperson training them properly and setting

00:22:31.720 it up so that they can succeed that is how because entrepreneurs won't grow into pain okay so kevin

00:22:38.680 when you were coaching 75, 80% of the classes, if somebody came to you and said, Hey, I've got

00:22:44.440 a strategy that allow you to double the amount of clients you have. Do you think you would be

00:22:49.800 eager to pull the trigger on that? Or you'd be scared shitless?

00:22:53.720 Uh, who would probably be down the middle because it's encouraging obviously to have

00:22:58.200 that. Right. But it's also artificially draining. Yeah. Cause you're like, okay,

00:23:01.960 if I get these, this double the capacity, now I have to teach more classes and my classes

00:23:06.120 are big and then you know what i mean so entrepreneurs will not grow into pain this

00:23:09.800 is pain this is growth and it shows up in all these like unique ways where um you'll be slow

00:23:15.400 to reply to an email or um you have an opportunity to go on the radio but you kind of don't want to

00:23:22.360 do it or you you have a marketing campaign that's working and you decide to turn it off because you

00:23:28.280 kind of don't like it there's literally all these different ways that entrepreneurs throw hand

00:23:34.840 grenades in their business because they they don't have a way to grow into pain so the reason why i

00:23:40.120 teach the buyback principle is because if you have this process of continuously buying time out of

00:23:45.560 your calendar then as you grow your life will actually get better and you won't wake up in

00:23:51.400 five more years or even back when maybe you're like man this really sucked you won't wake up 0.64

00:23:56.440 hating the business and that's the reality of why there's a high business failure rate

00:24:00.120 is really talented people get into business with a dream and they're successful but at that level

00:24:07.960 of success the way they look at their time they've got a dozen people reporting to them

00:24:12.120 they wake up in the morning they work for 10 hours the end of the day they're burnt out they didn't

00:24:16.760 get anything done on their to-do list they talked to a bunch of people it wasn't like they didn't

00:24:21.560 work but they're not feeling like they're making forward progress so to me this is just a simple

00:24:26.760 elegant kind of first principle approach to saying, hey, if the Kevin Wood of today in 12 months

00:24:34.360 isn't buying back time out of his calendar, he just needs to look how he's prioritizing his

00:24:38.520 reinvestment of his money into the business. And that's where when you say podcasts,

00:24:45.160 March programming or whatever, that's the question. Is this going to help me generate

00:24:51.800 more revenue that I can then hire people to take time out of my calendar to free me up to do that

00:24:57.640 if not then I've got a list of things that I know are guaranteed going to generate more revenue and

00:25:01.400 gross margin that I probably should execute on because from that profit I'll be able to hire

00:25:05.960 people to buy back my time and at that place when you all of a sudden literally and this is a

00:25:11.240 beautiful place to get to as an entrepreneur this is what an owner is you wake up and you could or

00:25:16.040 could not go to work and it would not change anything in that moment then then there's freedom

00:25:22.200 and it happens and i remember one of my clients rick uh he ran a company called unbounce and he

00:25:27.080 built out his team executive leadership team revenue very deliberate six years just bang bang

00:25:31.720 bang bang bang and he called me up and he says what do i do now and i said why is that he goes

00:25:37.240 i have no nothing to do the team told me to leave them alone marketing's deal and sales

00:25:42.360 deal and customer success, product engineering, everybody's happy. And I said, well, you've got

00:25:47.880 three things, a CEO, as long as you want to stay CEO, if you don't, that's fine. Hire a CEO, work

00:25:51.640 your way out of the business. That's like the next, next level, right? Where you have somebody

00:25:55.400 managing your business and you are owner. And I said, the three things that you need to be focused

00:25:59.800 on is vision because you're the vision holder, right? Speak the future and new existence,

00:26:04.840 making sure the capital structure is there so that the business keeps running, right? So making

00:26:08.600 sure the reporting is in place, the receivables are tracked, all the financial side.

00:26:12.840 And then third is just making sure you keep refining the people you have on staff because

00:26:16.120 I'm sure, Kevin, you've had some people that were bad hires and had an incredible impact to the

00:26:20.520 business. We all have that in hindsight, you're going to make better decisions. And as long as

00:26:25.400 we're always making sure the vision is clear to everybody on the team and that it's communicated,

00:26:30.360 we have the capital to support the business and grow the business and the reporting and no hiccups

00:26:35.800 come up right no unforeseen things and that we have the right people on the bus and they're in

00:26:39.880 the right seats i mean that's what creates a business that is a joy to run right and that's

00:26:45.240 kind of where you want to get to does that help we're we're i can taste it right it's right it's

00:26:52.920 right there so we're getting very close to that yeah kevin based on what i shared today what's

00:26:57.480 resonated the most with you um i guess the the buyback time part like it i've always known that

00:27:05.880 concept i guess the i the the harder the challenge is figuring out what to do with that time that

00:27:12.360 you bought back where do you prioritize that that time that you do have and focus it on something

00:27:17.800 that's going to grow the business so those three things yeah help you get more customers per month

00:27:23.880 help you keep customers per month, help you increase revenue per customer.

00:27:28.200 That's it. So if you got free time, you got extra five hours this week, for some reason,

00:27:32.200 tomorrow, somebody shows up and says, Kevin, you don't have to come into work.

00:27:35.400 I'll take care of your whole workday. You got eight hours. Ask yourself, all right,

00:27:38.920 how do I get more customers showing up every month? And if you got that dialed in,

00:27:43.320 how do I get more people to stick around? Or how do I monetize the clients and really serve them

00:27:48.040 more, create more value for them than I'm currently doing? And again, these are the nuances where,

00:27:52.920 you know, 20 years of experience. It's easy for me to say for that, that, but it's in the practice

00:27:59.160 and building that muscle where it just becomes second nature. The distractions will take care

00:28:02.840 of themselves. Some of them will fit into one of those three things, but some of them will be

00:28:06.760 quick no's or not now's, which is great. It's not no forever. It's just not right now.

00:28:11.880 And you can kind of keep them on a list to revisit in three months or six months or 12 months.

00:28:16.600 I guess thinking time is important as well. Just being able to sit somewhere that's not

00:28:22.200 in the business that's not in my office and just go and think so as long as you seed the questions

00:28:28.840 right so so get really good at curating good questions like one of my favorite questions to

00:28:35.000 ask clients is if somebody bought your business tomorrow what's the first thing they would change

00:28:41.480 that's a good question i've got a whole bunch of those kind of questions because

00:28:45.240 the thinking time is great but if i'm just sitting there i you know what i mean like

00:28:49.240 I need to ponder on something that's going to hopefully come up with some good ideas.

00:28:53.980 Anything else that resonate with you today, Kevin?

00:28:57.820 No, those are the main points.

00:28:59.940 They're useful.

00:29:00.960 They're helpful.

00:29:02.100 Awesome.

00:29:02.520 Well, I appreciate the time.

00:29:03.720 Excited to see the journey and keep showing up for the community.

00:29:07.340 I know it's appreciated.

00:29:08.660 Yeah, man.

00:29:09.160 Appreciate it.

00:29:09.800 All right.

00:29:10.140 We'll talk soon.

00:29:10.980 Thanks again.

00:29:11.480 Later.

Dan Martell - July 19, 2021

Ask These Questions to Grow Your Business

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