HOW I LEARNED THE PROCESS TO 10X BUSINESS REVENUE

Hey, if you want to know the process that I learned that’s helped, at least one client 10x his revenue in just over three years, then stay tuned. Hey folks, Doctor Kevin here. 

In today’s video, I want to talk about the processes, more than once, that I learned that have helped businesses dramatically increase their customer base, their revenue, and their profit. Killer stuff that’s going to help you be able to have that mindset and have that key information to grow your business. Stay tuned.

Now, I never intended to be the guy that would dramatically help businesses grow their revenue and their profit. What I set out to do at all. What I was really trying to do out of the gate was just help create healthy, healthy businesses and effective cultures that allow businesses to survive.

Now you’ve heard my story before, you know I grew up in Flint and my dad worked for General Motors for 34 years before it went bankrupt. yeah, before I went belly up even though before GM went bankrupt, it was doing massive layoffs and those massive layoffs were having huge rippling effects throughout Eastern Michigan and southeastern Michigan. I’m talking about empty malls, restaurants shut down. My friends that I went to school with their parents unemployed and out of work, work foreclosed houses. It was not a good scene.

As I talked about in previous videos inside me, I knew there had to be a different way and the thing is what I found over time was a deep and hardening sense of dissatisfaction. I was completely dissatisfied with what I was seeing around me with the way things were currently. And what I discovered along the way is that if you want to change your life or your business and if you’re a business leader who is committed to taking your business to the next level, it starts with dissatisfaction. If you are not dissatisfied with the way things are currently, you will not change. In fact, it is one of the key elements in creating change. A sense, a natural sense of dissatisfaction with how things are. You’ve got to have their queasiness, that sickness in your stomach when you just feel like you cannot continue on this pathway. That’s what I experienced back in the day when I watched the Crumbling infrastructure in this city around me and I saw my friends getting laid off and I saw the difficulty as the buildings were becoming boarded up. I knew, without exception, there had to be another way.

Now at one point, my family moved up north. Up north I say, out of Flint, 1/2 an hour and when we lived in the country I had less exposure to that, but that experience I had as a child left a permanent mark inside my mind and a permanent sense of dissatisfaction. Not only dissatisfaction because that’s half of the equation. I was dissatisfied with the way that business, GM, and other businesses were being run because I saw them failing, I saw them not surviving and that was really in me. The real vision, that’s the other half of the equation having dissatisfaction, but having clarity on their vision. My vision, the thing that was driving me, that drove me to create those processes and discover those processes that were 10X of business was that sense of vision to see what’s possible. And as I studied and became a student, and entrepreneur myself, I began to discover that there are certain core elements you can have in place. It’s possible! It’s possible to create a fantastic, amazingly successful business.

But you have to have clarity of vision. When I talk about clarity, the vision, right, it’s interesting ’cause the vision is something you see, but a true vision has in it all the senses. When you create a vision of what you want your business to look like, it’s important to see the entire scene in your mind’s eye. To have yourself in that scene, as the leader, to smell it, to feel it, to taste it, to touch it. Use all your senses as you create that vision in your head. The vision compensates for the sense of dissatisfaction. Really two important elements to understand your sense of dissatisfaction with the current state. If you’re fat and happy and comfortable, but you have clarity of vision, there’s not a very good likelihood that you’re going to move that much forward. If you have no vision, but you’re completely dissatisfied, you’re probably not going to move that much forward in creating the business you want. But when both of them are in place, a deep sense of dissatisfaction, (as I experienced back in Flint growing up) and clarity of vision as I experience more and more as I watch businesses that were thriving, as I learn to help them drive, as I develop clients that started to 10X their business, then, I started to have that crystal clarity of the vision that allowed businesses to thrive, to move forward. Have crystal clarity of your vision and a sense of dissatisfaction. These two are the key and the first step and one of the things I learned along the way. When I was growing up back in Flint, that’s the first thing.

Now, another one of the processes I discovered that has helped businesses 10x is not what you would expect. Because it’s really not even connected to the business at all. Or maybe it’s completely connected to the business. Again, it’s not into it. What I discovered, and took a long time on my own journey. See I was always kind of a self-awareness geek. I was on a self-awareness path to discover what made my mind tick. And whether that happened, as I came out of the situation where the economy was faltering and people didn’t have jobs and I want to show people related and reacted to that. I saw people who actually got emboldened and stood up and made a concerted, determined effort to succeed, and then I saw people who just fell into complacency who never succeeded. Who just became OK being mediocre at best. Recognizing that there’s a choice in there, but there are also patterns. There are patterns that we develop in how we think drove me on a path of self-awareness to be a real self-awareness junkie, to spend time in monasteries, to spend time in meditation centers, to spend time in Graduate School actually studying how meditation impacts leadership.

In fact, getting my doctorate, studying leaders who practice meditation, and I found that those leaders who have that solid platform of self-awareness, of mindfulness, leaders who make that a discipline who lead with greater intention, get better results because they learn how to focus on the right things, they become non-reactive, and they stay unwaveringly focused in their vision. Now, this was a hard-fought lesson for me. I certainly didn’t know it out of the gate. It took me decades, decades of my own study, decades of me being a victim and making excuses and not getting the results I wanted. You know, sometimes it still sneaks into my life, but I recognize first and foremost that I’m in charge.

As a leader, you are in charge of what you think with your thoughts, you create your world. Change your thinking, you change everything. It starts with being self-aware, taking that focus that you have spent your whole life in your career, honing the focus that you pay a turn onto the external world, and learning to turn it inward. So you can become acutely aware of those patterns that are driving your thinking and giving you the results you want. When you start to interrupt that pattern and operate from a sense of troop, presence, and awareness, then you can dial in on that vision. That vision is absolutely key.

In fact, I had one business owner that. I worked with and he brought it all back to that. 

I asked him, we worked together for about a year and a half. And after working together, I interviewed him. I stopped and said, let’s talk about what it is that’s working for you because your business has seen ridiculous growth. He tripled in the first year and then tripled again in the second year. That’s not a stretch for businesses to do that. That’s really focused. And I asked him, what was it that allowed you to do that?

It was interesting because this was not something he expected out of the gate. What he said was, “Kevin, when we first started working together, you forced me to sit down and clarify my vision.” In fact, what we did was I took him up to the cabin and he had a vision building retreat where we actually drew it out. On a flip chart, we’ve listed it using our left brain, but also drew pictures of what it would look like. What we provide for him for his family or his community, what the business would look like? What kind of material wealth you would be able to gain from that. But also you know, why he was doing this thing. Right to be able to understand with his entire being what that vision was, was essential. In fact, it was what he called the number one thing, is having clarity on the vision. Having clarity on your vision is an essential part of the process if you want to 10X your business.

So there are two things I learned that were essential when you have to have dissatisfaction, you can’t just be OK with the way things are going. And two, you have to have clarity of your vision. You have to know what’s possible. But now the third thing.

The third thing that I learned that is essential in 10x businesses beyond just having dissatisfaction and to have clarity of vision, is where you focus yourself as a leader, as an executive. Why do you pay attention to it? see it’s interesting, I just completed an assessment with an organization. Just finished it with an executive team, a leadership team of a company. And there was so much feedback. I asked the leadership team to do feedback on how their team is functioning and then level down. Everyone who is important in the leadership team provided feedback, not of the individuals on the team, but how the team itself was functioning. And the word that. Came up again and again and again, Micromanaging.

The folks, the director, felt Micro managed and because of that sense of being micromanaged, there was no trust, there was no accountability, there was no follow-through. The entire organization operates. The other word I saw silo, so there are silos, there’s no trust, there’s micromanaging. Guess how effective that is In helping 10X business, it’s ineffective. You have to lift people up as a leader. Your job is to take care of the employees, the employees will take care of the customers and the customers will take care of the business which in turn will take care of you as a leader. There’s a real disconnect though, with so many executives in so many leaders we’ve heard me talk about this before in other videos. The disconnect comes because what got you here, the secret to your success, you keep doing the same thing and that is your Achilles heel. You gotta do things differently as I’ve talked about before, the difference between I mean style, that is, your personality playing itself out and doing what you’ve always done. The secret to your success that got you here. 

Now changing that be more strategic and recognize that great your ability to roll up your sleeves to be right, to be a high performer and to get things done, got you into the leadership, the executive position. Maybe you’re an entrepreneur or an owner. It got you here now, and it is the thing that will absolutely undermine your success. It’ll shoot you in the foot every time. I’ve seen it 1000 times and I’ve seen it all.

Why do you do it differently? So important to remember your job is to lift people up, not to be right, not to demand excellence. Now you have to demand excellence, and it’s helpful if you’re right. But that’s going to get in the way. Your job is to lift people up, so they can’t demand excellence, so they can be good at being right, and being open, and being innovative, and making data-driven decisions, and making sure they don’t miss the impact of their decisions, and executing on time, and creating accountability. But that can’t be done from you as a leader, that’s got to be done through them. Your job is to motivate, inspire, and fire them up. So that they become the best version of themselves.

I learned that the hard way. When I first started a business and I had employees and, Oh my goodness, they were underperforming. I was so frustrated and I was just nailing, hit him, hit him, hit him, hit him and the more I hit him, the more they either turned over through attrition. Often I was happy. Get rid of them, but they were never performing the way I knew they could. When I got out of the way and I stopped being demanding and started being curious, being curious about what they thought the path forward was, it was phenomenal how their behavior changed! How their performance changed, how they were able to level up and in leveling up, be able to take care of the customer more effectively, to execute the systems and processes, and create that kind of successful organization. Not only have I seen this in my own experience, but with countless organizations that are attempting to 10X, to try and double their profit, triple your revenue, increase your customer base. What have you? You can’t do it alone and it’s tough being a leader, being an executive at the top of the mountain, it’s lonely and you feel like you have to do it by yourself. I have so many, I think every business owner I work with right now everyone, and there’s quite a few. All struggle from the same thing. In their mind, nobody measures up. Nobody does it as well as they do, and they might as well do it themselves, and so they end up getting way down into the weeds, rolling up their own sleeves, and staying out of their lane as an executive. They get pushed down and suddenly they’re going two layers down. That kind of work in the organization absolutely gets in the way of their scaling. If you want to scale. If you want a 10X, you’ve got to focus on making your employees better off. You’ve got to have clarity of your vision and you kind of have a sense of dissatisfaction with your current state. Those three elements I learn those processes first hand. 

I learned why they’re important in my own business and in again many, many businesses that I’ve worked with and help them create the systems and processes and the leadership capacity that has taken their business not only to the next level but to 10X! You can too!

Folks, thanks for watching the video till the end. There is great stuff ahead of and great stuff you can do to scale your business. You’re doing it. You’re on the right track. Here’s your great success. 

Bye for now.