When managing a business, you need to know which stage you’re on and the next step you should be doing to make it even better. In this episode, Ken Courtright asks the question every business owner should ask themselves, “What’s the next overall look and feel and shape of your company?” Ken explains why their business is not selling the same product from years ago and why they keep morphing their company. Don’t miss out on this episode to learn how to keep up to speed with what’s next for your business.
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What’s Next
This is where we drop some gems and some nuggets of how do you grow a business today. I don’t throw out techniques that worked in 1982 or what might work in five years. This is about what grows business now. This is part three of a three-part series on the theme that Tony Robbins is famous for talking about which is, you manage two businesses. The first business you manage is the business you’re in, and the second business that you manage is the business you are becoming. If you’d like a better explanation of that, check out episode 113.
We’re going to continue. For those of you that have heard a few of my podcasts, especially the ones that have been with us since the beginning, the first episode I cut was on entropy. Entropy is the law that anything man-made or God made is built to go from order to disorder, everything is built to break down. I explained in podcast number one that there’s a reason the book I wrote with Brian Tracy became something that has put my books in my podcast on the map. I urge everybody. It’s along the theme of this concept of managing two businesses. If you have not heard episode 1, check it out and share it with especially the teenagers that are going to be the future business owners of this country, it would mean a lot to me.
This episode and all episodes leading up to our next event are sponsored by Digital Footprint. You can get info at DigitalFootprint.net. I thought I’d like to add something cool. I spoke at an event. We did a promotion at that event to fill this Digital Footprint. We happened to be in the largest ballroom we’ve ever occupied, and we will fill the place, we sell out all the time. There are 6 or 7 tables left, I’m going to extend something and it’s cool. What is the next step for your business? What’s the next product you’re going to come out with? What’s the next overall look and feel and shape of your company? That’s what this podcast is all about. I was trying to decide how I could talk about Digital Footprint in a new way. I realized, “Wait a minute, we have an app called the Next Step Tool.” For our sites that are $400,000 and the larger, we give this app away.
Connect with others and learn from each other on how you can make yourself better. Click To TweetWe also sell this app for $8,500. Anybody that registers to our event Digital Footprint and also brings three guests that registered at Digital Footprint, we are going to give them a brand-new iPad, not a tablet, but an actual physical iPad. Embedded into the iPad is our $8,500 app called the Next Step Tool. Why is it $8,500? It’s $8,500 because there are five things that this app does. Number one, when you open it up, you turn on your iPad, you click the app, and then it says, “Put in your domain name.” You type in the domain name of your company website or your product website and within five minutes, it scans it. It tells you every section of your website that’s broken and recommends the proper code to fix it. That’s step one of the Next Step Tool. The First thing you do, is you fix what’s broken, then you go onto what’s next.
Step two of the Next Step Tool says, “Here’s what’s okay with your website. Here’s where you’re doing well on certain parts, certain rankings, but here’s what you could focus on that would be great.” It highlights 10 to 20 items that if we owned your website, what would our company work on next? Thus, the name The Next Step Tool. Once you do step one and fix what’s broke, then you go to step two and you say, “Here’s what’s okay with our site,” and then you make that part great. Step three of the Next Step Tool says, “Moving forward in the next 90 days. These are the content pieces you should be writing on according to Google’s tools of what the world is searching for.” That’s step three of what you should do next. Thus the name, the Next Step Tool. Number four is brand new for us, we added this piece, and it can predict revenue.
If you write on in step three what it recommends, it can give you a guesstimation using Google AdSense alone based on the traffic of your site’s current traffic and where it will be if you do the writing, what type of revenue you could be looking at. Number five, the Next Step Tool runs a complete digital footprint of your industry and your competition for your website. It shows you in the last twelve months what went viral, what you could replicate via content. It even shows you what sneezers out there, what bloggers out there would probably, if you contacted them, help you promote the new content you wrote. That tool is amazing, that’s why it’s $8,500. For those of you that register, because you’re on this podcast and you go to www.DigitalFootprint.net and you register.
You email me the names of the next three people you helped register for our events that’s you plus three, that’s half a table. For those of you that do that, I’m going to give the first person that triggered those other three a brand-new iPad, not a generic tablet, a real iPad with our app embedded on it. You can put your website in, it’ll tell you everything broken, what to write on, where to take your site. You’d make all the changes, you run it again a few weeks later, and it’s got a whole new section of instructions because your site has changed and your industry has changed. You can use that tool into perpetuity for the rest of your life. This podcast is titled, what next? What I wanted to do is list out five things that our company, a three-timing, 5000 company, 24 years old, does on a fairly regular basis to make sure we’re constantly morphing and changing.
Number one, none of the products we sell, were we selling three years ago not one of our major products. None of what we do at all today were we doing it all in 2008. We’re constantly morphing, we’re constantly changing and we are constantly growing. There are five things that when I thought about this episode, I can clearly show that we do on a regular basis. Number one, we attend industry conferences. Our people and I go to Moscone, we go to share sales conferences, we go to affiliate summit, and we attend the events of our industry. We stay in tune. Number two, we attend private workshops. We’re sending a gentleman, one particular employee to a five-day camp. It’s $13,000 for the five days, but he will be among 20 to 25 people in a hands-on private workshop that has 25 students and ten instructors. It’s fast-paced, hands-on, and our gentleman, Jonathan is going to walk out of there probably with his hair, blown back with a lot of ideas for our company.
Number three, we keep up with the latest credentials. As the world of the web changes, our head designer John, he’s on the advisory board of the WordPress design team. We’ve got a Facebook guru that has a lot of credentials in the area of Facebook growth. Our head SEO and marketing guys have credentials and attend certain conferences and they get their certificate. The concept is, whether you’re in insurance, whether you’re in real estate, stay up to speed with the latest credentials, the latest continuing ed, in your space. One, two, and three are similar, four and five are different. Number four, I personally am part of a number of mastermind groups. I teach at a number of them, but there are other instructors that I can learn from there. I’m part of a twelve-person men’s group where twelve of us fly in from all over the country.
You manage two things in your business - the business you’re in and the business you’re becoming. Click To TweetEvery 60 days we meet for a few hours, we discuss our health, we discuss our families, our businesses, and we connect at a deep level. All twelve of us have global businesses and we get around likeminded people. It’s not a business mastermind. It’s a men’s group. It’s called Men’s Group. If somebody’s stuck, the eleven people rally into their database of who they know that could help that person, and it keeps us on the cutting edge of what’s timely and relevant in life. Number five, I recommend that you guys befriend three experts in your field. I’ve done this for twenty plus years. I always befriend the experts in my space. If I don’t know them, if I don’t know somebody that can introduce me to them, I befriend them. What does that mean? Everybody is going through life charging forward to get something. Tony Robbins, what is he charging forward to get? More people, he wants to impact more people.
Dr. John Maxwell, what is he charging forward to get? More people, he wants to impact more people. It doesn’t matter what you do, everybody is charging forward. They either want clients, they want more employees, and they want more people following them in social media. Everybody gets up in the morning and charges forward to get something. If you want to befriend three experts in your field, find out what they’re charging forward to get and deliver it to them on a silver platter. I’ve said in a previous podcast, if I was going to try to befriend Tony Robbins, I would start a Tony Robbins’ fan club. I would be the president of the Tony Robbins fan club, and I would build a Facebook platform with 10,000 people in the Tony Robbins fan club.
I would find a way to go to a Tony Robbins event and I would find a way to have somebody introduced me so I could shake his hand. I would make sure they introduce me, that I was the president of the Tony Robbins fan club. Why? Because then, he would say, “What does that mean?” I’d say, “I’ve got 10,000 people following you.” Instantly he would go, “Wait a minute, timeout. You have 10,000 people following you, who are following me in social media?” He’s going to turn to me and say, “When can we connect? How can we get together? How can I help you?” The point is if you want something bad enough and you want to be the best at something, befriend the three people that are currently the best at that.
Find a way to work with them, find a way to be friends with them and connect. Here’s the key, Tony Robbins is the biggest proponent of stating, and you manage two things in business. The business you’re in and the business you’re becoming. If you don’t manage the business that you’re becoming, you will feel the pain points in my podcast number one titled S-Curves. Trust me guys, I live through one of those. I don’t wish that on anybody that is incredibly painful. I urge you strongly to check podcast number one called S-Curves. If you like it and you’re impacted, please share that with every entrepreneur you know especially the younger ones, so they can learn from that in their early days when they have energy. Over and out, take care.
Important Links:
- episode 113 – previous episode
- episode 1 – previous episode
- www.DigitalFootprint.net
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