No successful business owners have reached the top without going through the ups and downs. In this episode, Ken Courtright talks about the concept of the success wheel that every business must live through. He talks about the process of maturity a business takes and the wisdom found in riding the journey towards becoming a success. Join Ken as he moves you through the life cycle of business growth.
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Grafting In Growth
Episode 446 is one I’m physically living through at the moment with my wife, Kerri. Let’s just say I’m living through the greatest growth and the greatest impact the businesses ever felt. In the last chapter of the book, Rally, that you can get on Amazon, it took my wife and I a couple of years to write and two years to edit. It is definitely our best life’s work. It’s 300 pages, small print. It is a beast of a book, subtitled, 19 Business Growth Strategies You’ve Never Heard Of. These can be overlapped in any business, any industry at any time. We’re not technically done. There are a couple of pages that got to get adjusted. We’re doing a soft launch for six weeks, then the final cover, the final intro and outro going in, etc. As I was reviewing the last chapter, something hit me pretty strong. It’s about the success wheel. I’ve covered this topic in pretty good detail in the Today’s Growth Classics. It’s a separate podcast in iTunes. If you want a deep dive in it, look for one titled, Success Wheel. It’s one of the originals.
As I was reviewing it, it’s still relevant, current. I wouldn’t even change anything about the pictures or the diagrams. Nothing’s changed but I just want to share a personal story. The concept of the success wheel stems from a phrase that Brian Smith, the founder of UGG Boots, said once on one of our stages at one of our events. He said, “A frog has to be a tadpole first. You can’t be born a frog.” What he’s saying is businesses must live through an evolution, a life cycle. They have to start out as a baby, then a toddler. They do their thing and they become teenagers and they rebel and then they become young adults and then very mature. We are in the process as a company of becoming very mature.
No successful business owners have done it without going through their own success wheel. Click To TweetMy success wheel goes through three iterations of the wheel, of the life cycle of most people. It’s expressly built around my personal success wheel. In my early days, I’d go to conferences, I’d read book. I’d fill my brain with knowledge on marketing and the topic I’m in of consulting. I would meet people and we would do deals and my intellectual property would grow because of the deals. I would go through this whole circle again. In a couple of years later, I’d go to the same or similar conferences. Here are these incredible speakers, read the books they recommend and I got stronger and stronger. In the top right of the success wheel, no matter what your wheel looks like, the top right of everybody’s wheel involves people. As you grow in life and as you grow as a student of business, the bigger your intellectual property, meaning the more you know and you’re willing to share, the more bigger people are attracted to you.
When I mean bigger, physically in further stages of the success line of a business. There are businesses go zero to $10,000 in their first month and then after that they can’t make more than $10,000 a month and then they die. There are some companies that had zero to $1 million, they fly. You can’t get past $1 million and they die. There are companies that get to $300 million, then they die. They can’t break through. Every business hits some level of incompetence where you have to find bigger players that have managed things much bigger than your situation. You graft them in and their intellectual property takes you to the next level. I want to add a little nugget of the power of bringing in a world-class leader. It’s the power of stretching yourself and going after a partner, a business leader, a manager that’s much further along than yourself.
It’s a little bit scary, but at the same time it’s comforting. We were counseled for two years. We were approaching the $50 million mark. Go find a leader that ran a company $500 million-plus. We ended up finding the COO of the multibillion-dollar company, TD Ameritrade. We plucked them out of retirement. Here comes David Kelly. Our company’s completely different. We have an office opening in Manila, Philippines. We have now an office that I believe starts with access of 600 programmers in India. Many of our fundamental systems and processes have been tweaked, if not changed, all together. We went from vertical groups in our company to horizontal teams. We are way more efficient now than before and it’s all because when David Kelly was attracted to Income Store, he had to be attracted. He had to find us attractive. He was not going to come give us a couple of few years of his life if we’re not attractive.
We had built up our personal intellectual property from the success wheel and because our team did the same and because our company did the same, he decided to join the team. What happens when you graft in a leader like that? They themselves have their own success wheel. They themselves have their network of connections from their twenty years at Merrill Lynch and their multiple years at TD Ameritrade and their previous stuff. What came with Dave, and we knew it and we predicted it and we talked about it before he came here. We said it’s inevitable that he brings to us people he knows that he trusts and away we’ll go. Sure enough, there are two to three key people that have been already been to our office. They’re already in essence part of our team. We’re already running tremendous amounts of volume, of service work through them. The people that came with Dave are just as polished and professional as Dave. They also know as many people as Dave knows. Our whole collective IP of Income Store has absolutely exploded.
What’s the point of this? Number one, if you haven’t heard the podcast, Success Wheel, go to iTunes and go to Today’s Growth Classics and hear it after this. If you haven’t read the last chapter of my book on Success Wheel, which hits it from a completely different angle, then go to Amazon and buy the book and have it overnight to you. You’ve got to wrap your brains around this principle of success wheel. No successful business owners have done it without going through their own wheel. Many don’t even know they’re on the wheel. Many of you know that you’re on the wheel. If you’ve read it and you understand the principle and you know how to tweak it. The point is stretching. Expand your wheel. Now that I know what I’ve seen, I cannot wait to do this again. I’m not going to stop with Dave Kelly. We’re going to add more and more departments and more overall management. It’s just beginning. It’s so exciting. It’s so fun. Go do it. Don’t get good, get done.
Important Links:
- Rally
- Today’s Growth Classics on iTunes
- Success Wheel – previous episode
- UGG Boots
- David Kelly
- Income Store
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