How can you prevent entropy of your business and allow it to grow freely? Today, Ken Courtright introduces his growth map and teaches us how to use his Growth Checkup Chart. He talks about the four principles against your company’s past, present, and future growth. The only thing in business that can beat entropy is an S-curve. He also shares some tips on how we can prevent entropy.
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Listen to the podcast here:
Growth Guide Map #1
This is episode 63. The title of this is Growth Checkup Chart. We use a chart internally for our websites, when we consult clients and when we consult ourselves. I’ve made some tweaks to it as we have to adjust it every 6 to 12 months, so I’m excited to put it on our website. This episode is going to be sponsored right in the middle of our second company, Income Store. We did a commercial and had a sponsored piece. For those of you that are loyal readers, you know that we do hardly any commercials at all, but we’re going to make an announcement on this episode.
The next few podcasts are going over what we use as a growth consulting guide map. We use this for ourselves. We gather a lot of data from our 700 websites and we do a lot of push and pull. When we consult outside of our own space or if we’re in a mastermind group, say for CEO Space, New Peaks or even Secret Knock, and we’ll gather a lot of data from those. We’ll bring them back, test him on our web properties, and if it works, we’ll add it to the guide map. This guide map, which you’ll see on KenCourtright.com, I’m going to put up a PDF document and anybody can use it. I know that you’ll have to go back probably once a year to get a new updated version. As the world changes, the guide map changes.
First, I want everybody to understand that this is a guide map. This is my disclaimer. I do think the principles on this map are time immemorial. These have been around forever. In the middle of this document, you got to make sure that you’re using it as a guide map and you allow for testing and stuff like that. After covering the fundamentals and principles, I’m going to be uploading this guide map in PDF form on KenCourtright.com, so look for navigation at the top or it might be under tools and resources. I might even put it in the book section. As everybody will see across the top of this physical guide map, there are four principles of growth that have and always will stand the test of time. These principles undergird every section of the chart and they directly affect every area of product and company growth.
You will see that as you progress through and across the Growth Checkup Chart, that no matter the size of your company, you can spot your company in its size, pain point, and growth challenges. I don’t care if you started yesterday or if you’re starting tomorrow, if you don’t even know the name of your company or if you’ve got 5,000 employees. What you want to do is you want to find out exactly where you are, so you can look back a little bit and more importantly, look forward. My suggestion is that you remind yourself of the four principles of growth prior to trying to move from one box to the next. Since you don’t have the chart in front of you, imagine that you’re looking at a PDF document and it’s horizontal. Across the top, there are four principles of growth and the bottom, 80% of the chart is just a bunch of boxes with data insights. You can read the data and determine exactly where you’re at. Once you find where your company’s at on this chart, you then follow the arrows, either up to the right or down, and it’ll give you the next step you can take as tips and advice to grow your company.
You want to make sure you’re benching these four principles against your company’s current growth, past growth and future growth. You want to assess these four principles before moving from one box to another. They’re repetitive, but you’ll find this enlightening, if anything. Principle number one, past growth is no indicator of future growth. I don’t care who you are, what your product is, and what your industry is. There is no past growth chart with a past growth management team in any industry that if you do exactly the same thing with the same people, is going to yield the same results. It never has. Meaning, especially in the world of the web, when a year is dog years, that’s seven years in the 1990s and ten years in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Any one year now is like lightyears in the technology and the business environment.
Past growth is no indicator of future growth. Click To TweetI want everybody to think for a minute and let’s presuppose your parents, grandparents or great grandparents were in the buggy whip business. Could you imagine in the hay day when you were the biggest buggy whip manufacturer in the world? I don’t even know if buggy whip manufacturers even exist, maybe a couple. How about if you were in the VCR industry or eight-track tapes or you made records? How about fax machines? What if your dad, grandfather or grandma was in the landline telephone business? You made the physical phones that plugged into the wall. You probably thought when you worked at AT&T making landline telephones. You had a job forever. What about bell-bottom jeans? Do I have to keep going? The reality is time immemorial says that everything changes. Entropy is real.
S-Curves is the title of my first podcast. I picked that podcast on purpose. It is the chapter of the book that put me into the bestselling author Hall of Fame with Brian Tracy. S-Curves are the only beater of entropy. Entropy is real. Entropy means anything God-made or man-made is built to go from order to disorder. Everything is built to break down our bodies, businesses and automobiles. It’s called the Law of Entropy. It is not the theory of entropy. It’s like the Law of Gravity. The only thing in business that can beat entropy and going back forever that has ever beat entropy is an S-Curve. IncomeStore.com, under the Book section, you can get a free PDF copy. I have the right to the PDF version of my book with Brian Tracy. There is no cost and I’m too lazy to send a followup email. You will never get an email from that book ever, but I beg you and urge you to download that book and read chapter 39. I believe those 7 to 10 pages is the best content I’ve ever written in my life.
Brian Tracy was my idol when I was younger and I studied that man. I went to his conferences. I was at that guy’s feet. Any of his books, you name it, I’ve read it. To do a book with him, I was honored. It took me six months to write seven pages, but I would love it if every adult and every teenager could get their free PDF of that book on IncomeStore.com or KenCourtright.com. I can’t stress this enough. If anybody ever gets even an autoresponder of an email because you downloaded that free book, please call me and I’ll put you on this podcast. You could tell the world that Ken’s a liar, but you’re not going to get any spam or any email because you downloaded that book. I urge everybody to please grab that PDF and make sure every teenager and every adult understands what that means. The only thing that beats entropy is an S-Curve. 100% of the main sources of income fail, 100% the author is Ken Courtright.
Our second company, Income Store, put us on the map as to what looks. I’m proud to say that it looks like we hit the Inc. 5000 list for the third time. We’re now a three-time Inc. 5000 honoree, Income Store, which you can find that IncomeStore.com is known for two things. Number one, we help people, companies and private equity firms buy or build revenue-generating websites. We became well-known when Forbes and other publications like Website Magazine and BizBuySell showed the world that we are sure of our management of these web properties. We are able to put a written guarantee of the performance of any asset we build or buy and we will put that guarantee into perpetuity.
Number two, Forbes recognizes the event that we hold twice a year as a can’t-miss, must-attend event in 2016 so we’re proud of that. The third thing, and we will soon be known for this after several years, I am happy and proud to announce that our newest and largest product offering came out. We are calling these products on Facebook platforms. They come with a Facebook page and an authority website. We went all in. We got three of the sharpest minds in the world when it comes to Facebook traffic, the website traffic and website on-page monetization. We grabbed these people from other companies, paid them more, and vested them into the company. We started a completely new division and after six months of testing and funding our stuff, the numbers are in and they are explosive. We are going to take what took us seven years to get to 200 million eyeballs and we’re going to add 800 million eyeballs across our network with these products. It is amazing.
These are our largest product at a $200,000 cost to fund the build-out, but they also come with our largest percentage of guaranteed return. If you’d like to see a short video of how they work and perform, email me at Ken@IncomeStore.com. Principle number two of the four principles of growth is the brain trust that allowed the growth to stop, typically, can’t resurrect the growth. This is called Einstein’s Theory or Einstein’s Law of Growth. Meaning if the collective management’s knowledge base could not stop the growth, as growth started to slow down, assuming all companies have good growth in the beginning, if it stops and revenue stays flat.
The odds statistically of that same management group resurrecting growth to grow again statistically is close to zero. It’s scary but true. You will probably need outside input. This goes to the Einstein Law that says the brain that got you into the jam, can’t usually get you out of the jam. What does this mean? This means that this is one of the reasons why good consultants make a significant income. Great consultants come into a company because it is assumed or presupposed that they will bring collective inside industry knowledge and outside industry knowledge. Meaning there’s a consultant’s cliche. Most clients’ challenges have already been solved in a different industry. If they networked more, they would know that. This is like an inside joke with consultants.
On to principle number four, product and service death is inevitable, company death is not. Meaning every single product sold now has a shelf life. There is no product now in its entirety, in its sameness that was the same 50, 100, 200 years ago, it can’t be. Ten years from now, it won’t be. However, the company doesn’t have to die with the product. There are only 61 of the Fortune 500 from 1955 that still exists. Meaning 439 of the Fortune 500 companies are gone, yet the product lines of those every one of those 439 companies still remain. Why don’t the companies remain? If the product lines are still in existence, why aren’t the companies? They didn’t change. Here’s the key. If you move a product or service now, which every single person reading this moves a product or service now. Everybody does.
It’s the only thing you can move, a product or service, you must accept that the product itself or how the product is delivered to the market is going to die. The product you sell or how you get it to market, the mechanism is going to die. ABC, CBS and NBC in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, even early ‘90s, dominated 90% of television advertising revenues. Did you know that two of those three companies technically are no longer at the helm? Meaning the logos and brands are still there, but two of those entities, the companies didn’t conform fast enough. Revenue started dropping sharply because the knowledge-base running those companies were unwilling to change. NBC had to be bought out by Comcast to stay relevant. Comcast didn’t even exist in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Comcast didn’t even exist and they had to buy NBC.
Disney had to buy ABC. Why? Because the management of those two massive entities was unwilling to change. Gigantic tech-based companies had to buy them to lift the cultural mindset gap. Entropy was killing those companies. Are you personally stagnant? Are you staying relevant? Are your mindset and intellectual property staying relevant to the changes in your industry? Are you studying your industry? Are you reading a book a week? Are you reading and absorbing 30 to 50 Google Alerts of the 30 to 50 most important key phrases in your industry? Are you front and center mentally and physically at your industry’s biggest events? I recommend you review these four growth principles every 90 days until they’re part of your subconscious and your soul. I hope this helps. See you.
Important Links:
- S-Curves – episode 1
- IncomeStore.com
- Book – Against the Grain
- Ken@IncomeStore.com
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