Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Juvenile Detention to 5 Exits & 600+ SaaS Clients | Dan Martell - SaaS Academy Founder & Buy Back Your Time Author

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Lessons - Juvenile Detention to 5 Exits & 600+ SaaS Clients | Dan Martell - SaaS Academy Founder & Buy Back Your Time Author · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, explore why scaling a startup often breaks, not from lack of customers,
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  but from flawed models and weak retention. Discover how pricing strategy, expansion revenue,
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  and customer fit drive, sustainable growth understand the personal traits that separate
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  high performing founders from those who stall and uncover how choosing the right coach
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  accelerates execution and long-term success.
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  And I'm curious, where does the machine break? Where do you find entrepreneurs
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  making the biggest mistakes when they get to that point and can't scale past that?
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  Typically, it's the reverse of what they think. So I call it chocolate broccoli. People come to me
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  because they think they need more customers and what they really need is a better model.
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  So what does a better model look like? There's only three levers in staff. It's top of funnel
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  retention and monetization, right? So most of the time people have a retention problem,
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  but they don't want to admit it or they think it's good enough. So we need to keep more customers
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  than we're losing because that scale, that percent loss per month gets to the point where you'll
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  hit what's called the growth ceiling. So retention's number one, number two is monetization.
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  Though expansion revenue through upsells, cross sells add-ons, especially your pricing.
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  Most staff founders don't understand pricing economics and psychology, and that is probably
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  the lowest-hanging fruit. Normally clients build too much stuff and they don't have a clear
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  understanding of value drivers and how people should transition in between different plans and how
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  structure their plans to create that sales motion to pull people through that expansion, right?
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  So that's the big thing where are they doing it wrong? Yes, do they even know they're not doing
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  it? No. I mean, these are things that if you haven't been doing this for a long time,
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  it's your first time building a software company. You've spent most of your time just trying to
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  figure out how to get this thing built that you didn't spend any time on pricing optimization.
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  And then finally, once we have that, Dennis, all that sales velocity, right? Like, how do you
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  take the right customer, which I call a perfect fit customer, ready to buy customer?
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  So how do you decide who to focus on, who to sell to? How do you get the message in the market
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  appropriately, what channels do you use? And then once you get their interest, what's the conversion
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  process to get them from opportunity to customer and get that done in the shortest amount of time,
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  so you don't have these long-scale cycles. That's at a high level, and this is all covered in my
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  eighths growth engine framework. But most people start at the top, attract, and then they go to
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  convert expand scale. I almost start at the bottom because I need to make sure the model,
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  the unit and economics of your process actually makes sense to scale, because if it doesn't,
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  then we can waste a lot of time and money on marketing that's just not going to produce the long-term
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  revenue retention that you need. And no, I appreciate it. I think that if somebody's listening to
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  this, even that awareness of what could be broken can drive them to look to the right resources,
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  and you know, yourself, or even, you know, a ton of others. But to understand all those points
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  that you just mentioned that could potentially break when trying to scale, I think it's very
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  important. And I think that you sort of, I'm covered that recipe, you know, quote-unquote recipe
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  for success. When it comes to scaling startups, a lot of the things that you're mentioning,
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  I hear emulated from a lot of other very successful sales leaders were talking like Mark
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  Robair from HubSpot. He emulated, especially the turn piece like mitigating the loss,
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  you know, plugging that leaky bucket. That's another one that I hear a lot, the people don't
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  focus on, I've seen it a lot. And I don't want to, you know, reiterate everything you just mentioned,
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  but I think that as people try and scale their company, it's really smart to understand,
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  like you said, these things that are going to be huge growth inhibitors. Now, I'm curious about,
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  these are very tactical growth inhibitors. In terms of perhaps personality traits, or
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  I don't want to say that there's a perfect kind of startup founder, but what are the personal traits
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  or growth traits that somebody should focus on internally that can allow them to be successful,
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  or is there just that kind of person that has the grit, determination, drive, perseverance,
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  you know, self-awareness, empathy, whatever that is the most important trait to be successful
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  as an entrepreneur, because you work with so many. Yeah, no, I think these traits can be developed
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  and taught and learned. I think there's a natural, like, you know, there, you need to be a certain type
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  of person to build a Mark Zuckerberg or equivalent, right? So there are, there are these like outliers
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  in the data set, but there's this like very large medium, the mean of people. And when I look at that,
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  most of my clients are bootstrapped, you know, incredibly successful. They all have a lot of
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  characteristics. One is they're very growth-minded, meaning that they're willing to invest in
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  themselves, hence why they're coaching with me. They're willing to invest in themselves because
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  they have confidence that with that knowledge, they can do better than without it. Most people
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  don't trust themselves. When you ask somebody like, why do you not hire a coach? They'll make up a
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  bunch of reasons, but the truth is, is they don't trust themselves to get knowledge, to implement,
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  to get a return. That's the only reason why you wouldn't hire somebody's been there before,
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  to help you, because if I was going to climb Everest, you'd be an idiot to not want to go learn
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  from people that have been to the summit of Everest, or Everest, before you had hemped it. Like,
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  that would just be honestly suicidal to anybody trying to do it. Yeah, people do that every day in
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  their business, and I think the reason why is they just don't have a lot of confidence in their
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  abilities to translate that information into execution. So that's one thing. So the people that
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  are going to succeed have a level of confidence about their ability to execute that most people don't.
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  They're very much intuned with feedback. What does this look like? It means that they're willing to
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  pick up the phone and call customers and get feedback. They're willing to call, talk to their
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  team and ask them their team questions like, what do you need more for me as a leader? They're
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  willing to instrument the metrics to know what's really going on in the business. A lot of founders
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  that don't have the product or financial metrics around their business, I believe it's because they
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  just don't want to know. They'd rather not know, right? They put their head in the stand,
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  then actually pull that together because literally there's so many tools out there that'll give
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  it to you for free, that for you not to know what your turn or your expansion revenue or your
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  activations are or your trial conversion or whatever they are, it's really just ignorance around
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  getting that information and being scared to know. I mean, they don't come down to fear. I mean,
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  it's got that's the reality. But the traits is those things. They're curious. Curious is a big
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  one. They're driven. They have a vision. This is a big one. They have a vision for their future
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  that's way bigger than where they're at today. And they're able to expand that as they expand.
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  You know, I think what happened sometimes, people peed her out because they actually hit, you
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  know, I would just love to make 100 grand a year. And then they hit it and then they just stay
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  there forever. Which is fine. Just not what I do. What I do is push people way beyond what they
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  think is possible by showing them examples of that and reinforcing within them that confidence
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  encourage and clarity of execution to make sure that that comes the reality.
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  And when they're looking for someone like you, there's a lot of coaches out there. How do they
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  find somebody who's right for them? How do they audit that coach? Yeah, and I had a lengthy
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  discussion. One of my clients, Liam, he's the founder of Time Doctor. And he actually interviewed
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  me. So if people want to search that interview, like, he's coming on. Yeah. Yeah. But he's the one
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  that asked me that question. I mean, here's how I hired my coach. I want somebody who's been there
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  before. Okay. So Mercy, for example, one of my coaches back in the day, she built a company
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  brought a public 5,000 employees, right? So in there before had had results with other people.
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  I think a lot of people are idiots of bonds in the sense that they know they can do it themselves,
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  but they're not really good at getting other people the same results. I want to I want to know
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  that they've been able to get other people similar results. I would reference check the crap out
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  of who they are. I think you should back channel. So if you see somebody on a Facebook ad, you should
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  see if you have mutual friends reach out to them. Is this person a good person? What have you
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  heard? How long have you known them for? A lot of fly by night coaches in the industry. It's
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  unfortunate part that I, you know, I'm okay with because I understand that, you know, performance
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  over time is the best, the best example of success. It's just keep being consistent. Do do what
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  you do over long periods of time and eventually you'll separate yourself from everybody else. But
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  yeah, there's a lot of coaches out there that, you know, come off and they're very flashy and
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  they're, you know, they're they're selling with material things. But when it comes down to it,
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  their students results should be speaking for themselves. And that's that's a big thing that I
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  pride myself on is is client wins on a monthly basis and progress over everything
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  than really good marketing per se. So I don't know. I think it's a personal decision. If you don't
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  resonate with the person, if you're listening to me and you don't like the way I talk, you really
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  shouldn't work with me because that's not going to get better. That's probably going to get worse.
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  And I think that's important to know is, is you need to find the person that you vibe with and
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  that you feel is going to provide you with honest, direct, clear feedback. And if you don't feel
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  that, don't force it, right? I think it's a very personal decision on who you coach with.
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  Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so
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  you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the
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  links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.