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The 8 Factors That Predict Business Growth · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: There's a point when most businesses stall, and it usually isn't because of a lack of effort. It's because the founder is still in the system. Everything runs through them. Decisions, delivery, momentum, and the moment they take a step back, things slow down or stop. A lot of people don't realize that's the ceiling they're building until they hit it. So with that, I'm excited to be joined by Darryl Urbansky. Darryl works with businesses on predictable growth, And he spent years breaking down what actually separates companies that scale from the ones that stay stuck. In our conversation, we get into why most founders build themselves into the bottleneck, how losing touch with the real problem kills growth and what it actually takes to turn a business into something that runs beyond you. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here is my conversation with Daryl Urbansky. Daryl, thank you so much for being here. speaker-1: Hey, it's an honor and a pleasure to be here, my friend. speaker-0: So Darryl, when you look at a business, the businesses that you've worked with, what is the biggest difference between the ones that grow consistently and the ones that don't? speaker-1: So there's a couple of different factors. mean, business is a multifaceted approach, but ultimately you have to have an offer that people want at the end of the day, right? People line up because they want the new iPhone. So there's a couple of things. One is you have to be in touch with the market, what's happening in the market and what the market wants, the reality of things. And then you have to have an offer. So you have to know what they want, be able to deliver on it. You have to package it in a way people like and want. And then you have to have systems on the backend because systems scale. So business is a team sport and where a lot of people get stuck is the founder only gets so far. I just got a call with this recently because his company in Singapore, they're doing 25 million and the owners are trapped. the founder wants to retire and his son is sort of running things and his son doesn't really have his heart in the business, but he can't leave because the staff don't have their own. Like if he doesn't push things forward, nothing happens. So there's no operating system to the company. It's the founders, it's them. I mean, they made it 25 million and they're making it work, but the problem is that if they're not running in the hamster wheel, it's not going to continue to be spinning. And it's the same issue. I got other clients that are smaller, you know, and it's often the same thing. So you got to be in touch with what the market wants. You have to have an offer packaged that's attractive to the market, because there's going to be a lot of different people. I mean, think of a food court. You don't want to be a restaurant at the end of a dead end road. You want to be where everyone's hanging out. So you have to be where everyone's hanging out. But if you're there, you probably have competitors. It's not a bad thing, but then you need to have a special offer that makes you attractive compared to the other options. And then you need a way to be able to deliver consistently and to get out of doing it yourself. I just had a call new client yesterday, guys in construction and he's like death by boutique. It's just, he's always doing custom this custom that custom the next thing. And he's not pricing things right. And so he loses money on a lot of jobs. And it's because he doesn't have sort of a standard service offering and you can do custom work. you think about when you go to these ice cream places and you get your, your vanilla ice cream, and then you got the tray of toppings. You can have a core standard offer with a bunch of customizations. That's still fine, but you have to have, I mean, imagine if McDonald's offered different food at different locations. I was in a. Africa for nine weeks. spent four weeks in Uganda, five weeks in Kenya. And I was craving just some like, like normal food. I was living, my girlfriend at the time was from there. I was living with her family, her relatives. And I just wanted something like a burger. Like I just want a burger or something. And there was a botanical hotel in Entebbe in Uganda. And I went there and I got the spaghetti and man, it hit the spot. It was just like grandma's spaghetti that I remembered. And two, three days later, I wanted that spaghetti and I go back there and I got a green sauce spaghetti. And I said, what, what's this? I go, it's spaghetti. know, I know, but it's different. they're all, well, so and so is the chef today. And so be based off of who was cooking the menu changed, like the recipe changed. And that's what you get into. And it's a boutique. If your business depends on rock stars, it can be tough. You can make it work, you can make it happen. There's nothing wrong with earning a good living. You when it comes to scaling, it gets tough. You still need good quality talent and good quality people. But as much as possible, you gotta try to have systems and standardization in place. speaker-0: I said this all the time when I had my marketing agency when I was building that up with a business partner of mine. need standardization of offer is the only way to standardization in fulfillment. Right? If you're doing something different every single time, there's no way that you can have a repeatable process, like a proven process. This is the best way that we know how to go about doing this because it's something different every single time. So, but your point about creating that standardized offer, it starts with understanding the market. You need to understand what does the market actually want. need to first start, and this is something that you've said in your content, you need to start by finding a market of buyers first and then building the product that they would want or the offer that they would want second. So in your mind, when somebody is trying to choose a market, where do they usually get that process wrong? Do they usually start with product or what are you seeing? speaker-1: Yeah, so I'm as guilty as this as maybe anybody else, but they spend way too much time cackling like a mad scientist alone in their closet, ⁓ working on something for stupid amounts of time before they've really tested if people even want it. Elon Musk made $300 million. Love him or hate him. He made $300 million selling a car. had no factory to build and no team to make. He made a prototype and then he got refundable thousand dollar deposits and he sold three hundred million dollars worth. And then he built the factory. In my hometown, there was a gym opening up, like a big franchise kind of globo gym type thing. And there was a trailer outside this building and then inside the building it was under construction and it was right beside the mall. You pass it to go to the mall and they had marketing all over the city and they were trying to get people to go to the trailer to sign up for the membership for the grand opening. Grand opening never happened. One day I drove by and everything had just closed down, shut down and disappeared. And I said, what? going on?" And they went, ⁓ we didn't hit our numbers. I had a buddy that worked at the trailer, like trying to sign people up. ⁓ we didn't hit our numbers. So they pulled out and they decided to do a different location. I'm like, really? Because a lot of people, what they would do is they go, that's my spot. And then that's the spot. And then they fight tooth and nail and make it work. This company, they're like, hey, if we don't have enough members by opening day, we refund everybody. We cut our losses and we move on. speaker-0: So those two stories really demonstrate you need to validate the product or the offer or the thing that you're selling before you buckle in and really start building and delivering on it. speaker-1: So, I mean, you want to make sure that you can fulfill, but you can also just be honest with people. Hey, I'm launching this and we're going to give by being my guinea pig, you're going to get X, Y, Z, A, B, you know, you're going to get a better price. You're going to get more service. You're going to get, but this is what I'm doing. Are you interested? Like go collect some money or, you know, I've heard people say, go get 10 people to do it for free. And that does work. It's not a bad way to do it. It works, but it can be a grind. And at the end, you don't necessarily have a proven sales system yet. Like a sales process. If you just do interviews like this, but about a topic, Hey, can I talk to you about XYZ? I mean, here's the difference of the offer too. We talked about the offer. I call this the food court test. Imagine you're walking in a food court, someone gets on a table. And they go, basket and raw beds. Everyone just kind of look at that guy and be like, oh, okay. And keep walking. Somebody else gets on a table and goes, free ice cream. And you go, what? And you go walk over and goes, hey, free ice cream. Yeah, we've got five flavors. You can taste two or no, taste any one you want. It's $3 for a tub, $5 for two tubs. Which flavor do you want to try first? Totally different offer. Totally different style of marketing. One is going to get customers and clients. The other one is just brand advertising, which you want to build a brand, but it's more like a reputation. You've got a relationship with a friend and it's got a name and a personality. That's like the business, but the marketing is about almost think of coupon marketing, like offers, like this is the offer. That's how coupon marketing started. They were trying to figure out what offers are people actually wanting. What deals? Cause it's all about, I want a deal. Everybody wants a deal. Right. So what are the deals that people want and you'll test 12 and now I can track it because I used a coupon and I got the coupon back, you know? Yeah. And so it's one of those ways. But yeah, you see this a lot. Like Netflix versus Blockbuster was a good example. Blockbuster was doing something like six billion with a B, six billion dollars a year. And they could have hired any talent and they could have built any technology. They could have bought Netflix, but the people that often start companies. are really in tune with the problem in the market and they develop a solution for it because they feel it themselves and they can see it and touch it and taste it and they know the people that are experiencing it and they build a solution for it then they build this team of people to help them with it. But then as the company often grows, you get these layers built and all of a sudden the people in the company are so far removed from the market that Netflix drove Blockbuster Bankrupt. And it's because a lost site of the problem that they were solving. Problems are markets, not demographics, not services, not even offers. The problem is the market. And if the problem shifts, so does everything else. speaker-0: And what you're saying rhymes with a lot of what Kelly Roach, who we had on the podcast last week, was saying that you need to spend a majority of your time market facing, right? Talking to your clients, talking to your customers, hearing their feedback and getting to know, you need to know the problem that they're experiencing better than anybody else, better than your competitors. Because to your point, the problem is the market. And again, that also rhymes with what previous guests have said on the show. And you know, you read any book, the right advice is, you when you're starting a business, you start with the problem, right? You identify what is the problem that I'm going to solve, and then you figure out how to solve it, and now you have a service or a product, right? And that's your business. That is the foundation of your business, is that problem that you're solving. speaker-1: In 2020, when everybody was arguing about the science of this and the science of that, I grew up in a house of applied science and geography, like hard sciences. It made me think, what do people, what does the science have to say about business success? So I ended up spending around 50 grand of my own money and having 10 different people help me go through all the academic literature I could get my hands on, all the published studies from different countries, from the U S from Saudi Arabia, from Thailand, Indonesia, all over the world to go what. are the critical success factors that move the needle for small and medium sized businesses. And ultimately we identified eight critical success factors. And then we add the eight, we drilled into the sub components of them. And so the eight are, and I like to say them in this order, self-efficacy, market intelligence, strategic planning, marketing strategy, sales strategy and skills, money management. business operations and business intelligence. Those are the eight categories and everything from HR to IT to my AI team to anything and everything fits into those eight buckets. Self-efficacy is your ability to accomplish things via yourself and others. The rest are relatively self-explanatory, but there are key components to each of them. You know, market intelligence, we just talked about that. So you have to, you have to get things done, right? You have to have not just market. product market fit, have to have product market founder fit. Cause there's instances where people start a business and the thing that they're selling or that they're doing, it's like the book report. You just can't get done. Cause you have no interest in the book at school. And then there's also people that like the product, but they don't like the types of customers are getting like, they just don't like those people. They don't get along or it doesn't suit them. So you need to have product market founder fit. And then you have to have a strategic plan for how to deliver something of value. that competes with the other options in the marketplace or else they're not going to buy from you. Could you imagine being the first person to sell a fax machine? Like, hey man, I promise this is going to get big. It's going to be popular. Just buy one now. I'll have one. You'll have one. It'll be great. It's a tough sell, right? It's like, yeah, you couldn't, you couldn't get, you wouldn't be able to sell fax machines today very well. then your strategic plan to deliver something unique consistently. And at scale, although don't worry about the scale, maybe in the beginning, just get going. You can figure that out after if you have to. And then the marketing strategy, because you have to go out and see how many people are raising hands. You have to go talk to people. You have to go to the market. If a tree falls in the woods and no one's there to hear it, doesn't make a sound. The business graveyard is littered with world-class products and services that nobody knew about or were ahead of their time. They were solving a problem that didn't exist yet, or it was not. what people, it wasn't the immediate thing. So then after that, now you have to have a sales strategy and skills. McDonald's sells through impulse purchase prices and their marketing. Their selling is just order taking. There's no sales process. Really. You show up, it's all in the marketing. You go and it's, you know, the location and they got the playground inside and you got the kids and they do birthday parties and it's easy. You just write a check and it's done and everybody's happy. So, know, that's, that's, that's their sales strategy, but it's different if you're selling bridges, it's different if you're selling, ⁓ private jets, it's different if you're selling jewelry, it's different if you're selling an info product. So the sales strategy and skills depends on what you're selling and the price point. And then after that, you have to have money management. You got to manage your money. You got to, ⁓ cash is gas to a business. There's no gas in the tank. You, you, you're stuck. You can't pay staff. You can't pay for tools. Can't do a whole lot. And then after that, you have to have your operations and then the business intelligence. And they're all equally important, but the business intelligence are the feedback loops, your dashboards, your listening skills, the intelligence layer of everything. speaker-0: So a lot of this to somebody who maybe hasn't started their business or is in the early stages, a lot of this can sound kind of overwhelming. You're like, okay, I need all eight of these categories, these. speaker-1: Eight critical success factors. If you've ever seen someone at the circus, they spin plates on sticks and they'll get 12 plates spinning on a stick. That's a business. You get this one going and then you gotta get the next one going and the next one. ⁓ but the first one and the second, ⁓ the fourth one, I got to fix it. You're constantly chasing bottlenecks and fires. You're chasing them. But the problem is, that I worked with Michael Gerber for over a year and a half. He's the guy that wrote the book that made the term work on not in your business famous. And that's how you're supposed to be as a business owner. In the beginning, you're doing everything, but ultimately you have to start creating standardized processes that you can teach other people how to, how to do, how to use. It's an ebb flow process. Like you document it, you train one of the best methods that the boy scouts have is edge, EDGE, explain, demonstrate, guide them to do it under your supervision and then empower them to do it on their own and come back to you with questions. Explain, demonstrate it being done. guide them to do it under your supervision and then empower them to come back. And that's where a lot of people get stuck too is, ⁓ I need someone to help with sales. They hire someone, they go, this is what we're selling. Give them a bunch of brochures, give phone numbers, go out and sell. Okay, but have you sold it? No, I haven't sold anything. speaker-0: In order to create an effective standard operating procedure, you need to have gone through it and defined and built a proven process that works. So you, as the founder in the beginning, you're the one that has to do all of that for everything. So you need to establish this is the proven process. This is how I've been able to get it done. This is now what I'm going to delegate to you. And you need to document that. You need to explain, demonstrate. guide and then empower them through that process. And then something that I've liked to do with all of my team members, all the people that I bring onto my team is clearly from day one, tell them that you are now the owner of this process, of this function in the business. You are now responsible for making this better. Right? So I stole this directly from Amazon, right? They have this core value of it's always day one. We're never going to do something the same way. twice. Like the excuse is never going to be, that's how we've always done it for a reason why something was done. Where we're always going to look for ways that we can improve a process or approve a thing every single time that we go through it. So I always from day one set that expectation that here is the best way that we know how to go about doing what you're responsible for every function. But you are now responsible. One of your KPIs is going to be making improvements to that process. Like I want you every single time to go through this to be thinking about and looking for ways that we can make this better. and you are the owner, you are responsible for that now. Because if it's up to me, it's never gonna get done. I don't have the time, the bandwidth to do that, but you are the one touching feeling going through this process every single day. You are way closer to it than I am. You're gonna be way more qualified to be able to make improvements to this process, to this function in the business. So I'm going to empower you to be responsible for improving upon it. speaker-1: Yeah, that's smart. Um, cause it's a team sport and that's really it. You know, um, there's only so many hours in a day. Now where people get tripped up is in the beginning. How do you hire people? Cause it means you're going to have to take a pay cut because the money's got to come from somewhere. And a lot of times the business, the business is the business owner's income. There's no separation. And that's part of why the money management is in there as well, because as you're getting leads in sales, you need to set up proper and it's some, it's, it's so widespread. Man, for the education system that we built up and all the years of coach training and all the money you spend, people come out of school really ill-equipped for life in a lot of different ways. It's almost like it's indoctrination, not education. But anyways, the cash, you have to manage your cash. have to manage your cash. Most businesses don't even know what a runway is. Like you need to have a runway. Things like COVID happen. What happens if you have no more income for eight months? Can you operate the business? Do you have a plan for that? Because things are going to change. The top 50 of the Fortune 500, top 500 of the Fortune 500 tends to change frequently because they grow and they disappear. They get merged, they split up. I mean, it's almost like what happens with countries. They grow, they expand. Change is the constant. so, ⁓ business is a multidisciplinary sport. And if it sounds overwhelming, it's cause it kind of is. A lot of people, when they start a business, maybe they're cleaning, like just they're cleaning an office building and they go, I do all the cleaning and The owner gets all the money. I'm going to start my own business. And then they realize, ⁓ it's more than just cleaning the office. It's actually finding the clients and knowing how to price and to do the budgeting and to make the deal with them and the legal contracts and the training for consistency and the communication with the client and the supply and inventory and the research and development and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and it's not just go there, do the work clock out and go. You get paid in proportion to the size of the problem you solve. If your problem is where, how do I, if the problem is I need to make sure nobody leaves this store with things they haven't paid for. I'm going to sit at this chair and watch everybody and collect the money. That's one level problem. If the problem is I have 50 locations and I have to coordinate inventory to them all and make sure that only the things people tend to buy are in those locations in sufficient volume to maintain, feed demand. and I have to source them and add a profit and I have to pay attention to the gas price, all this doesn't coordinate at all. That's a bigger problem. Yeah. And so it's a bigger paycheck. speaker-0: You get paid to the proportion of the size of the problem that you solve. love that. I haven't heard that before. Yeah. And, you know, everything that we're talking about is the ugly truth of being an entrepreneur, of starting your own business, running your own business, right? Everybody talks about how when you're an entrepreneur, you have all this freedom, right? But nobody talks about the flip side of that, where as an entrepreneur, nobody's telling you what you need to do, right? Nobody's telling you what you need to work on. But when you have frameworks like these eight eight critical tasks, right? There's, it's up to you to figure out what it is that you need to work on and build this understanding. And then you also, throughout your entire journey, right, you need to have a mechanism where you can look at and evaluate and decide what are the most important things that I need to work on. And I would imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, when you're evaluating a business, whether it's your clients or your own business, you're taking a look at, okay, where in these eight buckets, where is the constraint? Right? Because the theory of constraints or the law of constraints, whatever it's called as a business or a system will grow to the level of its constraint and no further. So you need to look at these eight buckets and identify where's the constraint to our growth. Right? And then we need to relentlessly focus on that one constraint. And then once we have that unlocked and solved, then we move to the next constraint. is that how you use it tactically? speaker-1: So, yeah, close. You're very right. It's all about the bottlenecks. All about the bottlenecks. And you try to kill one at a time. Because you can't chase two rabbits at once. You can't catch two chickens at once. It's hard to catch one chicken. So, one focus at a time. And then you stack the twins and you get there. But it's not necessarily a scorecard against all eights. If I was a pitcher in baseball, I maybe have eights. And including the subcategories, I've got 47 types of pitches I can throw, but I have to see who's at the plate to know which options are viable for them. So it starts off with a gap analysis and the gap analysis is not against the eight factors. It's mapping out the customer journey from awareness all the way through to purchase delivery for, you know, a customer check-in. You know, satisfaction survey, ask for a referral from beginning to end. If you've got multiple backend offers, it includes that whole thing too. We map the whole thing out from start to finish. And what's used, what are the tools, who's involved, what do they do? How long does this take? How long does that take? And we map that out in painful detail. And then through that process, we tend to figure out what the sticking points are. So I mentioned a guy that's always doing boutique stuff and he's, you know, death by misquoting. So one of the things that we did is we exported all of his QuickBooks data, all of his Trello data. I uploaded it to six different. LLMs, and we asked them all the same sort of questions, and we had them all analyze it, and we identified two job types that one, he closes 40 % of those when he gets them through the door, and he makes the most money when he closes them. So guess what we're going to do? speaker-0: on us too. speaker-1: Say no to everything else, but those two things. Yeah all in on those so it wasn't that I went against the eight factors It was mapping out what's the biggest sticking point? He's like well, man I just did this cut did this job and it was 60 grand and I thought it was gonna be juicy but I lost money on that and I'm like you do a 60 grand two-month project that you pay 60k and you lost money on it. What is going on here? And well, it's because it's in this wheelhouse, which is not really your specialization. So it's, it's about the bottlenecks, like you said. speaker-0: To kind of, guess, put a ribbon on that point of no, like the flip side of freedom is that it's all on you to make the decision of what it is that you need to focus on and the right move to make and the right area to put your focus and just, it's up to you to decide what you need to do. So that process of identifying, okay, what is the most critical constraint or what is the bottleneck that I need to solve or what is the next most important thing for me to do is kind of an element of goal setting, if you will, or prioritization. And there's all kinds of prioritization frameworks, me personally. Just the first book that I read was Measure What Matters by John Doerr. So I've stuck with the OKR framework, but I know there's the EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, the ROCKS, Pebbles and Sand, I think is their thing. Is there one that you prefer? there one that you use? And then how do you guide your clients through kind of installing that? What is the frequency? Is it something that you have them do quarterly, yearly? Like kind of what is the framework that you use and how do you help people to decide this is what we need to focus on, this is what we need to do next? speaker-1: Yeah, they're, all pretty similar. For me, I like to take, you know, a three to five year plan, break it into an annual plan, break it into quarterly and then break those into, you know, three for getting three for serving customers, clients. then for those, we identify three key metrics. So the quarterly goals, you know, whether it's OKR or quarterly goal for me. And it depends because when I'm working with clients, know, client has to be happy. So sometimes it's a definitive, this is what I want. I want 10 goji berries. Okay. You want 10 goji berries. But I personally like to prefer to define them as a process. I like to define the quarterly goals as a process. And then I, I make three key metrics, which describe the performance of that process. If that makes sense. So for getting customers, just as a simple thing, maybe I'm, ⁓ consistently using the podcast to close new deals every week, every month. And then I will go, okay, so what are the three key metrics? that would measure whether I'm running that process at its peak potential. Maybe I need to be sending 10 invites a day to someone to be on the show. Maybe I gotta make sure that I'm setting up. Out of those 10, I'm getting, you know, I'm, consistently and we can't control the outcome. So consistently asking my gap identifying questions during the interview. So after the interview, I can ask if they want to do a followup discovery call to talk about that gap. And then with the third one, and I would break those. so every quarter, and I don't know if that's a good example, and I just pulled some out of my, but I'd have three quarterly goals for getting and three of quarterly goals for serving customers. And then so you can have a maximum of six, depends how big the team is, maybe just two, maybe three. I got one client, we've got three and a half because one's not necessarily a quarter long thing that they need. ⁓ but they've got a really tight, it's a very tight, very profitable little operation. all they need. But then we break them into the three key metrics because the three key metrics you can. Cause now you can better identify if you're performing, if you're not performing, it's easier to identify why not. If the goal is I want 30 clients and you don't have them, you kind of just sit in there with your balls in your hand going, what do I do? I don't know. But this way, if you identify the process that if you perform at that process at a peak level, it would be absurd to not achieve the goal. speaker-0: I love it. So yeah, you go a level deeper when defining these quarterly objectives, these goals, whatever, instead of just talking about the outcome that we want to achieve, you break it down more specifically to this is the process that we are going to follow in order to achieve that outcome, right? you're focusing on leading. speaker-1: What would have to be the heartbeat running to make that possible? The outcome I want possible. And then let's break them into three key metrics and who's the owner. So you got one owner per quarterly goal and then either it's an old person or a department owns it. And then they can organize themselves if they want after that. And then you're meeting them. They're weekly one-on-ones. So typically, you know, there's a Like a level 10, that's an E entrepreneur EOS easy term level 10 meeting every week to identify what bottleneck each person is going to be tackling or every owner, every outcome owner is going to be tackling. But then you may do one-on-ones in between that weekly meeting. The team needs to sync up at the beginning. I like to do Monday, Thursday, because then that gives you buffer that if there's any fires, you've got 24 plus hours to put them out so everyone can enjoy their weekend. Cause you got to take care of the staff. And if you're finding out Friday, something's wrong and everybody's got to work late Friday and work Saturday. That starts to build up over time. So if you do it Thursday and also work expands to fill the time you give it. So I like to do, I like to do pre deadlines. I don't know how to call them, but if I'm like, ⁓ it's gotta be done by Friday. go, I gotta have it done by Tuesday. And then I squeeze to get it done by Tuesday. Cause I know I'm have to iterate it and fix it. And that way by Friday, it's good. So the team has to meet on Monday and what are we getting done? What's happening? I may or may not be there. Thursday, I may or may not be in that team meeting, but I do the one-on-ones with people. And the one-on-ones is about their specific outcome. And that's when we rate the score. They score themselves, I score themselves. And what's happening is that we're talking about how they're performing, and then we've talked about why they are or are not performing well. A painful lesson I learned was public praise, private criticism. So I meet one-on-one so I can talk with them about that. So that way, when they go to the Thursday meeting, The meeting runs smoother, it goes better, and they've already made the decisions they need to make. And so that's the declaration of what their sprint is for the next week. And anything that might make them look bad, we've already discussed in private before that call. speaker-0: I'm gonna be meeting one to one with speaker-1: Well, it depends. mean, it's my own team. If people, you know, if they're willing to pay, I'll do it for their team and their company. Or I train others on how it's done and how to do it consistently and how to handle it because there's you know, devil's in the details. speaker-0: I it. And with that, like I'm definitely going to steal this because I'm still working through the process of setting the objectives for myself for the next ⁓ quarter here. I know I'm a little running behind a little bit on that. But anyways, with the process articulation for each objective, it helps you to get way more specific in what needs to get done in order to accomplish that too. Because if you have those three key metrics articulated in that process, you can just zoom in way more specifically on the exact things that need to happen in order for that. to be the reality that you're meeting within that process. So getting specific is important. speaker-1: Yeah. And then you have to define, cause if it's not quantifiable, if it's qualitative, you have to have descriptors for how do we know if it's great or if it's terrible. Yeah. And so that takes it. That's, you know, it's a planning thing that takes a minute, but ultimately, ultimately what happens is you got your scorecard and you and the PR, you know, you and the team member or you and the departments are down and talk about it and identify it. And you got to watch out for things like I, the reason why I do it, you can't delegate some of this stuff. A lot in business you can delegate, but it's hard to delegate the money management and the marketing stuff. ⁓ you can delegate a lot of other stuff, but even with this part of the management, I like to keep my finger on the pulse because I've come and I remember once I had a staff and I thought she was doing terrible. And I checked the three key metric sheet and my manager, she's getting eights. And I go, well, how is she getting eights out of 10? My guess is, well, we changed the, we changed the score. the scoring, like we changed the definitions. She was getting sixes, so the manager changed the definition and what they were measuring so she could get eights. And I'm like, that's not how this is supposed to work. And then we just moved her. We moved her to a different role, a different task, and then she was getting nines. Right. So certain things, there's, this is an old stoic thing. If, if it has to be done, right, go, if not send. It means if, you know, if it doesn't need to be done, perfect, send somebody else. If it's okay, if it's not done, send somebody else. If it needs to be done, you need to go. And that's why I do those with my team. I may not be on the team meetings, but I'm going to do those because I want to make sure that the solutions, the sprints they come up with are important and meaningful. speaker-0: Mm. speaker-1: and make a difference. speaker-0: And those are the standard, right? That is in for, that's the time where you enforce and reinforce the standard. And that's not something that can sacrifice, right? That's, know, as Jeff Bezos would call it, that's when it becomes day two. And that's when you start declining, right? That's when you start shrinking and it's the slow painful path to death. Once those standards start to slip. So delegating being the enforcer, if you will, of the standard for everybody. And that doesn't mean that you need to be a d***head about it, right? It's just being straightforward and holding people accountable to the standard that was set and agreed upon from onboarding, right? Where all this ties together, right? These are expectations that you need to clearly set for everybody during onboarding, whether they're coming into a new role or they're shifting into a new role or you're announcing some new strategic objective, right? You need to clearly articulate the expectations for every individual and their role that they're playing from the jump. So it's not a surprise. It's just like, okay, here's what the expectation is. Here's how you're going to be measured on it. Do you have any questions? And you stay that from the jump so that when you start bringing that stuff up again and having those conversations. It's not a surprise. And, you know, they understand the standard is the standard and this is what I'm going to be measured on. And then, you know, you need to do the tough work of making sure that those metrics and what you're going to measure everybody on, you're setting the right incentive because what gets measured gets improved and yeah, but those incentives are everything. And then once you're measuring people on it, you can't be soft and change it, change it like the manager had. So what is the... the process or the mechanism about how to go about generating leads and bringing in business and building a predictable growth engine online. Like what are some of maybe your favorite frameworks or styles? Obviously it's going to vary based on the business that you have. Maybe for an online business, like a coaching business or a course or a consulting type business, what is maybe that the structure of the online business generating mechanism that you would like to build? speaker-1: Yeah, so I'm going to use some metaphors and analogies here to help people because I think it's an easier thing to understand. Having a business is like a never-ending job hunt. I think most people at some point in time in their life have had to hunt for a job. If you have a business, the hunt never stops. Apple is not going, I think we sold enough iPhones, let's just close up shop. Let's close the factories down. Tesla's like, hey, we've sold enough cars. And this is something that is almost so easy. It is often overlooked, but prospecting, prospecting, prospecting, prospecting, prospecting, prospect. You have to have a prospect before you can have a lead. So you go from unknown universe. I don't know who's out there. to prospect, I think this person might have potential, to a lead, to a marketing qualified lead, to a sales qualified lead, and now you've opened the sale. Now you have to close the sale. There's two parts of every sale. Opening the sale, getting it started, getting the person in, and then closing the sale. And all that opening stuff is like awareness, attention, interest, desire, action. It's your Remarketing, it's your awareness, consideration, conversion. It's your lead magnets. It's your content marketing. It's interviews like this. It's all out there. And it's all about prospecting. The goal of business, Drayton Byrd wrote this. This is my favorite line from his book. The purpose of business is to find prospects, turn prospects into customers and make those customers lifelong friends. speaker-0: Mm-mm. Simple That's it. speaker-1: So same way if you were dating, if you had an endless capacity to have partners, if you were in a culture that was okay with a man having 200 wives like Solomon, and you wanted, you'd have to be swiping nonstop and doing first dates nonstop and second dates nonstop, and it would never, you'd never, I mean, for 200, if you'd never end, it would just be. non-stop. You'd be swiping, you'd be going to dances, you'd be doing all of it. You'd be doing all of it. There's a, I don't know where it first came from, but I heard this thing, you know, someone goes to a guru at a conference, goes, a guru, tell me, tell me like, how do I get a hundred clients? Tell me one way to get it, like I need a hundred clients. And the guru says, I don't know one way to get a hundred clients. I know 100 ways to get one client and I use all of them. And that's where diversity leads to stability and multi-channel marketing and multi-method marketing works well. But you have to have a standard something that works as well. Right. So that, you know, that's a bit tongue in cheek because you're not going to do a hundred different things, but maybe you do eight different things. And then you narrow down on the three that work. And then you're constantly testing for new, because the market can change. had, uh, for my wife, actually, we grew, she had an agency that we grew to. I think she had something like 37 clients at her peak. And she was, I mean, she was breastfeeding our baby. She was working a four hour work week. She had almost as many staff as she had clients. She had a three tier quality control system and we had a cold email outreach system that I set up that just worked like gangbusters. We knew for every leads we put in there, we get maybe one to two, sorry, one to three replies requesting a demo. Half the demos bought and nobody ever canceled. It was the bottleneck was more on the team side, training up staff and managing the people. But then chat GPT came out and overnight that stopped working. Right? And so things became different. And then if you only got one, one's the worst number in business. One key lead gen process, one key employee, one key... One is terrible. Cause it's like, it's like rental properties. If you only have a, if you have a single family home, it's a hundred percent occupied or a hundred percent vacant. But if you have a, if you have a tri- triplex, you might be able to soften the blows. speaker-0: That makes sense. think there might be some nuance to that idea too, where something that Kelly Roach has shared and something that Alex Hermosy talks about and the, I think it was Ready Fire Aim book, just talks about when you're first starting, maybe the one thing, just having one focus, like one channel, one product, one niche to your first million, but then beyond that 100%, you need to stabilize and create some more. speaker-1: You still focus on the one, but you have different things that gets them through the door. speaker-0: I hadn't heard that idea too, that one is the most dangerous number in business, like one key thing for sure, because that's extremely risky. And you want to try and spread out that risk and limit that risk as much as you can. Cool. And another thing that I could add to this too is something also that Kelly Roach talked about is that whatever it is that you decide that you're going to do, whether it's outbound or Instagram ads or YouTube funnel or podcast funnel or whatever it is that you choose, you can make anything work. But you just have to stick with it long enough to actually get good at it. Right? Like you're gonna suck at whatever it is that you do to begin with. But you just have to stick with it. You could pick any one thing, as long as you know, like newspaper ads, probably not gonna work right now. Just pick something and just use your best judgment. Pick one thing and then just go all in on that and just stick with it long enough until you can make it work. Because it's going to, ⁓ you just have to get good at it. But I guess, how do you respond to that? speaker-1: Well, they say God will sell you anything at the price of labor. You can have anything you want as long as you're willing to sacrifice everything else for it. But also, I don't necessarily think it has to be sacrifice. I mean, you talked about freedom before. There was a Mossad agent that owned the publishing company of all the educational textbooks that we use in the West. And in some ways, I feel betrayed because you talk about freedom. My eldest daughter's name is Malaya, which is Filipino for freedom. And I feel like if somebody had told me when I was in my 20s or even anytime that freedom was actually owning some land, owning a house, having being semi self-sufficient. You don't need to go full off grid, but just you're good. You got a rainwater barrel. You got a well. I blew my mind in the Philippines here. It's really common for people, even in subdivisions, to have a couple of chickens. because you don't need to do anything. They just eat ants and spiders and they scratch and find worms. They feed themselves. So you just have them in the yard. There's no snow here. you one chicken gives like five, six eggs a week. So you got two chickens. You got like free free eggs. Like they just come out of their ass. Like you just they just hang out in your yard and you go, ⁓ this this thing just gave me some free food. That's so crazy. You know, and you can kill it. It's made out of chicken. You can kill it. And sell it. It's it's crazy. And they, and more chickens come out of the chickens too. If you get really complicated with this, it's just, it's like a crazy perpetual motion machine almost. And so, you know, a lot of people are trapped in this hamster wheel. I did a mastermind lunch in Singapore. I hope this is a cool cohesive thought. had 16 business kind of thought leaders at a mastermind lunch in Singapore. And I was, I'm working on this. prefabricated off-grid home project. And one of the guys there says, well, you know, Darryl, Singapore has the highest percentage of home ownership in all of Southeast Asia. And I said, ⁓ do you mean condos? He goes, yeah. I go, ⁓ how long can you miss your condo payments before they take your condo away? Is it part of your contract that you have to have insurance of a certain level or they'll take your contract, your take condo away? You know, like you own it sort of, you own the ability to pay them for life. That's what you own. That's not land. That's not land. You can't put seeds in the ground. Now I've got two papaya trees in my yard. I don't even think about, but once a month or so we've got a housekeeping lady that comes here and she's like, sir, you got papaya? I'm like, oh geez, that's free. It's free from the sky. So freedom comes if you like owned a house you lived in with no debt. Usury is not a value that built the West. The West was built on Christian and Catholic values. And usury is lending money at interest. So credit cards, third, like mortgage until dead loans. Politicians printing money. None of that is part of the values that founded our civilization. And so the real freedom is you would have some, mean, that's what sold, we got everybody to come to Canada and to the States was go get some land, go make a piece of land, make this land your little castle. And then find a way to trade with other people to get the things that you can't be self-sufficient with or, know, it's easier as a community. You're good at tomatoes. I'm good at potatoes. We trade, know, we still use money, of course, but we trade. So we talk about freedom. That's how a lot of people get into trouble. Cause if you think about first principles, you're going to start a business. You think about gym, two gyms are opening up. Now we talked about the example before and they pulled out, but there's also the example of if and when you know that the gym is successful. Do you continue to rent the building or do you buy the building? And then what happens? Now you've got a totally different competitive advantage. And you're talking about building moats. So you have staying power in the industry. There's a great example Dan Kennedy talks about. It's like the proactive skin cream and the moat is not the glop. You can take it to a lab, analyze it, have a knockoff in an afternoon. The moat is the economics of the business. They lose money for the first eight to 12 months of the customer, but their customers stick with them for something like 10 years. And no one has pockets that deep to compete with them in that way, or form. And so they've got a moat and that's. don't know if that was a cohesive thought process, but my point is he's talked about freedom in a lot of ways. Our education has not prepared us the way it was more indoctrination than education. And I'm hoping with AI now. Although you still have to be careful because we've got issues with woke fine-tuning where it gives like the founding fathers are all... Is black. Yeah, like what's what's going on here? Well, some of that's not intentional, you know, it's just it's a complicated thing. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: But so we talk about freedom, that's really, you know, in the beginning, roof and ramen. Do I have a roof over my head? Do I have food in my belly? And then after that, it's a game. And how many people can I help? How many people can I serve? I think people are kind of stick a profiteering for profit sake. So if you have something that can add value, that's more and more. speaker-0: That's the game, is just adding value and just providing value to others. That's how you... and then you extract some of that value for yourself, but you need to provide value to others in order to receive value in return. ⁓ speaker-1: Yeah. See, but you say that, but this year, last year, they changed the food pyramid. They literally flipped it 180. They inverted it, which means that for 50, 60 years, it's been institutionalized to lead people to sickness, illness, and death. Cause there's a lot of money in sick people. So that's part of where we're at. And the new generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders have to decide. Like what's gonna fly, what's not gonna fly. And with transparency of social media and these tools that we have, we have to innovate this kind of stuff. speaker-0: Yeah, the tech and tools are definitely empowering the individual more than they ever have before. But you know, as we talked about, there's definitely a lot of influence through this system. There's a reason that this system would, and I'm talking about the educational system, you know, the pharmaceutical system, all of these systems were designed intentionally to reward and extract as much fat, like profit and money out of the general population. but yeah, there's a good line that you can't rely on anybody else to give you your freedom. Right. It's up to you in order to learn the things that you need to learn and do the things that you need to do in order to build it for yourself. Right. Nobody's going to do it for you. And if you kind of stick to the status quo and do the things that you're kind of told or taught, just recognize that that was influenced and designed intentionally in order to create like really good workers and productive workers for. You can say like the ruling class or the elites or whatever, but that's exactly. speaker-1: Steel barons in the beginning. Rothschild, I don't need thinkers, I need workers. Exactly. He famously said that. that's part of why this coming up is because we need more successful small and medium sized businesses. We're the ones that change the world. We're the ones that, I mean, if you look at since free market capitalism is spread across the planet, poverty's almost been completely eradicated. Infant mortality's decreased. Literacy has gone up. Life expectancy has doubled. I don't know if you knew this. But in the early 1800s, 36 was like old age. I mean, that was a hundred something years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago. Your life expectancy was four. Like today's my birthday. I'm 43 today. I would have been, that would be it. Now I'm hoping to live to be double. Like I'm at the half and I don't even think I've got a goal of 300, but we need that because what happens is you get into situations of mass planners and this happens in companies too. Localized solutions. We need small and medium sized business owners because you make a localized solution for the people in your area. But we get into a mass planning scenario. You have a room of people that are far removed making decisions that impact people that they don't know. And there's no more dysfunctional incentive model than someone spending that's money that's not theirs for things they're not going to use for people that they don't know, don't necessarily care about, have no relationship with personally. That is the most inefficient incentive model. Ever. And it also produced piss poor results for the end, for the people that receive it at the end. speaker-0: And if you add the incentive that you need to spend as much money as you possibly can, or you're not going to get that money again in the future. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, if you spend, you don't spend a budget, you don't get it again. That's right. So you got to spend it. I mean, this is, and so this is where we need a realignment on that. Yeah. And, um, for sure. That's, that's going to be the next 30 years. speaker-0: Yeah, I 100 % agree with you. It's going to be messy. But I think that more and more people are just looking at how obviously broken so many of these different things are in our system. That it just has to change. Like there's just no way that the status quo can continue. There's going to be, you know, a revolution is a really strong word, but it's going to change. It has to change. And it starts like with every evolution, bottom up. It starts with the individuals at the bottom, you know, making this transformation in their own lives, in their own communities, in their own families. And then that bottom up transformation is how every evolution has occurred throughout history. But I'm really excited about that. You know, the optimist in me looks at the things that are happening and see the idea that in the future, there's more people are going to be forced into a situation where they have to create their own value in the world, AKA become an entrepreneur. And I think that, you know, as we had talked about going back to the beginning, A successful business starts by identifying a problem and you can really only identify a problem that you can solve through your own personal experience, right? So I just believe kind of shortening this and I brought it up in like the last five conversations that we've had, but. I'm really excited about that idea because the only way to really build a successful business is for you to really care about the problem that you're solving, about getting good and doing a good job. So I think a lot more people are going to be a lot more engaged in the work that they're doing, which is completely contradictory to what we have now. I think so many people are so checked out and they just coast and they just don't give a ****, they don't care about doing a good job. Nobody cares about their job, like in a lot of ways. And it's really hard. speaker-1: Well, you're born, and so I'm from Canada. And right now, if I bust my a** and do what I'm supposed to do, and I'm a top income earner, I'm going to pay 36 % federal income tax. If I live in Ontario, I pay 16 % provincial tax on my income. And then everything I'm buying, when I go to the store and I get a candy bar, when I take someone to the movies, and when I get gas, when I go to a restaurant, everything has a 15 % sales tax on it. 36 plus 16 plus 15. And for what? For what? And so I'm working to pay bills to work to pay bills to work to pay bills. This really seems like a feudal system of a working class supporting other people that don't care about you and just do what they gotta do to appease you so and distract you, bread and circus. And so we got to get back to real principles, which means everybody has to take control of their lives. Everybody needs to find their own piece of safety security. I don't know what to say or what to do about apartment buildings and condos and people living in those. I understand. I lived in them for years after getting locked in one twice during COVID for things other people did. My wife and I decided we were only going to live in houses after that. And then on this journey, I realized, ⁓ we should really like own land outrides. I mean, we don't even want to have to be farmers that, if you Dave Ramsey says this, goes, you know, when you've, when you step out on your lawn barefoot after you've paid off your mortgage, the grass feels different. It feels different. that's, that's, that's like a real thing. That's a real thing. I mean, we're moving to our farm. End of this, end of this month. I've got, I'm, it's a whole sidebar tangent, but I mean, that's where you get freedom. Because right now too many people are living lives of indentured servitude, high interest rate credit cards, mortgages that are going to take them their entire life to pay off, car payments, student debt. I mean, it's all indentured servitude. speaker-0: And the only way out of that is you taking it into your own hands and going and making it happen. speaker-1: Yes, yes. 100%. Get some freedom. Get some freedom. I didn't finish that. Freedom is owning some land, being semi-self-sufficient, and having something to trade with the outside world that can't be taken away from you. You can lose a job, you can lose a pension, a government pension, you can lose all sorts of stuff like that. But if I've got a small business and I trade and I know how to do it and I've got a craft, I know how to trade with the community around me, and I own my land, and I got some chickens and some food and solar and a well, you can't f*** with me. Unless you want to get kinetic. It's really hard to do anything else. speaker-0: Yeah for sure. And that's why, you know, we got the second amendment, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Exactly. Going back to, you know, starting with a problem when you start your business. I had mentioned the fact that I had a marketing agency for four and a half years that I was building with a business partner of mine. And then I exited that last year and started this new business. And whenever you're starting a new business, right, you kind of have like this skill set, this ability. And for me, that was building and developing these AI. speaker-1: First, that's right. speaker-0: custom AI tools and AI systems. And I explored for six, seven months about what is the problem that I can really meaningfully solve and provide a lot of value. But anyways, the problem that I landed on is in my own personal experience and then in some clients that I had worked with, I found that I've always been a voracious reader of books, buyer of coaching programs, investor into courses. And I never had any problem actually consuming them, like reading the books, no problem, highlight, bend page corners, watch all the course videos, show up to all the coaching calls. But then when it comes time at the end of the chapter, the end of the module, after you hop off the coaching call to actually go and do the work, I would stall out, right? Like I would have no problem consuming the information, understanding what it is that I need to do, but then actually going and doing it. So I called out the client execution gap and I find that it's present in every info product. So that's every book, course, coaching program. Like you need your clients to do the work in order for them to achieve the result that you promise. So you've built successful coaching programs. Sounds like you're still doing this today. So how have you gone about closing that client execution gap and getting your clients to do the work that you tell them to do in order to achieve the result that you promise? speaker-1: Yeah, that's a great question. There's two answers. One is because of AI and the agent systems and that the gap between coaching and implementing for someone is narrowing because in the time it takes to explain it, you can just demo it with agents. But the sidebar that is I actually built a 52 week business mentorship and coaching program done via daily habit tracking and weekly challenges. So. I already had a group coaching program, but I had a issue where one guy was in Japan. Another guy was in Mexico. Another guy was in UK. I'm in the Philippines. I had a guy in Australia. I had a guy in Canada and another one was on the West coast of States. And it was like, somebody's got to be up at 3 a.m. for the calls. This is terrible. And also we were doing, I got into habit doing habits and sprints, tracking people's habits. Cause some things you do daily, some things you do weekly, some things you do monthly, quarterly, annually. And so we would have Google Sheets, but every time we added somebody new, it would break the formulas and we have to fix them. was a pain in the ass. So part of why I did all that research was to make sure that if I was going to go into the, you know, before you had vibe coding tools, if I was going to go through the development process, that I want to make sure that what we were doing was really robust. And so that's part of where we went and found those a critical success factors and then broke them into the sub factors. And then we made it an app. It's a, we call it habit hero. ⁓ and it's, just, starts simple and it's just, it scales until things chunk every week. They change and evolve. And it's just instead of, cause I learned this when I was hitchhiking, I hitchhiked across Canada six times. And you know, if I give you directions for someplace now, you may need to recite it a couple of times. But when I was hitchhiking, I get dropped off in a new city. I've never been before and I got to get where I'm going. Cause that's where my bed is for the night. And they give me directions. I don't need to write it down. I don't need to rehearse it seven times. It is like a survival thing. So my brain just sucks it in there right away. And I just remembered it. It's like just in time inventory, just in time learning. And so that's part of where the habit app is just like, just wake up and just look at your checklist for the day and then do the things you need to do to check those things off. It's that simple. And if you can't check it off, that's a bottleneck. Hey, what do we do with those? So that's how I address that. And now with AI agents and that, we're building agents and teams and workflow processes. So between the habits and the agents, I'm really going to have things covered. speaker-0: Love it, amazing. Yeah, have it hero. I'll find the link to that and put it in the description below. I'm definitely gonna check that out and sign up for it. That's amazing, cool. Final question for you here, Darryl. This is a question that I ask every guest, but if you had a giant billboard that every person in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-1: What could you do to make your immortal soul proud? speaker-0: Why that? speaker-1: I think about that a lot. mean, I go through a lot of stoic material. And so you reflect on the reality that you're mortal and may die. And then one day I had the idea, was thinking, well, you know, some philosophies believe in reincarnation, which means that basically you have an immortal existence. And some people think you die and go to heaven or hell forever. And that's an immortal existence. And Brian Johnson's trying to live forever. He wants, know, some people think technology is going to make us immortal. And all three of them think that you have an immortal's timeline. And so if the prospect of an immortal timeline is on the table, what would be the things that would make my immortal self proud? What would be the trophies that I would want to hang over the fireplace? And I should live my life in a way where my immortal self would be proud. speaker-0: What you do in this life, you'll reflect on in immortality, right? In eternity. speaker-1: Maybe maybe not. Nobody knows nobody knows. I like I like near-death experiences, but ultimately you don't know till you go right so speaker-0: Alright, you can go now until you go. speaker-1: But I think there's a lot worse ways to spend your time. It's certainly better than being punched in the nose. speaker-0: No doubt. No doubt. I love it. And that idea of reflecting on your mortality and studying psoriasis as a parting thing that I would recommend for sure has completely changed my life. got the memento mori tattoo on my wrist. Just meditating on your mortality is super productive. But Daryl, thank you so much for the time today. Thank you for listening. The core takeaway that I took from this conversation is that growth doesn't come from doing more. It comes from removing yourself as the thing that everything depends on. Most founders don't fail because they lack effort or intelligence. They fail because they never build something that can operate without their constant input. And the uncomfortable part is that fixing it isn't about adding more tactics or sheer will. It's about stepping back and forcing clarity into the business and pouring into others. What problem are we actually solving? What is the standard way we solve it? And where does the system break when I'm not involved? That's where the real leverage starts, that recognition, that awareness. Strong operators understand that you don't scale effort, you scale systems. And the moment you ignore that, you cap your own growth, whether you realize it or not. If you want to get connected with Darrell Urbanski, you can find his links in the description of this episode. If you run a coaching program course or mastermind and your clients aren't completing the work you know that they should be doing, download the free program execution system toolkit in the description. It shows you how to install execution infrastructure into your program so clients actually follow through and get results. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.