I’m pleased to reveal that Renegades will be working closely with John Warrilow’s, Value Builder Team and our Mastermind Group Leaders will soon become Licensed Value Builders™.
This is an exciting alignment and one I’m very much looking forward to leveraging to the advantage of our Renegade members, so watch this space as they say!
John Warrillow is the author of two of my favourite business books, Built to Sell and The Automatic Customer. Both books are on the recommended reading list for Renegade members and a must read if you want to maximise the return on your investment in your business.
In one of his articles promoting his Value Builder System™, John explains why it is that small businesses stay small either by choice, or because they start chasing growth in the wrong places.
“When you strip away the layers, it all comes down to darts”, he says.
Let’s examine what he means by this.
Picture a dart board with its bull’s eye and that series of wider and wider circles all around it. The bull’s eye is where the people just like you hang out.
They are the people (or businesses) who really feel the problem our company set out to solve and they’re usually our first customers and most loyal fans.
The further we go outside of that bull’s eye, the less these prospects feel our exact pain.
But why would entrepreneurs go outside their bull’s eye?
“When you strip away the layers, it all comes down to darts”
In the early days, each time I self-funded a start-up, I was scrambling — just trying to bootstrap my way to become a company.
Each time I didn’t have a lot of money to invest in formal marketing, so I relied on word-of-mouth and referrals, which also meant often talking to people outside of my bull’s eye.
These prospects may well have experienced the problem I was trying to solve, but they were slightly different (that’s why they weren’t in the bull’s eye). They liked my product or service but wanted a little tweak to it: a small customisation or a different version.
I didn’t see the harm in making a change and started to adjust the offering to accommodate those customers outside my bull’s eye.
This new (slightly-outside-the-bull’s-eye) customer told her friends about how great we were and how willing we were to listen to our customers. She referred more prospects even further outside our bull’s eye who again, asked for further tweaks…
Making these changes to our original product or service to accommodate customers outside our bull’s eye seemed innocent enough at the time, but eventually, it undermined our growth.
Why?
To grow a business beyond our efforts, we need to hire employees (or build technology) that can do the work. As humans, we are usually lousy at doing something for the first time but can master most things with enough repetition.
Think about teaching a toddler how to tie his shoes.
The first few attempts are usually rough. It’s a new skill and their tiny hands have never had to make bunny ears before. You break it down for the child and show them how to master each step. It can take weeks, but eventually they get it. As adults, we don’t even think about tying our shoes — we’ve mastered the skill by repetition.
The same is true of your employees. They need time to truly master the delivery of your product or service. Every time you make a tweak for a new customer outside your bull’s eye, it’s like changing the instructions on tying your shoe laces.
It’s disorienting for everyone and leads to substandard products and services which your customers become less than enthusiastic about.
Having unhappy customers leads the owner (you) to step in and “fix” the problem… and that, becomes your problem.
Each time you create this customised product or service for your new, outside-the-bull’s-eye customer, you’re making your company even more reliant on you in the process.
A business reliant on you will stall at a handful of employees when you run out of hours in the day.
The secret to avoiding this plateau, and continuing to grow, is to be brutally disciplined in only serving customers in your bull’s eye for much longer than it feels natural. When you want to grow, the temptation is to accept whatever revenue you can, but the kind of growth that comes from serving customers outside your bull’s eye can, and indeed will, become a dead end.
As tough, and counter intuitive, as it will feel, you must do all in your power to focus on the bull’s eye, the niche inside your niche.
This will ‘polarise’ those who live in that circle from those who live outside. It will enable you to build a business capable of delivering a predictable and consistent product or service every single time for every single customer, whilst ensuring your staff keep their sanity!
If you’d like to get your Value Builder Score™ and find out whether you’re on the right track to build a business that’s independent of you, go to https://score.valuebuildersystem.com/729-renegades/dave-dean
