Kory: And so most of us are saying at this point, probably, yes, I get it. I start too many projects, I change direction. You know, I want to grow faster. What do I do? And I like to be practical with that. And the thing that was a big kind of an Aha! moment for me was when I read, you know, Goldratt’s book, The Theory of Constraints, which is technical for a lot of people, but the point is that there’s something that’s stopping you from growing. So I always ask, what’s stopping you from growing?
If you don’t know, say I have a car and I want it to go faster, right? I say, well, what’s stopping your car from going faster? And you have to really think about it for a minute, because most people go, I just need a bigger engine. Okay, so you drop a bigger engine in it, and that gets you some more speed. But there comes a point where the bigger engine is not enough, right? Your transmission is going to break if you have too much horsepower. So there’s this linkage of parts that have to work together to really grow. And so if you think, all I’ve got to do is drop in a new engine, you’re going to be stuck. So a lot of people nowadays, that’s like, Facebook ads is a great example.
James: Yeah. Like, you probably weren’t running Facebook ads back in the early 2000s. Right?
Kory: No Facebook ads. Nope.
James: I think I was running them maybe 2008 or so. Like, really, really early, like a long time ago. It’s not a big part of my thing. Of course, you have the big engine, you’re going to have to handle, the corners are going to come up and you need good brakes, right? Because now you’re going so much faster and you need a well-balanced machine.
Kory: That’s right. So you take care of all the obvious stuff first in your business, right? Okay, you got to have traffic and you got to have a landing page and you got to have a funnel. So you get that all kind of going. But then, to get the next level of speed out requires a little more finesse. Right? If you talk to a guy who’s built a hundred racecars, he’s going to be able to troubleshoot your business very quickly and give you more specific advice on how to unlock more speed, right?
James: Yup.
Kory: And when it comes to marketing, there’s so many choices out there every day. Am I a content marketer? Am I doing Facebook? Am I doing SEO? Like, as entrepreneurs, we have all these choices. And we have teams that depend on us to make the right choices. And it can be a little scary. And I know, as humans, we have to chase certainty, right? So if I’m going down a track, a path, and then I see something else that comes along that seems like, well, maybe that’ll work better, it’s easy for me to go after that next direction.
So one of the core things of growing faster is, get a good plan and give it some time to work before you change direction. So a lot of what we do is just, what are we doing for the next 12 weeks? If this is really the thing, let’s focus on the thing and let’s just not take any left turns. Because if you spend two months building a funnel, for example, and it just doesn’t work, that’s a huge slowdown of your whole business. And I see that all the time. I see people who have spent six months building these very sophisticated funnels; they never stopped to ask, is the thing that’s stopping me a new funnel? Right?
James: So they’re working on the wrong thing.
Kory: Working on the wrong thing. That’s right.
James: Crazy. And you know, in an earlier episode before this, we were speaking with Caleb O’Dowd, and he said most copywriters are, they’re building out campaigns that are flawed from the beginning because they never did the research. It’s like, you’ve got to have the fundamentals.
I love the Theory of Constraints. I like Eli Goldratt’s book called The Choice, and the concept of inherent simplicity, that the more complex a system is, the simpler you can impact it. Like, a car is a good example. You’ve got this huge expensive lump of metal, plastic, rubber, electricity, oil, gas, metal. It’s just this big thing with all these bits. And basically, if you lose the key to the car, the whole thing’s useless. Like, as simple as that can impact the entire machine. And on the flip side, if you do change one thing, then you can get a completely different result. Like for example, you cut the muffler off. It will go from really quiet to really loud. Unless it’s electric, of course, which it’s already quiet anyway.
You know, one small change. And so like, if you want to take that car, stick it on a racetrack and cut the muffler off, you can extract a whole lot more power out of it by just removing something. You can remove something from this machine and make it perform better. Crazy.
So I like this. You’ve really highlighted that we should stop for a minute, just stop all this craziness and think, am I actually on the right track? Is my strategy going to get me where I want to go? And then you can fit the tactics into that and make it actually happen. Because you got to execute, of course. That’s where the other disconnect can often be, between the big vision and then actually getting the results.
Watch the full episode HERE
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