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Interview highlights:
01:47 – Did growth just happen?
05:01 – When you hit 20 million…
07:32 – Why not spend more?
08:59 – Knowing how big your business is
11:16 – Triggers and reporting
14:42 – Does segmentation come into play?
17:26 – The impact of current events
21:46 – A CEO’s routine
24:53 – Growing pains to look out for
28:34 – Tool/technique recommendations
30:45 – Sources of business ideas
33:45 – An effect of success
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Transcript:
James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. I’ve got a guest back for the second time. The last time I interviewed this guest, his business was doing around $5 million a year. We were talking about the comparison between direct response and ecommerce styles of marketing and how you can actually blend the two in what he does with his successful business called Survival Frog, and that was episode 491 in August of 2016. Now, here we are, at the time of recording at the end of May 2017, and our guest has almost doubled the business. So today, I’m going to be speaking with Byron Walker about business growth. Welcome to the call, Byron.
Byron: Great. Thanks, James. Glad to be here.
James: Now, I’m interested in the story of how you’ve doubled your store in less than a year. Especially because business growth is a hot topic with both SuperFastBusiness and especially SilverCircle. A lot of the things that I focus on are to achieve business growth. And I think the first thing that we should probably address is, was the growth something that you had planned or has it just happened?
Can you plan growth?
Byron: Yeah. It was definitely planned. In fact, I think a lot of the reason why we’re not only growing but growing in a fairly smooth manner; I mean yes, there’s growing pains and there’s craziness, but overall for the type of growth we’re seeing is fairly well leveled and feels good. And I think the reason behind that is we had already gotten a lot of our basics down, our procedures, documentation, the right people in the right seats. A lot of the things were in place that allowed us to grow. Because I mean growth is great, but sometimes it can cause a lot of damage too. And so we’re growing but we’re also growing where we’re increasing margins. Don’t get me wrong, it is so crazy but it’s pretty well-controlled in our growth. So it was planned and I felt we had a really good strong base before we really started popping the lid off the top.
James: So when you sit down and think about where you want the business to go, who’s involved in that process and what is the process that determines what you’re going to plan and what is the plan for Survival Frog?
The plan
Byron: Again, I’ve got the right people in the right seats. Myself, I’m the CEO, and although I’m out of the day-to-day operations, I’m very heavy into the strategic planning of the company. And so who’s behind that? Certainly, I would take the lead role as the CEO of the company in charting the path to the future and where we’re going. But my executive team as well. So we’ve got some great managers and no decision’s ever made in a vacuum. So it’s always team effort and we talk through the pros and cons and then we make the decision after that.
So we do have some great managers on staff that are helping steer the ship. With that being said, I’m definitely the lead steerer just because. And there’s a lot to be said about being pulled out of the day-to-day operations, because I feel that although I’m still in the forest as they say, I may be one step out. So I can see a little bit more clarity than managers who are running day-to-day operations.
As far as where we’re heading, we’ll certainly be able to surpass $10 million this year and we’re hoping to hit $20 million the following or maybe halfway through the next year to be on track for $20 million. So our big goal and our big thing that we’re looking at in the future is to be able to hit $20 million in an annual period. And again, not just that number, because we’re not just growing for the sake of it. It’s with better margins, it’s with more systems and documentation in place, and it’s with, for the most part, really with the team we currently have. We’ll have to add a few other people, but we’re not going to have to double the staff to be able to double the sales, at this level at least.
James: What will doing $20 million mean that’s different than when you’re doing a revenue of $10 million?
Byron: The big drivers behind the growth, whether it’s what got us from last year to this point or even from this point onwards, has a lot to do with the new products that we’re launching. With any product, I think, that you get a lot of traction with, you’re going to have burnout. The burnout may happen in a couple of months, it may take a whole year. But whatever that period is, it will burn out. It could be from your own efforts, it could be from the competition coming in, it can be from a bunch of different things, but a product is not going to just last for indefinitely. So finding those top sellers and replenishing them on an ongoing basis, that’s our biggest driver.
“Growth means that your business will survive.”
James: So in other words, ironically, it’s survival. Growth means that your business will survive.
Byron: Yeah. By having those fresh products coming into the pipeline. So right now, given the idea, we launch around five new products a month right now, five to seven. And yes, it is as maddening as it sounds. So we launch a lot of products. And some of those are direct response sales pages, which do take a lot more effort, and some of them are just ecommerce products. But with that many products coming out on every month, then we’re bound to have a success in there.
Let’s say our successful ratio, one out of five, even one out of 10, whatever it is, you start launching that many products, you’re going to start having winners. Because as soon as we have a winner, then we really crank up marketing and we can spend anywhere from say $40,000 or $50,000 a week in paid marketing right now. That can only happen when we’ve got products that are top-selling and performing very well. And we can only do that by bringing in our products to the market and seeing which ones win. Because I think even after I’ve been doing this 20 or 30 years, I’m still not going to be able to pick the winners. It’s not up to me, it’s up to the market. So we have to present enough to the market so that they can choose the best one and that’s the one that we push so hard on paid marketing.
James: That’s quite interesting and it’s good to hear a marketing bedrock, I suppose, that the customer is the one who votes with their wallet. I’m wondering why $20 million, why not $50 million, why not spend $400,000 a week on ad spend?
How much to spend
Byron: Sure. Well again, we’re not just growing for the sake of it. It is planned out. It is controlled. And who knows, so $20 million maybe that’s $50 million or who knows what it is. But we have to have certain metrics. We don’t want to just double the business for the sake of it. We want to make sure the margins are intact, that our overhead is within the cap that we’ve set. We have something called the labor efficiency ratio, basically meaning we can’t hire until we have revenue to hit a certain mark, or if revenue dips a lot, we may have to lay off. It’s a metrics where I know if we’re heavy or light on our labor cost.
So there’s a bunch of KPIs that we’re monitoring where if they’re within range, great let’s keep going, let’s keep going. But as soon as something starts teetering, that’s one we may pull back. And to answer your question on the marketing spend, as long as we’re breakeven or within 10 percent negative or 10 percent positive, we will spend whatever we can. We’re spending $50,000 a week now because that’s the number we’ve been able to dial in and stay at breakeven.
James: Do you do an analysis on how big the market might be? Do you get a sense of whether you’re a big player in a small market or a small player in a big market, or somewhere in between?
Byron: Yeah, I think about that often, but I don’t have an answer. I do believe we’re the largest survival gear ecommerce company. When I look at all the traffic of all of our competitors, we certainly get more traffic than anybody else. And we definitely monetize our traffic better than anyone else. So I would say we’re the leader. What percentage of the market that is, I don’t know. And how big is the entire pie, I don’t know. I’ve heard upwards of a billion dollars. I don’t know where that number came from. I don’t really focus on that too much, though.
James: Well, I mean I focus on some of those things because of where I came from. In companies like Mercedes-Benz and BMW they did a lot of analysis. And also Vodafone, and General Motors Finance. They did a lot of analysis on how big the market was, and what piece of the market we were getting, at least as a guideline to know if you’re underperforming. That’s why I was curious about the 20 million. Is it just a stab in the dark, or is it, like beyond that point, you’re getting saturated and it’s very hard for you to have ownership?
Just a few other questions around that. It’s a privately owned business?
Byron: Yes.
Growing to sell?
James: So, is the goal at some point to sell the business to someone else, like an Amazon?
“Look at the end when you start.”
Byron: As of today, no, but who knows what the future holds? And so one of the goals is to make the company as attractive and healthy as possible, to where if there was an exit, it’s an attractive company. So I’ve always believed in you look at the end when you start, or the exit when you start. And so that’s certainly part of the business model, but there’s no activity in trying to sell it, no.
James: Yeah. I don’t think you’re in the zone where you’re just doing this as a hobby. At the point when you’re doing 10 million dollars a year, it’s definitely more strategic than that, and that’s why I was curious. And I like that you’ve got some triggers that guide you as to when you should be hiring or changing the size of the team. What other triggers do you have in the business that…you said plus or minus 10 percent for your ad spend versus profitability for the new products, so that makes sense.
Do you have other triggers that you look at, and I’m curious what sort of things do you actually report on. Are they lead metrics, or lag metrics, or a combination? And how often are they reported and to whom?
The KPIs involved
Byron: Yeah. So we are very big with our KPIs. We have big whiteboards and we track everything on a weekly basis. There’s about 12 KPIs, and there’s who knows how many more.
So key performance indicators, let’s say there’s 12, and some of them, they’re all lagging. How many leads did we bring in last week? What was our ROI? What did we spend? What did our database produce? But some of the key ones that we look at certainly is our database, because with our paid marketing we’re just breaking even on the front. Plus or minus 10 percent.
So we’re not making money when we bring in new customers. We only make money when the customer buys again and again in the lifetime value of that customer. And so, obviously we’re really watching the database, making sure our open rates, click rates are healthy, EPCs, and what the net is, because that’s really what feeds a lot of other pieces that we have going on. So that’s the health of the list, let’s say.
James: I guess there could be some lead metrics that you look at there, like how many broadcasts you’re sending out, and how many people are visiting your website. Because they will tend to be an indicator as to how many people might make that first purchase, which will definitely be an indicator as to how much the value of the business is going to improve in the future as that customer goes through more spending hoops.
Byron: Yes. And in fact, for this year and next year, one of the key drivers is repeat buyers. Yes, we have a lot of repeat buyers, but I don’t have clarity on it yet. And so that’s one thing that we’re starting to work on more and more is, what percentage of all of our buyers have another purchase within the first 60 days, and how can we push that higher? If someone goes 60 days without buying, it’s really tough to bring them back. And so not just tracking the number, but also what five things or however many things, but five things can we do to proactively get them to buy, besides just the random emails.
James: Yeah, I like that. I saw Ezra Firestone was talking about that in his ecommerce conference. He has a win back campaign when he recognizes that a first-time buyer has not purchased again in enough of a timeframe. And there was actually some extremely sophisticated marketing in terms of video campaigns, a percentage of the video watched triggering behavioral autoresponders and leading people back to the next product in line. And it was very clever.
What about segmentation?
I’m wondering, do you do much segmentation and do you do much with sort of behavioral database management?
Byron: We do. We use a system called Klaviyo, and so that monitors people that bought X, we can sell them Y. It also monitors when someone has come back to the website but not purchased, and what did they view on our ecommerce store? Let’s email them about those products. It knows if they only went to the product page versus the order page, and treats them differently. Different coupons, things like that.
So Klaviyo’s really smart in how it emails people based on their behavior and their purchasing. And we do have a win back in place, win back email campaign. But in addition to that, we were building out our outbound phone call center right now, it’s all in-house. And so soon we’ll be able to call every single person who makes a purchase. Right now, we’re just cherry-picking and pulling out the VIPs, but soon everyone will get a phone call.
We can also put that together with direct mail, whether it’s a catalog or a free item or whatever it is. When we can isolate someone as a VIP, someone who we feel for whatever reason is going to be a repeat buyer or spend a lot, then our budget’s much bigger. So there’s a lot of things we can do.
For us, customer support is just so critical for us at this phase. We’re always trying to create what we call the “amazing buying experience.” So when someone calls into our office, we answer the phone, and email or whatever. We’re pushing them to try to be on the phone as opposed to just email. In fact, one thing that we do, all of our customer support reps, they are required to give away $500 in product each month. And it’s not a suggestion, it’s not, ‘it’d be nice if it happened.’ It’s required. They have to give away $500 worth of product. And that’s retail value, so the cost is obviously much lower for us.
But that really amazes people. And sometimes the free thing, whatever it is, it might go to someone who’s upset. But it more than likely will go to someone who’s really happy, or someone who says, “I love you guys, I’m going to tell all my friends.” Well, let’s get them some free product in their hands. So we really push the amazing buying experience, whether it’s a phone call, a free item, whatever it is, we really want to impress them so they continue to come back.
James: Yeah, that’s a good idea.
Current events and TV
I’m wondering, what sort of effect if any do shows like The Walking Dead have on your seasonal marketing, and other things, like when North Korea launches another missile?
Byron: Yeah. We have not seen any spikes in sales when there’s a natural disaster, or whether it’s North Korea doing their thing. And I think the reason why we don’t see a spike is because we do so much paid marketing, our spikes are really just when we spend more money. And so I think organically, those spikes are so small we can’t see them on the radar, if you will.
James: So maybe it just moves the entire market sentiment and you’re just tapping into it with your regular marketing?
Byron: Yeah. We’re probably just a part of it. Our sales since the elections – this is interesting. Since the elections, it seems like we exploded. So our growth is really fast, we’re easily 50 percent right now growth year over year. It’s probably a bit higher than that. And some of our competitors are seeing good growth, or similar growth, but we’ve also seen some competitors that are suffering.
And I’ve talked to these competitors, because they’re friends and we network. And the only thing we could come up with is that people that are really suffering are those that had a very far right, politically speaking, sales pitch, angle. Everything was super conservative. And ours is more central, more apolitical.
And so in one way, with Trump winning, the logic was, well, all the conservatives who were the main preppers are now going to be relaxed and they won’t buy as much. And I think that hurt the companies that were marketing on the right side. We’re more apolitical, and so we may just have doubled our demographic, or our pool of buyers. So now, we have all the liberals. And we do, we have a lot more liberals coming in, people on the left, politically, who are buying a lot of products from us now.
James: Right. So I guess all you can do is just react when things take a turn. Like I imagine, if Trump gets impeached, which is highly likely according to some people, there might be some more turmoil and uncertainty in the market and how tuned in to that would your copywriting be?
Byron: Completely. Yeah, we definitely follow all these trends, and we’ll have blog posts that are talking about it, our email copy, but our products are very, again, apolitical. So we may use some political ad copy to get them to the sales page, but most of our sales pages are very product-focused, not hooks or pitches or story line.
And then you did ask about TV shows and how that impacts us. This is kind of interesting. We have always had a spike, at least in the last four or five years, in September. And we weren’t really sure why that was, and I think the best explanation is that’s about when new TV shows come out. And so all the survival shows come out around that time, and we might believe that’s when we get our first spike of the year. And then from September through December, it’s just crazy. That’s our busiest time. But I think those TV shows do help us in a roundabout way.
James: Yeah. I’ve just watched the entire series of The Walking Dead from start to finish, and you do think about things that were not on your mind before. It’s like, what would you do? What’s their next move? It’s really quite interesting learning the whole craft of survival through that lens, and I imagine that that’s a part of what you’re selling, it’s in the name of the brand and it’s the target market. And I imagine they would be absolutely rabid buyers and extremely subject to emotional marketing.
Byron: Yeah. I’m sure it adds up. As we say, usually bad news is good news for us. Helps with sales.
The life of a CEO
James: I’m interested in you as the business CEO. You’re out of the day-to-day a little bit, enough to get some clarity. What sort of routine do you keep on a weekly basis? How do you get in and out of the business activities? Is it hands-on in the office, is it remote via a dashboard, is it over the phone? Is it every day of the week, is it Sundays? Like, how do you keep a finger on the pulse and contribute and also maintain that perspective of being slightly out of it?
Byron: Well, we have an office and we have 20 employees, so I’m in the office almost every day, if I’m not at meetings or something else. And when I’m in the office, it’s full of meetings inside the office. So with my managers or other key people. And so those meetings are really what gets me in touch with the employees, with what’s going on, the problems, challenges, opportunities, things like that. So those meetings are obviously very important for me.
One thing that helps me kind of keep a level head, maybe several things, but one is reading business books. It really helps me kind of put things in perspective. It also helps me connect the dots, if you will. Like, ooh, that idea and this idea and that idea, these things can be combined. And so it helps me stay out of the deeper day-to-day stuff and more on top where I can kind of be more strategic in my thinking.
I meditate, that helps a lot, specially when I’ve got a hundred different ideas bouncing around my head, we’re all some form of ADD. Meditation really helps me kind of get clarity and bring it back to the most basic things.
“You can only get so much done.”
And then lastly is priority. Lists. And both myself and all the key managers and even some of the key employees under them all have a working priority list that we monitor weekly if not daily. And the thought is, you can only get so much done. So your priority list has to be very organized, and you can’t add a new priority to your list without taking one off. And that really makes you figure out where’s the value and should we be adding this, or should we push that off for another quarter or for next year? These priority lists are just super critical.
I’ll tell you, one of our biggest challenges is we have too much opportunity. And I know it’s a great problem to have, but it is a huge problem, because there’s so many shiny things being thrown at us on a daily basis, if we chase every cool idea, we’d never get anything done. So really being strict with our priority lists has really helped us stay focused and make sure we hit our targets that we’re reaching for.
What growing pains are there?
James: Yeah, cool. So tell me about some of the pains as you’ve grown, like what things could we expect as we keep growing the business that we would look out for? Because I’m a huge fan of preventing things that might go wrong if we were to be aware of it in advance. And I imagine that’s a top reason why you read books, so that you can learn about things before they happen and discover things to implement into your business rather than having to figure it out for yourself. So what sort of pains should we look out for?
Byron: Well, with my business, it’s all physical products, and so most of my pain is within our products, meaning buying enough so we don’t run out of stock. If we run out of stock, we stop the marketing. We’ve moved away from doing mostly air shipments last year, to this year we’re doing containers. And so we bring over one container every month now. And so most of our pains deal with product itself or the lack of. Nothing worse than turning off a very successful marketing campaign because we’re out of inventory. So our biggest pain points are those.
Cash flow when you’re growing is certainly one. You know, that’s funny, because my wife, it was a couple of months ago, and we’re talking about the business, she goes, “That’s great, it continues to grow. I’m so excited! By the way, where’s all the money?” And I just instinctively said, “Oh, you don’t make profit when you grow. You only make it when you stop growing or slow down.” And she just looked at me like, “What?” But it’s true. When you have this type of growth, you’re not banking much of it. Almost everything we make that hits the bottom line gets reinvested right back into the company.
So cash flow’s always going to be an issue as you’re growing and scaling. Because we have to buy, again, a container full of products, and our lead time before we get that money back is several months. So you have to be able to cash flow that.
James: That’s kind of one of the things that sucks about an ecommerce business. And at the same time is a huge barrier to your competitors, who if they can’t figure out their cash flow or the founder has too big mortgage on their house, they’re going to have slower growth than what you’ve experienced.
Byron: Yeah. And that brings up the last point on growth or problems. And that is, problems, and this is all mindset, but problems are OK. In fact, we have a saying that says, “Easy sucks.” And the reason that we say that is, anything that’s really easy doesn’t last very long. So we don’t want easy. We like challenges. We like when it’s difficult, because if it’s difficult for us, it’s going to be difficult for the next guy or the competitor.
And so we don’t wish for the challenges to be easier to go away, we just hope that we have the ability to overcome those challenges better and faster than our competition. Because if we are better and faster than our competition in dealing with those challenges, boom. We just won. So we don’t want the problems to go away, we just want to be able to work through them better and faster than our competition, and that’ll put us out way ahead, right there.
James: Nice. So that’s along the lines of, the obstacle is the way.
“The smaller challenges aren’t nearly as fun.”
Byron: Yeah. Absolutely. And just having a positive attitude, because you’re always going to have problems. In fact, the problems just get bigger. But it’s OK. We’re lucky to have these quality of challenges, because the smaller challenges aren’t nearly as fun.
James: What’s a tool or a technique that you’ve found particularly useful that you think would be good for other business owners to have a look at or investigate, if they’re not already using it?
Byron: I’m drawing a blank on that one. I mean, we use a lot of project management tools – Evernote, we’re moving to Redmine, which is a project management software. But other than that, nothing’s really jumping out of my head. It’s more systems and what we have in place.
Achieving labor efficiency
Back to that labor efficiency ratio, that’s been a huge driver for us. Because I used to hire people when we needed people. And then I’d find ourselves two or three months later in this negative cash flow where we’re losing money. And so since we implemented the labor efficiency ratio, it sounds so boring, I know, but it’s just this idea of you take your total labor cost, including the owner’s salary, and divide that by the gross sales. And you need to have certain ratios in place before you can add more people to the payroll. Systems and documentation, systems like that, really help us guide the ship and make better decisions.
James: We had a similar one which was the number of support tickets per person. By the way, every time we created a job in our SEO business, it created a support ticket, because we would manage it through a support desk. So if we added an extra 50 support tickets, that meant there was 50 more jobs or 40 jobs and 10 enquiries, but the associated volume required to support that. So it’s great to have triggers. Other triggers that people could use would be things like when they reach a certain revenue, they could change the company structure or they could lodge their trademarks or get business insurance, when they’re in the very small stages, because a lot of people start off with none of those things, which is frightening, but true.
So that’s been good. I imagine you will continue to grow the business. What things do you keep an eye on outside of the business that you’re in, that market that you’re in, what do you look at or where do you draw from for ideas, other than your business books? You got any other resources you like to stay in tune with?
The power of live events
Byron: Yeah, for sure, and that would be masterminds and conferences. You know, Traffic and Conversions Summit is one we always go to. And we actually draw less and less from that every year, but we’ll continue to go each year, because it’s just great. But now we’re adding new and different conferences.
So next week, I’m going to Internet Retailer Conference, IRCE.com, I believe it is. And so what that is, that is ecommerce companies where we’re going to be the small fish. And that’s what I’m really excited about. We’re not the bottom, but we’re in that bottom third, as far as our size. And so, where most conferences we go to are direct-response-oriented, this is ecommerce-oriented. And so all the big boys will be there, and so really excited about that. Just new circle of people, business leaders, and companies that are doing much, much bigger things than we are.
“You don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room.”
Because being the biggest in our little niche, it almost concerns me. I’d rather hang out with people that – you don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. And so going to these new conferences that are outside of the direct response is really where I’m getting a lot of value. And same with little masterminds outside of the survival niche, I get a ton of great ideas and I just learn so much from those.
James: It’s a really valid point, and certainly one of the reasons I’m bringing this podcast out and doing really well with SuperFastBusiness and SilverCircle is because I attended those events. Hopping on that airplane for the first time since I was 12 years old and heading over to Los Angeles, to Underground 4, was a big eye-opener for me and definitely the start of a huge growth phase. And for that reason, I’ve been running live events each year as well, to cross-pollinate my customers and prospects.
But the most recent one that I’ve got running, which is the Maldives Mastermind, which is held on a boat, it’s over a hundred-foot-long boat in the Maldives, in September. Someone emailed me and said, “Am I going to be out of place here? Am I going to be wearing the wrong pants? I’ll get there and find everyone’s doing bigger and better than I am.” And I said, “Well, that’s the one you want to be on. You want to be on that boat. As long as you’ve got board shorts, you’ll be in the right pants. You’ll level up if you play with people who are further down the path than you.”
The more successful they are…
The other thing that I’ve found to be true, and I’m interested if you have too, is that the more successful people are, the less worried they are about reaching out and helping you. It’s like they sort of empathize with you and they see a little bit of a reminder of that spark that they once had at that point and they seem extremely helpful and willing to share, where you might think they couldn’t bother to spend the time with you or to extend an olive leaf. But they really do actually pull you up, they reach down and bring you up faster, because they’re not afraid of you and they’ve already been where you’re at.
Byron: Yeah, in fact I’ve got a great story on that. One other thing that I’ve been doing is reaching out to ecommerce companies in the Denver area, it’s where I’m at, and trying to network. Non-competitive. So I reached out to a company called eBags, you’ve probably heard of them, they’re in Denver here. They do $220 million a year. So that’s way bigger than us. I reached out to them on LinkedIn, and the CEO said, “Yeah, come on in, we’ll talk.”
And I figured it’d be a 15, 20-minute conversation at most. We spent over two hours with the CEO and the founder of the company in their office. And then got a full tour and met all the managers and everything else. We were in there for like, three hours before we left. And two hours of the CEO and the founder’s time, that’s so valuable. But we asked great questions, and we helped give a little value where we could, and it was just a great synergy. But to your point, they wanted to help. They saw themselves in us, many years ago, and they wanted to help.
So I agree. The more successful people, they want to give back. So don’t be timid, don’t be scared of reaching out to people and asking, maybe not for help, but asking just for, “Hey, can we talk?” Because most of them want to talk, and they’re very eager to help other people.
James: Yeah. There was this one guy, when I was a sales manager at Mercedes-Benz, there was this guy who had a Mercedes-Benz dealership and approved Mercedes-Benz repairer. And I wanted to know how he did it. So I actually asked him, “Can I come around and interview you about it?” And he said, no one’s ever asked him about that. He said yes because I was the only one who would send him a handwritten note at Christmas every year when he sent a fruit box to all of the sales managers. And I went around there, and I think I got an education for about four or five hours straight and he was sharing with me these deep insights, which have still guided a lot of the things that I do online now. So it’s really just a matter of asking.
And a lot of the time, I didn’t even have to ask. When I had very successful customers, they were more than willing to share their journey to the top and how things work. They were in manufacturing, they were in media, they were in politics, they were in Hollywood movies. They were fascinating people to be around, and the way that they lived their life and the way that they generously shared information was really quite a surprise. So I do encourage people to go to events, and I do encourage people to not be afraid of being the person who’s there for the first time or it’s a new experience.
Like you’ve come onto this show, Byron, to share. We’re not in your market and probably not too many of my audience are going to rush out and buy a water filtration system. I’m not sure, maybe they do, and I hope if they do they’ll go and visit your website at survivalfrog.com. But thank you so much for coming along and sharing this. You’ve definitely been going through a journey that I know we’re interested in, that growth journey, how to double your business, what are the key drivers, knowing that you’ve got systems and routines, that it’s not all roses, there’s some pains as well. And you’ve given some good clues as to the trigger points to look for, and what sort of information to report on and who should have it and how you’re continuing to evolve yourself as a CEO and stay sharp.
Hopefully, we’ll have you back next year to talk about how you doubled the business again.
Byron: There we go. Love it, love it.
James: Thanks, Byron.
So if you want to check out what Byron’s cooking over there, go and have a look at survivalfrog.com and you’ll see this empire growing right in front of your eyes.
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Great yarn James. Really like Byron’s story and your ability to eek it out for us. Thanks.
Great yarn James. Really like Byron’s story and your ability to eek it out for us. Thanks.
Thank you Corey!