Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another season and another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. My name is Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, this is Jeff Amerine. Glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah.
Jeff Amerine:
Brand new season. What do you think, partner?
Jeff Standridge:
Well, you know, what is this? Uh, season three, I think.
Jeff Amerine:
Hard to believe that we’ve been kept on the air for three seasons.
Jeff Standridge:
I think, I think that’s by our choice. I think we didn’t have any external influencers there.
Jeff Amerine:
You know, Ted Lasso made it through three seasons. What the hell? We ought to be able to do at least three, right?
Jeff Standridge:
You would think, you would think.
Hey, what I want us to do, Jeff, today is let’s talk a little bit about this concept of 10x, 10 times growth, 10x growth, exponential growth. You know, we use that verbiage a lot in both our sister companies, Startup Junkie and Conductor, but also in our Innovation Junkie business as well and the work that we do with larger clients. And I’d like first just spend some time talking about what does that mean when we talk about 10x growth or we talk about exponential growth? You know, what are we talking about there exactly? Make sense?
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it does. I mean, it’s time, and there’s been much written about it in addition to what we talk about. But you think of the book by Peter Thiel, which was Zero to One, where he said, don’t think about incremental, think about how to do something 10 times better. It kind of gets to the same theme. Guy Kawasaki, the chief evangelist from Apple, said, nobody ever was successful by thinking we’re gonna add some new fonts to a dot matrix printer. They said, no, we’re gonna do a laser printer, which is something 10 times better than dot matrix. So it’s that whole mindset of figuring out how to really do things in a significantly better, faster, and bigger fashion. I think it’s really timely.
Jeff Standridge:
Well, in Jim Collins, you know, in Good to Great, his famous quote there is that good is the enemy of great. And when we’re focused on being incrementally good, it really erodes our ability to even think beyond incremental to get exponentially great. And so another, and just a more recent example that I’ve stumbled on to in the course of the last, actually, I pre-ordered it when it was announced, is Dan Sullivan, who runs an organization called a strategic coach, teamed up with Benjamin Hardy, I believe his name is, and they wrote 10X is easier than 2X. And the thing that really stood out to me as I was reading kind of the first several pages of that was he said, if you think about, if I were to ask you a question, what could you do to double the size of your business, to double your business, 2X your business? You’re going to come at me with a litany of responses. Well, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this. And so many responses and so many options that you get lost in all of the options. And you have no idea of determining the merits of one option over the other. And so you just spin your wheels. Uh, and he said, but if I were to ask you the question, what could you do to 10X your business and just to be clear, 10X is 10 fold or a thousand percent. What could you do to 10x your business this year? Just the question limits the potential options down to just one or two or maybe three.
Jeff Amerine:
Right.
Jeff Standridge:
And so it removes all of the noise of those multiple responses and multiple things that one could do to actually 2x their business.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s true. And it forces you to kind of throw off some of the constraints that you would typically have based on maybe if you’re thinking constantly about organic growth, maybe the only way to 10X your business in a year or two is through acquisition as an option. If that’s something you’ve never considered, it’s the kind of thing that you would consider if you were really trying to figure out how to grow really rapidly.
Jeff Standridge:
You know, one other principle that Sullivan and Hardy bring forward in the 10x is that, I’m trying to remember the actual quote, the road to hell is paved with volume, I believe is what he said, something along those lines. And what he’s really meaning to say there is that we think we can 10x by just doing voluminously more of what we’re already doing. And his response is you can’t get there that way. You can’t get there by doing more of what you’re already doing. You have to figure out how to do at much higher quality one or two of the things that will take you to the next level. In other words, you have to walk away from the 80% of the things that got you to where you are, and you got to look at the 20% of the things that you’re currently doing that’ll take you to the next steps, and you’ve got to do those infinitely better. Some of the examples that I like to use for what exponential means, one of them, is this concept of the compound effect. And I’ve used that example multiple times. If I were to ask you whether I could write you a check for a million dollars right now, or I would give you a penny a day, double daily for 30 days, which one would you choose? And most people would say, well, I would choose the penny, double daily for 30 days, but I’m not really sure why, and I’m not really sure that that’s the right answer, but I think it’s a trick question, so that’s gonna be the answer I give. And what I tell them is, What I tell them is that if you chose the million dollars, you would have been absolutely right. But you would have only been right for the first 27 days. Because somewhere moving into the 28th day, that penny double daily for 27 days and now 28 days would have crossed over to be about $1.3 million, then 29, about $2.7 million, and then on day 30, about $3.4 million. So it would have gone dreadfully wrong after about day 26 or 27. You’re familiar with, I believe his name was Galen Moore, but Moore’s Law from Intel in 1965 was really an observation that he made at that time, but it really became a law because for the last 50 plus years, that law has continued to manifest itself. And that is that the power, speed, and efficiency of computing technology has doubled every 14 months, roughly some years a little more than 14, some years a little less than 14. But on average about every 14 months. And so that’s the reason that, and I have my iPhone sitting over here on a charger, the reason that we can carry around in our pocket, the computing power that used to take up a room this size probably in 1965, because of that seemingly small growth every 14 months, multiplied over a number of years produced exponential results. I believe it was, Friedman, Thomas Friedman, I believe it was, who said that if you were to take that Moore’s Law and you were to apply it to the 1971 Volkswagen Beetle, in other words, if it were to have increased in power, speed and efficiency, doubled in power, speed and efficiency every 14 months since 1971, that today it would go 2 million miles an hour, would get 300,000 miles per gallon and cost less than a nickel. So that’s the power of exponential.
Jeff Amerine:
I’d like to buy that car.
Jeff Standridge:
And most people think that I have to grow, I have to improve by a thousand percent in order to get a thousand percent growth. And you really don’t. You just have to find one or two of those areas where you can take seemingly small actions, consistently apply those actions over a period of time and it’ll produce the exponential results in the end.
Jeff Amerine:
And it does speak to focus. I mean, a lot of, a lot of business owners and, including ourselves, we tend to enjoy doing a variety of things, a lot of different things, large portfolio of activities. And so we do. And you’re constantly faced with the situation of realizing that you’re probably sacrificing top and bottom line growth because you’re doing too many things that you enjoy rather than focusing on those few that could really drive growth.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. And go back to Jack Welch, you know, what, what things can we be the best in the world at? Oh, number one or number two in the world at, and if we’re not going to be number one or number two in the world at them, then let’s get rid of them. Let’s jettison them and let’s focus on those things. So even Sullivan would say the same thing. What are your unique abilities? What are you uniquely qualified to do? We talk about this in terms of the lean canvas, your, you know, your unfair competitive advantage. Your unique value proposition. What can you be better than anyone else at? And then pour gasoline on that fire rather than the 10 other fires surrounding it.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, it’s absolutely true. And you know, to cite as an example, we actually in a sister organization, the conductor run the 10X Growth Accelerator that focuses a lot on how to think about it, right? How to think about the strategy and the strategic growth plan and how to set the objectives and all of that, that can underpin really getting to 10X growth.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. And it is a process, right? It’s not just, oh, let’s close our eyes and dream. You know, one has to actually execute against that. And so what we do in that 10X growth accelerator, and what we really do with a lot of our innovation junkie clients as well is we may not do a 14 week accelerator for our innovation junkie clients, like we do our conductor clients, but we do a 10X process to help them think through how they’re going to strategically grow. Where are they going to focus? By definition, where are they not going to focus? And help them build and wrap the execution plans around that to actually to actually achieve that exponential those exponential outcomes
Jeff Amerine:
How, you know, talking to some of this, based on what you’ve seen, how often does this type of process really require significant behavior change on the part of the leadership team or the team in general to get away from all those things they’ve been comfortable with, maybe they’ve been incrementally improving, and to really take that big leap forward?
Jeff Standridge:
Um, I don’t know, 102% of the time
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah.
Jeff Standridge:
It does. I mean, it is, it is a, anytime you have a quantum mindset shift, you have to have some habit change, right? Some, some breaking of bad habits, some institution of new habits. And that’s why we don’t really, you know, a lot of consultants will, will help an organization build a growth plan, or build a strategic plan and then give them that plan and then ride off into the sunset. And our experience is that, that works real well for about 89 days. And then by the 90th day, we’re off track, we’ve been distracted, a new shiny object has flown into town or an unplanned distraction that was really not an opportunity, more of a challenge got in the way, the plan goes on the shelf, we happen to look up nine months later and say, oh, crud, we’re 90 days away from the end of the year and what are we gonna do now? Right? Or let’s look and see how we’ve done. And so what we really focus on doing is not only helping them build out that 10X or that strategic growth plan or that exponential growth plan, but to build the execution disciplines around it in order to keep it on track from quarter to quarter. So we actually come back in every 90 days or so and say, okay, let’s look at where we are versus where we said we wanted to be at the end of 90 days. Now let’s plot our next 90 days and let’s take remedial actions where we’ve gotten off track.
Jeff Amerine:
No, I think it’s great stuff. And it is something that as the audience wants to begin to go down this path, we’re going to have ongoing conversations around what it takes to think about how to 10x your growth and the processes that you can put in place.
Jeff Standridge:
What we’re finding, and I know we’re going to need to land this plane pretty soon as well, but what we’re finding is that on the front end of the process, when we start the planning process, it can be a little bit overwhelming for the CEO and his or her executive team. But it’s real interesting. Once we have that plan created and we’ve run one or two of those weekly review cadence meetings, there’s a freedom that starts to pervade that group and a sense of relief because they begin to see that really the execution process really facilitates the achievement of that which we’ve planned and they’re really simultaneously working together to produce the outcomes and it really produces a freedom on the back end versus a sense of overwhelm and that’s really encouraging to watch kind of take place over the course of about a three-week period with some of these CEOs and their executive teams.
Jeff Amerine:
No doubt about it.
Jeff Standridge:
So this season, we’re gonna probably be challenging the status quo quite a lot. We’re gonna be talking about exponential versus incremental. We’re gonna be talking about 10X versus 2X. We’re gonna be talking about great versus good and really trying to challenge our listeners to step beyond habit, step beyond comfort zone, step beyond the status quo, and think about how to fundamentally transform their organizations by using some of these principles.
Jeff Amerine:
Season three is gonna be a great ride. I’m looking forward to it.
Jeff Standridge:
I’m looking forward to it. Absolutely. I’m as well. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies podcast. We look forward to having you here in season three. Take care.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.