The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Strategy Sprints: 12 Ways to Accelerate Growth for an Agile Business by Simon Severino

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

Strategy Sprints: 12 Ways to Accelerate Growth for an Agile Business by Simon Severino https://amzn.to/3VzwToN You can grow your revenue and scale your business without sacrificing your whole personal life. It's all about working smarter, not longer. Strategy Sprints is the blueprint that you need to increase your effectiveness, grow your revenue and secure business resilience. Using the "Sprints" method, agile expert Simon Severino shows you how to transform your business with 12 assignments or "sprints" that will make you more impactful as a business leader, grow your revenue and make your strategy execution rock. Through these tried and tested exercises, businesses blow the competition out of the water. Strategy Sprints will teach you to identify the bottlenecks that are weighing your business down, turn you and anyone in your team into a sales superstar and streamline processes so you spend time where it matters. The outcomes you'll master include: - developing a compelling vision - mapping out where you can make the most money - increasing your conversion rates to sales With plenty of practical tools and templates that work, learn how Strategy Sprints can transform your business.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Thanks for

tuning in. As always, we certainly appreciate you guys as an audience. You guys just are amazing in every way, shape, form, and delight. You guys are delightful. A delightful audience. Have I ever told you that? Have we ever shared that moment together over the last 14 years?

If not, we just did. And I hope you're touched touched enough to further show your family friends and relatives go to goodreads.com for chest christmas youtube.com for chest christmas goodreads.com for chest christmas all those crazy places on the internet you can find us there we're even on tiktok now we're trying to get shows working over there uh it's kind of interesting format that they have there uh plus we don't do anything like racy or like faddish or there's no like controversy like oh god what happened on the chris voss show we just have like intelligent people that make you smarter and when you're smarter you're sexier which is all the more reason to for the show your family friends

relatives today we have an amazing smart gentleman on the show. He's going to be talking about his amazing book, and we're going to learn so much that will be just, well, the craniums in our brain will have to be expanded. You can order new ones from Amazon out here. He's the author of the new book that came out February 22, 2022. There's a lot of 22s there, and twos, actually, in the February. Two, two, 22. Strategy Sprints, 12 Ways to Accelerate Growth for an Agile Business. Simon Severino is on the show with us today.

He's going to be talking to us about his book. He's a multi-book author as well, so we'll get a plug in for the other one and talk to him about that. He is the author of Strategy Sprints and CEO of consulting agency StrategySprints.com. He is the creator of the Strategy Sprints Method, a TEDx speaker, coach of coaches, member of the SVBS Silicon Valley Blockchain Society, and scaler of digital agencies. Welcome to the show, Simon. How are you? Hey, Chris. Hey, everybody.

Thank you for having me. There you go. Thanks for coming. Give us your.com so people can find you on the inter? Hey, Chris. Hey, everybody. Thank you for having me. There you go. Thanks for coming. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. We are at strategysprints.com. There you go. And, Simon, what motivated you to write this latest book? You've got two books, don't you?

Yeah. I was asked, hey, Simon, can I have this template? Hey, Simon, can I have this template? Hey, Simon, can I have this template? So at some point, I started having a sprint university of templates. So I coach B2B entrepreneurs, and I help them solve the B2B sales problems. The B2B sales problems are that it takes forever. So sales cycles are long. The B2B sales problems are that it takes forever. So sales cycles are long. The sales is complex. You have multiple deciders. And sometimes it's tough to sell all the four

different value propositions in that complex situation. And by the time you've done that, you might have a cash flow problem or burned out team and so those are the three main problems shortening the sales time increasing the win rate and making sure your team is motivated and stays with you and is aligned so this is what i do all the time and since 21 years and people have been asking can I have this can you share this can can you send me this and so at some point I had a collection of things that work and the pandemic came and I finally had also time to share them with more people and I found that it was the right moment to share them with more people because more people were actually in need of helpful tools to navigate the stormy waters, the broken supply chains and everything that was happening in the pandemic.

So I sat down. I finally had time to properly curate those tools. I teamed up with a publisher in London who knows how to do books, with an editor who helped me, you know, with my Italo-English to make it readable and enjoyable, and with a graphic designer to make it also appealing

when you have it in your hand. And that team, for six months, delivered a labor of work, and now it's out there. Right now, it's getting translated in Chinese. I'm curious how that market will react. Yeah. It's always interesting to see your book in international markets.

It's like, wow, okay, somebody's buying it over there. It's not even English. But I always worry. I'm like, I hope it doesn't get translated in like something that like is wrong that's always my big thing so you you use what you call the sprints method tell us a little bit more about that please yeah the strategy sprints method was what i had to build for myself because i was building a a consulting agency in a digital age. And so I was looking for, hey guys, who can help me start it the right way and scale it fast? So I was looking for scaling

consultants, growth consultants, growth coaches. And I said, hey guys, help me. And so every year I would have to solve a specific thing i was hiring somebody that was recommended and and i needed help in first of all in getting to 35k per month then the second was to automate and to make it a converting machine like every new attention to convert it into a client. And so I needed somebody to help me systemize that part. Then I had no email sequence. I had somebody that helped me build an email sequence, what I call a relationship building sequence. And so every year I had an expert helping me solve one of those things. The next year, I had to solve the problem that

I was the bottleneck. So I had to get myself out of the way. I was the delivery. So I had to fire myself from client delivery and pull myself to levels above fulfillment so that I could start working on the business, not just in the business. So that was the next thing that I had to solve. And now I'm solving the community building problem. How to curate, organize, foster a healthy, resilient community. And so all these things I had to solve one by one and i i was it was tough to find the tools to find the coaches and sometimes um they they were middle helpful

so i was like okay uh how can we improve this and so I improved the way those things were working for me. And since I'm a B2B agency, I said, hey, now I can share this with everybody who is a B2B agency. And similar like the book, it became then the support structure to our one-to-one coaching. It's now the Sprint University, which is modules and templates for the people that that we serve the b2b business leaders that's awesome that's awesome sauce and so you talk about uh different ways to develop a compelling vision mapping out where to make the most money and increasing your conversion rates to sales which are those ones who people struggle with the most you find in business? Right now, people are struggling with filling the pipeline and closing deals in the pipeline. Those are the two things that get pulled most out of the Sprint University.

Because it's risky times. It's extremely volatile times. And what's the number one de-risking thing to do right now? The number one de-risker for all of us is to have a pipeline that's full, even slightly more than we need it, so that we can actually choose the right people to work with. And the second one is to have a mechanism to close at least 50%, 60% of the right people that are in the pipeline. So those are the two things that we're working on. Part one, how do you fill the pipeline?

And how do you qualify out the wrong people? And then part two, now that they are in your pipeline, so they are booked on your calendar, because remember, we are working with B2B high-ticket businesses, professional services like consultancies, marketing agencies, professional services, recruiting agencies. So they have a few conversations per week, maybe 15 discovery calls per week, people that jump on their calendar.

And the goal is, okay, first, how can we maintain 15 discovery calls per week, people that jump on their calendar. And the goal is, okay, first, how can we maintain 15 discovery calls per week? What are the marketing activities that are conducive to that? And then how can we close 10 of them per week? And closing is everything, right? Getting the money, getting the cash, always be closing as they like to say uh and so you have tried and tested exercises that you talk about in the book i teach you how to identify bottlenecks is a lot of the problems that entrepreneurs have is that they try to do everything themselves and they don't hire out stuff or delegate i think it it is prudent to first of all do it yourself because it's it's the most resilient um way to do things and so i am with the people who actually say let me do it myself

first and i am i'm the same i do i did everything myself first. Maybe the vital thing here is as soon as I have solved that problem, I wrote it down and I hand it over and I move on to the next bigger problem. So for example, writing the first email sequence. I did not hire a copywriter. I wrote it myself. And then every week, I was going over the numbers, open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate. And I was killing the 10% losers. That was my method. And after a couple months, six months, I had then a set of things that was working just by elimination of what's not working.

A simple process, but an impactful one. So I wrote 50 emails. They would go out. And then every week I would cut to 10% with the highest unsubscribe rate, the lowest click rate, and the lowest open rate. So at the end, I had an RBS, a relationship building sequence. And that one, of course, was automated. Same thing with the hiring process. It's the last bit that I just have outsourced.

I was doing the hiring. And so I had to think of how to write the hiring announcement on LinkedIn, on what to do in call one, which is a 15 minutes call, and then what to do in call one, which is a 15 minutes call, and then what to do in call two, which is a demo call, and then how to onboard them. If we pick them, then how to onboard them, what happens in week one. So I did it. And as soon as I had a repeatable process that worked, I wrote it down. I recorded myself. I gave it to ChatGPT and I said, write it down as a process that everybody can do. And I had a process. So I'm actually with the people who say, let me do it myself until I found out how it works.

And when I have it, I hand it over to a software, to a freelancer, or to a full-time employee. There you go. And so it's worked pretty well for you on how you do it. You do coaching, you do speaking. And I think you have a community set up, don't you as well? Yes. So I had only one offer, which is the 90 days one-on-one coaching. We call it the strategy sprint. In 90 days, let's improve your revenue and let's align your team. So that was the only thing. Now, after 90 days, many people said, but Simon, but I would still like to learn from you. Is there more of a long-term mentorship

kind of program where we can still hang out, ask you questions? And I said, no, I don't have that. But actually, it's a good idea. So why don't i introduce you to other people who sprinted and we have a community where we hang out and we ask each other questions and we push each other and support each other and so that became a community and now i'm running this community and those are my favorite 40 people right now who are hanging out there. We are 24-7 in Slack and we are all the time, hey guys, I found this. How are you using this AI prompt? We are discussing all kinds of things. How do you hire? How do you fire? What's working right now in digital sales? We are discussing how you can leverage AI in sales. Many, many things that are on our hearts and minds,

we can immediately exchange there. And so, yes, that has become the community. It's called the Joint Venture Club because those people become now joint venture partners, referral partners to each other. And what's the best way people can sign up for that or find out more about it? That's at strategysprints.com slash JVC.

And JVC stands for Joint Venture Club. There you go. There you go. It's interesting all the different aspects of what it takes to run a business. And definitely you need as much help and you need to hire the smartest people in the room. What haven't we touched on

that you have in the book Strategy Sprints or your previous book? Let's get a plug in for that as well. Yeah, the toughest thing right now, I think, is hiring for multiple reasons. First, because we are all not sure about future cash flows because we might be in a recession or stagflation, low growth or negative growth. So everybody's very careful with costs.

And I think it's prudent to do that. So hiring, we either have hiring freezes or are very, very careful, which I think is prudent. And then there is a second reason. Even when you restart hiring, I am hiring right now, so I know that it takes so much of your time. So two of my favorite chapters in the book, Ready Sprints, are chapter 12 and 13, the hiring chapters.

It took me forever to find a process that's time efficient and that helps me pick the right people without putting in 400 hours of screening 400 candidates, which was my previous system, which just wasn't a system. It was just a ton of manual labor. And now I found a way to screen them and to have a demo and then just to talk to the top 10% for 15 minutes and then there is a 30-minute demo, etc. So I found a time-efficient process for that if people are

hiring and want to save some time, chapter 12 and 13 of the book Strategy Sprints. There you go. Well, this has been really insightful to have you on the show and talk about your book. Anything more you want to tease out before we go? I think one really important thing to do, because we don't know if we are in a stagflation or recession. So in both cases, a smart thing to do is to go over your biggest cost positions right now, whatever the top three costs are in your month, and try to turn them from fixed costs into variable costs. How can you do that? So instead of paying per input, just a package, a subscription, a retainer per month, negotiate a payment around results so that you de-risk your costs.

So when there is less results, you will pay less. And when there is more results, you will pay more. But you have a good reason to pay. So don't pay from your revenues. Pay from your profits. And do not pay a fixed amount, but rather a variable based on results. And you can do that with all cost positions. There are examples for all of them in our community.

I'm happy to share. If you need some ideas, hop onto strategysprints.com, jump on our calendar. I'm happy to share some specific ideas. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Simon. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris, for holding this space for your community and keep rolling. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Simon. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris, for holding this space for your community and keep

rolling. There you go. Give us your dot coms one more time as we go out. Strategiesprints.com. There you go. Enjoy the show, folks. Refer your family, friends, or relatives. Go to goodreads.com, FortunessCrispFoss, YouTube.com, FortunessCrispFoss, and all those crazy places on the internet. Stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.