Ep. 184 – Three things good businesses do well – With Bill Flynn

With more than thirty years of experience working for and advising hundreds of companies, including ten startups, Bill Flynn has had a long track record of success; five successful outcomes, two IPOs, and seven acquisitions, including a turnaround during the 2008 financial crisis.

He has been a VP/Sales eight times, twice a CMO, and once the GM of a division of a $100MM+ IT services company until he pivoted to becoming a business growth coach.

As a coach, Bill has earned certifications and cultivated partnerships from organizations such as ScalingUp, Metronome United, Predictive Index, MassMEP, Small Giants, and The Neuroleadership Institute.

He is also an author and international speaker. Bill’s best-selling book – Further, Faster – The Vital Few Steps that Take the Guesswork out of Growth continues to garner a 5-Star rating.

Most passionate about

I help leadership teams take the guesswork out of growth.
I’m probably most passionate about my daughter.
On the professional side, I think it’s a shame that really good ideas, really good people, and really good businesses either go out of business or struggle for completely preventable reasons.

Bill’s career and story

My goal over the next 20 years is to share, with as many people as possible, that there’s a lot of predictability in business. Most people don’t know that. I’ve been studying it for about 30 years, and I found that there are a few things that good companies do well.
We never really teach people how to be good team leaders. It’s a skill that can be taught and you can get better and better at it, but we don’t teach it.
The second thing: Strategy and execution are two really important pieces of the business. They are two sides of the same coin and those who do it well, create a system.
The last one is cash. That should be your primary growth metric. Once you are no longer a startup, once you’re a scale-up or a real business, cash should be your primary growth metric. It takes cash to grow and you typically have to invest in front of growth.

I want to invite you to the free live training about 7 practical ways to get more customers: www.getmorecustomersregistration.com

Best advice for entrepreneurs

I have a particular set of things that I recommend. One is to solve a problem that’s worth solving for yourself and your target customer.
It has to be interesting to you. It has to be something worthy of the other person. There may be a lot of problems out there to solve, but if the target customer you’re going after doesn’t have it high enough on their priority list, then it doesn’t matter to them.
Don’t run out of money!
Then you get to the entrepreneur who now has a business that’s growing. There’s some predictability and scalability to that business.
At a high level, a few things truly matter in business—and, really, in life. As a leader, you need to focus and figure out those few things that matter to you.
You really need to focus on the demand side of the equation.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

I was a sales-guy at one point, in my 20s. I started off on an inside sales team for a company. We sort of competed with Novell at the time, in the 80s. And I was really, really bad at it.
The failure was in trying to tell them why they should buy from me, instead of understanding what caused them to buy.

Biggest success with customers

My greatest success is the reason I’m a coach now.
The reason I do what I do today and why I say this is my biggest success is that two of the managers who were the least experienced said almost the exact same thing to me when I left. That was: “Bill, I just want you to know what you made me do. I hated it. It was really, really hard, but I’m so glad you made me do it because now I know what to do.”

Bill’s one key success factor

My greatest success is the reason I’m a coach now.

Bill’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed?

Actually, for people who want to scale their business, it’s basically like climbing a mountain. I like to use the Everest example. If you’re going to scale Everest, you don’t just decide one day and then start climbing. You have to prepare!
Deduce before you produce. And then, you don’t go to the top right away. You go to the base camp and work from there.
You acclimate to the environment and then you take the next step. Sometimes you have to go back down because the weather is terrible where you are. You have to move back down the mountain.
You can’t really see the top at the bottom. You might have a vague understanding, but you really don’t get it until you’re there.
I’ve been up Mount Mansfield, which is in Vermont.
I’ve also driven up Pike’s Peak in Colorado, which is one of the largest in the United States.
The best one I went up, which was just fun, was above the clouds and it was beautiful. That was in Hawaii, in Maui. It’s called Haleakala.