168 | Win in 2023 and beyond, based on interviews with over 150 CEOs and business experts

Happy new year!
Not only 2023 just started, but also it is the 3 year anniversary of the Business Growth Accelerator podcast. This episode covers best practices on how to build and grow a successful business based on interviews I made in the past 3 years, with successful entrepreneurs, CEOS, and business experts. 

The episode is divided into 3 segments:
💥 Obvious best practices
💥 Less obvious best practices
💥 What businesses must focus on in 2023 and beyond in order to win

Obvious best practices:

• Define clear long-term goals, and derive short-term goals that would lead you toward the long-term ones
• Build the right teams that can achieve these goals
• Put the right people in the right seats of the bus
• Put in place suitable systems and processes that would enable people to achieve their goals most effectively.

Less Obvious

• Having a mission, a vision and core values truly mater, if you know how to make them the north star and the operating system of your business.
• Having a deep understanding of your customers' and prospects' needs is key 
• Developing a community around your business, allows you to get feedback and iterate faster, while developing a moat built on trust, and generating high-value content.
• AI - We are reaching a tipping point in AI and its role inside businesses. Companies and organizations that will learn how to leverage AI faster, will come ahead of those who don't. 

How to win in 2023 and beyond 

• Start experimenting with AI (ChatGPT is a great place to start). Find places where AI can make your company or role, more efficient.
• Build and nurture a community around your business.
• develop a strong and positive company culture around clear core values. This will attract the right people, who cannot be replaced by AI (at least in the near future 😉)

Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
I would love it if you connect with me on LinkedIn. Drop me a DM, and LMK you listened to the podcast, what you think and what topics you would like me to cover 🙏

Transcript

Isar Meitis: 0:59

Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Matis, your host, and this is a truly exciting episode. This episode is the three year anniversary of this podcast that actually started as the e-tribe Podcast, and then later on turned into the business growth accelerator in these three years, I've recorded over 170 episodes. Over 150 of them are interviews. Over a hundred of those are with CEOs and the other 50 are with business experts who are leaders in their fields from all over the world. It has accumulated over 15 thousands of hours of listen ship, which sounds like a number. It's very hard to comprehend whether it's big or small, but if this was somebody's job and you would do it for eight hours a day for five days a week, like a job, it will take that somebody, seven years and four months to go through that time of listen ship, which is really, really humbling to understand that people out there, you who are listening to this right now, spend that much amount of time listening to myself and the amazing experts that have been on the show sharing content and sharing knowledge and providing value That can help you develop your career and grow your business. So what is this episode going to be about? Well, this episode is going to be about the lessons I've learned, the clear things that I've seen from interviewing all these amazing people as well as being an entrepreneur myself, and breaking them down in a way that will make sense, that will be easy to follow and easy to understand, as well as using them to make some predictions for 2023 and beyond. So let's get this started. If I look back to those 150 interviews, Which is obviously a lot and there's a lot of stuff that I talked about it's not easy to summarize all of it in one episode because we've covered so many topics with so many amazing guests about strategy and leaderships and systems and processes and mindsets and getting and maintaining and growing talent and so on and so forth. I was really trying to figure out if I summarize it all up, what do I find out? What are the things that I would really like to highlight from all these episodes? And I understood that it falls into two different buckets. And now I'm boring terminology from Christopher Lochhead, who's one of my favorite writers and podcasters and thought leaders in the world today. And Christopher Lochhead talks a lot about obvious and non-obvious. Conclusions and thinking. And I would really like to divide everything that I've learned and the things I'm gonna give you that are the things you need to do in a business in order to grow it to the obvious, and maybe not, not obvious, but the less obvious stuff. So let's start with the obvious. And that obvious doesn't come just for me. Again, it comes from interviewing multiple, very successful serial entrepreneurs and CEOs of businesses in different places around the world and in different industries. The first thing is you gotta be very clear in setting your business goals. I'm a big fan of the O K R style, but you can use any other concept of setting up longer term goals that then breaks into shorter term goals in order to define where the business needs to go. Step number two is to set up the right teams within your company in order to support these goals. And in many businesses, that's not a given meaning. Many businesses do. The first thing we're like, okay, let's define our three year goals and then our one year goal, and then et cetera. But they keep on running the business with the same teams, with the same people that they have always done versus. We have a new set of goals, maybe we should reconsider how our companies actually structured, what people we have on what seats, what seats we actually have that will help us achieve those goals. And it's not an easy exercise to go and rethink your business completely, but if you wanna achieve goals that are in the future, you gotta do it based on future terms and not based on your past terms on what brought you and the company to where you're today? So setting long term goals, breaking them down into shorter term clear goals, and then putting the teams together around them that will be able to achieve the goals that you've set for the short and the long term are an obvious that has to happen for any company who wants to be successful. And then in order to make this actually work, you gotta put together in place systems and processes that will allow you to a, define the required execution in a very clear way for short increments of time. You can call them sprints, you can call them whatever you wanna call them. But being able to identify to each person in the organization and to each team in the organization what they need to do today, tomorrow, this week, this month, is critically important for the success of a business to hit the short-term goals and hence the long-term goals that they're supposed to lead to. Another obvious take, borowing some terminology from some great people that I interviewed, but also from Jim Collins is putting the right people in the right seats of the bus. Meaning you need the right talent for specific things within your organization. People have different kind of skills, and you need people with the right skills, running the right segments of the company that is aligned with their personality, that is aligned with their experience, that is aligned with their set of skills in order to maximize. A, the level of happiness you will get from that employee and more on that later on. And B, the effectiveness of that person in the specific role and hence the organization will work in a much more effective way because each individual will work in their zone of genius and will be able to do better for themselves and for the people who report to them. This is, again, not an easy thing to do because it may require moving people to different roles in the organization, which are sometimes considered inferior to the role they're in today. It may require letting some people go. It may require hiring of new talent that you don't have today, replacing people that you do have today, which again means the person in that role today will have to move up, down, left, right, somewhere to free the role to somebody who has better skills, better experience and is that overall better fit to lead in a specific role in order to achieve the business goals that were set. Having the right people on the right seats of the bus is critical in order to achieve the goals that you set for yourself. The next topic is systems and process. And I will start with systems first because I do believe that today technology is not a nice to have anymore. It is a must. There is such amazing tools out there, technology tools out there that can help you in literally every single aspect of your business. And if you invest time in researching exactly the tools that are the perfect fit for what you need, so not necessarily what you see people around you do. Not the big hype names, but the systems that will really provide an edge for the way you want to run your business. You will get an edge over your competition, and in many cases, if you do the selection correctly, it's gonna be either free or close to free in the bigger scheme of running your business. And it definitely, if you do this correctly, will give you a very positive ROI. So having the right systems in place is critical for businesses. Too many businesses today, by the way, overcorrect, meaning they have too many systems, which means a lot of the systems are not fully utilized and it creates a big mess or a spaghetti of all these different systems that don't necessarily play well together and in addition, cost an organization a hell of a lot of money to maintain. And so sometimes you want to declutter your systems and go back and do a revision and look at what you have and look at what licenses you're carrying, both from a financial perspective as well as from a usability perspective. In my personal experience, one of the companies that I led in last minute travel, one of the first things that I did when I took the leadership of last minute travel was to look at all the systems that were in place. And I was able to save a huge amount of money right off the get-go, just eliminating systems that were barely being used. I mean, they were being used by about 15% of the functionality was being used, not providing enough value for the cost that it carried with it. So that's from my personal experience, but it happens. Probably in almost every single company out there that there's a lot of stuff that is being used, but not in an optimal way. Another small tip, if you want a way to save money, many software platforms have different kinds of licenses, and too many businesses go into this either through a consultant or themselves and say, Ooh, we decided to use this tool and we have 57 employees who need access to it. So we're gonna buy 57 licenses, I will give you an example of how. In my previous company, we saved a hell of a lot of money doing that, so we use click up as a task management and team management tool. It's similar tool to Jira or Monday or Asana or many other tools like that. I actually really like click up. I think it's an amazing tool, but in click up, same as many other tools. As I mentioned, you can go and buy licenses per employee. But the truth is, for every license that you have, full license, you can have 10 free guests. The difference in usability between a full license to a guest is basically negligible. It has to do with more system admin and stuff like that, meaning you can cut your expenses by 90%. Meaning paying only 10% of what you're paying right now to this particular platform if you just go and assign 10 guests for every actual license that you have while still maintaining all the functionality that you had before. So this is just an example, but that happens in a lot of companies. And if you go back to the drawing board and look at what systems you're using, what licenses you have, you have the opportunity to A, make things more effective. But B, save a hell of a lot of money. Next topic that has to do with a subset of having systems in place is making data-driven decisions. What I mean by that, the ability today to have a clear data tracking of almost every activity you have in the company is there. It exists. It's just the decisions of whether you want to track it or not. And if you track it, it will allow you to make a lot of your decisions based on actual data versus gut feelings. This goes across everything in the company from. Marketing, tracking different data about traffic and conversions to management, how much people are efficient in different steps in different days, in different teams. How your production happens, whether it's for a service or a product, and so on and so forth. So the ability to have. Data on how your company is operating and then using that data in order to make data-driven decisions is a given, again, to me, an obvious thing that should happen in every company today. So, These are the obvious things. Having clear long-term goals that derive short-term goals that define the way teams are put in place, that define the systems and processes that need to be put in place in order to support the short-term goals that will achieve the long-term goals, using data in order to make decisions. This exists out there today, meaning there's multiple really good books, great consultants and mentors that can help business leadership through this process and amazing systems that can support that. And when I say it's obvious, it means really there's very few excuses why you should not be at least good in all these things. Meaning not everybody can be great, but there's really no excuse not being at least good on all these things that I just mentioned, Which leads us to the less obvious stuff. And some of you who are listening to this may come and say, this is pretty obvious. I don't really understand the difference. But the reality is, again, after interviewing so many people, there are enough people out there who do not see the following things I'm gonna talk about as obvious. And they might see, some of them are obvious, but some are not. But to me, these hold some incredible keys and levers to grow business beyond what your competition is doing, just with the obvious things. So let's start with the less obvious stuff, having core values. And again, if you're listening to this and you are a hardcore core value business person, then you will tell me, this is pretty obvious. I dunno what you want. I dunno how you can run a business without core values. But then again, there's those who see core values as fluff, as something that is a plaque that they have to put on the wall because some consultant told them to do that. The reality is having the right core values becomes the operating system of your company. So if the business goals define what needs to be achieved, the core values define a. Why do you want to achieve these goals? And B, how each person in the company, how every employee should behave, act, think, responds, et cetera in the company in order to make it the most successful. And having the right core values as the operating system of the company makes a huge difference in the trajectory the company will take because it aligns every single person to the way the business is supposed to work. It makes selecting the people for the right seats on the bus a lot clearer because if they do not align with the core values, it will fail in the long run, even if they're very good executioners in the short run. I've recorded multiple episodes with multiple brilliant business leaders about how to define core values, but as a quick summary, it's about putting together a group of people from leadership as well as other levels within the company to really think what's important to you as people, not as a business. What are the important things to you as people? What are values that you are willing to lose business in order align with? And this is really the test, right? The test is your core values are things you're willing to give up business in order to stay aligned with your core values. And not just saying that, but literally doing that. And so defining that makes then very, very clear to define goals, to take actions, to make decisions because you have this north star that you know that everybody's aligned and will not move from and because having clear core values becomes this compass, this North star, that allows everybody to be aligned with the goals that were set and understand why decisions are made, you end up with a much more efficient organization as well as people who stand behind what the company does, and feel a part of the journey and not just employees off the company, which in return drives faster and more effective business growth. So how do you really take these core values that you define with a group of people and make them an operating system? Like I said, at the company, it has to do with more than just putting a plaque on the wall and talking about it in the annual company meeting. It's about. Making sure that your day-to-day operates based on that. It's about rewarding people and highlighting people who operate by these core values and doing this on daily basis and weekly basis in team meetings, in company meetings, in sprints, whatever it is that you use as meetings in order to run your business. Find the time, one minute within each of those meetings to highlight people who operate by the core values, which means more people will act accordingly. And the people who don't will either feel out or we be weeded out by their partners and coworkers because they do not align with core values. So this is one way to take core values from being a plaque on the wall to being something that guides action within the business. If we're talking about people, the next non-obvious that I see a lot of companies miss is company culture. Company culture is not something that is easy to define. And again, many leaders and many business managers see that as fluff. I'm like, oh, we just need to get stuff done. Do this, touch a job. The reality is it makes a huge difference if you have a healthy culture in the workplace because a healthy culture that people feel aligned with and they feel that they thrive in. Drives better results. People that are happier outperform people that are miserable. People who feel the part of the journey will outperform people who just feel they're doing a day job and all they wanna do is go back home every day. And to get that, you need a healthy culture that people align with. How is a culture created, first of all, by example, by leader? It's created through rituals that you're doing every day, every week, every month within the business to highlight, the things you want to see, and as importantly, to weed out the things you do not want to see. Coming back to having strong core values that are stronger than business decisions. Example, you have somebody who's a really amazing salesperson, but is an asshole. If he stays, it sets an example, right? That person drives a lot of business, but damages the culture of the business. If you keep him, it's a sign for other people that business goals are more important than company culture and other people will behave like that and you will lose good people because of that. So in the short term, you will probably win because that person brings you a lot of sales in the long term. You will lose a lot of the talent that otherwise would've stayed on board with you just because of that one person. So it's always a loss in the long run to allow people to ruin the company culture, just to gain some short-term business benefit. The next topic is probably the most obvious out of the less obvious stuff, and yet there's so many companies who do not do this at all, which is mind blowing, which is having a deep understanding of your true customer and client needs. And what do I mean by companies are not doing it? Too many companies. assume stuff, or once every three years, they go out and they buy this survey or they conduct a small survey themselves. But the reality is, in today's world, in the year of almost 2023, you can have a regular, ongoing conversation with your actual clients and prospects without investing a hell of a lot of time in it. Allowing you to really understand your clients and talk to them on a regular basis and get feedback from them continuously, which allows you to grow, improve, and iterate faster than your competition because you have a better understanding of your client's needs. So how can something like this be achieved? How can a business have ongoing continuous access to the deep thoughts and needs of their clients? The only way I know, or the only way that's scalable that I know is having your own community in which you communicate with the people in the community on regular basis, what I mean by regular basis, this could be every week or every other week, have a live show in which the community's invited to ask questions, participate, get educated, and receive value on topics that are interesting to them. Meaning not necessarily your product, not necessarily your service, not necessarily your personal expertise, but having a conversation about the problems that they're having and bringing the experts that can help them solve these problem. What you get if you do that is you get a few amazing benefits. The first one we already talked about, which is deep understanding of your customer needs, their problems, and the gaps that they have that you can help solve with your product or service, it also allows you to iterate on many different things you can experiment with new language, with new concepts, with new products, with new services, and get immediate feedback on it versus six months of development, three months of implementation. Just to find out in month 12 that it wasn't the right thing. If you have a community that is engaged, you will get feedback on that in week one, two, and three, which may save you those 12 months with a lot of effort that may not lead to the business goals you wanted to get to. Beyond the obvious that I already mentioned, meaning knowing where to drive your business in order to provide value to clients in order to grow faster than the competition. There are a lot of other benefits of having a community that you continuously communicate with. Benefit number one, it's an amazing source of referrals because people feel a part of the journey. They feel a part of the company and they'll be evangelists for it, which means you'll get more business without investing money directly in that growth. The other thing that comes from it that is a part of that is social proof. If somebody comes into a community of a company looking for a solution and they see a lot of other people like them, same status, same kind of companies, same industry, same. Something that they can relate to saying, oh my God, all these people are like me and they're using this product or their service successfully. This can help me solve my problem because they are like me. So in addition to the referral source, the people who come in, not through referrals will also be a lot more likely to do business with you because of that active, engaged community. Another really critical benefit of having a strong community is it's an amazing source of phenomenal high value content. What I mean by high value content, high value content is content that provides value to your customers and prospects and companies. Spend a hell of a lot of time building content calendars and hiring content experts and figuring. What goes out every week and running on this hamster wheel of content creation, where the true value comes from co-creating value with your customers and clients. If you allow your clients and prospects to participate in the process by asking you questions, by definition, you're answering the questions that they want answered, meaning it'll be more valuable if you allow them to participate in providing value, you make the even a closer inner circle of that content, which means the content and the value is co-created with those people who will now feel a part of your journey and will now drive more business to you, will have longer retention, more referrals, better social proof, and so on, and in the backend you will get amazing content that is relevant to the people you want to attract. So that's about community and co-creation of value. The next topic is category design. Category design. If you haven't heard about it, it's been around for a while. Most business leaders know about it today, yet, a lot of business leaders in company leaderships do not use category design as a way to help define the future of their business. In a very high level category design allows you to differentiate yourself from your competition. Meaning instead of competing on better features, lower price, and whatever, defining a new category in which you are better than the competition and highlighting that aspect of what you do, aligning the business to that and aligning the messaging to that as well. And then using what's called lightning strikes, events, content stuff and so on, in order to tell the world the story through that new lens. The idea behind this is if you can clearly define a problem in a way that people are not seeing it yet, and you can articulate it in a way that people can understand, people will assume, and hopefully for the right reasons that you have the answer. In other words, and now stealing the terminology from Christopher Lochhead. If you can frame it, name it, and claim it, people will think of you and your business as the people who best understand the problem, and hence, most likely have the best solution, and hence, Are the go-to company in order to get that problem solved versus, oh, we know there's a problem. Here are five companies who have solutions. I'm gonna pick one basis on who's gonna give me the cheapest option, which then becomes a race to the bottom. So category design is, another less obvious. That is, should be known to a lot of people today, but too many people are not using it yet. The final topic I want to talk about in the less obvious before we dive into predictions for 2023 and beyond is the world of artificial intelligence or ai. The world of AI is growing extremely fast and it's impacting more and more aspects of businesses and more and more aspects of our lives. And yet there are a lot of businesses who still are not either aware or really understand how to leverage it for their business. And I think that's gonna be a huge, huge divider moving forward. Meaning your ability to know what's happening with AI-based platforms and know how to leverage them in order to grow your business will be a huge differentiator in the next three years, which leads me. Predictions for 2023 and beyond. What do I see as huge trends that are gonna make a huge difference for companies who jump on these trends early that will help them run faster than the competition and hence win in their businesses? Let's start with the one we just finished on, which is ai. Back in March of 2021, I've recorded episode 126 that talked about AI in marketing and talked about tools that auto generate blog posts and text it's a really interesting episode that you should go back and check. But since then a lot has happened again. The world of AI keeps running faster and faster because it's feeding itself more and more data. And so open ai, which is the leading open platform out there today for AI in the past few months have released chat, G P T and Dall E. Two different platforms that use ai, machine learning ways to help achieve different things. Chat, G P T is just a machine that you can have a chat with, that can do a lot of stuff for you and it's free. You can go to open.ai right now and open chat g p t and go and type whatever you wanna type. So what can it do? Well, it can plan. You're a New Year's party. If you go and said, I'm planning Anu year's party and I will have about 30 guests, and I want the theme to be X, it will tell you what you need to prepare for the party. You can ask it. What's the best way to write a blog post that will summarize the year in marketing. And it will write that blog post for you. You can ask it to write your opening speech for 2023 for your company. Give it some background and it will write the speech for you and it will be pretty damn good, at least as a starting point. So this can save a huge amount of time, whether you take it as is copy and paste, or if you just use that as a baseline in bullet points, and you take it from there and enhance it. Either way it's gonna say view or your teams or people are doing these kind of things. A hell of a lot of. But this goes way beyond that. And I'll give you an example that I've seen already, people that are playing with, and I'm gonna record an episode because I'm gonna run this experiment and I'm gonna record a dedicated episode about that. So think about giving chat. G P t, again, a conversational engine, a task. To write you a specific lecture about a specific topic, then you can take that lecture and put it into a speech engine, something like the Descript. I use Descript to edit this podcast and to edit the videos that you see me on LinkedIn and so on. But one of the side features of the Descript beyond being a really cool, phenomenal editing software is the ability to read stuff from text in your voice, including all the nuances of your voice after you train the machine. Which means I can take the text that chat, G p t created, put it into Descript and have it be read in my voice as if I'm speaking. And I promise you now it's really me. But I think that in the very near future, I can take text and put it in there and just send it out to you as my podcast and you will never know it's not actually me speaking. But then there's the following step. There are platforms out there today who know how to take a still image of somebody's face and use a voice recording that can be digitally created, not by the real person, and make the face speak in a very natural way. One of those is D-ID, which allows you to do what I just said. So let me take you through the steps. If you lost me along the way, you can go to Chach GPT and have it write something for you that you want to talk about. You can drop it in a voice engine like Descript, have it speak in your voice, take the audio file. Drop it in a platform like D-ID and then have a video of you speaking that lecture and the whole process beginning to end can take you 10 minutes. So having a lecture on video of you talking about a topic, including all the research behind it for 45 minutes, while, you actually invested 10. Now, this could be either really exciting to you or really scary. I think there's very few people who will say, eh, whatever. But regardless whether you're excited or terrified from what you just told you that exists today, it doesn't really matter because this is happening. This is where the world is going, and in order to understand why I'm saying this is critical, as part of your 2023 and beyond stuff that you need to do for your business, just look back at history every single time the human race found a technology, a new thing that helped it make progress. It was adopted globally regardless of negative consequences. This has to do with stone tools, the fire, the wheel, nuclear energy, gun-powder, et cetera, et cetera. Every single time humans found a new technology that can help progress. One thing the potential negative outcomes of that thing were neglected and the new technology was used broadly across the globe. Once the technology gets adopted widely, you have two different options. Either you join and start using this technology as well, or you become the Amish of the new world, If you're in a business, you most likely don't want to become the Amish of the new world, which means you will have to adapt to this new tech, which means whoever starts using it early, the early adopters will really understand how AI works, what it does well, what it doesn't do well, how you can leverage it in different aspects of your business to make them more efficient. You will be ahead of anybody in your field, in your niche, in your industry that do not do that is prediction and lesson number one for 2023 and beyond. The rest has to do with all the less obvious stuff that I talked about before. Core values, culture, building a community co-creation of value. These things will play a bigger and bigger role in success of businesses. Now, this may sound contradicting to using AI for everything, but the reality, it's exactly the opposite. It's the ultimate compliment and enhancement of using ai because AI is still limited with some of the things it can do. It is very well in doing very specific task. It is not great in human interactions, relations, understanding psychology, working with people in order to make them happier in their job place, more engaged, more energized in order to achieve different things, and the same thing goes obviously for your clients and prospects. Meaning If you can build actual trust with real people and create and nurture relationships over time, your ability to win in a world that is AI-based for the day-to-day tasks becomes the biggest differentiator because Over time what will happen is that day-to-day tasks will be fulfilled by AI and the companies are going to win. Are companies who will know how to develop trust with their clients and prospects will build long-lasting relationships, will have communities who will have better EQ versus IQ within their company to have human talent that is focused on developing new differentiated thinking versus completing tasks because everybody will be able to do it incredibly efficiently using AI. So quick summary of this episode. There are a list of things that every company should be able to do good right now, just because the data is there, the systems are there, their knowledge are there, the books are there, and if you just follow that, you'll do good or great. And there's the things who are less obvious, like core values and company culture, and. Co-creation of value and communities around businesses and ai, that could be the differentiator that will take your business way faster than your competition if you learn how to use them now, when everybody is still not paying attention because they're paying attention just to the obvious. That's it for this three year anniversary episode. I hope you found this interesting. If you have, and if you've been listening to the show for a while, I would really appreciate it if you share this with people you think that can benefit from this. Just open your phone right now, hit the share button. Send this to friends or colleagues that you think can benefit from this episode or from the overall podcast. I would really appreciate. While you're at it, go to Apple Podcast, leave a review, rate the podcast, tell me what you think, and if you want to impact where this is going as far as future conversations, I would really love your feedback. Just find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, send me a direct message, and I promise you, me personally, not on AI and not on automated system. will respond to you and we'll connect with you and we'll try to create something together. And before I say goodbye for today, have an amazing 2023. I really wish you great health and happiness and success in the year of 2023. And until next time, have an amazing week.