Marc Daniels is the CEO and co-founder of ResultsBI, a business intelligence platform that has helped thousands of companies create a strategic plan, execute it, and track it. His passion is guiding entrepreneurs through creating a Strategic Plan of growth, and helping them execute that. 

Join Jim and Marc as they compare and contrast strategic ambitions and execution frustrations. 

3 Key Takeaways

• Planning Is Worthless Without Execution:  For an ambitious entrepreneur with a laser focus on growth, meticulous planning is essential. Yet planning alone can only take an entrepreneur so far. The true path to success lies in effective execution. As Marc says in this episode: “Planning is crucial to your success. But it’s the execution that brings in the millions.” 
• Riches in the Niches: Focus on your niche, core competencies. This allows you to respond quickly to customer demands, technological advancements and competitor moves. If you spread your business too thin, you’ll find it difficult to stay relevant in a dynamic business landscape.
• Experiment with Trends: If you pick a trend every quarter, eventually you’ll pick one that is right and adds a lot of value to your business.

Resources

Marc Daniels on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-daniels-231456a3/ 

Marc on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcldaniels/ 

Marc on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarcResults 

ResultsBI website: http://resultsbi.com 

ResultsBI on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/resultsbi 

About Our Guest 

1970s: Marc Daniels launched one of the US's first computer mail-order companies. 

1980s: Marc launched his first online presence and rebranded Varityper to PrePress Solutions, which grew from bankruptcy to $55M in yearly sales. 

1990s: Marc worked with Instrumentation Engineering, which sold for $300M in 2001. 

2000s: Marc worked on the launch of GameDealer.com, which sold to Electronic's Boutique, and co-founded Diligent Board Member Services, which sold to private equity for 941 Million NZD in 2016.

2010s: Marc is the CEO and co-founder of ResultsBI, a business intelligence platform that has helped thousands of companies create a strategic plan, execute it, and track it. His passion is guiding entrepreneurs through creating a Strategic Plan of growth, and helping them execute that. 

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

If you love what you are getting out of our show please subscribe.

For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/orchidblack/ 

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All contents of this show are rights of Orchid Black©️ and are not to be used unless authorized by written consent.

Mark, welcome to the dirt.

Hi, Jim. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Alright, yeah man, we're happy to have you. So, who are you?

I'm Mark Daniels, a very blessed individual. And, you know, in short, I've been blessed to run a number of companies and really been very fortunate both by some of my tenacity, but sometimes just good fortune to have some very successful ventures behind me.

Let's talk a little bit about those. So what is your origin story, a little bit of background, and then obviously what you're up to at Results BI today?

Okay, well, I'll try to make this quick. When I was in high school, I did a television commercial and it was during the energy crisis. And I was, we had to come up with a themed commercial. It had to be about the energy crisis. And when I was in high school, it was the 70s.

and we had gas lines and you can only take your car to get gas on odd days or even days depending on your plate and there my commercial had to be on the energy crisis so I had a guy and a girl on a sofa and I had a guy at one end of the three seat cushion stove for your traditional old-fashioned living room with a three seat cushion and a lamp on each side so the guy looks nervously over at the girl

She looks nervously back at him. And he reaches and turns off the light at his end of the sofa. And then he looks at her again and he gets up the nerve to move, one seat cushion closer to her. And he reaches around her and turns off the light and everything goes to black. And it said, enjoy the energy crisis, turn off all unnecessary lights. So I won first place in the state of New Jersey.

And I got a scholarship to a Jersey State College. And I went to college. And my guidance counselor, guidance counselors aren't always, you know, I don't wanna put down guidance counselors all over the world because we get a lot of emails from them and text messages and you'll get slammed. But my guidance counselor said, well, you need to go into television.

She was wrong. Marketing was at the heart of me, not television. So I went to college and my major was television and film production. And then when I was a sophomore in college, a drunk driver crossed to the wrong side of the road, hit me head on. Had my left arm nearly cut off. I spent a month in the hospital. They told me I'd never use my arm again.

Um, and I switched my major to accounting. Now, some people say, well, that must have been terrible. You know, um, you know, wish you wish, I bet you wish that never happened. It was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me in life. Because I really learned finance and I learned a lot about finance, learned a lot about accounting. And as I embarked into my career, I, uh,

with a practicing account.

But all of a sudden, I was doing the books for a Radio Shack dealership in a little town of West Milliford, New Jersey. And at that point in time, the country was in a real recession. We were in what's called stagflation. Inflation was running rampant. Prime rates were going up. They actually reached 18%. So I don't want to hear anybody complain about the prime rates today.

Go back to the late 70s and 80s, there were 18%. And the country had come to a screeching halt because any extra cash coming into the economy was going to pay for inflation. The Ford-Mawa plant two towns away closed down. It was the second largest manufacturing plant in the United States. This Radio Shack dealership lost instantly 20% of its revenue.

because people who had a work and unemployed. Then the drinking age in New York State was 18. That was one town away from West Milford, New Jersey. All of a sudden, the drinking age in New Jersey went to 18 because it was the end of the Vietnam War. And, you know, we were killing people, killing our young men in Vietnam. So the drinking age went to 18 all across the country in the late 70s and early 80s.

But people used to drive through West Milford and come to the bars in Greenwood Lake, New York. Well, all of a sudden nobody needed to drive to the bars in Greenwood Lake, New York. So the economy in the area was totally going away. Warner Brothers ran a retreat or a destination place, sort of like Disney World called Jungle Habitat. They closed down. And more than 50% of the population was unemployed. Out of work.

Terrible, terrible time in Northern Jersey, in that corner of New York State as well. So I was working for a Radio Shack dealer. He had just purchased his franchise, and he had signed off his house. And I turned to Joe, and I said, Joe, you're going to be out of business within six months.

And he said, you crazy effing kid, you don't know what you're talking about. He said, rerun the numbers. Came back in two days later. I said, Joe, you're right, I was wrong. You're gonna be out of business in four months. Not six, four. So that weekend, we went to a Radio Shack convention in Middletown, New York. And all these Radio Shack dealers were talking about.

Thank you.

this RadioShack Model 1. And some dealers were complaining about a place called Pan American Electronics in Texas that was mail ordering the RadioShack computer at a 10% discount. So rather than selling it for $7.99, they were selling it for $7.18 or $7.19.

So I pulled Joe away, we went to the bar, on the back of a bar room napkin, I wrote my first strategic plan. And what it was, was really simple. If someplace in Texas could do it, and nobody could afford computers in West Milford, New Jersey, we'd appeal to the whole United States to buy computers from us. I ran, he didn't wanna go forward with it, I ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal.

We were bringing in truckloads of RadioShack Model 1 computers and shipping them all over America. And every one we shipped, we made $100 clean on it because RadioShack transfer price was $599, and we were selling them for $699.

So that's how I started. And I got into the computer industry not really knowing what the hell I was doing. It was timing, luck, a little bit of marketeering. That's where it started. I ran that company for 12 years. We were originally called Computer Discount of America.

The margins started to deteriorate in computers, and we started to sell to musicians, desktop publishers, architects, lawyers, people that needed systems configured for their very specific needs. And that's when I realized that we had to change our name from Computer Discount of America to CDA Computer Sales. And...

and not be a discount house anymore, but to be a different type of, and that was sort of my first pivot. So very early on I learned, you know, how to pivot a business slightly, and then majorly. So that's how I started. I don't know if that's a, that was a long answer to whatever question you asked, but it gives you a background as to how I started.

Hmm.

Well, yeah, I mean, you said it's going to be a short answer.

and how I got to where I am today. I will tell you one, go ahead, ask your next question.

No, I mean, you said it was gonna be a short answer. I can't wait to hear the long one. The start of what you did on the strategic planning side is fascinating. So I'd love for you to just keep going and talk a little bit more about your stories as you grew into the man that you are today around strategic planning.

Well, if you think about it, the early purpose, you know, you always want to come up with your core purpose, why you're doing it. Simon Sinek wrote a good book about it, and it's called Start With Why. It's got a great podcast if you don't want to read the book. It's one of the number top five podcasts of all times, Simon Sinek. But you always want to start with why.

Why I started that company was to save Joe Russo's ass to save this guy who was in his 40s and it just signed off his house and You know and the next thing you try to do when you're putting together a strategic plan is figure out where you're gonna Go, I probably ignored it at that point in time. I didn't know where the hell I was going I didn't know what I had buckled up for I just was going by pure gut instinct

One of the very early things you do is you define your target market in what your geographic region is. And that's probably the fourth or fifth thing I usually work with or we work with on a client or in our software is, okay, now you know your vision, which is your why you're doing it, where you're going, and what kind of people do you want on the journey with you. That's what you typically do first. I ignored two of those in the beginning.

But what I did accidentally stumble onto is the fourth or fifth component that you look at is your geographic territory. And I realized that we were dead in West Milford, New Jersey. West Milford, New Jersey is a 17 mile long town. It's one of the three largest square mileage towns in the whole state of New Jersey. People aren't going to drive to come to a Radio Shack dealer to buy your stuff, even if it's discounted.

And you certainly are not going to get enough people to drive there. So we expanded the geographic territory to the entire United States. So that's part of the things that, you know, so many companies will start their business and they, they don't go through a strategy. Entrepreneurs, you know, I'm going to start a restaurant, you know, like if you're going to start a bagel shop, make sure it's on the way down the highway to New York city.

Hmm.

or to the major metropolitan area, you don't want the bagel shop on the wrong side of the road, right? People don't buy bagels on the way home. They buy bagels on the way to work. So you have to start out with simple strategy. And so many people, they're passionate about what they're doing, but they never put together a strategic plan. They might even put together a financial model, but you can't properly put together.

Right.

a financial model without thinking about the strategies that go with that first. So I got lucky. I was in a depressed area and I said, let's widen the scope of this to the entire country. And we actually gave it that name, Computer Discount of America. And

Right.

So that was the first component of strategy. Later on, when we weren't making money anymore, the margins were eroding. We had this snot-nosed skinny little kid, Michael Dell, entering the market. And there were so many computer competitors back there. There was Gateway, there was Commodore, there was Atari, there was Epson.

There was IBM that came out late to the market. They go, the list goes on and on and on. You know, we had to change our offering and appeal to a different market. It was no longer, you know, Computer Discount of America. And I actually recognized that a little late, but I was, I was at home one day. We had just.

It was the 80s, mid 80s, and the business had moved to a larger warehouse. And I got a call from one of my call center people. And they said, we have a customer on the phone and he's crying. And he won't get off the phone. We said goodbye to him once and he called back and he's crying. I said, switch the call to me. Switch the call to me. And.

And I take the call and the guy says, listen, I'm working on a, I'm composing something and I'm composing it. And I've been working on it for a year and a half. And my, my Macintosh 2CX just stopped working. And I said, well, do you have a backup? He said, no, I don't have a backup.

I said, well, I said, where do you live? He said, I live in Holland, New Jersey. I looked, it's been an hour and a half, two hours from me. Before you could look at addresses on the phone, but I knew where it was, it was on the Delaware River. Went to the warehouse, grabbed a brand new Macintosh 2CX, drove out to the guy's house, pulled the hard drive out of the computer, put the hard drive in, and the computer booted. Guy gives me a hug, he's crying.

So what are you working on? So my name is Stephen Mankin. I'm working on a score called The Little Mermaid. It was Alan Mankin who was working on The Little Mermaid. And after that, I changed my entire business plan. We started to sell to musicians. We had a phone number, 1-800-526-MIDI, M-I-D-I, musical instrument digital interface.

I started to sell the desktop publishers. We started to sell to architects. We started to sell to Indy race car teams. We signed with Porsche Motorsports and supplied all the computers to them for a while. So now we weren't just selling computers at discount and making nothing. You know, it used to be you could sell a lot of boxes, you can make it up in a volume. And that's an old joke, you know, sell it at a loss, make it up in a volume.

But now we were making, when we shipped a system, we were making five, $10,000 on a system that we shipped. From making hundreds of dollars to making thousands of dollars. Our numbers stayed pretty flat during that period of time, but our profit margins went through the roof. So that was where we changed one of our core disciplines. Right? We weren't an Amazon, and Amazon didn't even exist then.

but we weren't an Amazon. We were customer focused business building unique systems. That's another part of strategic planning. Are you going to be a value shop? Are you gonna be intimate with your customers? What's the, there's three disciplines. I'm trying to think of the third one. Oh, you know, like a BMW where you are allowed to charge more because your product is just crazy. You know, it's just a.

crazy high-end technology. So you're going to be a, and some people, when you're doing a strategic plan for some companies, they say, I'm everything. I'm really close with my customers. And yeah, we ship right away. We're, you know, we're like Amazon. We get it out there right away. And, you know, and yeah, we're a technology company. You can't be all three. You have to pick one area of discipline and be really, really good at it.

Right.

When you're really good at it, then you can add something. And Amazon sort of did that, they added Prime, right? So they were first a Turner of product, and then they picked up their service level in some areas and added another component. So when you grow up and you're a mature business, you can add another element of discipline, but you're never gonna be successful if you have three areas of discipline. So that's really important.

companies to realize that they can't be good at everything early on. So these are all components of strategy. There's really, I view it as 14 unique areas of strategy as you're putting together a plan. That's right.

So you guys went from being a discount shop to a luxury, in a sense, right? From cost-based pricing to value-based pricing. What drove those shifts in, was it just a response to market shift, or were there any other signals that you were able to drive?

Well, the biggest signal, the biggest signal was our P&L. We went from making a fair amount of money every time. We did $10 million in sales. We're making $500,000 down at the bottom line. Then we did 10 million in sales. We brought 250 to the bottom line. Then we did 10 million in sales. We brought zero to the bottom line.

We were at the point where we were starting to lose money. And it was really a doggy dog business. It was, yeah, really just terrible. And so it was, it was a light bulb going off in my head, my early head, that I needed to shift from, I needed to figure out. It was that light bulb that really, first went off when Reeve Calloway,

who owned a company called Callaway Corvettes. I don't know if he's still in business. He used to retrofit Corvettes. It was called Callaway Corvettes. He landed his helicopter in our parking lot to pick up a computer. Helicopter comes down in the field across the street from our headquarters in Califon, our shipyard warehouse in Califon, New Jersey. He jumps out, runs across, grabs a Macintosh, puts it under his...

What piece of software do you know today except if you're talking to Netscape sells for $5,000, right? Nothing. So that was, but I think it was really that night, overlooking the Delaware River in Holland, New Jersey with Alan Menken as I drove back and I just said, we're changing everything. And within a few weeks, you know,

I was doing strategic planning sessions with my team and saying we're going to shift everything. We had a big blowout sale, blew out all the crap, brought in cash, hand over fist, and it became a different company. Got some phone numbers like 1-800-MIDI. Alan Menken actually introduced us to a number of musicians, friends of his, so we really started strong in that area.

Hmm.

Reeve Callaway introduced us to Porsche IndyCar, the Porsche IndyCar team.

So, that's what really, then I sold parts, I sold that company. I sold that company to Micro Warehouse, Mac Warehouse. I sold off parts of it to different business units around the country. And I stopped doing computers because again, all those components that you had to buy.

Yes.

that went into the computer. Now we're becoming part of the computer, right? Now a computer could drive a big monitor. Now a computer could talk to a musical instrument. A little program called Garage Band or something. It was Apple's first attempt to do music. It was really terrible at first, but I could see the writing on the wall that all that was going away.

Yeah.

So I said, I'm getting out of this. I'm not gonna go through this again. And I went to a new company and I became, I was brought in to set up a mail order division for them. They were called Varityper. Varityper started in 1880. 1880, that wasn't a misspeak, 1880. And their first success was creating dog tags for the United States government.

They could hammer type into metal. And after the Civil War, there were literally hundreds of thousands of bodies that could not be identified and could not be returned to their families. So after that, we sent every serviceman to war with a metal dog tag, with their ID and name on it.

And that was their first big claim to fame. By the time I got to their company, typesetting was starting to fade out because you could now do typesetting on your computer. And you burn it to, so they started to make image setters. You could burn it to a Mylar piece of film and typesetters were going out of business. And even the people that would create the plates for presses were going out of business.

Hmm.

So again, I realized that I had joined the wrong company. This company was in trouble. They were nearly bankrupt. But there was one technician, one engineer that was working on what's called a plate setter.

of recordings in the 90s of a panther sitting on top of an image center and showing how quickly we could generate a metal plate. It was a live panther. I don't have time to tell you the story about being attacked by Shadow the panther, but I was attacked by a panther, a live panther at one point in time. So, doing a photo shoot.

That's a whole other story. I would tell you that another time. But um, anyway, we started to do these Panther image setters and they were relatively successful, but they weren't going really, they weren't selling like hotcakes. And then we went to a newspaper show.

Part two.

I think it was in Las Vegas, might've been in Los Angeles, and newspapers said, "'Can you build this in a tabloid size?'

And I'm talking sheet size. I'm talking about like New York Times size. And we said, yeah.

And we started to sell those things and we were selling those for $180,000 each. And the cost of manufacturing them was about $35,000. And we sold them like hotcakes. Every newspaper in the United States and Canada and all around the world bought two of them. Because newspapers were still hot back then. And that meant that they didn't have to go to film, that they could go direct to plate.

And before you know it, this company was doing $55 million a year again. They had gone from $80 million down to about 15, one 5 million. And now they were back up to $55 million selling these Panther plate setters.

Hmm.

It was a trend in the industry. And that's probably where I first started understanding that what I had read in the books that are up on the upper shelves here, the SWOT analysis, which was created by Albert Humphrey in 1960 at MIT, SWOT for people listening to the dirt.

The dirt is that swats were great back then, but they're not the best way to plan your future today. So I now do what's called a swaddle.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Throwaway threats. Nobody, nobody guesses threats right.

Hey, you were traveling last week, were you in the Bahamas? Yeah, you know, do you know they're being hit, gonna be potentially hit by a hurricane this week? Okay, but did you know that before you left or before you got there with your family or wife? Yeah. Okay, so you did know that it was coming, but you know, the businesses in Barbados where they might take a direct hit from this hurricane.

Yeah, I was in the Bahamas.

Now that's a threat.

I knew it before I was leaving, but not before I got there.

they probably didn't plan for being wiped out, right? And they could be, right? The Bahamas were wiped out a few years back. I have an investor that owns a company there. They were decimated. So nobody planned for COVID-19. 8,000 companies we serve on our platform. Nobody put global pandemic as a threat. Not one company listed global pandemic as a threat.

to their business. What you really wanna look for is trends. Trends are what drive growth. Now let's go back to computer discount of America. What drove the first wave of explosion there? Computers, you couldn't buy them. There were no stores. The only place you could go is go to a flea market, a computer show. There were no computer stores. You had to either, you had to buy them online. What drove the next explosion?

People that needed customized systems built, unique systems built, they needed their hands held. What drove Prepress Direct and Varityper to their next level of success?

Type setting was going away. They needed to cut two steps out of the printing process, direct to plate.

Um...

So I recognize then that trends were driven so much of the growth. So I do a SWOT very differently. I like somebody to look at their strengths because that's a sure bet. I like some company to try to eliminate one of their weaknesses because that's gonna make them stronger. And then I want them to look at a trend, an emerging trend.

Here are some results.

And I want them to do that every quarter. Because trends are hard. I'm gonna stand up for a second. I'll give you an example of a trend. I'm a surfer. I'm out there in the ocean.

I'm looking back, I see a wave coming. I jump up on my board and the wave sucks. Right? That wave, nothing. That was a trend that I picked in the first quarter. Now I see another trend. It's possible. This looks like a good trend. This wave is trending nice. I get up on that wave and I ride all the way in the shore.

If you pick a trend every quarter, eventually you'll find one that's right. And in the interim, you've done something you're really strong at, and that's probably been a success because you've leveraged a strength and you've hopefully eliminated or mitigated that weakness. Now what's this third letter? Oh, I don't use opportunities. I create three strategic projects. Then I create...

one big project that might last a whole year. What's the biggest obstacle you face in your business today? If you're a restaurant, it might be retaining people and keeping servers on the floor. If you're a restaurant here on Martha's Vineyard where I live, it's gonna be provide housing for your employees, because they can't afford to live, so they don't come here in the first place.

You know, if you're a startup, it might be secure funding.

So if I can get a company, if we can get a company, doing that every quarter.

working on their strengths, one strength, one project on the strength, one project to mitigate or eliminate a weakness, and one that's trying to ride a potential big wave, a potential trend, they're gonna grow. It might take them three, four quarters, I promise you they're gonna grow. So that's really, and it does take a discipline, it takes a disciplined leader to do that. And then the obstacle,

You can tell I read a lot of books. Great book by Ryan Holiday, I think his name is. The Obstacle is the Way. The Obstacle is the Way. And whether you plan a course around your obstacle or straight through your obstacle, getting through that obstacle is the way. So you know those are, and if I get people focused on that obstacle

No.

It really helps them. And the obstacle is typically a one or two year project that might take some time. Might be raising capital. I believe you have, I've read your bio. Yeah, you've been involved in fundraising. You've been involved in raising equity. That's not something where you do your first pitch deck and you walk in and boom, it's done. No, you might work on that pitch deck.

for a half a year till you even get a good bite. You might work on it a whole nother year till you get somebody saying, okay. So, you know, the obstacle is the way, but to keep somebody focused on the big thing that's blocking their success is really also important. So. Yep. So, that's, I call it a swaddle four, you know. Swaddle.

Yeah.

and then L.

You know, you leverage those four things. You find a project. Typically quarterly, they don't always have to be quarterly. You can do a project in six weeks, four weeks. Typically you want to spend that time and have a discipline to take your strategic plan and pause every quarter and see what progress you've made. And then as a leader, to have the discipline to look at your strategy.

every single week, whether it's in a dashboard, whether you're looking at those four projects and tracking how those projects are moving along, those four strategic projects that you created from those four components. Oh gosh, okay.

So I want to go back to something you said before that's tied to the swaddle and tied to everything you've done. You mentioned that there's 12 aspects to a strategic plan. What are those 12 aspects?

So we start out with your vision. There's three components of your vision. Your vision, your why you're doing it. And your why real quickly, it's never because I wanna be a millionaire. You have to love what you're doing. Today, I love what I'm doing. I love helping companies grow. I get great satisfaction out of it. The money will follow. I always say that, the money will happen. The money will just happen.

The next thing is where you want to be. What do I want to, where do you want to be in five, ten years? Jim Collins in his book called A Beehive, big hairy audacious goal. Where are you trying to get to? Now that you know that, what type of people do you want on that journey with you? That's your who. Who do you want on the bus with you as part of your journey? So that's your vision. Get that nailed.

Then your target market. Really understand your target market. Everybody say, I know who my target market is. Bull. Tighten up your target market. Narrow your focus down. Understand who they are. Create a persona for two people. The persona of your buyer and the persona of somebody who's gonna recommend you. Give them a name.

So my first persona might be Sally. She buys lots of stuff from me. She buys strategic planning software from me or she buys whatever I'm selling from me. And then the next person might be, so I'm always gonna, when I'm creating a new offering or putting product in my store or providing a new service, I'm always gonna think like, would Sally buy this from me, right? Then I'm gonna add another product.

and I want an influencer as my other persona. So I say, would Jim recommend this? Would Jim get behind this product? So that's my other persona. So I have Sally and Jim, right? So I like to see two personas come out and then your geographic region. Where are you going to focus on now? And I also then throw a curve ball. Where do you think you'll be in two, three years? Just serving?

the island of Manhattan? Or do you think you'll be serving all five boroughs? Or do you think you'll be coast to coast? So, where do you think you're gonna be in five years? Well, I wish I had printed them all, but the next one would definitely be your core values. I mean, your value discipline. And we talked about that already, your value discipline, whether you're customer centric.

The next one are the three reasons that somebody would buy your product from you. And you have to appeal to three different types of people's brains. The first is the rational person. You know, they're the CFO in the company. So the functional benefit, the rational benefit, and the benefit of the heart, the emotional benefit.

So I'll give you a good example. If you're selling B2C to a customer and I'm a painter, hey, I'm gonna paint your house. I scrape by sand and I paint it. That's my functional benefit, okay? The husband says, you scrape it, you always scrape it. Oh, that's great. So now he's thinking of his brain. That means it's not gonna chip as soon. And that means it's gonna last a little bit longer.

So he's thinking with his brain, that's his rational side. What do you charge? Oh, well you're a little bit more than the other guy. Oh yeah, but we all give everything three coats. Now he's thinking, wow, they're gonna sand, scrape, and give it three coats. It's gonna last eight years rather than five years, okay? And the wife, she's thinking, this little bit sexist, she's thinking, wow, 2,000 colors? And if she loves her husband.

She's thinking he won't fall off the ladder and die. Right? So she's got an emotional benefit, right? Now business, CEO says, man, we got to grow. We needed this piece of software to grow. You know, that's his functional benefit. The CFO, where's he go? He goes to the rational side, right? He's thinking right away, oh, it's going to save the money company. It's going to save the company money.

Yeah.

And the guy running sales is going to say, oh, it's going to be so much easier to enter an order and track an order. So he's the emotional person. So it works no matter whether you're talking to B to C or B to B. You got to appeal to all three of those. Then you want to do a competitive analysis. I was very, I was, I'm always very competitive. So you asked about the

12 to 15 components, but the competitive analysis, I always did. I always looked at what my competitors were doing. And it wasn't until years later that I started to do what's called a pest analysis. Competitive analysis, I forget who created that. There's a book up on my shelf. All consultants around the world, basically follow the similar steps through putting together a strategic plan.

And one of them is the five C's, the five C's of competitive analysis. They later on made it the seven C's and, you know, the seven C's are used a lot in Europe. But the five C's, you just really stack up how you stack up against all your competitors. But the one I skipped when I was younger, which was really stupid, is your pest analysis.

And I'm a little bit more involved, but it's political, economic, social, and technology.

So you do the pest analysis. And I was really very foolish in my early days that I didn't always look, I didn't do a pest analysis because I just always jump in right to let's be competitive. But in our world, we're changing so rapidly. We have political things affecting our product offerings, certainly economic, social. There was tremendous social discord two years back.

Black Lives Matter. Before that, there was that crisis on Wall Street. There's, you know, economically, war, gas prices, inflation, COVID, and then technology. Technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that you just cannot run a business without doing a pest analysis on a regular basis. I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of them.

Our software goes through all 14 in a very logical flow. And then of course the swaddle, which is four very special components. I do recommend that once a year you list your threats, the things you perceive to be threats. I don't want you to totally ignore threats, but very rarely.

I'd rather you look through your threats and say, which one of these threats is your biggest obstacle? You follow? Like threats, you don't typically grow your business because of a, well, COVID was something you could build, you know, if you were selling medical supplies and one of the threats was catching COVID, yeah, you could sell more masks or more hand sanitizer. But threats are really a challenging component to,

Everybody guesses threats wrong. Threats are something you usually don't, you don't get, you know, so, um, yeah. Um, and then, you know, I, I guess the biggest thing is that, um, I had a great mentor.

It's just a re oftentimes I see people just repeating their weaknesses in a different way. Yeah.

He's passed away since. Actually, he was the original CEO of Varityper. And he brought us away for a strategic planning meeting. And then he came back from that strategic, we came back from that strategic planning meeting, and the meeting was incredible. It was a great strategic planning session. But so important to involve your team and share your plan with your team.

Once you have this strategic plan done, and you know what you're gonna do for the next year and specifically the next quarter, to get your team excited about it, and to bring them all up to speed as to what you're going to do, that serves multiple purposes. Number one, get their feedback. Say, hey, do you think you can do this, Jim? And you say, yeah, I can do this, Mark. And then you turn to Joe and Sally.

And Sally says, I don't know, that's going to be really hard, Mark. And you say to Sally, what could I do to make that doable? What could I take off your plate? How about I give you another person in your department? Oh, if you give me another person in my department, I'll be able to do this no problem.

You know what I've just done? I got buy-in from you, Jim, that you can do it, and I got buy-in from Sally that if I give her another person that she can do it. Right away I call HR or I hire somebody for Sally. Sally's gonna have somebody else. A month from now I sit down with both of you and I say, okay, how are your projects going? You've given me the permission to harass you in a polite fashion, of course. Jim, you said you could get this done. What's going on? How can I help you?

What's the challenge you face? What obstacles can I help you remove? How can the rest of us help you get this project back on track? It's four o'clock. Sally, the same thing. We say, Sally, I gave you that extra person. What's up? How can I help you? What can we do to help you? What can we do to facilitate you moving this project forward? So it's really important.

Yeah.

that you become a disciplined leader, and that you're helping push and drive this strategy. You might have hired the best people in the world. You looked at their resume, you did a disc profile, you did all that, you did top grading, whatever you used. You even bounced them against your core values before you hired them. They're brilliant people, but they're not executing. The most important thing as a leader is to be a leader.

Mm-hmm.

and drive that execution. And I'm not saying beat them up. I'm not saying whip them to death. I'm saying get their buy-in and excitement at the beginning of the quarter. Make sure they're excited about you, as excited about it as you, and optimistic that it can be accomplished. In every single week, check in with them, hold a monthly quick, it doesn't have to be a long meeting. I hate meetings. I worked at FlexTronics for three years.

In San Jose, California, a multi-billion dollar company. Let me tell you, I hate wasted, stupid meetings. But have that quick meeting once a week to make sure your projects are on track. Once a month, sit down and go with it through it in more depth, and once a quarter, lock yourselves in a room for two or three hours and come up with your projects for the next quarter. If you do that.

your company will grow. I have so few people that fail to grow their company. You asked for 15, and while I was talking, I thought of two other things. There's two other components that we look at when you're doing strategy, is things that you must keep on doing, and things that you should stop doing.

And it's real simple. Are they aligned with your core purpose? Are they aligned with your core purpose? If they're not aligned with your core purpose, why are you doing them? Why are you doing them? And when I go into a company and say, oh, we're bleeding cash, we're in trouble, and we got to turn this thing around, I look at those two components very early on. And I say, why are you doing that? I was in New Zealand doing some coaching for a client directly on site.

And he said, well, because my father started this company and he always did that. And I said, is he still involved with the business? Yeah, he does a little bit of selling from every now and then. I said, stop doing it for the customers that you sign. Keep on doing it for the customers he signs. Went back a year later, he said, thank you, Mark. We saved $180,000.

by stopping that practice of what they were doing and going up and doing for all their customers that they serviced. And they continued to do it because his father was still lightly involved with the existing clients and with his father's new clients that he was still bringing on, but it saved a lot of money for the company. So if you figure out what you're doing that's aligned with your core purpose and stop doing things that aren't aligned with your core purpose. So many companies, they try to go too many

directions at once. And, you know, so you'll hear me say way too often, probably, narrow your damn focus, narrow your focus. So I don't know how long you have for us today. I think I've gone for about an hour here.

I want one last. Yeah, I got one. I would I would too, and I think we're gonna have to plan a part two. That's that's a in motion decision I'm going to make right now because we all.

I'd love to tell you about Diligent in our next session. Diligent Board Member Services, we sold that company for $941 million. Started with two clients.

But.

Alright.

So we're gonna dig into that and a bunch more on the next, on the part two of this, but one last question before we hop into our founder five. So what do you think of the quote, plans are useless, but planning is indispensable?

I say, I have a similar quote, so I'm just going to reply with my quote. Planning is crucial to your success, but the execution brings the millions.

I like it. You and Dwight Eisenhower, masters of planning.

the execution because you need to execute the plan. I told you a little bit about Bob Ternkamp coming back from that strategic planning session. He didn't get anybody excited about the plan and he never checked back in because he thought he'd surrounded himself with great people. So it's the execution of the plan.

So that's what's in there.

always about the execution, always. All right, so let's hop into these founder five here. So the first one is what is the top KPI that you are relentlessly focused on?

It's typically, you asked for the one. It's typically one of my, the progress on one of my three strategic projects. Now, I know that's not a key performance indicator.

In the results system, we have a dashboard, which is all of our measurements. So, you know, I like tracking the progress of our key strategic initiatives. Now, typically, they'll have a number assigned to them. So if we're doing, we're trying to increase the, let's say one of the projects is to increase, improve our retention.

Well, I'm going to be looking at the retention that quarter. If one of our projects is to grow the number of signups that we're having, I'm going to look at the new customers. So my KPI is typically tied to one of the strategic projects that I'm tracking. Um, of course, I always look at number of days of cash on hand. So you just got three answers and I'm sorry, but.

No, that was a good answers. They're good answers. And surprisingly, day's cash on hand is not one that I hear often enough. Um, so that's, that's a, that's a good one for our listeners. All right. So, um, next one is top tip for growth stage founders like you.

Three projects.

Three projects, not 20. You can't manage 20, you can't manage 10. In the 80s, I had the privilege of going, or I didn't have, it was a privilege, but I signed up for Franklin Covey, time management program. Went out to California, took a two-day class. In the Franklin Covey system, they said, make a list of the 10 things that you're gonna do. Circle the two.

Now with the big black, fat magic marker that you have, put a line through the others so you can't even read them. Go do the two. Now I tell you to do three, with a fourth one that's longer, but narrow your focus. Make, do the hardest thing first. Get that done. Get in the discipline of doing the big thing first.

All right, next one is a favorite book or podcast that's helped you to grow as a founder.

Oh, wow. Okay, well, my wife's a spiritual counselor. I have recently been listening to Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty has a great podcast called Purpose. He's interviewing basketball players, people that have started businesses, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian.

The basketball player, I think his name is Alan is his last name. He's a point guard. He's been in the NBA for 18 years. Remember what I start out with the strategic plan, your core purpose. His podcast is called Purpose. And when you have a purpose in life, everything else falls into place.

It starts with what your core purpose is. So my favorite podcast right now is Jay Shetty's and it's a podcast you can find, it's called Purpose. So.

Excellent. All right. Next one is a piece of advice that counters traditional wisdom.

Um.

I would say finding, you know, so many entrepreneurs, they think they can, they're going to do more by working 18 hours or working 16 hours a week. And work less. Work less. Find balance in your life. You know, find balance in your life. And if, when you.

wake up and do those two things on your list that I talked about, work on those two projects, you know, you'll find that your business is moving forward. And I think so many young entrepreneurs and even older entrepreneurs, they think they're just going to accomplish more by how many hours they work on and find balance in your life. I don't know if that counters traditional wisdom. I think some people would say that is wisdom, but I think for a lot of entrepreneurs

They think just working harder is the answer. It's really working smarter. Put together a strategy.

Yeah, agreed, agreed. All right, last one. What is going to be the title of your autobiography?

So.

execute.

Nice. I love it. Exclamation point probably, maybe three of them.

Execute. Yeah, I mean somebody who picked that up and say, what's this guy killing people? No, execute. Execution. Unending focus on execution and strategy. Yeah, just that discipline, but execute would probably be it.

Ha ha ha!

Maybe not execute them, execute it.

That's a good one. All right, you've given a ton to our listeners today, Mark. So time for a little bit of self-promotion. How can those listening help you out?

ResultsBI.com. I do a lot of free monthly. I do a free strategic planning session. I have one coming up in July because it's the middle of the year.

And if you haven't done a strategic plan join me for a three-day strategic planning intensive Hour and a half every day and I'll help you step through putting together a strategic plan for free for free and You know visit results bi.com. I also have a LinkedIn page and So I do post the LinkedIn

fairly frequently, at least once a week now. So those would be the two places to go to. Sign up for our newsletter. I put out a newsletter every other week and that you can find right on the results BI website, the newsletter. Yes, for sure. Great, thank you, Jim. Same here.

Is LinkedIn the best place?

Is LinkedIn the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Excellent. Okay. All right, Mark. It's been a pleasure. Stay tuned everyone for number two coming out soon where we're going to talk to Mark again. So thanks for joining us, Mark.

Two customers 2000 from zero sales to 80 million in sales and a sale of that company for 984 million dollars. I'd love to tell you all about it Okay, thank you. Bye bye

All right, we're going to do that. Awesome, man. Great having you take care. Bye Mark.