Transcripts
Hi, welcome to the Close The Loop Podcast.
Kevin Dieny:I'm Kevin Dieny, your host, and we're going to be talking today about
Kevin Dieny:scaling your business like a weed.
Kevin Dieny:And I have a special, really exciting guest today.
Kevin Dieny:His name is Stu Heinecke.
Kevin Dieny:He's a best-selling author.
Kevin Dieny:He is one of the wall street journal cartoonist.
Kevin Dieny:It's actually so awesome some of the stuff he's done.
Kevin Dieny:He's a twice nominated hall of fame marketer.
Kevin Dieny:His book, How To Get A Meeting With Anyone was named last year, one of
Kevin Dieny:the top 64 sales books of all time.
Kevin Dieny:While his next book, explores a new growth strategy model based on
Kevin Dieny:weeds, How To Grow Your Business Like A Weed, releases May 2022.
Kevin Dieny:So you want to get your hands on this.
Kevin Dieny:This is fantastic.
Kevin Dieny:So welcome Stu.
Stu Heinecke:Hey, thank you.
Stu Heinecke:You can't get your hands on it yet.
Stu Heinecke:There's no pre-order link or anything, but I hope it's coming soon.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah, there's some stuff out there about it.
Stu Heinecke:Yeah, there's a lot.
Stu Heinecke:I'm talking about it a lot and we just, it was kind of cool.
Stu Heinecke:We just, the publisher just sold the audio book rights.
Stu Heinecke:So when it releases in May, by the way, that's intentional.
Stu Heinecke:That's when all the weeds start popping up all over the Northern hemisphere.
Stu Heinecke:They're my memes.
Stu Heinecke:So anyway, the audio and the print edition will be releasing at the
Stu Heinecke:same time, which was really cool.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah, that is awesome.
Kevin Dieny:And just so everyone's understanding what we're talking about today,
Kevin Dieny:and we're talking about scaling your business, like a weed, uh, and
Kevin Dieny:that's being the topic of Stu's book.
Kevin Dieny:We're going to be really diving into scaling your business.
Kevin Dieny:And I think this puts a lot of onus on the owners of businesses because.
Kevin Dieny:The way I look at it is every business should and want to be growing, should
Kevin Dieny:want to be expanding either its market, its scale, its efficiency,
Kevin Dieny:and that's a cultural component.
Kevin Dieny:A lot of that falls on leader, the owner, the business managers, whoever's in charge
Kevin Dieny:of their departments, of the company.
Kevin Dieny:That's a cultural component wanting to scale your business and making sure
Kevin Dieny:that that's happening all the way down through the lines of your business.
Kevin Dieny:I think is something that some companies, some business owners are
Kevin Dieny:like, ah, that sounds like too much.
Kevin Dieny:That's too tough.
Kevin Dieny:That's too crazy.
Kevin Dieny:So it's easy to get comfortable, I think right, Stu?
Kevin Dieny:Maybe it's just too much to do right now.
Kevin Dieny:And so what do you have to say about all that?
Stu Heinecke:Well, I mean, if you're talking about, about growth as a tangent
Stu Heinecke:to culture, the owner, the leader of the business is the one that leads the growth.
Stu Heinecke:That's true, but they lead a team and that team has to be with them all the time.
Stu Heinecke:But here's the thing, you know, I think the most effective thing you can do,
Stu Heinecke:and if by the way, it's falls under soil strategy under in the weeds model.
Stu Heinecke:I think one of the most effective things you can do is to create a
Stu Heinecke:movement around what you're doing.
Stu Heinecke:So there are internal and external movements and, and certainly you
Stu Heinecke:want to start wherever it happens.
Stu Heinecke:But, addressing your question in particular, you'd want to create
Stu Heinecke:an internal movement so that everyone is saying, wow, this is
Stu Heinecke:the, you know what we're doing it when we're together for a reason.
Stu Heinecke:And this is a moment in time that we'll never forget and we're going
Stu Heinecke:to do some really great stuff.
Stu Heinecke:Let's say, if your company sells windows, that's not quite a movement,
Stu Heinecke:so you've got to create some, some excitement about what you're doing.
Stu Heinecke:So it might be that while you're selling windows, you're also doing
Stu Heinecke:something with habitat for humanity.
Stu Heinecke:Or maybe you're giving an award out.
Stu Heinecke:Maybe it's a, maybe there's an architectural award that you can give out.
Stu Heinecke:Like when the, when the book comes out, I'm going to have a blast and I'm going
Stu Heinecke:to have a blast with it because one of the things we're going to be doing is
Stu Heinecke:giving out an annual Total Weed award.
Stu Heinecke:So we're going to choose the person who most exemplifies weed-like
Stu Heinecke:determination and grit and growth.
Stu Heinecke:I'm gathering a whole group of judges.
Stu Heinecke:So it won't be up to me, thankfully.
Stu Heinecke:It shouldn't be just up to one person, but my money is on Elon.
Stu Heinecke:Does that make sense?
Stu Heinecke:So you create a, you create this, I'm like do something that makes
Stu Heinecke:people feel like they're what they're doing is important in the world.
Stu Heinecke:And there'll be right there with you.
Stu Heinecke:So I think that, it's important to do something important in the world anyway.
Kevin Dieny:Also, my mind when you say weed, right?
Kevin Dieny:There's a lot of synonyms, things, definitions.
Kevin Dieny:There's a lot of things that you think about.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah, so when you say Grow Your Business, Like A Weed, why use that?
Kevin Dieny:And how does that really apply to the grand scheme of growing a business?
Stu Heinecke:It's a universal or universally understood metaphor.
Stu Heinecke:Everybody knows what it means to grow like a weed.
Stu Heinecke:Right?
Stu Heinecke:I mean, we all know what that is.
Stu Heinecke:And I think most of us who own businesses would love to have
Stu Heinecke:our businesses grow like a weed.
Stu Heinecke:And I guess then the point is.
Stu Heinecke:Then, well, how does that work?
Stu Heinecke:And the other thing is all you have to, if you have a yard or if
Stu Heinecke:you have eyes, just look around, you'll see what they're doing.
Stu Heinecke:And so right now, they're in senescence.
Stu Heinecke:So they're, they're resting.
Stu Heinecke:But their seeds are in the ground.
Stu Heinecke:They are ready to germinate in the spring and they will run their process.
Stu Heinecke:This winning process.
Stu Heinecke:This process has been developed over tens of millions of years and it's just
Stu Heinecke:programmed straight into their DNA.
Stu Heinecke:They just run it like programming.
Stu Heinecke:All of that is set to go.
Stu Heinecke:The timing of the release of the book is important because I wanted it to come out
Stu Heinecke:when the weeds are also sort of releasing themselves when they're coming out of
Stu Heinecke:the ground and running their processes so that everyone looks around and says.
Stu Heinecke:Look at these weeds, they're coming up.
Stu Heinecke:Oh wait.
Stu Heinecke:But there's that book?
Stu Heinecke:I've got to get that book.
Stu Heinecke:So I hope that it does that, but, but the thing is, it is an universally
Stu Heinecke:understood metaphor, growing something, growing anything like a weed.
Stu Heinecke:But here's what I hope the book will do.
Stu Heinecke:I think that what it'll do is that people go out and they start looking
Stu Heinecke:around their yard and they notice...
Stu Heinecke:Oh, you know look at that.
Stu Heinecke:Look at the dandelion.
Stu Heinecke:Look what the dandelions are doing.
Stu Heinecke:I didn't notice it before, but they're running their process of
Stu Heinecke:flowering and seeding really fast.
Stu Heinecke:And they do it over and over and over again throughout the growing cycle.
Stu Heinecke:Whereas more polite plants, less aggressive plants do it maybe
Stu Heinecke:once in the whole annual cycle.
Stu Heinecke:They're doing it over and over and over again.
Stu Heinecke:The thing is weeds never do anything without an unfair advantage.
Stu Heinecke:And so if you watch them, they have cultivated all kinds of unfair advantages.
Stu Heinecke:And these are the things that we can learn from in our businesses.
Kevin Dieny:What would you say to someone who's like, well, I don't
Kevin Dieny:think my business can do that.
Kevin Dieny:I don't know if my business is capable of that.
Kevin Dieny:I don't know if my teams, if my product, or my service, could
Kevin Dieny:go that direction and scale.
Kevin Dieny:I think that there, there might be lack of a vision possibly where
Kevin Dieny:someone may think scaling is a luxury.
Kevin Dieny:And maybe that doesn't apply to my industry.
Stu Heinecke:Well, man, there's a lot of ways to go with that because if your
Stu Heinecke:business can't scale, what are you doing?
Stu Heinecke:Like why, why does it exist?
Stu Heinecke:We build our businesses to, to grow them.
Stu Heinecke:I think beyond that, a couple of things maybe might be implicit in your question.
Stu Heinecke:They might be thinking to themselves I just don't see my team doing this.
Stu Heinecke:Right.
Stu Heinecke:I don't see this doing this, with my team or maybe my product or my service.
Stu Heinecke:I'm just a pizza place, but you know, there are huge franchises
Stu Heinecke:of pizza franchises out there.
Stu Heinecke:There is a lot of scaling around almost anything.
Stu Heinecke:I can't give you the vision, I mean, the entrepreneurs have to grow
Stu Heinecke:their own visions, but assuming you have a vision, I would say anything
Stu Heinecke:that can grow can grow like a weed.
Stu Heinecke:And I think though the thing is you just have to understand what that means.
Stu Heinecke:I'm not a botanist or even a gardner you know, I just don't notice the weeds.
Stu Heinecke:And I was like, wow, look at them.
Stu Heinecke:How can we assume and assimilate what they do and what is it that they do?
Stu Heinecke:And so what I realized is that through, through all this research is that weeds,
Stu Heinecke:they take all forms and come in all sizes.
Stu Heinecke:They're on six continents.
Stu Heinecke:A lot of weeds spread across all six continents.
Stu Heinecke:They're not in Antarctica because I guess it's just a little bit
Stu Heinecke:too cold, but otherwise you find a dandelion they're everywhere.
Stu Heinecke:They're all over the world.
Stu Heinecke:So there's some really very successful strategies happening here.
Stu Heinecke:So here's the thing.
Stu Heinecke:All I mentioned, they all come in all shapes and sizes, but they all follow the
Stu Heinecke:same formula and isn't that interesting?
Stu Heinecke:There's a simple formula, but it branches out from there.
Stu Heinecke:They all use this incredibly aggressive mindset.
Stu Heinecke:And they leverage that and unfair advantages, which they cultivate
Stu Heinecke:and turn into force multipliers.
Stu Heinecke:They leverage their mindset and force multipliers against collective scale.
Stu Heinecke:That's what they do.
Stu Heinecke:They do it according to a process that is programmed into
Stu Heinecke:their DNA, they just run it.
Stu Heinecke:And that process is a miracle because it is honed over millions of years.
Stu Heinecke:The fossil record says that flowering plants showed up on
Stu Heinecke:the planet 145 million years ago.
Stu Heinecke:And we have to assume at least some of them, or maybe most of them, I don't know.
Stu Heinecke:Cause the most successful were weeds.
Stu Heinecke:And so that's a long time to hone a process, but at the same time, this
Stu Heinecke:process is able to pivot on a dime.
Stu Heinecke:There's one weed that showed up in agricultural fields about, let's
Stu Heinecke:say 10 years ago, it really started showing up it's called waterhemp.
Stu Heinecke:It's just a weed from hell because waterhemp releases up to
Stu Heinecke:4.8 million seeds as an annual.
Stu Heinecke:So it does that every year.
Stu Heinecke:It's not divided over five or 10 years.
Stu Heinecke:Every plant can release up to 4.8 million seeds and it does it every year.
Stu Heinecke:And so these seeds they're like little Careway seeds, they're little tiny seeds.
Stu Heinecke:They stick to actually everything they stick to everything.
Stu Heinecke:And so when the farmer comes through the fields and with their combine machine and
Stu Heinecke:they start spreading those seeds around.
Stu Heinecke:You're never going to get rid of this plant.
Stu Heinecke:Now here's the thing, agriculture uses herbicides a lot to control this problem.
Stu Heinecke:And it's a problem because these weeds, they grow faster than, than, the crop
Stu Heinecke:species like barley and rye and even corn, they grow faster than those crops do.
Stu Heinecke:So if they're doing that and they germinate before the crops do, they're
Stu Heinecke:going to just blanket the crops.
Stu Heinecke:So they have got to get rid of them.
Stu Heinecke:Well, waterhemp has has developed immunity to Roundup in four years.
Stu Heinecke:So here's an ancient process it's running, but it was able to, to
Stu Heinecke:evolve around Roundup in four years.
Stu Heinecke:That's incredible.
Stu Heinecke:And so I think I'm still answering the question, what if my company can't do
Stu Heinecke:this, but I think, we can all do this.
Stu Heinecke:It's just an, it's an attitude, it's a mindset.
Stu Heinecke:And it's also a process of building advantages into your company, like unfair
Stu Heinecke:advantages into your company so that they become force multipliers, unique
Stu Heinecke:force multipliers, just to use so that your competitors can't, can't beat you.
Stu Heinecke:And then you do that against the collective scale.
Stu Heinecke:And that is how we scale.
Stu Heinecke:That's how everything scales, not only in the weed world, but it
Stu Heinecke:also is how everything scales in our world, in the business world.
Kevin Dieny:So when you say force multipliers, is that like a
Kevin Dieny:competitive advantage, like something unique or something valuable that
Kevin Dieny:you can offer in a unique way that dominates or is special to you?
Stu Heinecke:Yup.
Stu Heinecke:Yup.
Stu Heinecke:I'll tell you, I'll give you a good example.
Stu Heinecke:I'm not only an author and a marketer.
Stu Heinecke:I'm also one of the Wall Street Journal Cartoonists.
Stu Heinecke:I'm a cartoonist, and I've been using cartoons my whole career.
Stu Heinecke:And I wasn't always in the journal, but I've been a cartoonist my whole career.
Stu Heinecke:And I discovered that really early on that if I sent someone one of
Stu Heinecke:my cartoons and it's personalized.
Stu Heinecke:That I would get through to anyone.
Stu Heinecke:In fact that's the basis of the two books behind me.
Stu Heinecke:How To Get A Meeting With Anyone and Get The Meeting.
Stu Heinecke:I started sending cartoons around to people about them.
Stu Heinecke:And, when I first started my business, I wanted to create direct mail campaigns
Stu Heinecke:for publishers, for magazine publishers.
Stu Heinecke:So I sent this, I didn't know what to call it.
Stu Heinecke:I called it a contact campaign, but an 8 by 10 print of a cartoon,
Stu Heinecke:each one about each recipient.
Stu Heinecke:These recipients by the way, were about two dozen VPs and Directors of Circulation
Stu Heinecke:Network, or Consumer Marketing at the big, big Manhattan based media companies.
Stu Heinecke:Print media companies like Time Inc, and Conde Nast and the Wall Street Journal
Stu Heinecke:and Harvard Business Review and Forbes.
Stu Heinecke:And there aren't a lot of them, so I only needed to reach out
Stu Heinecke:to about two dozen people.
Stu Heinecke:So I sent this contact campaign, it's a print of cartoon, by
Stu Heinecke:me and about each recipient.
Stu Heinecke:And I said, this is art, with my note, this is the device I just
Stu Heinecke:used to beat the controls for Rolling Stone and Bon Appetit.
Stu Heinecke:I think we should put this to the test for your titles.
Stu Heinecke:Well, I ended up getting a hundred percent response rate to that campaign.
Stu Heinecke:I actually I had a hundred percent meeting rate.
Stu Heinecke:All of them met with me.
Stu Heinecke:I got a hundred percent conversion rate.
Stu Heinecke:All of them became clients.
Stu Heinecke:It was worth millions of dollars.
Stu Heinecke:And I spent about a hundred dollars on this campaign.
Stu Heinecke:The point is.
Stu Heinecke:My unfair advantage there was cartoons.
Stu Heinecke:I was a marketer and a cartoonist together.
Stu Heinecke:And there have been a few that have popped up since.
Stu Heinecke:The Marketoonist and Tom Fishburne but anyway, so some have caught onto
Stu Heinecke:that, but being a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, that's just a huge advantage.
Stu Heinecke:As an example, the there's a huge LinkedIn group among sales.
Stu Heinecke:It's like the salespeople and it's like half a million followers.
Stu Heinecke:It's called sales humor.
Stu Heinecke:So I reached out to Ken, the guy who runs it, and I said, Ken, I'm
Stu Heinecke:a Wall Street Journal cartoonist, I would love to contribute some of
Stu Heinecke:my cartoons to what you're doing.
Stu Heinecke:And he said, man, how can I, how can I resist?
Stu Heinecke:Right.
Stu Heinecke:So.
Stu Heinecke:Great.
Stu Heinecke:He's going to start running my cartoons.
Stu Heinecke:And then I don't know if he's going to do this or not, but with some of
Stu Heinecke:the other groups that I'm working with, well, we can turn those
Stu Heinecke:cartoons into their personalized.
Stu Heinecke:We can turn them into the same Christmas cards and I can
Stu Heinecke:produce a PDF card generator.
Stu Heinecke:So you can go in and change the, the name and the caption printed out convert it.
Stu Heinecke:And you've got a card like, like this, you know, It looks pretty cool.
Stu Heinecke:And you can write a note in there.
Stu Heinecke:Of course that's what you would do, send it out.
Stu Heinecke:So, I ended up waltzing into some of these circumstances or some of these
Stu Heinecke:situations because I'm a cartoonist from the Wall Street Journal.
Stu Heinecke:So that's an unfair advantage.
Stu Heinecke:Nobody else can do that.
Stu Heinecke:No one else can match that.
Stu Heinecke:That's a force multiplier because now, now with sales humor, I'm working with Ken and
Stu Heinecke:I'm serving his audience, but I'm reaching an audience of half a million people.
Stu Heinecke:And that same thing happens when my cartoons, when they go
Stu Heinecke:into the journal itself, they're circulation last I checked.
Stu Heinecke:Their circulation is a little over 2 million.
Stu Heinecke:So that's an unfair advantage.
Stu Heinecke:Well, just being able to reach out to people, all the things that I
Stu Heinecke:covered in in the two books behind me in the two meetings books, you've
Stu Heinecke:got to get the meetings, books.
Stu Heinecke:If you're able to get a meeting with someone or like virtually
Stu Heinecke:anyone, that's a huge advantage.
Stu Heinecke:If you have a way of doing that, that's an unfair advantage and you
Stu Heinecke:want to cultivate all kinds of unfair advantages in the way that your business
Stu Heinecke:is structured and how you do business.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah, I think of the times I've been, let's
Kevin Dieny:call it like a home gardener.
Kevin Dieny:I've planted some things and thought I'm going to make a great garden.
Kevin Dieny:I'm going to eat out of my own backyard.
Kevin Dieny:I'm going to have a meal where it's something I've prepared for myself.
Kevin Dieny:I think of that kind of like the entrepreneurial mindset.
Kevin Dieny:I'm going to build a business.
Kevin Dieny:I'm going to create a department.
Kevin Dieny:I'm going to hire people.
Kevin Dieny:It's going to serve something right out of the hard work that I'm doing.
Kevin Dieny:But a hundred percent of the time the garden goes awry.
Kevin Dieny:The garden gets untended.
Kevin Dieny:Something about it goes crazy.
Kevin Dieny:And the weeds pop up there.
Kevin Dieny:And my plants that I wanted, the great setup I had completely wilted and die.
Kevin Dieny:And so it's like, man, I wish these plants were more like the weed.
Kevin Dieny:But at the same time, at the end of the day, I'm always like, okay, this failed
Kevin Dieny:because of my lack of tending this, or my lack of getting this, this thing going.
Kevin Dieny:So I look at that in the business world too.
Kevin Dieny:The application here of all of this.
Kevin Dieny:And I think, well, as a business owner, as a business leader, when things aren't
Kevin Dieny:working, when things are going downhill.
Kevin Dieny:Maybe I can change from here.
Kevin Dieny:Maybe that pivot, maybe I can flip from being in the red to being in the black.
Kevin Dieny:But what do I do?
Kevin Dieny:How do I, how do I move?
Kevin Dieny:What direction is best for me to move from here so that I can start scaling?
Kevin Dieny:So that this can become successful.
Kevin Dieny:It doesn't keep going the way that it has always gone or that it feels
Kevin Dieny:like it's just going to keep going.
Kevin Dieny:And that pivot, maybe that change, that direction I switch, I think
Kevin Dieny:does require a force multiplier.
Kevin Dieny:Where am I going to go?
Kevin Dieny:Where, where is a good advantage for me to go where I can at least take that
Kevin Dieny:first step and use that to get a leg up?
Stu Heinecke:You know one of the things you were telling me about your garden.
Stu Heinecke:You know, I'm thinking, well, you know, weeds do is they take advantage
Stu Heinecke:of disrupted ground, don't they?
Stu Heinecke:You're inviting them in when you.
Stu Heinecke:Essentially, you're inviting them in, not because you actually said come on in.
Stu Heinecke:But because you, when you disrupt the ground, their processes are
Stu Heinecke:set up so that they immediately they take advantage of it.
Stu Heinecke:Let me grab something real quick.
Stu Heinecke:I have two jars here, right?
Stu Heinecke:One has douglass fir, um, cones.
Stu Heinecke:And then these are believe it or not, dandelion seeds.
Stu Heinecke:That's a lot of seeds.
Stu Heinecke:But here's the thing, I'm surrounded by Douglas firs are huge trees.
Stu Heinecke:They, I think they grow up maybe 150 feet.
Stu Heinecke:They're big.
Stu Heinecke:They're not sequoias, but they're big.
Stu Heinecke:And they start from a little cone like that.
Stu Heinecke:And when you watch what their process is, they just drop these things straight.
Stu Heinecke:That there's nothing there's no, well, the squirrels like run around
Stu Heinecke:with them, but, but otherwise there's nothing in terms of dispersion.
Stu Heinecke:So they don't have a secret.
Stu Heinecke:That's not a secret weapon, is it?
Stu Heinecke:I mean, it's like a, not a, not an unfair advantage at all.
Stu Heinecke:They're just dropping their seeds at their feet.
Stu Heinecke:Dandelions and see if I can get it to you of these guys and not let them get away.
Stu Heinecke:But here we go.
Stu Heinecke:I don't know if you could see it, but here's some dandelions seeds.
Stu Heinecke:We know what if I let these things go, they're going to fly away.
Stu Heinecke:The reason why, all those years ago the thing that started me on this quest to
Stu Heinecke:write the book and just really formulate weed strategy as a new model for growth.
Stu Heinecke:Is that I saw a dandelion growing out of a crack in the median, actually
Stu Heinecke:it was on the Santa Monica freeway.
Stu Heinecke:I think I'm not far, it wasn't very far away from you.
Stu Heinecke:This wide concrete median and six lanes of traffic going this way and that way.
Stu Heinecke:No place for a plant to live like this, this sea of impossibility, but
Stu Heinecke:they're process allows them to find exactly where they need to go to exploit
Stu Heinecke:essentially any opportunity to grow.
Stu Heinecke:So there it was the seed like you look at and you think, well, how
Stu Heinecke:could that have ended up there?
Stu Heinecke:Well, we know exactly how it ends up there.
Stu Heinecke:Those seeds fly around and they probe every possible opportunity for new growth.
Stu Heinecke:And that's exactly what was happening in your garden.
Stu Heinecke:That's exactly what they are up to.
Stu Heinecke:They pop those seeds out.
Stu Heinecke:The seeds are miracles, weed seeds are miracles.
Stu Heinecke:They're amazing.
Stu Heinecke:And they're going to go out and they're going to just take
Stu Heinecke:advantage of every possible opportunity they're presented with.
Stu Heinecke:And certainly we're actually the biggest disruptors out there actually.
Stu Heinecke:We disrupt ground that's, that's what we call yards and gardens and farms.
Stu Heinecke:All they have to do is keep running their process and they find them
Stu Heinecke:cause they find every opportunity.
Stu Heinecke:That's how they do it.
Stu Heinecke:Not like the douglas fir trees at all.
Stu Heinecke:They're not finding any opportunities.
Stu Heinecke:These things fall right at their roots.
Stu Heinecke:Weeds just have this really interesting relationship to disruption and Clayton
Stu Heinecke:Christensen's book, The Innovators Dilemma, he wrote a wonderful book.
Stu Heinecke:Unfortunately, he's not with us anymore, but he was a professor at
Stu Heinecke:Harvard Business School and he was studying companies that had been market
Stu Heinecke:leaders, just undisputed market leaders.
Stu Heinecke:And then they, they lost it all.
Stu Heinecke:And they lost it all to new disruptive technologies.
Stu Heinecke:And he studied that look well, what's going on there?
Stu Heinecke:A lot, like the weeds thing, what's going on there.
Stu Heinecke:So he presented several case studies, but one of them was Eastman Kodak.
Stu Heinecke:And Eastman Kodak, at least those old enough will remember, used
Stu Heinecke:to be the dominant force in film.
Stu Heinecke:We know that film eventually was disrupted by digital photography and
Stu Heinecke:so there were digital cameras and that has been disrupted by smartphones.
Stu Heinecke:So his contention actually is that these disruptive technologies,
Stu Heinecke:when they first show up, they don't look like they're viable at all.
Stu Heinecke:And so the market leaders of the current incumbents will ignore them.
Stu Heinecke:And because they're looking at, and they say, well, what are the numbers
Stu Heinecke:we'll have there aren't numbers.
Stu Heinecke:It's not, it hasn't been developed yet.
Stu Heinecke:Okay.
Stu Heinecke:Well, then what's the business case?
Stu Heinecke:Well, there isn't much of a business case yet, but if the business case
Stu Heinecke:is, if you want to go into the future dominating the photography space or some
Stu Heinecke:part of it, you need to invest in new technologies, but what will they be?
Stu Heinecke:We don't even know who knows what's going to work and what won't.
Stu Heinecke:The ironic thing about Eastman Kodak is that digital photography
Stu Heinecke:was invented by one of their junior engineers and they ignored it.
Stu Heinecke:They didn't invest in it.
Stu Heinecke:And so Christiansen's approach is invest in disruptive technologies.
Stu Heinecke:The weed approach is...
Stu Heinecke:watch for disruption and exploit it cause disruption is happening all
Stu Heinecke:around you and just run your process.
Stu Heinecke:That's how they disrupt.
Stu Heinecke:They just run their process and their process is built around those
Stu Heinecke:tools, those force multipliers, the why the weed mindset, et cetera, and
Stu Heinecke:always pursuing collective scale.
Stu Heinecke:By using that process, and just running it, sticking with it, but
Stu Heinecke:also being nimble enough to change it.
Stu Heinecke:As in the case of waterhemp, encountering Roundup, then the
Stu Heinecke:process will evolve around it, but you got to run your process.
Stu Heinecke:So that process is really important.
Kevin Dieny:You mentioned disruption, and that is something really interesting.
Kevin Dieny:That is something that's happened all of 2020, and still into 2021.
Kevin Dieny:We're talking about the pandemic.
Kevin Dieny:That's been like an external disruptor and there's also things that you're talking
Kevin Dieny:about where your company is the disruptor, you're the one causing the disruption.
Kevin Dieny:You're the one taking it and finding.
Kevin Dieny:So in a disruption, there's that interesting balance of it's a risk.
Kevin Dieny:It could be a risk to you, but it could also represent an
Kevin Dieny:opportunity for a business and knowing how to exploit that, yeah?
Stu Heinecke:Well, I was going to say it's both.
Stu Heinecke:It's really both.
Stu Heinecke:Sometimes you're the disruptor.
Stu Heinecke:If you're an entrepreneur.
Stu Heinecke:Let's hope you're the disruptor.
Stu Heinecke:And then other times you're being disrupted.
Stu Heinecke:So there really are two different, two different sides of disruption.
Stu Heinecke:The thing that's really interesting about what weeds show us is well,
Stu Heinecke:when disruption is happening, that's your opportunity.
Stu Heinecke:That's your opening.
Stu Heinecke:You don't have to invent the flying car to disrupt something.
Stu Heinecke:You can have your process and watch for these opportunities to disrupt.
Stu Heinecke:You mentioned the the pandemic.
Stu Heinecke:I think we're always being disrupted and always, that's a constant.
Stu Heinecke:That's the only thing that doesn't change is that things always change.
Stu Heinecke:Right.
Stu Heinecke:But so the the pandemic really gave us some really interesting
Stu Heinecke:insight into this because we watched as the economy clamped down.
Stu Heinecke:We haven't experienced this.
Stu Heinecke:Right.
Stu Heinecke:We know that there are regular disruptions.
Stu Heinecke:In other words, recessions, those just happen.
Stu Heinecke:It's like breathing in and out.
Stu Heinecke:That's what the economy's do.
Stu Heinecke:There are some businesses that we think of as being recession proof,
Stu Heinecke:like gyms, people sign, these long-term contracts and they continue to pay.
Stu Heinecke:And it really, they continue to pay whether they go or not,
Stu Heinecke:whether they use it or not.
Stu Heinecke:And no matter what's happening in the world, they have to keep paying.
Stu Heinecke:And it's a nice way to relieve the stress anyway.
Stu Heinecke:So maybe the gym usage goes up.
Stu Heinecke:I don't know but but that's a model for being recession proof.
Stu Heinecke:And another one is restaurants, food, people still eat.
Stu Heinecke:Look what happened to restaurants and gyms during the pandemic.
Stu Heinecke:They're not pandemic proof.
Stu Heinecke:Their the worst.
Stu Heinecke:They're the worst things to be in, the worst businesses to be in for pandemics.
Stu Heinecke:But then Peloton stepped in like a weed and look what it did.
Stu Heinecke:There was a great deal of disrupted ground.
Stu Heinecke:And it just like the weeds that show up in your, in your
Stu Heinecke:flower bed, it said, okay, boom.
Stu Heinecke:They just moved right in.
Stu Heinecke:And, and Peloton now, and home gyms are the new gym business.
Stu Heinecke:They may not be that, that for long, I guess eventually people
Stu Heinecke:will want the camaraderie of going to a gym, but they are the new gym
Stu Heinecke:they took over the disrupted ground.
Stu Heinecke:Isn't that, that's totally weed like.
Stu Heinecke:A lot of the restaurants, they're really an interesting case because
Stu Heinecke:if they had no email address or email list of all their their patrons,
Stu Heinecke:then they were in real trouble.
Stu Heinecke:Weren't they?
Stu Heinecke:If they just stuck with the model of, no, you have to come here and sit
Stu Heinecke:inside and eat, then they perished.
Stu Heinecke:But there were restaurants areas who said, okay, we have email addresses of everyone.
Stu Heinecke:We went ahead and collected those.
Stu Heinecke:We've been talking to them anyway, we're going to tell them we're
Stu Heinecke:going to go to a take-out model.
Stu Heinecke:And so the local pizzeria here thrived because of that.
Stu Heinecke:Now there take-out model.
Stu Heinecke:You can't go and sit.
Stu Heinecke:They've got a really cool place, this place is, it's like a hundred feet
Stu Heinecke:above the water on a cliff, on stilts.
Stu Heinecke:It's a really cool, but you can't go in and sit there in there now.
Stu Heinecke:You just go and they have a pickup window and their thriving.
Stu Heinecke:Then they took their branded pizzas and put them into the
Stu Heinecke:local supermarkets here as well.
Stu Heinecke:So they, they pivoted and there's part of the weeds model that is actually
Stu Heinecke:focused on dealing with disruption to you.
Stu Heinecke:Dealing with disruption that you're not causing.
Stu Heinecke:Disruption that you're subject to.
Stu Heinecke:As opposed to the disruption that you're causing, if you're Uber and
Stu Heinecke:what the disruption you're, you're causing to the taxi industry and
Stu Heinecke:on, and on lots of examples of that.
Stu Heinecke:But isn't that interesting.
Stu Heinecke:They that's what they do.
Stu Heinecke:If you are functioning like a weed you're watching for opportunity,
Stu Heinecke:you have this balanced stance?
Stu Heinecke:And you're watching for opportunities to pivot into other circumstances.
Stu Heinecke:It's actually part of your process if you're a weed and it should be
Stu Heinecke:part of our process as business owners to do exactly what those weeds
Stu Heinecke:were doing to your flower plant.
Stu Heinecke:I love that.
Stu Heinecke:I know you didn't put, I think that's great.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah, I know.
Kevin Dieny:And each time I was like, maybe there's just some large sweeping change.
Kevin Dieny:Maybe I'll just spray it with Roundup.
Kevin Dieny:Maybe I'll just buy plants or soil that is weed proof.
Kevin Dieny:I looked for some large sweeping, easy, fast fix.
Kevin Dieny:But I think something you're pointing out too is it doesn't have
Kevin Dieny:to be inventing the flying car.
Kevin Dieny:Like you said, I think a pivot in the disruption can be something kind of small.
Kevin Dieny:And when you see it works, you could take advantage.
Kevin Dieny:It doesn't have to be investing your entire company switching
Kevin Dieny:it from one thing to another.
Kevin Dieny:I think you could experiment a little bit with little things but you have
Kevin Dieny:to be in that mindset of, I need to be experimenting in the market,
Kevin Dieny:or I need to be able to be flexible to pivot, if something I'm testing
Kevin Dieny:out suddenly shows, promise, right?
Stu Heinecke:Yeah.
Stu Heinecke:Yep.
Stu Heinecke:Yep.
Stu Heinecke:And we just have to know that we do know it, but that disruption
Stu Heinecke:is, there are two sides to it.
Stu Heinecke:We're sometimes we're disrupted and sometimes we're, if we're lucky,
Stu Heinecke:we're the ones doing the disrupting.
Kevin Dieny:Yeah, and I think a business could possibly break it
Kevin Dieny:down by thinking what is my purpose?
Kevin Dieny:What am I really doing?
Kevin Dieny:What's my unique value here.
Kevin Dieny:And then at the same time, looking at it, like.
Kevin Dieny:At the end of the day, as long as my revenues are outpacing my expenses I am
Kevin Dieny:okay, but it's more than that, right?
Kevin Dieny:There's going to be disruption coming.
Kevin Dieny:You've got, you're going to want to find the opportunities
Kevin Dieny:to take advantage of that.
Kevin Dieny:That might mean investing in here, there to see if something will be
Kevin Dieny:insurmountably you know invaluable to you.
Kevin Dieny:But, one other thing I was going to ask you about was like a roofing business.
Kevin Dieny:Something that you have some experience with before.
Kevin Dieny:It's not, it's one of those industries where I'm like, how much innovation has
Kevin Dieny:there been in the last, 50 years there?
Kevin Dieny:I mean, there's just been different types of roofing material.
Kevin Dieny:There has been solar has started to rise up and they've been like, you
Kevin Dieny:know what, we're going to replace your entire roof with solar panels.
Kevin Dieny:And that's disrupted the industry.
Kevin Dieny:But I think a lot of roofing businesses may be like, where's
Kevin Dieny:the innovation in my industry.
Kevin Dieny:Small changes, what are you talking about?
Stu Heinecke:Yeah, I mean, well, so roofing is an interesting business because
Stu Heinecke:as a homeowner or building owner, you don't need those services all the time.
Stu Heinecke:It's not a constant.
Stu Heinecke:Your roof failed okay call the roofer, or look at this roof, it's a piece of crap.
Stu Heinecke:I need to get rid of it and your loathe to do that.
Stu Heinecke:Cause it's really expensive.
Stu Heinecke:So people resist working with roofers, but I think the innovation probably.
Stu Heinecke:Solar is a great one, actually.
Stu Heinecke:But otherwise it's probably in the way that they market.
Stu Heinecke:I see roofers doing some pretty expensive mass marketing.
Stu Heinecke:I've worked with roofers that, that do, I think much, a much smarter
Stu Heinecke:approach and they, they keep a database.
Stu Heinecke:They, they cultivate that database.
Stu Heinecke:They talk to it, all the time.
Stu Heinecke:And they, they promote to it all the time.
Stu Heinecke:And the reason is that, or they run drip campaigns all the time.
Stu Heinecke:And the reason is that if you're a building owner, if you're an investor
Stu Heinecke:particularly so on the commercial side, well then, you are probably going to
Stu Heinecke:need to do something with your roof.
Stu Heinecke:Things do go wrong with them.
Stu Heinecke:But maybe what you want to be doing is getting them on a maintenance contract.
Stu Heinecke:But that's not an innovation now that's what they do.
Stu Heinecke:They do that a lot, but getting them on an, on a maintenance contract is
Stu Heinecke:a lot better than just waiting for 30 years for someone to say, okay,
Stu Heinecke:I know you don't need another roof.
Stu Heinecke:So if you're a roofer in the roofing business, then I'd probably
Stu Heinecke:a lot of the innovations are going to be how you address your
Stu Heinecke:audience and how you keep them.
Stu Heinecke:How do you keep them engaged so that when they do, when the storm
Stu Heinecke:came through and it's leaking all of a sudden, where'd that come from?
Stu Heinecke:Who, which one are you going to call?
Stu Heinecke:And you want to be top of mind.
Stu Heinecke:I guess that's probably where it is, but you know, if we go
Stu Heinecke:back to Peloton for a moment.
Stu Heinecke:Peloton they weren't the, they weren't the change agent in the marketplace.
Stu Heinecke:It was the pandemic.
Stu Heinecke:I mean most recently it was the pandemic, but people couldn't go to the gym.
Stu Heinecke:So they took advantage of that disruption.
Stu Heinecke:They weren't about to be disrupted themselves.
Stu Heinecke:They were in a great position, but they took advantage of it.
Stu Heinecke:They just ran their process and very quickly started getting short on
Stu Heinecke:inventory and there were wait times.
Stu Heinecke:So that became another problem.
Stu Heinecke:They changed their delivery times and, gear up their production.
Stu Heinecke:But they took advantage of it and they filled in the void left by membership
Stu Heinecke:gyms that people couldn't go to anymore.
Kevin Dieny:Is there anything last you'd want to leave?
Kevin Dieny:A final summary or statement or anything that wasn't mentioned
Kevin Dieny:anything briefly you'd like to touch on and then yeah we will close out.
Stu Heinecke:I think the thing that might be the most counterintuitive of
Stu Heinecke:all of this is to think of, of something that has no brain, having a mindset.
Stu Heinecke:But the weeds have a fierce an incredible mindset.
Stu Heinecke:That is marked by optimism and aggression and urgency and resilience.
Stu Heinecke:Resilience is the best one, but perseverance and adaptability.
Stu Heinecke:They are all those things.
Stu Heinecke:We can see it, we can watch it happening in our yards and
Stu Heinecke:you can see what's happening.
Stu Heinecke:So they don't have brains, but they do have a collective intelligence.
Stu Heinecke:And they certainly have an intelligence and incredible
Stu Heinecke:intelligence built into their process.
Stu Heinecke:But it's how they run that process.
Stu Heinecke:That that's why, why I'm saying that they have a mindset they're really aggressive
Stu Heinecke:and, and I would say even optimistic.
Stu Heinecke:And look, they never get depressed.
Stu Heinecke:They don't stop.
Stu Heinecke:If you cut them down, they start over immediately.
Stu Heinecke:You know that's the, that was the, if we were doing that, we'd be optimistic.
Stu Heinecke:There is actually a weed mindset and I can't wait.
Stu Heinecke:I'm going to be launching a weed mindset bootcamp in a few months,
Stu Heinecke:it'll be ready when the book comes out.
Stu Heinecke:And I can't wait to teach that because.
Stu Heinecke:Well, how do you negotiate like a weed, you know?
Stu Heinecke:And they do, they actually do it.
Stu Heinecke:So there are all these, all these insights and aspects that we can borrow from weeds
Stu Heinecke:that really will make us grow like a weed.
Stu Heinecke:Writing the book has been transformative to me.
Stu Heinecke:And so it was kind of like I'm reading it while I'm writing it.
Stu Heinecke:Right.
Stu Heinecke:So doing that has been transformative.
Stu Heinecke:My business has changed because of it.
Stu Heinecke:So, yeah, I guess that would, that would be it.
Stu Heinecke:Give the weeds.
Stu Heinecke:I'm like, take another look at weeds.
Stu Heinecke:They're not just pests.
Kevin Dieny:Thank you so much for coming on Stu.
Kevin Dieny:It's been fantastic.
Kevin Dieny:I think.
Kevin Dieny:I think it's a big takeaway to think about everything you've put in from,
Kevin Dieny:how to manage disruption, how to look at opportunities to scale and
Kevin Dieny:grow a business inside, outside.
Kevin Dieny:Maybe not even necessarily changing anything you're necessarily
Kevin Dieny:doing, maybe positioning it differently than a Peloton has.
Kevin Dieny:There's a lot of lessons learned here and I really appreciate you coming on.
Kevin Dieny:This has been so exciting and so awesome to have you on.
Kevin Dieny:So thank you.
Kevin Dieny:And, if there's a way that anyone wants to find you reach out to you, I don't know,
Kevin Dieny:connect with you follow what you're doing.
Kevin Dieny:How can they do that?
Stu Heinecke:Sure, you can connect with me on on Linkedin.
Stu Heinecke:Just tell me, I just mentioned that you saw me on the podcast
Stu Heinecke:and I'm happy to connect.
Stu Heinecke:And you might also want to visit my author site, which is Stuheinecke.com,
Stu Heinecke:S T U H E I N E C K E . COM and I'll have more and more and more,
Stu Heinecke:uh, really cool things about weeds.
Stu Heinecke:We're going to have a lot of fun, awarding the annual total weed award.
Stu Heinecke:You're gonna want to know about that.
Stu Heinecke:Maybe you want to vote.
Stu Heinecke:We've got beauty shots of weeds that'll be there.
Stu Heinecke:There's some really cool things that you'll find at the site.
Stu Heinecke:So, uh, yeah, that would be the thing too visit my site.
Stu Heinecke:And of course, connect with me on Linkedin.
Kevin Dieny:All right.
Kevin Dieny:Great.
Kevin Dieny:And thank you everybody for listening to our podcast today.
Kevin Dieny:Thanks Stu, and we'll catch you again next time.
Stu Heinecke:Sure.
