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There’s really three core principles, that if you have a deficit in one of these, it’s going to impact your ability to grow. And those principles are systems, automation, and visibility. And so those are the three core that if there’s a deficit there, it’s going to slow down your growth, it’s going to impact your ability to scale.

Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. In our podcast, we talk key learnings, cheat codes, hacks and principles that have served us on our journey in the hopes they serve you as well.

Sam: I’m your host, Sam Donaghey. Today, I’m joined by Michael Johnson, FSM’s Director of Growth. Hey, Michael, look, today we’re going to talk about some of the most common reasons that businesses struggle to grow. And we’ll also get into what business owners can do about it. You personally, you’ve worked with lots of businesses during your time at Fast Slow Motion, literally hundreds of businesses by now. We’ve worked with a lot of businesses who came to us because they were really struggling to grow. Why is it that so many businesses struggle with that?

Michael: That’s a great question. And I think ultimately it’s because growth is hard. It’s not easy. And if everybody knew the simple trick or formula, this one cool thing to do to grow, people wouldn’t struggle with it. But it’s a difficult thing. A lot of times leaders feel like they’re doing all the right stuff, but there are things that are out of control. There are things around them that they feel like they’ve lost control of and they’re preventing them from growing.

Sam: How does a business leader go about kickstarting that growth again?

Michael: Like you said, I’ve worked with hundreds of companies at this point. We’ve really noticed, across all that experience, there’s really three core principles, that if you have a deficit in one of these, it’s going to impact your ability to grow. And those principles are systems, automation, and visibility. And so those are the three core that if there’s a deficit there, it’s going to slow down your growth, it’s going to impact your ability to scale.

Sam: So if there’s a deficit there, what are the telltale signs that there is a deficit? Can you talk a little bit about that for our listeners?

Michael: If we think in terms of the systems core principle, a lot of people have read James Clear — “You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” And I think it’s absolutely true. Some business leaders — great leaders — but they’re missing the key systems that allow their business to truly scale. And so when I say “systems” here, what I’m talking about is kind of standardizing processes and standardizing the things that you need to succeed in. This could be onboarding, it could be training, it could be their sales process, but it’s building systems in your business. Standard ways, professionalization that allow you to consistently deliver that process all the way through.

Sam: Hey, what about automation?

Michael: There’s so much with automation to talk about and a lot of people discount automation because they think it’s a plus or an add-on or a bonus. But really it can be very critical for your business to grow because in order to get good automation, you’ve got to go through the right steps, the right forethought, the right planning to develop it. I love the 7 Habits — Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and the first three are required for good automation. You’ve got to be proactive to start the process, you’ve got to begin with the end in mind, and then put first things first. And so as you go through this process, you think about milestones, you think about the right things for the team to do and for your business to do. You automate those and put systems around it so that you can free yourself up for your team to add value, and suddenly your team is capable of way more than they were before because they’re not doing manual tasks and they’re not having to think about the right way to do things. You’ve already pre-decided that for them, so you kind of guarantee this level of quality that you couldn’t guarantee before.

Sam: So it sounds like it’s about having the right vision and being super intentional. You mentioned visibility as well?

Michael: Visibility is critical. It’s especially powerful when paired with the other two — systems and automation. If you add on visibility, you’ve got the ability to check direction, you’ve got the ability to make corrections where you couldn’t before. A lot of leaders, they have the right vision for their business, but they don’t have visibility into the business. And so there’s a lot to do with data structure and process and the way you organize things that allows you to see progress of your system, the progress of deals, the progress of things going through that allow you to be more strategic, make the right decisions, coach your team, and overall kind of build your team up to be at a higher level than they were before and allow them to grow.

Sam: So we’ve got systems, automation, visibility, and these core principles can ultimately help a business grow. Are there any other benefits to running your business according to these principles, Michael?

Michael: Ultimately yes. These principles, paired with the right tools, can create freedom. What we like to say is we help business leaders move from working in the business to working on the business. And so you’re no longer working on those things that you know are the right things, or you’re no longer the only expert there. You’re helping your team perform those at a more consistent level and you’re out of the day to day and you’re into long term planning. You’re able to focus on the right things. I think leaders should remember that there’s only one of them and they have a whole team. And so instituting these principles and putting this stuff in place allows their team to be at a higher level and not rely on them as a kind of a bottleneck for growth.

Sam: How early on can a business leader implement these changes and automate their systems and see the benefit? Is there a certain company size or a stage that the company might be at?

Michael: The earlier the better. You don’t want to get really far down in your growth cycle as a business because it’s painful to make some of these changes that you need to make. And so really focusing on these principles, focusing on tackling some of the reasons why your business isn’t growing, it’s better earlier than later, because it’s much more painful down the road to make some of these changes.

Sam: Would you say it’s still possible further down the line for any listeners that might be in that boat right now?

Michael: It’s still possible for sure. Still possible. It’s just easier early on. But no, I’ve worked with plenty of companies that are very far down the line. I mean, I had a company recently that’s over 100 years old, and it’s never too late to get that vision, tackle a new way of doing things, reorganize your process around a bigger vision in order to help your team grow.

Sam: So these are the principles that make it possible for businesses to grow. But so many businesses are missing the mark. If a business isn’t guided by these types of principles, are there any commonalities that you’ve seen? Common struggles that keep businesses from growing?

Michael: Over the years, I’ve noticed some commonalities and I’ve actually got a list of 15 plus reasons why your business isn’t growing. I’ll probably talk about five today. The first two are really around sales, which is a key driver for the organization. And the first one I always call pipeline ignorance — it’s really not knowing what’s in the pipeline. The way this manifests, we see leaders, they have a deal spreadsheet. You know what we find — they’re going through this process where there may be multiple versions of that. The way sales teams work when there’s not a standardized process, what we find is you get a lot of new deals and you get a lot of closed deals, but there’s nothing in between. And so the leaders in the company don’t really have visibility into the actual pipeline, and the sales team doesn’t have a strong process that they can follow to help them succeed. And so you lose the opportunity there for coaching and to make really good decisions and to really understand what’s going on in the business.

The second one is kind of related to that. I call it the lagging pipeline. They have this deal spreadsheet, they have almost an informal process, but they’re not getting the information they need as the process rolls along. You know, we worked with a company — the CEO was very involved in sales. And as we started working with them, he had this deal spreadsheet system he was using. It had a lot of good details and good process there. But as we dug in and what we found out was — and he didn’t even realize this — he was the only one updating the spreadsheet. He was capturing details from emails. And someone else had their own spreadsheet and there was another salesperson that wasn’t entering deals really until they closed. And so he was missing the ability to see into his process, find more important deals to focus on, find less important deals that maybe not focus on as much, coach his team to help them win. And so having that kind of disparate, non-standardized process really had a negative impact.

The solution here is really standardizing the processes of the sales cycle. You want to give your team expectations of what to do, standardize those processes, have it in a way that’s easy for them to maintain, put it in one place with standards and stages. So you can peer into it, you can see exactly where deals are, you can coach your team, you can be intentional and win more than you felt that you were before and know when you’re going to lose. It just has this whole other level of visibility and capability for your team to win.

Sam: I heard you say spreadsheets versus systems like a CRM. How important is it for a business leader to really take that data from that spreadsheet and get it into a standardized system like a CRM?

Michael: You can run your business off a spreadsheet, you can have a bad spreadsheet, you can have a good spreadsheet. And it’s really this continuum of no organization all the way through to organization. But I think once you make that jump to a CRM, you’re really building a system that can scale with your business. You get some extras — more than just organization — you get some extra process improvements, some data requirements that you can make. You get reporting, you get the addition of some client customer information. On top of that, you get some automation. And so then you’ve got a more powerful engine behind the system that can really help your business go. And so that’s when we see people make that jump, it’s tremendous what it can do for their business as a good foundation for growth.

Sam: So the two biggest issues come down to whether you have visibility into what’s happening in your sales processes, which makes sense because if sales isn’t working, then nothing else in the business really matters. What would you say is the next big struggle that businesses have?

Michael: We work with a lot of small businesses. Those businesses, as they grow, may find point solutions. They find a system that works for this one team, then they grow this other team, they find a system that works for them, they grow this other team and find a system that works for them, and they end up with a lot of just disconnected processes. These silos naturally form in organizations. But if you think about it, this is the foundation of your business. And if your foundation has a crack in it, that’s a bad thing. If you have a house — and it’s the same way with your business — things are going to fall through the cracks. And so we see teams that maybe drop details between sales and delivery, or we see complaints from their clients because their clients are having to repeat themselves over and over through the process. I don’t know if anybody’s ever been in that scenario, but that’s not fun. And clients don’t like it. And it’s because there’s not a consistent system to guide it. And so downstream teams can miss information that maybe the sales team required or took in but just didn’t record because they didn’t know it was important. You move these processes as close together as possible, you want to put them on one platform because that’s the ultimate cohesion. You can require the stuff you need to require for your team, and you can see through the whole process — everybody has access to the same information. So there’s no balls dropped in hand-offs between teams. And so that right there, you’ve got overall consistency, you’ve got client happiness improving, and that’s just a good foundation to continue to grow when your teams are closer together and they’re able to share information in a better way.

Sam: Do you often see hesitancy from businesses that have got these systems set up, but it seems like a little bit of a big task to bring it all together into one platform?

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, you see it a lot. And it’s because — and I understand it — it’s a sunk cost. You’ve spent a ton of time and energy building up the system and you’re not ready to abandon ship yet. It’s a totally understandable perspective. I think that when we work with folks, what they realize is that while that does seem like a cost, the benefits and the ceiling are so much higher on making the switch that it ultimately becomes worth it. And they want to achieve the higher level of growth because their current systems have become a bottleneck. And that’s one of the downsides of having some of these point solutions, is that you’re going to reach that bottleneck. But if you’ve got one system driving your business, your business is able to continue to grow.

Sam: Could you talk a little bit about maybe the business leader, the business owner that has the system, they’re on the platform, but they’re not seeing the results?

Michael: Absolutely. You know, I saw a stat recently that said that on average, companies are paying for CRM but only using 50% of the features that they’re paying for, and they’re not really maximizing the capability that they have within their system. So we do a lot of work with companies that maybe have a CRM and the process — they may be self-implemented and they have a process built out, but it’s not quite working or there are some gaps. Seeing hundreds of companies, you just see some patterns and some things that work that you can implement in these systems that can help them win. And so a lot of times it’s just having the expertise and the experience — the system can do it, it’s just how you build it that can make it work.

Sam: What’s the next big issue that keeps businesses from growing?

Michael: There’s two more that I’ll talk about. And one of them — we hinted at it before — but it’s really this concept of multiple sources of truth. And so we work with companies all the time that maybe have multiple systems or multiple spreadsheets. And it really is a detriment to growth because it’s hard to make decisions, it’s hard to understand what’s really going on. We had a client recently where if you asked the sales team what was sold, they would show you the closed deals spreadsheet and the closed deals system. And then if you asked the delivery team what was sold, they would check the project management system. All those numbers were different and it was hard to arrive at who was right. Just because there was missing information between those two groups, they had two sources of truth and they didn’t have a single repository of truth to really put their finger on what the true number was and to make decisions from.

So putting everything in one system makes everything a lot easier in that respect. And the last common reason that we see for businesses not growing is what I call an army of sales mavericks. Sales teams can be like the Wild West and everyone’s just kind of doing their own thing and it’s working. They’ve got a great team. And so it’s not bad, it’s not the people, but it’s just the process. Everybody’s going about things differently. And in that, you’re assuming some things are happening. You’re assuming that this person is handling their calls and emails and their tasks the right way, but you don’t really have visibility to it, and when you’re handing a deal off to someone, it feels like a black box. You don’t know what happens and at the end they just kind of come up and it’s won or lost. So you need a structured and defined process for the team. You’ve got good people, so help them by giving them a really structured and defined process with hints and fields that they need to fill out with critical information. And so you help them along the process, but also you capture the data that you need as you go along. It gives you insight to know what you need to know and make the decisions that you need to make. The catch is, you want to build this in a way that’s easy for them. And so if you do it right, they win because they have a better system. You win because you’ve got better information. And then hopefully clients win because they have a better experience and better interaction with you.

Sam: If you’ve got a sales team of mavericks that do things differently, how can you implement an overarching standardized process for everybody to follow? How do you deal with that situation?

Michael: You don’t want to fully take a top-down approach because there may be folks on your sales team that are doing things the right way that maybe the sales manager doesn’t know about. So it’s a collaborative effort. We want to bring everybody together, look at different processes, have them talk to each other and just kind of build this overall process based on best experience, best knowledge from multiple folks and have everyone agree on it. And sometimes that’s really hard. Sometimes that’s really easy because everybody says, that’s a great idea. And it takes good leadership to do this well. But ultimately, you bring everyone together, you get as much information, you put it out there, and you’re working with a team that has seen this done multiple times across multiple businesses and they can make recommendations on best practice. And so the combination of that produces this best case system that allows the sales team to have something to guide them and for management to understand exactly what’s going on in the sales process.

Sam: All of these are such important issues in the life of a business, but I’m sure that the thought of tackling all these can feel overwhelming to a business owner. What would you say to someone who’s listening and is wondering at this point, where do I start?

Michael: Thinking about your process, thinking about where do you want the team to be? Where do you want your team to go, what success looks like, what a win looks like. And a lot of times it’s tempting to try to boil the ocean here. There’s this concept of an MVP — a minimally viable product — that I love. And it helps you take some bite-sized chunks out of a large effort. So thinking about what a minimally viable product is for the system and how you want to build it, and then working with somebody that’s done it before — someone that’s got lots of experience, knows the ins and outs of the technology, but also has the business experience. I’m fortunate to work with some great business leaders that have been on all these journeys, that are entrepreneurs and have done a lot of this, have lived through this. And so it’s valuable to have that entrepreneurial business leader experience as well as some of the technology, and to have someone like that on your side to help you build it out the right way.

Sam: Would you be able to tell us what an MVP is?

Michael: A minimum viable product is just this concept of what is the minimum it’s going to take to get to say, yes, this accomplishes everything that I want it to — not everything that I eventually want it to do, it doesn’t accomplish all my hopes and dreams yet — but for this first phase, for this first milestone, this is what I needed to do. Eventually we want to build a vehicle that takes me from A to B. And I’m starting from scratch. So I may start with building a skateboard and that skateboard takes me from A to B, and then once I kind of learn some stuff and figure out, okay, this is actually kind of a hilly path that I’m going on, I can maybe build like a dirt bike on top of that. And now I’ve got a better vehicle. And then I learn some other stuff — I need to take some people with me. So maybe I’ll build a truck that puts someone next to me and takes them from A to B. And so taking this MVP approach is determining what’s important, building towards that, learning lessons through this kind of iterative process along the way, and then improving based on that knowledge. And ultimately you’re going to end up with a better product.

Sam: We always like to wrap up each episode with a quote or words of wisdom about the topic that we’re discussing. Michael, do you have one that you’d like to share today?

Michael: You know, I think two quotes apply here. I love John Maxwell. He says that everything rises and falls on leadership. And also, “When the leader gets better, everyone gets better.” If you’re a business leader and you’re listening to this, you can really make a huge impact and you don’t have to go it alone. There’s people out there that want to help you, that want to partner with you to make your business better. They want to see you win. And I’m one of those people. There’s a lot of us out there. And so just know that as a leader, you may feel like things are out of control, but really you have a large circle of influence and you can have a massive impact by just taking one step.

Sam: That’s awesome. Hey, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael: Yeah, thank you so much. It’s been awesome and I really appreciate it.

Sam: Well, that’s it for today’s episode. If you’ve been wondering what to do to help your business grow, we hope what Michael shared today will be useful to you. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform, or you can find archived episodes at fastslowmotion.com/podcast.