Scaling Business: Proven Strategies to Scale and Succeed with Bill Prater – ep 129

Mostafa Hosseini  00:03

Hello and welcome. In this episode, you will discover the major mistakes a business owner makes when trying to scale their business. The vital elements for scaling a business, that one single thing someone can do to 10x their productivity. My guest today is my good friend Bill Prater. Welcome, Bill.

Bill Prater  00:23

Good to see him stuff.

Mostafa Hosseini  00:25

Great to see you a long time no see. And today we’re talking about rowing versus scaling your business, which is the best strategy for your business. Now, as usual, please make sure to like and subscribe to whichever channel you’re watching. Share the link with your friends, a business owner that could benefit from this very insightful conversation that is coming up.

Bill knows his stuff has been around the block for quite a few years. And he is he has a lot of knowledge and wisdom and you’re gonna see in in a minute or two. And if you have any questions, tap, put them in a comment on social media. And we’ll do our best to cover it either during the show or after the show. Now let me do the proper introductions my friend, Bill, and we’re going to dive into a very interesting conversation because growing and scaling our business is kind of important. Right? And so let’s do this. Bill Prater is the founder and CEO of business mastery and to create a creator scale ology. Bill earned its reputation as America’s doesn’t this Alchemist.

By helping business owners and entrepreneurs break free of inertia and accelerate into the future. As they dream up. He loves nothing better than sharing what he has learned by working with those who are dissatisfied with the status quo and eager to transform themselves and their business. He created scale ology and the business mastery system as the core foundational principles of dynamic and continuous business growth. A typical client of his his sees their company rising to a position of preeminence and is not satisfied with just getting to the next level. Welcome, Bill.

Bill Prater  02:18

Thanks for having me on the show. Look Great to see you. We’re about are you? Phoenix, Arizona.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:24

And what’s it like out there right now?

Bill Prater  02:28

Yeah, so before you started, you did hear in the background whistling sounds. So we’re having a very unusual mid February here in Phoenix, Arizona, although exemption is not bad. It’s probably 60 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ve got a very high wind gusting up to around 50 degrees. Now that’s nothing, you know, like somebody’s high winds. But for Phoenix, Arizona, it is high wind.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:51

Yeah. Well, we got about almost a half a meter of snow up here yesterday. And my wife went to drive my kid to school, and she got stuck on the way like a couple of times. And it’s been interesting, the roads are slick, and not easy to drive on up here, either. And so let’s dive into it. Bill, what is your story?

Bill Prater  03:16

So still story. So part one of my story is that when I was a kid, we lived on a little farm and my dad believed in, if you will, carving out our own existence out of the earth. So my The first thing I did entrepreneurial, wise, and I use that with this one story, because it’s kind of, it’s kind of an interesting one.

So I ended up having my dad say to me, Hey, let’s have you raise a young steer. And then we’ll, when it’s fat enough to take off to the to the slaughterhouse, we’ll do that and then you can pocket all the money. I said, Well, that’s cool. How’s this work? Is it well, I’ll give you one of the calves when we have new calf. So we got a new calf. Raise this calf, takes about two years. So over a two year period of time fed this calf, quarried the calf made him feel good, petted him made him fatten him, you know and all that and any event so off we go, we go to the to the auction yard, not the slaughterhouse actually go to the auction yard and at the auction yard and somebody ends up buying my, my young animal for X dollars.

This just for fun, call it $200 Okay, so I got my $200 my dad hands me $200 we go we sit at the kitchen table, and my dad says Okay, let’s go through the invoices. And I say, invoices, what is an invoice? So then he would lay down. Here’s the bill for the fee. Here’s the bill for the vet services and he Lay down these bills. And as he did it, he would reach into my pile and pull money back and put it in his pocket. So after that’s all done, I ended up with $17. I got $17 Out of my original 200. Now, I still don’t know if my dad, you know, I can’t remember if he charged me grant and things like that.

But it was a great lesson for me to learn, oh, there’s more to business than just euros revenue. So, but I then went on, joined a fortune 100 fortune, actually a fortune 10 company called IBM, and got myself on the fast track, several promotions, ended up in management, ended up believing totally, absolutely, that I didn’t belong in a company in a corporation. And so reap, went back into my entrepreneurial, early lifestyle and picked it up and had been doing ever since then.

Mostafa Hosseini  06:03

Interesting. So what do you do these days? And who do you serve?

Bill Prater  06:06

Well, so that actually ties in with my, you know, my second to last company. So my current one business mastery, where I serve business owners who are interested in scaling their business, typically, they might have three to five to seven or so senior management, managing various departments, and they’re trying to grow their business double, triple 10x, its current revenue. But the that story really began when I had my second to last business, which was an investment banking firm. And I decided, after 17 years that it was time to sell that company. And so I was all prepared to have somebody show up on the doorstep and write a check. And I’d put money in my pocket, and, and write off in the greener pastures.

And what I discovered was that my business wasn’t saleable. Mustapha at all the investment bank, it would nobody wanted to buy it. And so I was pretty disappointed. This was late 1990s, when this was taking place. And so as good luck would have it. So I was at a trade conference, met with one of my loosely say, competitors, we didn’t compete directly, but she was she also owned an investment bank. And I told her what I was trying to do.

And she said, Well, no wonder nobody would buy your business. And I said, Well, why, you know, we, you know, we do pretty well we make high profit, we’re, we’ve got offices in, in two cities runs, we’re right down the middle of Wall Street, we’ve got great employees get all of that is true. All of that makes you ordinary. Ordinary, and that’s that’s really fun to hear, right, ordinary? Well, as it turns out, I’ll give you some statistics in a little bit about ordinary versus extraordinary, and so forth. But the net of it was that I was pretty much a mirror of every other investment banking company in the world.

And so there was nothing at all to differentiate my company from any other company. And it was compounded by the fact that I was effectively my own brand. My company was called Weatherly private capital. But everybody knew the company through me because I was the primary face to the market, if you will. So yeah, so that was the first problem that I had was being too essential. The second problem I had is we were in, in what I’d call the deal business, meaning that we went through feast and famine, we went out we’d have a deal, we’d raise the capital, we would get paid.

We’d have a nice, if you will, little pile of cash time would go on we do another deal. It was like a roller coaster. So it’s the time I didn’t know what that meant. We’ll circle back in a few minutes and I’ll we’ll put some put another spotlight on that Mustapha about this roller coaster ride that I was on. Fundamentally, it was lack of a system of management didn’t have a system of management didn’t have any managers. Which brings me to the third piece even though I had nearly 150 employees at the time. I really had no managers. I had a head of finance.

I had a I had a junior partner that that did that. put together the deals in I had a man that ran the entire office in New York where we had 125 people. But I had no management beyond that. And so this woman said, Well, you got three problems. One, your essential to you don’t have a management system going on and three, you don’t have a team at all. So that was late 1990s. Any event, so I, I went out and tried to solve that problem.

And visited with business school deans, I knew a bunch of went to them. And you know, they had these business schools, they have great brands, Harvard Business School, MIT, Stanford, visited a couple more. And they all basically said the same thing to me is, and that’s this bill, you want to know how to run a business. We don’t teach people how to run a business, we teach people how to be employees of businesses. So at that time, so this is late 90s, I finally learned, oh, MBA Means Business Administration, Master of Business Administration, it does not say Master of Business Ownership. And so that was a big lesson that I learned them.

Second, I went to these large consulting firms, big giant brand names, I knew a bunch of them. And the reason I knew these people is because we had a lot of interaction because of the business industry I was in. And then I found out from these consulting firms, they don’t know darn thing about running businesses, either. They don’t consult people in that space. They help people with projects. Today, it would be projects like installing Microsoft 365, or installing Salesforce or installing installing Oracle or something like that.

So they’re just they’re just project management companies. And so that was that was a dead end. And the third dead end, I have heard more. But the third big one was business book writers. And I knew two or three of them famous, super famous ones. And I went to see them and they said, Hey, Bill, look, we’re what we’re writing about is public companies, which, with information that’s readily available, and plus the stuff we wrote about, like Good to Great, if you go back and read the read the aftermath, five years later, all the good to great people were out of business.

So that’s another story. So I found a huge dead end. So I ended up creating a system of management, a philosophy of management today scale, ology is the philosophy and business mastery is the system. And that’s what I basically use Mr. Hmm. And what I currently do helping business owners, no public companies, privately held businesses, scale their business using those three tools I just mentioned. Interesting.

Mostafa Hosseini  12:50

Couple questions. How did you have 150 people on your team and no management? I mean, are these people just doing their own thing? Yeah,

Bill Prater  12:59

so that’s one of the what I call the big the big three lies. It’s one of the big three. And it’s very, it’s very typical, for business owners to hire what they consider to be the best and the brightest, you find the best person at whatever. And then you just let them do their thing. And that’s, you know, that’s if you will, if you hire a dentist, let them do their thing.

And that might work pretty well. But if you’re hiring different kinds of positions they need, they need accountability, they need goals, they need to be held accountable for completing those goals. I didn’t do any of that sort of thing. We were very successful. But basically, were a collection of individual, if you will, individual practitioners, more like a law firm than a if you will a true a business. So we were successful from the outside, but internally, we were a real mess.

Mostafa Hosseini  13:52

Did you at the end of the day ended up selling this business or what happened with that? Yeah, yeah.

Bill Prater  13:57

So when I, when I finally figure out how to manage, you know how to differentiate myself. So I went about basically getting myself fired. At the time, I wasn’t firing myself, I was just making myself on essential. Created a management team. I invented a management system, which I installed. So I had three pieces.

One, I had a singular strategy for growth mindset focused on that. Number two, I created a system of management. In simple terms, let’s call it as a nickname, goals and controls. And then number three, I created a culture of accountability. So I, we created a culture where people were held accountable to certain commitments that they made. And as a result, within two and a half years, I sold the business to Oppenheimer, and so didn’t take long, two and a half years to change the maths into converting us to a super high performing company.

Mostafa Hosseini  15:00

What is the difference between growing and scaling your business.

Bill Prater  15:06

So even though I had 150 people, I was really growing my business. And so maybe a good illustration for you to give you in our listeners is because people, they don’t quite understand or see the difference. But if I can use Mother Nature, I can explain it. So if you think about being in the in the agriculture business, let’s say, Let’s imagine we’re, we’re good at growing fruit. And we decided to get in the Apple business, we planted a tree a few years later, it’s able to bear fruit.

And ultimately, though, if you look at an apple tree, there’s no apple tree that ever grew like Jack and the Beanstalk, apple trees grow to a certain height, they’re limited by that height by mother nature, they produce a certain amount of apples, when you grow your business, it’s just exactly the same, you are only able to grow it to the limit of your personal capability to produce something. And so that’s if you will growing, it’s very simple.

That’s why you know, being a solopreneur, being, if you will, somebody that owns a beauty shop, or somebody that’s a lawyer, or somebody that’s in online, marketing business, or somebody that’s a coach or a consultant, those are extremely simple businesses, they can only be grown, they can’t be scaled, it’s old, it’s effectively it’s an owner operator environment, it’s a sole practitioner environment that’s growing.

Now, when you try to scale a business, you mold to the complexity all of a sudden enters the scene. So back to our apple growing business, if you want to scale that business, you’ve got to, you’ve got to acquire land, you’ve got to deal with lawyers and real estate agents, you’ve got to deal with government regulators who want to restrict the size of your land, you got to figure out how to put roads in there, how to irrigate how to how to how to deal with vendors, how to how to go out and talk to the shopping centers, to get to get them to stock your fruit to figure out how to package the fruit, how to market, how to create labels, how to how to hire practitioners, and managers, and then manage the people you hire.

And I can go on and on for an hour and a half about Scaling. Scaling is complex, multi nuanced, completely out of the League of any practitioner. So if somebody’s a dentist, that’s why they’re a single dentist, or two or three of them, they don’t have 1000 people in a room. It’s just not practical. It’s on a practical business to scale. So scaling is complex, multifaceted, that nothing to do with your current profession, you’ve got to convert yourself into being an owner, then if you decide you want to be an owner, operator, meaning everything goes through you, you control everything, you’re the end all and do all like I did with my investment bank, that won’t work.

So the only way to scale is to get the hell out of the way, effectively get promoted into from, if you will, sole practitioner to owner operator to become if you will, the investor. So that’s kind of part one. That’s let’s call that in scaling the owners journey. The myth that people fall into is the myth that you’ve got to basically be able to do it all to be superwoman, or something similar to that.

Mostafa Hosseini  18:43

You got to do it all by yourself. You mean? Yeah.

Bill Prater  18:45

Yeah. So if you’re growing your business, you might get, let’s say, virtual assistant, or a private assistant or somebody to help you out. And all they’re really doing is leveraging you. They’re taking various things off your plate, things like maybe copywriting, or, or, let’s say, sales or marketing or something. But as a practical matter, you’re not Scaling. Scaling means you remove yourself from everything, and then hire management to take care of all those other areas of responsibility.

Mostafa Hosseini  19:23

Got it? So scaling is when you remove yourself. Well,

Bill Prater  19:27

that’s part one. Part one, part two.

Mostafa Hosseini  19:31

Let me ask you a question before we go to follow on that path. When do I know and when when does a business know that it is ready to scale? Well,

Bill Prater  19:42

first off, most aren’t. So just to give you some statistics, and I know the US fairly well I don’t know necessarily Canada, the rest of the world. But in the United States there are nearly 33,000,030 3 million small Businesses 99.9% of those businesses 99.9% of 33 million have revenue of less than 1 million less than seven figures. So the vast majority of what’s called Small businesses are is a practical matter.

They’re microscopic, those businesses, the vast majority of them will never ever get to the point where they where they can begin scaling. What happens is, though, there’s the SE extremely lucrative marketplace. So if you’re going to be selling to that space, ie the seven, seven figure business owner is super, super juicy, because those people tend to be extreme, consumers almost addicted on the next shiny Penny.

So they make a great Mark, if you want to market to business owners, you go for the solopreneurs, they’re the ones that are going to be buying everything under the sun. Now, interesting scaling, so let’s call scaling, when you start making the transition out of being of requiring that you are the end all and do all and start realizing you’ve got to, you’ve got to bring in management. So let’s use the word management.

So from staff, staff, like I had, I had staff, but I was the sole basic manager. When you start bringing in managers, then you’ll you’re starting to position yourself to scale. The problem that people have in that space, is they’re they’re much too Oracle opportunistic, meaning that they don’t have a system of management, they don’t have a method of management, they don’t have a philosophy of management, what they’re doing instead is waiting for things to show up. ie a problem, then they try to solve it an opportunity, they try to take advantage of it.

 And so it’s it resembles when I look at it, and it resembles the carnival game called whack a mole. So if something pops up, they bang it on the head. So that’s a typical, if you will company that’s trying to scale but is unable to do so because they don’t have a system of management. They might have a system of marketing. They might have a sales funnel, but they don’t have a management system.

And a management system enables people to sail through things like the COVID economic crash, and burn and smoldering, whatever and world’s happening now. People with a management system went through them with flying colors. People went out one went out of business suffered, ended up taking PPP loans, things like that.

Mostafa Hosseini  22:57

Love it, how do you go about developing? Okay, I’m going probably too far ahead. Okay. Do you hire your first manager? Well, but going with all the with all experienced that you have? Yeah. If you would have to do it all over again, when would you have hired your first manager? That’s

Bill Prater  23:25

a different question right now I can answer that I can deal with an investment banking business. So yes, so the quick answer is depending on the kind of businesses when you know what manager you should hire, and so forth, and so on. But so whenever you feel that you can find identify somebody that could do a better job of management, managing some area of your business, and in my case, it would have been, in my case, converting comm from being one of the principal producer in New York to being the manager of Weatherly, New York office.

So my first hire in that case was the branch manager, or, and then the our next hires were managers that supported Tom, which was the directors of sales, and the director of production and the director of finance. So we had Tom and then three managers almost immediately. So in my case, I handled I hired for at once or promoted for my case.

Mostafa Hosseini  24:33

I was director of Operation finance and sales

24:37

in the investment banking space. And there’s a director of investment banking. No, no, no, I’m

Bill Prater  24:43

just saying that that answer. If you would have said if you were a construction company, would those be your first three managers? The answer would be no be different three managers because you’re in a driven industry, but in my particular industry, that’s the three that I ended up hiring first.

Mostafa Hosseini  24:59

Now tip Clint for someone that is watching or listening to this later, when should a business owner think about hiring their first manager?

Bill Prater  25:07

Well, first off, you got to make a decision, am I going to be in the 99.9% that are doing sticking, stay under a million dollars and be happy with it. Nothing wrong with that. When I hit when my business was south of a million dollars, my own current business, I was able to net about 800,000. So nothing wrong with netting 800, I had very little costs. Now if you’ve got a business doing less than a million, and you’re netting 50,000, you probably should figure out a way to get that revenue up so that your net would be higher.

So if there’s that’s a large range of potential outcomes, but I don’t think that should be the your objective, your objective should be first making a decision about what is your strategy for growth going to be? What is your singular strategy for growth? What are you going to do? What is going to be the core strategy? Once you’ve decided on that core strategy?

Then you can answer ask yourself and answer questions like, you know, what management should I hire, and so forth. But step one, is to develop a vision for the future of some state that you want to be. And I interviewed a guy today from Denver, for example. And he told me how he wanted to build his service company, he basically does repairs for the restaurant industry, and how he wanted to build his business into something that was franchisable.

So that was step one, in his mind, he was able to create a vision. Second, he had a strategy, His strategy was to build a franchise model. That was his strategy for growth. So one, Vision two, a central strategy, once that’s together, then you can start thinking about building your team. Love it.

Mostafa Hosseini  27:09

Gang, if you’re watching or listening, have questions about growing and scaling your business, put them in a comment and we’ll do our best to cover and respond back to you now built what are the vital elements for scaling your business.

Bill Prater  27:23

So we get recovered two already. So the first one really is that you’ve got to get in your mind that you need to come up with a singular strategy for growth, which really is a long term vision, and a growth strategy. And after you’ve got that in mind, you need to have a system a method, a methodology for management, which is a which is a system kind of the it’s kind of a mother system above all the other systems. So another system would be like, for example, your your billing and accounts receivable system. Above that is the management system, your sales and marketing system above that is your management system, your your production and quality system above, that’s the management system, a lot of companies never think about a management system, they instead think about individual departments, with the manager running the individual departments.

That’s, that’s a little different than having practitioners do whatever the hell they want to do. But it’s not, it’s not the same as having a management system. So in order to do that, in order to scale, the next super important thing to do is to read collapse all the variables down to what I call a vital few in the work and talk a bit about personal productivity, but part of it is coming up with a vital few. A lot of people think erroneously, that the larger more complicated the business, the more things you have to keep track of.

And I’ve proven over the last 25 years that’s completely backward thinking we can we can we can manage with management system, any size business with a handful of what I call vital drivers. So the net after we’ve got our our strategy in place, next thing to do is to create a game plan for the next, let’s say 12 months, and that game plan should include a list of vital drivers, five, six, maybe maximum 15 vital drivers.

And that’s all we need to have a super successful scaling organization. But we can’t do it in any other way. So we can’t just say Who am I going to hire would be prior to having your vision strategy gameplan and vital driver determined?

Mostafa Hosseini  29:44

Hmm. What are some examples of vital drivers for a business?

Bill Prater  29:51

So some that are common of First off, now we’re gonna get so let me see if I can explain it this way. So the the lower Are the closer to the customer you get in a business, the more different they are. So if you’re running a dental company, the customer engagement is with drills and in polishing tools and an X rays and bright lights, I mean, so so that that is entirely different than if we’re if you’re in the, let’s say, the construction business, where the closest thing to your customer would be ditches and and foundations and concrete and stuff like that.

So at that, at the, at the, if you will, the delivery level, businesses are entirely different. As we move down from vision and strategy and things in the vital drivers, vital drivers in the construction company are different than violent drivers in a dental office. But in common would be things potentially, like revenue, revenue often is a vital driver. And maybe gross margin would be another that would fit most businesses.

 But if you think of a typical financial statement of income statement, and balance sheet, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of items in there. Most of those are trivial for you at the management level, ownership level, they’re vital for somebody that’s doing the books. But for you, you could probably get by with revenue and gross margin, for example. So that would be a couple if you’re if you’re in any sort of a business where you’re delivering some product or service. Another common vital driver, again, not exclusive, but common would be quality, some sort of quality measure, like refunds, or customer complaints, couple of vital drivers there that are in common.

But then, as we get into different businesses, they become different. So I like to break them into four categories. This will help our listeners, four categories, one financials to productivity, three business development, and for quality. If you think of two to three vital drivers for each of those four categories, you’re well on your way to getting into the top 1% of all the businesses out there.

Mostafa Hosseini  32:27

Love it. So gang, if you’re watching, you’re listening to four categories of drivers, or what I would call KPIs to look for our financials, productivity, business development and quality. And I guess by setting one I call it KPI. What are you? What is your call it

Bill Prater  32:47

again? Well, okay, so that’s you’ve run a beautiful pointer. So there’s a lot of what I’ll call industry standards, industry norms. And I got in this trap myself. KPIs, for those of you that don’t know, stands for key performance indicators. And it’s what I would call in simple terms, it’s a cluster, it is a way for your, you want to convert your business into stunningly slow speed, focus on key performance indicators.

So in every industry, there are industry standards, industry norms, industry, key performance indicators. When I use the word industry, I want you to get into your your, if you want to scale and you do not get this concept, I promise you will never scale. And that is that the word standard also means average. The word standard means average. Let me tell you, when I ran my investment bank, I love the industry standards.

And that’s why my competitor just said, Bill, you got an ordinary company. So it’s a KPIs is a great way for you to turn yourself if you’ve got a nice company into a mediocre one. So know what you need to do is have this kind of brutality in your mind. Now I know when I when I talk like this, people say Bill, you’re awful brutal. Yeah, I am brutal. And I’m talking to the top 1% of business owners, not the 99, if you’re in the 99 will make any sense to you. But you’ve got to think about your business the same way you think about the human body.

 A KPI is equivalent to having a hand your left hand that’s called a key performance indicator that allows you to pick up something as a left hand. The truth of the matter is you’ll still live a vital driver in the human body includes the brain and the heart. A couple of others maybe, but your teeth, they’re not vital. They’re key and important and nice and pretty, but to die it, but if but most business owners that get involved in this, let’s call it super anal looks at their business, then all they do is spend their time looking at the financial statement, looking at the KPIs, reading all the industry journals, the rain things themselves down.

So a vital driver is gross margin, for example, but advised vital driver is not the cost per lead. But yet people get involved in that kind of stuff. If you’re able to have a zero cost of goods sold, that means your gross margin is 100%, that is so much more valuable than the price per lead, just put a little kind of cap on that notion. So we’re talking word vital, not important, not nice, not pretty, not well marketed to you, not what the industry does, not what the average player does. But the but what you do if you want to scale.

Now, again, just to let everybody off the hook 99.9% of the businesses have less than, than $1,000,000.80 5% of all the businesses in the US have zero employees, zero employees, you get the one to 510, we’re talking about, you know, top 10 15% of the companies. And then when you get up above above 500, microscopic number of companies, less than 1/10 of 1% of the companies ever get to 100 million. So don’t beat yourself up if you if you if you aren’t in position to scale, because you’re you’re like most people, so

Mostafa Hosseini  36:51

yeah, fair enough. But that was a new stat I learned 85% of businesses have zero employees. That’s interesting.

Bill Prater  36:58

Yeah, the easy way to get that is to go to the Small Business Administration. And that will give you that all that data.

Mostafa Hosseini  37:04

Absolutely. You could probably search it up on on stats. I know. Maybe

Bill Prater  37:09

Be careful, be careful about searching stuff out, because

Mostafa Hosseini  37:13

now you can ask chat GPT for Yeah,

Bill Prater  37:17

you gotta remember that. In simple terms, readily available information is often just the ordinary information. If you’re trying to get elite information. You want to talk if you want to know how to scale a business, talk to Elon Musk, not the not some guy in your industry at random

Mostafa Hosseini  37:36

that’s trying not to a guy who never sold a lemonade in their

Bill Prater  37:41

life. So there’s so there’s the answer, there’s a difference between KPIs and, and in vital. So you’re gonna get a list of vital drivers. I’m not against KPIs, you can have them if you want, but by all means, don’t spend your time looking at them. So

Mostafa Hosseini  37:55

built for KPIs, but I think I call the vital drivers KPIs. And I’m not like spending like, I don’t have 20 or 30 KPIs, I would probably track two or three, and I just call them different. Probably I have the same view as you do. Like, I’m not spending too much

Bill Prater  38:12

wasn’t trying to lecture to you. I’m just saying that. If for example, if I’m just trying to tell our listeners, Mustafa, if they were to look in their industry for KPIs, they probably get a list of molter probably a ton of KPIs. And I just said don’t go down that rabbit hole. Yeah, yep.

Mostafa Hosseini  38:30

Cool. Um, what are some of the major mistakes that people make when it comes to scaling?

Bill Prater  38:36

Well begin, we talked about two. And the first one is, you know, they don’t have a singular strategy for growth they have, they have a whole collection of strategies. Number two, the second big mistake is that they’re opportunistic, and they don’t have a system of management that’s anticipating things down the road.

And number three, is that they believe that if they hire the best and the brightest employee, then these employers will take care of your business for you don’t do anything. And that’s the exact opposite of the truth, which is you’ve got to have an accountability culture. So the big, the third mistake is people fail to have a culture of accountability.

Mostafa Hosseini  39:13

I mean, more about the culture of accountability. What do you mean by that? And where do we start with that?

Bill Prater  39:18

So accountability is in simple terms, it’s got two parts, it’s really part one is making commitments. So for example, a commitment would be on meet you for a meet you tomorrow at noon for lunch. That’s a commitment. Far too many people blow that off, show up 15 minutes late, forget about it, have some miscues, whatever. That’s would be the difference between accountability ie showing up on time on place every time and a lack of accountability would be blowing people off in a business environment.

 A great illustration is if I compare business to, let’s say, track and field Build a relay. So the way a relay works typically there are four first and relays. Person one runs leg one and two, like two etc. So the accountability takes place in the exchange of the baton vision. First woman runs 100 and 100 meters. And her job is to hand the baton to the second person. It’s a second if the second person believes that the first person will keep their commitment, and that is to show up 11 seconds later and hand her the baton, she’ll take up off running like a bat out of the hill, when the when the person is approaching is maybe 15 yards away, and then they’ll she’ll be at full speed when the other person shows up.

That’s a that gives a graceless, a graceful handoff, accompany without accountability works like this. salesperson says, Hey, George, I’m going to close Acme construction next week. And I’d like you to stew to order the concrete for to build the building. If the Head of Production didn’t believe the salesperson, they wouldn’t do anything. And what would happen is in the rare instance, to salesman actually shows up with the agreement. The production guys will say, Oh my God, you actually delivered a sale cheese, I gotta get it by ordering the equipment.

So a typical company goes Smash, smash Smash. And that is, if you will, a lack of accountability. So accountability culture is people make commitments. And they deliver make commitments they deliver. And then the management system assures that happens by holding people accountable on a on a frequent basis.

Mostafa Hosseini  41:49

Plastic, when you make an accountability culture, something’s up, you make a commitment, and you deliver and you’re held accountable for what you’re promised.

Bill Prater  41:59

Well, that’s it. But the second part of it is, is that the other person believes, believes that somebody will deliver, as promised, and we’ll hold them accountable for that. And what’s what’s magic about that is it means that the the boss, the owner has no job whatsoever in that transaction. It’s all happening. Accountability happens without the owner’s involvement.

Mostafa Hosseini  42:21

Love it. We promised people to go over the single thing that business owner can do to 10x their productivity, what a

Bill Prater  42:31

business owner to do what I’m what I’m saying. And in that is. So here’s the kind of the deal, we’re talking about personal productivity, how can you get more done in an hour than you can typically get done in today? So and and really, it’s, it’s understanding the concept of Vital Few, we’ve already talked about vital, and the human body vital is brain and the heart, for example.

But in your day to day activities, there’s a collection of trivia, things that are fun, things that take a little bit of time, distractions, shiny pennies, and they’re believably valuable and productive. So so what we need to do if we’re going to increase our productivity, is to make sure at all costs that we spend time on the most vital and the way I do that is first, you got to understand the concept of what I call the Pareto Principle, which is some people call it is the 8020 rule.

Actually, Robert Duran created the 8020 rule based on Pareto, but fine, we’ll call it the The Pareto principle, but it’s really Pareto to the third power. So what Prater Pareto tells us or any 20 tells us is that 20% of the input, call it time, versus 80% of the outcome, let’s call it results 20% of our time produces 80% of the role. The key is to pick the right 20%. What percent of a day is what, typically a couple hours.

So in a couple hours, you can get 80% done mean you many many people just fritter away the day and never get to that 20% But that’s called Pareto, I call it Pareto to the first power greater the second power says, Okay, let’s look at the 20% of your time. So if you take 20% of 20, now you’ve got 4% of your time. So 4% of your time is going to produce 80% of 80%. Eight times eight is 64 telling us that 4% of your time produces 64% of your results. Key is find that 4% and get that done. Now, what’s 4% of 10 hours 40 minutes, no, four minutes, not very much. And so If that produces 64%, that’s a pretty good trade. So spend your time there.

And then to the third power simply means take 80% of 4% 80% of fourth point eight, let’s call it 1%. So it means 1% of your time produces 80% of 64, which is 50%. And so in simple terms, 1% of your time produces half your results. Make sure on a daily basis, you find that 1% Get that done, you get half your normal, total output of the day finished. I do that Mustapha with a routine I do it my case multiple times a day.

But you certainly should I recommend people do it once a day. Once a day, you simply say, based on everything I did today, everything I did today, everything I did today, am I closer to my long term vision? Remember, you got that vision in place at the beginning? And if the answer is no, that’s okay. If the answer is yes, that’s okay. But the next question is most vital. And that is what’s the single most vital thing I can do tomorrow, that will take me the furthest distance down the road to my long term vision, you keep that going on a daily basis, you’re always determining what’s the most vital thing I can do tomorrow.

And once you get that pattern going, you’ll get at a minimum a 10 fold increase in personal productivity. By the way, the whole system I just went through with you this whole accountability culture, high performance team management system, focusing on your long term vision have a singular growth strategy. All of that’s based around that same philosophy of focusing on the vital few and ignoring the trivial many, that’s how you scale I love it.

Mostafa Hosseini  46:46

You have a gift, titled How to tennis, your personal productivity?

Bill Prater  46:51

I do I do. I do. And the simplest way to get to that is just go to get bills. gift.com and you’ll get your hands on it right away. Yeah,

Mostafa Hosseini  46:58

so the the link gang is in the comments of the show in the description of the show. And if you are listening, go to get Bill’s gift.com GE t b i ll s gift.com. And you will get to what is it? What is it? What are they getting when they go there? Pretty

Bill Prater  47:18

much Oh, pretty much it’s a it’s a little masterclasses about 15 minutes long and it kind of walks through it. We did real quickly there about teaching people how to focus on the vital few and ignore the trophy on any day.

Mostafa Hosseini  47:30

Notice it’s only 15 minutes. It’s not five hours to teach you how to do something simple. It seems like it’s

Bill Prater  47:38

a lot of people don’t pick up on that. I tried to get it under 10 minutes. They just couldn’t do. It took me I think it’s actually 12 minutes and 40 some seconds.

Mostafa Hosseini  47:47

Yeah, sometimes I see trainings that are like, Oh, here’s a simple thing. It takes 35 days to learn the simple thing, or 472 pages. I’m like, What’s simple about that?

Bill Prater  47:59

Well, I learned that way back in the day when I first started my consulting business in 1999. And I used I started up for some I don’t know why. But I used to charge people for half days. I didn’t I never did by the hour, I did half days and full days. And somebody would say, Well, they’d say to me, Well, what if what if I wanted to pay less money?

And I said, Well, it would just take more time. take more time. What would you prefer? Would you pay for for fast? Or slow? Or fast? Okay, well, then fastest, more expensive. So if I can get it done in a minute is more valuable to us. And if I can get it done or now or right? Yeah. Okay, cool. Let establish if you want my pricing model, so I did I always price things on result, not on time.

Mostafa Hosseini  48:46

Love it, love it. I think a lot of business owners actually make that mistake about taught with respect to value and time and pricing. I have a hard time pricing out because customers are like, Oh, you only took a minute. Alright, and then they’re like, Well, yeah,

Bill Prater  49:04

that would be people in like, coaching consulting business. But if if somebody’s in like, you know, the, you know, let’s say dentistry that would that wouldn’t be applicable. If you will, I don’t think if you went in to get a get your hair if you will, your hair highlighted or something like that. You want somebody to say hey, I can charge you $250 It’ll take me of 30 seconds and wouldn’t work. But yeah, in certain in certainly in the coaching consulting business.

People do get hung up on pricing by the hour. Let me explain why by the way. The reason is that’s the standard of the industry already talked about ignore the standards of the industry. Do what the one percenters do the one percenters in your industry. Don’t charge by the hour they charge by the result.

Mostafa Hosseini  49:55

Love it. Don’t charge by the hour charge by the result. Write that down somewhere and probably think about it long and hard and reach out to your bill, if you have questions about that. So Bill, give us a 32nd Simple or what you might call a vital marketing strategy that people could do or implement Edward getting closer to results.

Bill Prater  50:22

You want to deal on thinking about marketing only. So the north the most the the, my call it that simple and quickest marketing strategy that I could come up with is this. Go to your former clients, and ask them, give them a template. But ask them. And there’s tools, you can do this first, simply send them a little email message somehow, and ask them to give you instantly right back immediately, a video testimonial about their experience with you on and give them little kind of hint.

Give us a quick case study, George on how I helped you. Hire your superstar sales salesman and whatever your particular area is. That’s the simplest, easy get beat make it easy for people to give you a case study slash testimonial. I love it.

Mostafa Hosseini  51:24

Actually, soon, as you said that we’re going to use it with actually probably with it with a with a mutual client of ours. I’m not going to name names, but we were working on some reviews and testimonials, but not with video ones. And I think they could use some of that. So thank you for what

Bill Prater  51:43

you and I are not in the business of necessarily promoting certain vendors. But there’s a tool that I use for this purpose. It’s called Doug de UBB. It does they have a system that does exactly what I said. Part of their system, you don’t have to adopt anything.

Mostafa Hosseini  52:03

Yep, is that like.com?

Bill Prater  52:06

And maybe it could be dubbed god i Oh, but the brand is pretty strong. So if you type in dub, like dub video, you’ll find them

Mostafa Hosseini  52:14

or videos and any you can use that true. Solicit and get testimonials from your customers. Yeah,

Bill Prater  52:21

yeah, they actually have little system and they teach a little micro class that teaches you how to script a little message to your customer client, and say, I’d like you to get back to me immediately. And then inside the video that you send to people’s a button, they push the button it turns on their camera, the whole deal. Pretty simple.

Mostafa Hosseini  52:42

Love it. Love it. Love it. Can I ask you some personal questions? Okay. All right, what’s a new thing you have tried recently big or small.

Bill Prater  52:52

New thing I’ve tried recently is I’ve fallen in love with with a cooking process called su v. And so for those of you who don’t know, that’s basically a high end restaurant trick of always delivering, for example, steaks at exactly the right temperature every single time. They’re cooking dozens and dozens of Soviet you can have a bunch of if you will, meat products in vats of hot water inside of a vacuum wrap, and you just dial the water up to the temperature you want. Then when somebody ordered medium rare, you pull it out, and you sear it at super high temperature, and it’s delivered perfectly every single time.

So when I first started, I seemed so odd. But finally I understood that it had to be a vacuum sealed. She works like a top Suvi

Mostafa Hosseini  53:44

How do you spell that? Su

Bill Prater  53:46

s o u s? V ID ECVI?

Mostafa Hosseini  53:50

The survey. All right, love it. I’m gonna look it up. Give me two of your favorite books.

Bill Prater  53:58

Well, two of my favorite books, I like to read the richest man from Babylon once a year. And so that’s number one. And number two, I’m giving you now my annual reads. And number two is is the famous Napoleon Hills thinking Grow Rich.

Mostafa Hosseini  54:15

Grow Rich. Love it. What’s one advice that made a big impact on business or life for you?

Bill Prater  54:24

Oh, yeah, so the private biggest impact, I’ve already kind of touched on it. And that was when I had my competitor said, Hey Bill, your mistake is you’re trying to emulate the industry average. What you need to do instead is emulate the top 1% In her case, like me, and she was sweet enough to let me in on the secrets I gave you a little bit earlier today.

Mostafa Hosseini  54:47

Love it. So try to copy like the top 1% instead of the rest of the pack. Correct. Love it. Bill if you had a Facebook or Google Ad Where everyone around the globe could see your message whoever had access to the internet? What would your message be? For the people of Earth?

Bill Prater  55:13

You sound but for everybody, so nothing to do with nothing to do with my business.

Mostafa Hosseini  55:17

One message everyone around the globe with access to internet could see, what would it be? Well, that would be

Bill Prater  55:24

to practice the art of ignorance.

Mostafa Hosseini  55:29

What do you mean by that?

Bill Prater  55:30

I think unfortunately, people have been conditioned to say, I’ve heard that I’m familiar with I know that. I know. I know. Instead of doing that you say, instead, even if you know it cold, somebody brings up nuclear fission and you’re the world’s expert in nuclear fission. Instead of saying, I know that you say, Tell me more. Practice the art of ignorance. Never act like you know it all.

Mostafa Hosseini  55:57

Oh, love it. Love it. Love it. Belt. This has been an absolutely amazing conversation. Thank you for sharing all the knowledge and wisdom gained from your watching or listening. Go back and watch and rewatch and read Listen, this episode, there was a lot of value bombs in there. And nuggets and wisdom you could use like right away.

And do reach out to bill go get his gift at get bills gift.com The How to tennis, your personal product productivity, he has a 15 minute video where he shows you how to become productive in like 10 minutes, which is a very important and essential for your success. The 140 minute thing that moves you along about 64% in a day, or gets you closer to your goal and vision. It’s vitally important to know that and if you don’t know if, if here’s a tip, if everything on your list is essential, you have a problem.

Right? If everything is that five out of five or 10 out of 10 priority, you have a problem you don’t know how to prioritize, go watch this video and he will show you how to do it. Bill, was there anything that you perhaps wanted to talk about that we didn’t get a chance to talk about?

Bill Prater  57:21

There is not you did a fantastic job of of getting clarification on some of the points I made. I appreciate that very much. I’m happy to have been here. Hopefully you’re happy. Hopefully our your audience is super happy as well,

Mostafa Hosseini  57:36

gang. By liking and sharing the show on whichever channel you’re watching. You will support us you will help us get the message across to other people in your network and other people around you. If you want to share the link with them or tag a friend on social media in the conversation if you know a business owner who could benefit from growing and scale and scaling their business, which is pretty much every business owner. Put them in a comment.

Don’t be shy. And if you have any questions for Bill or me again, put them in a comment and we’ll do our best to get back to you. You’ve been watching and listening some simple marketing show. Thank you for joining us, and we will see you next week. Bye now.