Seven Stages of Business Success

Carl Gould, everybody. Carl, thanks for being on the show. I know I’m only taking a snapshot here, so tell me how it all started.

Thanks for having me, Sam. My entrepreneur journey started in college. I was going to school for accounting and finance, and I broke my leg pretty badly in the second year and had to leave school. I was paying my own way and couldn’t afford to stay, so at 18 and a half years old I had to find my way. I started my landscaping company. I had done that all through high school, so I knew it pretty well. I opened a design build landscaping firm and enrolled in college for my horticulture degree, took the courses I needed, surveying, plant identification. My Latin is still pretty good, actually, though the only real use for it is when you walk into a garden center. I grew that company and sold it, then started a custom home building and real estate development firm. Log homes, post and beam, modular construction, stick frame, residential and commercial. Grew that and sold it. Along the way I was coaching with Tony Robbins and Stephen Covey and Ken Blanchard and Dale Carnegie Leadership. I had all those certifications, DISC, NLP, all that sort of thing. I was an individual coach throughout the nineties, and in 2002 I started the business I have today, Seven Stage Advisors. I was one of those very early six figure and seven figure coaches, one of the early pioneers in the coaching space.

So that’s where you learned these skills. You read the books, took the courses, and then became the coach after that?

At the time I became a coach, it really wasn’t an industry. What you did back then was take a series of certifications, and I took every certification you could possibly take. At the same time I was still running my regular business. I had my construction company, I was a licensed real estate agent, licensed insurance, licensed building inspector. I got all the relevant certifications and education that would help me in my building business, so I was very much a fan of adult education and continuing education. There weren’t the same credentialing processes then as there are now. There’s more now, and it’s better. But I got trained through International Coach Federation, the International Association of Coaches, Coach U, all of that.

When did you come up with the framework you talk about now? Did that develop over the years?

Early on in coaching, the main behavioral assessment was DISC. Everybody’s heard of it in some form, and now there’s Predictive Index and a number of other versions, but most of them are based on DISC theory, the four temperaments, the four humors, the four behavioral styles. Every coaching client I got in the early days got a DISC assessment.

I remember doing the paper version before it was computerized. Fill in the box and draw the lines.

That’s it. So I was coaching a two hundred thousand dollar a year small business owner and at the same time coaching an executive from a Fortune 500 company. I did their DISC analysis, and they had their strengths and weaknesses and blind spots. Then I said, tell me about your business, and they told me how it was strong in this area and weak in that area, and it corresponded. Wherever the owner was strong, the business was strong. Wherever the owner had a blind spot, the business was underperforming. I thought, whoa, there’s something here. So I wrote an assessment for the business as if it were a person. I took the four behavioral quadrants and asked, what are the four functions of a business? Strategy, business development, operations, and finance. One of my clients was very operations focused, so his business was operationally sound, but he admittedly was not very personable, so sales and marketing were a big problem. Another one was very detail oriented and not very people oriented. The details in his business, you could eat off the floor, but he couldn’t sell his way out of a paper bag. Another was personable and outgoing, great at sales and marketing, tons of clients, but losing money, back of the house in disarray. What I found was that the personality of a business will mirror the personality of its owner.

Yeah.

I’ve tested that now for 36 years and it seems to be the case. It’s only two questions I need. If I ask a business owner two questions, I can understand where their primary style is, where their blind spot is, and what the corresponding business strength and business blind spot are. Within two questions I can analyze somebody’s business and drive 10 to 30 percent revenue growth in that sector of the business within a year, because that’s what’s hiding out in the blind spot of the owner.

Something just blew up in my mind when you said that, because it makes a lot of sense. I had an M and A mentor who said it very crudely. He said if the business owner’s personal life is a train wreck, his business will be a train wreck. I’ve looked at a lot of businesses, but I never thought about it the way you just said it. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and it makes sense that the business would mirror that. You’ve coached thousands of people, and you’ve trained thousands of coaches. Where do you see most people get stuck? Is it revenue, is it a certain point of growth, or is it that thing you just described?

Those become inhibitors over time for sure, but in the beginning it’s almost always the same thing. The first and biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when they launch is their pricing strategy. They think, to get market share, to get off the ground, I need to discount my prices. Well, nobody knows it’s your first day except for you. The reason your customers know you’re new is because you told them. Established 2026. You don’t have to say that. Especially now, because we’re in our own businesses and always talking about them, we think the whole world knows about us. Nobody knows who you are. So advertise like it’s year five, not like it’s year one. Your business might be new, but you’re not new at this. If Oprah Winfrey launched a mentoring program, she would not discount her way to market share. She’d say, I’ve just not been available to the market in this way, but I’m making myself available in a way I never have before. If you want in, here’s the application process. It’s not going to be for everybody and it’s not going to be cheap, but here it is.

So you like a model where people have to apply, where you’re putting it out there that you don’t accept everybody.

I think it’s dangerous when a company tries to be all inclusive when they’re not. Only a few companies get away with it, and you have to be an incredibly high volume company. I’m talking Google, Target, and even those companies have challenges. When you want everybody, you get everything that comes with it, and the one thing you don’t get is loyalty. You’re getting all the values, not just the chosen values. Think about your favorite musical act. If they put out a bad album or a bad song, you’re not swearing off them forever.

Right, you might not like that one song, but you’re still going to the concert.

You’ll still buy the album, still download the song, still subscribe. You give them a pass because you share the value, there’s a shared goal of experiencing that music. But if you get invited to a festival and you didn’t really care about the music, you walk in, you don’t hear what you like, you just leave. At your favorite artist’s concert, if the first song isn’t the one you wanted, you’re still going to stay, buy a beer, get something to eat, hang out. At the festival, you walk in, not for me, and you’re gone. No loyalty there. So I encourage businesses to decide who their audience is and speak directly to that audience. You’re not necessarily turning people away, but you’re focusing on who your audience is, and if somebody is willing to change their behavior in order to work with you, that’s fine. The US Open does not have to only get tennis fans through the door, but if you want to come to their event you have to follow their rules, and as long as you’re willing to do that, they’re happy to have you.

We did something similar years back with our medical clinic, and it was transformative. I set criteria. You have to meet these criteria before I’ll take you on in the clinic. It got rid of a lot of noise. I coach our employees on this. These are the people we want, and the problems tend to go away. I would rather, from the get go, turn somebody away and say this is not the right place for you, here are some options. How big is that for a business? What kind of changes do you see?

Your clientele will be more loyal to the brand, stay longer, and spend more, and the customer is relying on you, the business owner, to vet and protect who the client base is. I recently joined Planet Fitness, and it’s a good example. Everywhere in there it says no judgment. They have that big sign on the wall that pokes fun at the person who would slam the weights and grunt and make a lot of noise, and there’s the lunk alarm. I’ve never seen it go off. They set up their gym for the average casual exerciser. It’s not made for the high intensity athlete. That doesn’t mean that person can’t come in, but it’s built for the person doing circuit training and cardio and light weights, and that works for them. If you’re a lifter or a performance athlete, you can go there, but it’s not made for you.

Exactly. You’ve got to go to a CrossFit gym or a personal training studio or a powerlifting gym.

I like to use free weights, and there aren’t free weights there, so I’m on the edge of what would be their clientele. I like it because they have locations everywhere.

You travel a lot. That’s why you like it.

It’s really not the perfect gym for me, so what I do is adhere to their rules. I mold myself to them when I go there. Everything goes in a locker, there’s a certain way they like to do things, and I’m happy to follow their rules because I feel like a guest there. It doesn’t feel like my home gym, because it’s not how I really like to work out, but they’re happy to take me as long as I follow their rules.

In your books you talk about hyper growth and the seasons of a business. Can you expand on that?

Hyper growth, by the definition Harvard uses, is 20 percent year over year growth for an extended period, two or more consecutive years. When you do that, you’re in hyper growth mode. The seasons are really interesting. There was a great book called The Fourth Turning, written by Strauss and Howe in 1997, and the research holds true. It’s a 500 year study of how our society goes through cycles, and there are essentially four seasons that come in 20 to 25 year blocks. A seculum, as they call it, is 80 to 100 years long. Just like weather, you have spring, summer, fall, and winter. 1946 to 1964 was spring, when the baby boomers were born. 1965 to 1985 was summer. Think of all the revolution, the fuel shortages, high inflation. 1985 through 2005 is the harvest, that’s fall, when the stock market went crazy. Lots of volatility, but for the most part hockey stick growth in value. Then 2005 to around 2029 is winter, and we’re in winter right now. That’s the big correction, and in 80 years there’s usually a world conflict. Between COVID and everything else going on, it’s easy to see how we’d be in winter. What’s really interesting is the business implication. People buy very specifically in each of these four seasons. During winter, in the most volatile of times, purchasers defer to experts, because they say, I’ve got one chance with my money, where do I put it, what do I do? So if you’re an expert, people will be willing to pay you more for your products and services.

Yeah.

In fall, the economy is moving so quickly that people say save me time, make it convenient, and being in the middle of the pricing works. But in winter you don’t want to be in the middle. Middle means invisible. You want to be at the top or the bottom. Either you’re the lowest price, Walmart, Google, or you’re thought of as the expert. In the middle, you’re invisible. As a business you have to recognize which one you want to be, and it’s okay to be either. Subaru has the longest track record of increasing sales every year because there is probably not a car company that understands its clientele as well as Subaru understands theirs. They’re not good at it, they’re brilliant at it. Lamborghini and Ferrari are equally brilliant. You’ve never seen a Ferrari commercial. You’ve never seen a Lamborghini commercial. Those brands are doing fine. They know their clientele and they protect the brand accordingly. If you know your client and you say, we hear what’s important to you and I’m going to give you what’s important to you, you keep that client longer. And as a brand you say no to people who don’t want to comply with your rules. With Ferrari, you’re not allowed to modify a Ferrari. They won’t sell you another one.

Exactly. Was it Justin Bieber or somebody who bought one and modified it, and they said sorry, you’re not buying another one?

That’s right. Who they say no to protects their clientele, and their clientele says thank you, the brand is bigger than any one person. And now nobody’s going to sell him their used one either, because they’ll trace it back. Who owned it, where did it go? If that car was in your name before it was in Justin Bieber’s name, you’re not getting another one.

That’s clever. Now that wouldn’t work with other types of clientele.

It just wouldn’t work for them. But with this clientele, who buys exclusivity and not just a car, they want you to say no to others. That makes them feel better, that you’re protecting the brand and their experience.

I’m a watch guy, and Patek Philippe is the same way. They’re particular about who they sell to, what you can buy, when you can buy it. If you modify it, the authorized dealers just take you off the list.

Costco is another example, a non car example. Their model is basically that you have a membership, and everything inside the building is our cost plus 15 percent. That’s it. Where Costco gets it right is that now and again they’ll get a product in that’s in very high demand, something they could charge more than 15 percent for and people would buy it. Costco resists that temptation. By doing that they protect their customer base, who says, you made a promise to us. We’ll buy your membership and stay members as long as you keep your promise. I’ll keep mine, you keep yours.

That’s the external side. Internally, their employees love them. They take care of their employees really well, and I think that’s a part of business people sometimes don’t take care of either.

Right, and they are very clear that they’re not for everybody. Not everybody wants the brands that are in there. If you want luxury brands, exclusivity, something no one else can get their hands on, that’s great, that’s not us, and we’re not trying to be.

Love Costco.

They didn’t go out and buy a bunch of Lamborghinis and say, we just put a 15 percent markup on them, come get them. There are certain things you’re not going to buy there and they’re okay with that. A few years ago John Deere, Pepsi-Cola, and Bud Light all tried to be everything to everyone, and it really hurt their brand. The NBA did the same thing, they got political, and it doesn’t even matter which way, the second they got political it hurt their ratings. The NFL learned the same thing. We’re here to watch your game to escape that stuff, not to get another taste of it. Those leagues learned the hard way. Just be the sport. That’s what we want you to be.

When you’re coaching businesses, do you help them figure out who their customer base is? Do they pick it, or does the market pick it?

We do a lot of ideal client avatar work. If they’re business to business, we ask, what kind of business are you selling to, and who is the person inside that business who makes the decision? Not necessarily who writes the check, because that could just be the bookkeeper. Who decides that you get hired? For example, in my business I said to one of my team members, we need a CRM, and since you’re going to use it every day, you pick it. I’m never going to use it. So you research it and pick it, and I’ll pay for it. I’m the customer, but I’m not the client. The client is my team member. I’ve never logged into our CRM, I don’t even know how. They narrowed it down to three and chose Zoho. I asked why, and they said because they have the best customer service, and that’s important to us, because when we have a question we want to know we can call somebody and get a response right away. By the way, they weren’t the cheapest. So Zoho did a really good job understanding what my team’s top needs were, selling to those needs, and there was my team advocating for them, saying they cost more, but here’s why they’re worth more. Great job by Zoho. They’re the influencer in my company, they’re the client because they’re the user, and I’m the customer because I’m paying. If you’re B2C, understand who that person is, their demographics, their psychographics. What are the last 10 books they read? What do they do in their free time? How old are they, income level, where do they live, do they own or rent, do they drive or take mass transportation? We need to know all of that so we can get inside their world.

Do those avatars change over time?

They can, but they don’t change that much. There are a couple of companies that sell to multiple avatars. An airline has multiple avatars on the same plane. They have to sell one class of seats to one group and another class to another group. They don’t have a first class plane and an economy plus plane, they’ve got one plane and everybody’s on it. Sports teams are the same, one stadium for the same game and everybody has to fit in it. If you’re a brand that’s evolving, take NFL football, they’ve catered to a more corporate clientele, and all the professional leagues have done that, so they’ve added avatars over time. That’s a bit of a brand extension, so you have to be careful not to lose your core, but you can add avatars. It’s not uncommon, it’s just not always the needle driver.

I messed that up before, where we had too many avatars.

You can’t get unfocused as a business.

Now we find we have one or two avatars, and the marketing gets hyper focused, the operations get a lot smoother. You wrote a book called Biz Dev Done Right that became a number one bestseller. Business development is almost a buzzword at this point. Where do you see business owners get stuck, and what’s the biggest blind spot there?

Especially in the early to mid stages of growth, the problem clients get caught in is the feast and famine cycle. They say, wow, we’re slow, we should go get some business. So they go out, do all this lead generation, do their sales, and now they have clients to serve. So they put their focus into delivery and fulfillment, and meanwhile the sales and marketing efforts go down. Then they finish fulfilling and say, we need more clients, wait a minute, we haven’t been doing lead gen. So they get back out there, fulfillment goes down, lead gen goes up, and they’re on the hamster wheel. What they really need to do is decide where they want to be as a business and find out what the funnel is. If I need 10 customers a day, how many people do I have to reach? How many have to see my pricing? How many get a proposal, do a demo, go to the fitting room? How many ultimately buy? You decide that level of activity and you keep it the same forever. It never stops. The most common question I get, Sam, especially from a veteran business owner who’s been around 10 or 20 or 25 years, is, when does it get easy? And I say, oh, you’re looking for a date. Never. They say, why? Why would it? What have you earned? Business is a merit based activity, which is beautiful, but the problem is you always have to be earning it. You always have to earn the trust, always have to be out there selling and marketing and meeting the changing needs of your clients and prospects. It’s never going to get easier. You just have to get better. Funny thing, I sleep better when things are going wrong than when they’re going right. When everything is going right in business, I’m a nervous wreck, because I’m thinking, when’s the next hammer about to fall?

That’s the same for me. Right now is one of those times where I come in and look for something to do and there’s nothing to do, and that’s when I don’t sleep the best, because I’m thinking, what am I missing, what’s about to happen? A lot of the business owners I talk to are either in feast or famine or there’s a dumpster fire burning. How do you help clients get ahead of those phases?

We’ve interviewed and assessed businesses since 1990, and we have over 300,000 data points on the clients we’ve worked with. Most of the businesses we work with now are seven and eight figure entrepreneurs, which is the top 4 percent of all businesses. The number one area they’ve struggled with statistically over the years is that they don’t have a plan. No strategic plan. They’re probably really good at what they do, or very conscientious, or both. They hustle, they meet the needs of their clients, their clients are happy, but there’s no plan for the next step. They don’t ask what’s next. Whatever the fundamental motivation was for starting the business, they’ve outgrown it or hit that ceiling, and now they say, all right, what do we do next? I wrote a book called The Seven Stages of Business Success, and it lays out the seven developmental stages of a business. Each one has its own needs, its own plan, its own goals. Stages one through three are the growth stages. Growth is just doing more of what we’re doing. We did this one time and got one customer, let’s do it 10 times and get 10 customers. That’s growing. Scaling is different. Stages four through seven are scale, where you go internal and turn the fulfillment engine of the business into a machine. You’re building an assembly line, and it doesn’t matter what your business is. Wait a minute, I’m a lawyer, every case is different. No, they’re not, they’re all similar. I’m a doctor, every patient is different. Kind of, but not really. There’s still a process no matter what. The content within each step might be different, but the process is usually the same. Once you build that assembly line, you can scale on top of it. Where people get stuck is they have an idea, they grow and grow, then they hit the ceiling, and a lot of times it’s the business model inhibiting the growth. Perfect example. I had a landscaping company with a dump truck that would hold 10,000 pounds, and I would roll into the service station with 15,000 pounds worth of stuff in it. Sal and Vinny would fuel up the truck, and that’s a New Jersey thing, by the way. Every other state you pump your own gas. In New Jersey they pump it for you.

Still in New Jersey?

Still. All the reasons you were thinking of moving here, that’s the next one. So they’d come out and fill up the truck and say, you’re killing this thing. You’re overloading it, it’s going to break down. And I’d say, we can make it, we can make it. And Sal would say, you need a bigger truck, you’re carrying too much. That’s what happens in businesses. You have a certain software, certain systems, certain people, you get too busy, and you overload the system. You need a bigger truck to carry everything. In other words, you need scalable systems. You can’t just piece together your Outlook email with your Gmail and your cell phone. Those are good in the beginning, and then you give everybody else a cell phone and a Gmail and tell them to get on WhatsApp. At some point you need enterprise level systems, because otherwise everyone’s siloed out and you have a bunch of generalists when you need specialists in each area of the business. You have to make that leap in infrastructure, in specialization, and in platform.

That’s funny, because you almost always need those things before you can afford them. That’s a big part of being a founder, reinvesting and doing those next steps. How many businesses do you see stay stagnant and stay small because they just won’t do those things?

The most celebrated example is Kodak. They had digital camera technology, they invented it, and they said, wait a minute, we’re in the paper business. Sony said, okay, you don’t want it, we’ll take it from you. BlackBerry did the same thing. They thought the whole world wanted security and privacy, and as much as people complain about it, we really don’t care that much. Just don’t steal our stuff and you can have it.

I know it. I give more information to a social media platform than I do when I apply for a loan. I’ve never had a mortgage application ask me what I like to do on the weekends or what my sign is, but on social media, here’s my whole life.

BlackBerry never embraced the app world, and it blew right past them. They went from being the number one provider with the largest market share down to gone, for all intents and purposes.

I want to shift gears and talk about your fishing. You said your dad was an offshore fisherman and he taught you to drive the boat when you were probably way too young to be doing it.

Seven years old, and yeah, I was driving that boat. My dad did a lot of offshore fishing, and I live in New Jersey, so we fished off of Ambrose Channel. For those who know that area, if you picture New Jersey going straight up and Long Island going out the other way, there’s this little L, and there’s a ton of great fishing. Striper fishing, bluefishing, big game fishing, tuna fishing, you name it. There’s an area out there called the canyons, 60 to 100 miles out, and you go fishing there. I did a lot of that growing up, a lot of trolling, which was cool. There’s a lot you’ve got to know, and it relates a lot to business. You’ve got to know the depth of the water, when the fish like to run. When the tide is stagnant, the fish are stagnant. When the tide starts to move, the fish start to move. Depending on what you’re going for, some fish are ambush predators that like to come to the surface and bite, some dive deep. You have to have the right bait at the right speed at the right depth at the right time in order to catch the fish, and you’re always learning something. So there I was with a buddy of mine off the coast of South Africa, on the back of a sailboat, just sailing along at six knots. He says, hey, this is trolling. We were 11 miles off, where the continental shelf is, and the tuna run up the coast. We put out one line and I caught a yellowfin, nice size, great fish. Put it out again, we get another bite, and while I’m reeling it in I feel a jerk on the line. My hand came off the reel and the line just took off like nobody’s business. I said, what the heck was that, and the guys said, you’ve got a shark on the line. It ripped it out of my hands. They said let it run, don’t even try, and it ran out forever, and then it stopped. They said start reeling it in, and I said, guys, there’s almost no tension on the line. They said reel faster, it’s coming in the boat.

Oh really?

And then all of a sudden I felt a tug and it was gone. He said the shark probably ripped the bait off. Those guys fish those waters all the time, and sure enough, it was a bad day for that bait fish. It was just ripped. That was a really cool experience, and the thing is, the fishermen knew those waters. They knew right where to drop and how to drop it. Once we got out to a certain depth, it was awesome.

It’s funny, when you were describing what fish to go after, I was thinking that’s exactly how you described finding your audience. That’s what I love about doing this show. When I interview guys, there are so many parallels between business and patience and knowing your target. If I could only fish for one fish in the world it would be stripers, and if I’m targeting a striper versus something else, it’s totally different bait, totally different presentation, totally different everything compared to bass or tuna. A lot of business owners I interview who hunt and fish don’t even realize it until we’re talking, and then they say, man, there’s so much alike. I’ve seen some really excellent fishermen and hunters who, if they would just apply the same principles to their business, would be so much more successful.

There are so many different variables that have to come together in order to catch a fish, and it’s similar in business. You could change one of the variables and still catch a fish, but you’re not catching the fish you want. Same in business. If I change my pricing or my timing or my hours of operation or my geography, yeah, I’ll catch fish, but they’re not the ones I want and they’re not the ones I can build a sustainable business on.

Exactly. Back when we had to eat what we caught to live, it was the same thing, and now we’re eating what we catch in business. You said your son is a big freshwater fisherman. Do you still get out there?

I still get out there, do some fishing, do some hunting. I did the dove hunt in Texas a couple of years ago. That was a blast. I really enjoyed that.

Hunting is probably one of the most fun ones because you can be social, there’s a lot going on.

There was a dozen of us out there. It was cool.

You’ll hear more about this later, but in February we’re planning to go to Texas and hunt pigs out of a helicopter. You should come.

Really? That would be cool.

They set you up in the helicopter, they provide the guns and all the gear, and you’re locked in so you can’t fall out. Those pigs are invasive down there, they’re destroying the crops, they’re very destructive, and they want as many gone as possible. You probably can’t kill enough of them to get rid of them. Shooting out of a helicopter sounds really cool to me.

That’s pretty cool.

I love that hunting and fishing gets you out of your head. That’s what I use it for. It’s hard for business owners to find a way to get out of their head and relax, and those situations are some of the only ways I can actually clear my mind or shut it down. How important is that for you and your clients? Do you talk to them about their mental health and doing things to get there? Entrepreneurship is a tough business.

We talk all the time about knowing your rhythms and blocking out the time that’s important to you first. When you do your annual planning, I like to set all the me time, family time, and vacation time in the calendar before the year starts, because once it’s in the calendar you start thinking about it and anticipating it.

My wife taught me that, mainly because she liked to go on vacations, but what I found is that if I planned it out ahead of time, my business never suffered. Never. Now you do have to put some systems in place so you can be gone for a week or two without shutting the whole business down, but if you plan ahead like that you can use that time for ball games and kids and everything else. I was talking to a guy the other day who was an absentee father. He didn’t want to be, but he was running a business working 12, 13, 14 hours a day. I get it, but you can’t do that forever and keep a wife and a family.

Right, and I think people get tripped up on the concept of balance. I need balance in my life, a certain amount of balance in my business. I don’t know that that’s even possible, or that you’d want it. You have to integrate your life more as an entrepreneur. Your kids understand your business, your family understands your business and is involved in it. You take them on a business trip now and again. When you come home you want to shut off from business, but you also want to talk about what you’re doing so they understand. Whenever you can integrate it and make it fun for them and make it learning for them, those are life skills that are hugely important for when they get out in the real world.

It’s funny, the girl who works for me and runs my whole life, her dad was a business owner. When I was interviewing her, that’s how she grew up, working in his business, and she thinks like it’s her business and treats it like it’s her business. That’s very hard to find in an employee. That’s what I’m trying to instill in my kids, because even if they end up as employees, treating their job that way makes them better at it.

It’s true, and look, entrepreneurship isn’t for everybody. It’s hard enough when it is right for you. An entrepreneur is only one in 15 people to start the conversation, so you’re already in a smaller group, and it’s hard yards. For those of us that love it, we love it because it’s hard yards, but you’ve got to love the hard yards.

I always tell people I’m unemployable. I don’t know how to do anything else, and I was a terrible employee for the few years I was one. So looking ahead and thinking about everything you’ve done over your career, if you could give yourself a piece of advice 30 years ago, what would you tell yourself?

I would have thought a little bigger. As big as I thought, there were some things where I would have thought bigger. And I would have done more investing outside of my business earlier. I do a lot of it now, but I would have used my business as a funnel to other opportunities. Not diversifying my focus and attention, because I don’t want to be in a whole bunch of other businesses, but I would have diversified my portfolio a lot more.

If you were talking to a struggling entrepreneur who’s under a million, what’s the fastest way to get over that and get up to a seven figure business?

Fix your pricing. Start charging what you’re worth. Start talking directly to those people and no one else. Your marketing is not for everybody. Stop trying to be everything to everybody and talk directly to that audience, that passionate client. Believe me, you can get to a million quickly when you’re taking the right message to the right people. Your selling process is going to get a lot easier. It doesn’t really matter, Facebook, Google, whatever, if you have the right offer. Business is traffic and offer. That’s it. Are you talking to the right people, and are you saying the right things?

Before we get off here, I want to make sure we cover something I read about you, the obnoxious offer. Tell me about it.

The obnoxious offer is not being obnoxious in price, it’s being obnoxious in value. You’re making it such a no brainer offer that they say, oh my God, you’re speaking right to me. An obnoxious offer goes to the core sweet spot client for that product or service and speaks right to them. When you do that and you give them high value, one, they’ll pay your premium price, and two, you’ll do such a good job with that core audience that you’ll pick up the fringe audiences around it.

Carl, every time we talk I feel like I learn so much, and I appreciate you coming on here. Loved the fishing stories. You’ve got to come with us, we’ll go fish or we’ll go shoot some pigs. If people want to learn more about you, where can we find you?

Go to my personal website, carl360.com. That’s where you’ll find all things about me.

Guys, if you want help in your business, this is the guy. He’ll take you to the next level, I know it. Thanks again. This is Sam and Carl from The Hunt for Success. We will see you next time.