Ken Courtright: Today's Growth | Growing Business Today, Marketing Your Business For Growth And Success

First class is a figment of our imagination. It’s not real. It’s just branding. In flying first class over the years and in meeting people who are business owners and who definitely run large divisions and large companies, Ken came to a realization that half the people in first class are absolutely no different than most of us. 100% of them are just regular everyday people. They work hard and they earn a living like most of us. They just did something a little bit different or longer, or maybe they pressed a little harder, but they are by no means smarter or more intellectual or savvier. They still get intimidated or nervous. Realize that everybody following podcast belongs in first class. You belong in the VIP section. Take the leap and start getting behind the velvet rope because you do belong there. Once you get used to it, then you’re in pursuit of what’s next. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com

Sometimes we get to a point where we are so mentally full and then we walk into a meeting and somebody either tries to dump more responsibility on you or ask you to do something and you just blow up. When somebody in the company thinking negatively and reaches out to anybody that is not their boss and says something negative about their situation, the company, or their boss in any way, shape, or form, that is called cross-lining. In business, negative can only go upline; it can never go side to side and it can certainly never go down. Once the seed is planted and it gets nurtured, it gets spread. All of a sudden, there’s a touch of cancer inside of that organization, and the cancer spreads like wildfire. Cross-lining is one of the biggest killers of business growth. If you catch people cross-lining in your company, you need to stop it immediately. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter K

Everything has a force inside it that pulls, including a magnet. Magnets work the same way in selling. It can help you sell more stuff faster. If you go to a trade show, why do you go and walk up to some booths where you quickly will walk by ten other booths? Often you will see a tiny little magnet at the front of a booth and it’s something you can’t walk past. It could be a Twix candy bar, a breath mint, a pen. It’s that free giveaway so that you will walk up to the booth and stick your hand in the jar, giving the opportunity for the person behind the candy jar to ask your name and start a conversation that might lead into sales. Magnets sell. The question is what magnets are you using in your sales funnel? Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

The title of an article in Fast Company back in November 2011 is Risk, Survive, Repeat! They gave twenty examples of major companies that took major risks in 2010 and 2011. Groupon took a risk and turned down $6 billion from Google. Most people would think they’re nuts, but that one turned out to be positive. Nokia decided to not use the Android-based platform in their phones and they instead chose Windows Mobile. How did that turn out? Not so good. Netflix decided to spin off their DVD by mail division which was their whole company in the beginning. How did that work out? Amazing, now they’re one of the biggest movie makers and TV producers in the world. AT&T spent $40 billion on T-Mobile. That also turned out amazing. How can people take risks that are calculated? To do that, you need an R&D department, a research and development department, no matter how big or small you are if you want to survive in perpetuity. Ken throws out some guidelines so that any company of any size can kickst

Growth is change. In business, when your company is growing, you need to move along with it. That could mean to reinvent or reboot a company, taking the leap to implement some changes. Ken together with Kerri shares their own experiences with rebooting their own companies. They provide the signs to when is the time a company needs it and why it is necessary to go back to basics every few years. Looking at the things you’re using in your company, they share a software that’ll help you do the job efficiently. Lastly, they put forward the value of accountability, which can propel the overall productivity of the company. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

Continuing the series of interviewing Kerri, together they talk about growing your company with events. Starting off with some pains in the process, they provide a familiar view of the struggles of starting and finding your company moving forward—from the pain of not having enough time to the stress comes. They share their journey they went through in organizing growth events and take us into what happens during those times, providing advises on how to organize your own events in the future. Learn how to build relationships, when to sell an event, and what kind of event to do that is fit for your company. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

Finding the right people for your business can be tough. However, once you do have them, you’ll then have to think about keeping them longer with you. Ken is joined by Kerri to talk about starting a new employee partnership or a new vendor. They share what are the things they look for when hiring and what angles to go about in doing so while discussing their own processes and experiences about the entire situation. Giving great tips and insights, they offer the ways you can keep, nurture, and grow an employee, partner, coach or vendor. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

The same reason that Steve Jobs was fired from his own company to only later be brought back in is the same reason why Apple is what it is now. That’s an awesome analogy of the management system of a business. It’s cracking and you’re filling in the cracks with another manager. Has your management hit their level of incompetence? If so, that’s costing you three to six months in annual gross revenues. If you’re a one-man show or a ten-man show, it’s time for you to expand yourself, to get in pain and crack yourself, and fill in that crack with someone of competence so you can achieve fast growth. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

One of the old managerial metaphors was if you plant corn, can you get wheat? If you plant soybeans, can you get an oak tree? The answer is, of course, not. Growth consultants would often ask a brand-new client what growth seeds they plant. On a daily basis, the majority of businesses do not plant growth seeds of any kind. If you’re not planting any growth seeds or any seeds whatsoever that ensures the company’s fast growth, you’re actually growing weeds. Learn the different types of growth seeds in the average business. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

One stumbling block that keeps a business from reaching its goals is resistance. This resistance could be from anywhere – employees, clients, business partners, etc. It forces the business to step back instead of step forward, and harms its potential to grow. Learn the ways to overcome this resistance through the Three-Day Assault. Ken guides you through with a step-by-step of this method as he lays down reasons why you have the capability to reach your goals. You don’t need anybody’s approval to grow, you already have that in you. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

Imagine a portfolio of website grow in the number of domains to manage, in the number of people to manage, in the number of processes to manage. The bigger it gets, the bigger the valleys between departments get. The bigger miscommunication it gets, the bigger the misunderstanding of a process it gets. What every company that’s growing quickly has to do is self-inflicted pain. You’ve got to surgically cut out areas that are inefficient. Many times, this is just a tool on an annual basis. No matter what you have, whether it’s a single product, you’re just trying to ramp up salespeople, whether you’ve got nine divisions and you’re doing a billion a year, you’re going to find gaping holes of inefficiency. Think about every product and every employee like a part of our body. If you get gangrene, you’ve got to cut your foot off or you’re going to lose your whole leg. Learn some tips on how you can remove proven inefficiency which can be quite often painful. Love the show? Subscr

How does a mature company continually change even products and still have a pretty decent substantial growth? Ken views growth around the four Ps. He says the four pillars that anchor all growth are people, principle, products, and process. Growth often comes from the illumination of the four Ps put under a microscope. Ken puts out a State of the Union address annually where he covers a method that forces you to illuminate your four Ps no matter how big or small your company is. He encourages you to watch the video so you can discover how you can make your company grow faster and be more stable, and learn how to have way more opportunity than you have today. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

How many times have you seen a beer commercial where you’ll notice the person is drinking the beer, touching it and feeling it, and then you see that person drinking that beer looking and noticing someone else looking at them? That is level three selling. There are actually three levels of selling. Level one is touching, level two is letting them feel it, and level three is getting your potential customer to see other people seeing them with your product. Learn how you can get your sales presentation to build in the verbiage that not only lets people touch it but feel the product and in their mind’s eye see other people feel the benefits of your product. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

One of the major business challenges that people get stuck in, even with the right price point and a better service or product, is getting customers to pull the trigger. When they have a potential customer on the call, they immediately launch into their story with the foremost mentality that enthusiasm sells. However, when you’re the owner of company and you’re selling your service or your product yourself, by default, people only believe 50% of what you say because they know you have to sell to keep your company alive. When you say you’re amazing, that’s a salesperson talking and that’s evidence-based. When other people say you’re amazing, that’s called social proof. People buy what the masses say should be bought. Discover how you can get endorsements and positive testimonials about your services or products to raise your social proof and get more people to actually buy from you. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community tod

If you’re bringing in a player wherein you get your top 20 people or top 10% to 15% people of your company, what you cannot do is have a short meeting or circular event where you introduce this person to your team and then you introduce the team to this person and then begin on-boarding. If the guy you’re bringing in is a major player who you’ve probably spent a ton of money and time in finding out that he is the perfect person to come into your company, if you want an explosive on-boarding to take place, you cannot bypass rapport, building value, building know, like, and trust, and put them right into the company. Realize that you are not adding a person to your team. You are putting this person into a room and you are mixing up puzzle pieces and you are creating a brand new team. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s simply setting the stage and continually looking at what techniques get websites on page one the fastest and what makes them stick there. The two types of SEO that’s going to be discussed here are on-site or on-page SEO and off-site SEO. SEO is basically math, and mathematicians that masquerade as marketers for internet websites run on-page SEO. They are mainly concerned with keyword density, anchor texts, meta-tags or meta-descriptions and everything else that makes up the physical quality of the site. Off-site SEO is completely different in that there’s very little concern to the physical construction/load speed so much as partnering. They’re concerned with creating content for a partner that they could put on their website that would actually link back to their site in exchange. Some of the biggest sites are actually doing strategic partnership type of marketing. You might want to ask yourself, are you mainly concerned with on-page like most compa

A recent article came out about direct to consumer companies keeping their advertising in house. Some experts say inside advertising or in-house ad agencies are a wave, but after reading this article, for sure it’s not really going to be just a fad. The article states four main points as to why these companies are doing their advertising in house, namely control of data, nimbleness of knowing things faster, cost savings, and intuition. Learn more about these four key points so you can better decide if inside advertising is the route for you. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s Growth community today: kencourtright.com Today’s Growth Twitter Ken Courtright LinkedIn

You see what people your age sees in a situation. When you look at a challenge, you see it based on the vehicle, in the business, and everything you’re in. An intern in college would see that business challenge, that marketing problem, or that that idea for a new product totally different from what an experienced colleague sees. You can leverage that and experience business growth from youth because tomorrow’s customers are today’s nineteen-year-olds. Tomorrow’s people buying the mega homes and the mega yachts are today’s nineteen-year-olds. We have to understand how these people think, walk, and tick because they’re influencing their parents and grandparents. Interns see problems differently and they see opportunities differently as well. They look forward and they’re not pickled with experience. If you’re not getting some young people, whether interns or full-timers, it’s time to do so. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Today’s G

To experience unconventional growth, sometimes you have to get the vision from other industries about your exact same problems which they may already have solved. In the fifties, a company was struggling with how they could improve the service of their restaurant. They did a two-day immersion in the banking industry. The guy got in his car, drove around, looked at banks and interviewed tellers. He drove to the third bank, half of the building looked like it was hit by a tornado and it was under construction. He walked up to the construction and asked what’s going on. They go, “We’re adding a customer service window.” The guy then goes outside the rain and said, “People are going to walk up to this in the rain?” They said, “No. They’re going to a drive-through and make their deposits. We’re going to give them their receipt through a drive-through window.” The guy got into his car, drove back to the corporate, blew the speed limit and stop signs, and h

Is there a special type of marketing, production, or research and development where you might be struggling right now financially? Do you need an edge over a competitor? You may want to consider carving out overseas to get strategic. From a vision standpoint, people in other countries view your product, your marketing challenges, and your whole company and the position of your company within its landscape different than you in the US. Everything about it is healthy. It’s a different opinion. It’s a different take. Some of these people are light years behind us in technology and thinking. Some of them are light years ahead of us in talent, time, energy and vision. That gives them a unique vantage point. It’s time to go overseas and get some of that vision. Remember, three from one. For every one single individual you have in the US, you can get three people overseas. To truly service our customer better, we should go with a better solution for the same dollar. Love the show? Subscribe, rate,