FIR 115: How To UNLOCK The GROWTH Mindset SECRET

Financial Investing Radio

In this episode, we take a look at the secrets of the growth mindset. If YOU could adopt the techniques for changing your growth culture, would you do that?

Thank you for joining me here today. So recently, I was taking a look at a site that was talking about some of the pain points around SMBs. Right? What are some of the things that make it difficult for small to medium businesses? I've been so busy doing some AI work, and projects that I've not had a chance to podcast recently. So I've missed doing this. Alright, so let's let's take a look at this. I was interested in focusing on what are the things that hold back a small to medium business. And I look through what lots of organizations are saying certainly looked at what my own experience has been as well. I found one in particular, that was interesting. It's called WalkerSands.com interesting site, they focus on accelerating the growth of b2b brands. Anyway, in their on their blog, there was a gentleman who had written down a list of 100 pain points, and it caught my eye and I, I started to look through those and then I copied them down. And then I started to categorize them. And I noticed that well, there were some that focused on business process pains. There was cash flow pains and competitive pressure pains, eco system paints, which are a How do I deal with, you know, those that I'm partnering with?

Of course, there are pains around expenses, of course, financial pains, government pains, legal pains, marketing pains, and then there are some personal pains, right things that happens in our lives, then there are product pains, and finally, workplace pains. So I went through on each of the 100. And I started to categorize them as well, right, this one's business process, this one's workplace and culture, this one's product and marketing and so forth. And then I sat back and I counted them up. And what I came back with, first surprise me, and then I realized it was confirming because it reflected my experience with working with lots of companies. So here's here's the results. Now this is an order of repetition. In other words, this is the ones that had the most number of pain points. Alright, so this is out of 100.

So the top one was 30% of the pain points on his list, dealt with workplace slash culture slash mindset kind of issues. Right? All right, that was the one that was the most repetitive. Now I need to say that the weighting of all of these that I'm going to go through certainly not the same, right. So at any given point, you know, one pain point could become more detrimental than 10 others combined. So I didn't look at it from that perspective. In this particular grouping, I just said, hey, how many of these in this category are there? Alright, so here's the list. It's 30%. We're workplace culture mindset. And then the next most repetitive was marketing. So 15% were marketing, and then 12% were financial. And then it drops down into single digits area. So 5% for competitive pressure, another 5% were personal, another 5% of them, were business processes, and then down to ecosystem and product, both of those are 4%. And then going down a cash flow is 3%. So there's only three out of the 100 that talked about cash flow. I thought that was a little small, you know, my experience with small, you know, doing small business stuff is cash flow is obviously extremely critical, and an important one. So that's why I pointed out a you know, in terms of the numbers of these, it's not that, you know, they're all weighted the same. All right. So it's an interesting look, though, as I've looked around lots of companies and worked with tons of companies over the last 35 years, I've noticed two common themes regardless of industry. The one is culture. workplace mindset challenges.

You could be in the medical industry, healthcare, you could be in financial services or banking, you could be an aerospace or defense, wherever it's, this is a common thing, culture or workplace or mindset challenges, just our are always the common thread. And then number two, which is real closely related, is communication challenges, right? That's always a big a big issue. And sometimes that feeds into culture itself. But if I, you know, those are the common things that I see. So when I, when I looked at this guy's list, and I see that 30 of his 100 dealt with workplace culture mindset, I wasn't surprised that, you know, he, at least from his perspective, that that was a common set of problems. Last month, or maybe it's six weeks ago, when I did my previous podcast, I shared some findings from a Harvard Business Review report, which talked about the small company trap, and how to break that. Now, if you recall, there are two and I invite you to go back and listen to it. If you haven't heard that one. There are two key areas in investing. Well, let me back up, there are two key areas to break that trap. The first one is investing and and adopting technology. So in that bucket, I put things like you got to have control your data, you have to have, you know, good systems to help you. Obviously, I think AI is a key part of that. And of course, I make a pitch and appoint a case for that. Right. So the Harvard business folks said, that was one of the common themes that they saw of small companies, and big companies that both survived and flourished through through COVID, as well as in other times as well.

Okay, that was the first one. second one was marketing slash brand equity. All right. So when you look at this other guy's list that I was talking about earlier, on pain points, marketing was high on the list. Interestingly, there's a little bit on on technology that was in there in terms of pain points. Here's the thing I wanted to get to those. When you look at the list above, you know, marketing had the highest repetitive points, other than the culture piece, right. And it was central to Harvard's finding, my experience has been that when AI is properly applied, it helps close the gaps between the marketing needs and the pain points we have there. And where we need to go to right in order to accomplish the kinds of outcomes, the Harvard that Harvard was talking about in that report. Now, what I did was I pulled together a list here of some of the marketing pain points that this particular gentleman included. Right. And and I'll just, I'll just mention some of them. Number Number one here, that he'd mentioned was, we are not able to get new customers. All right. The other is nobody knows who we are. Or here's another pain point. I'm not getting any foot traffic, or or online traffic. The other is, let's see. This is a commodity business. How do we differentiate ourselves right? on something other than price, right? Hey, Mike, my take on that is you need a good offer. I know an offer guy. Here's another one. I have no clue why we just lost that big sale. All right. Here's another sales are down 30% from last year, why? and so forth, right? Now, those are all interesting marketing problems.

And I've had an opportunity recently to be doing some things with an organization where we've been applying AI, looking at these kinds of questions and discovering, hey, what was the behavior that drove growth or that caused, you know, customers not to repeat their business right over the last several years, an AI brings out some really interesting insights for these kinds of organizations. So I'd say hey, you know what, the Harvard folks are, right? You got to invest in these kinds of technologies so that you can compete, because the table stakes have changed in terms of what it means to compete effectively with our marketing and AI is a piece of that. So I reiterate AI properly applied, does help us close the gaps between where we are today and where we need to go. But I want to come back to the previous point about workplace culture and mindset, right, which is by far the most common recurring pain point across organizations. You can even have the best marketing the best technology but as Peter Drucker used to say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Remember that culture eats strategy for breakfast. So you might have a strategy of a I'm gonna do AI, and I'm gonna apply it into my marketing. But if I don't have a culture and a mindset that will adopt and accept and put into place those particular changes that are coming out of that, that's a waste of time, right? So how do you achieve a growth mindset in your business, it's not enough to do the marketing, that's obviously critical. It's not enough to do the AI. Although I would say that it's critical as well. It requires these two things. Number one, you do need to apply the marketing best practices and use an AI to help you do that is certainly key. But number two, most important, you got to have a growth mindset, it's a change in thought, on adopting and adapting the way we work, right, we have to address the culture part. So growing our businesses by just technological insights alone, in my experience, that's naive to consider. Now while we may have short term gains, doing that, it doesn't possess the power to sustain at least my experience.

So what means sustainable growth? While it typically requires this mindset, that's continuously evolving it continuously vulnerable, right, continually speed being asking for what do I need to do or improve next, it's where I want me to take on new insights, and then to accept the need to change and grow. But you got to do it in steps, right? That's, that's the key. If I get too much insight, or too big or things to change, then it's overwhelming. And I might as well just stop because the human brain sort of shuts down, right, and the culture won't accept it. So it needs to be given in doses into a series of steps become smart steps. Now, I've seen large companies apply culture change techniques. But if they're done in mass, like I said, it becomes overwhelming and soon against syndicates drop. So from my experience, the growth mindset secret is these two things, number one, got to apply AI insights to your marketing, your sells your internal operations, take advantage of those platforms that are available today.

And I can tell you about the platform that we provide, we build on the big guys to do the stuff. Alright, that's the first one. Number two, bundle those insights that you get with a culture hack to make minor, you know, but yet still measurable adjustments to the way you work in order to adopt those AI insights. If you do number one, without doing number two, my experience has been the organization doesn't sustain. If you don't have the mindset for growth, than this stuff really isn't for you. Now, you might go one or two times through it. Now we like I said, we call this a smart step. Smart step has those two components in it? So the growth mindset, what that really is, is it's a succession of multiple smart steps.

When you're doing smart steps, think of those two components: 1) applying AI insights to your marketing, your sales, your internal operations, and, 2) then to applying a hacker culture hack to your organization that allows you then to change the way you work to adopt those changes that will come to you from the A AI insights and then grow your business right. Doing this puts you on a path of sustainable incremental growth. Now, as you know, there are so many pain points that an SMB experiences, and I'll be the first to say this, what I'm talking about does not solve all of them.

But I have found what it does do is it focuses the people on digestible attainable steps, which shifts the culture and the profits one step at a time. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining and until next time, get into the growth mindset.

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