Tom Bailey 0:07
Hello and welcome to succeed throught speaking the place for experts and entrepreneurs who want high value ideas to boost business results
Hello, I'm Tom Bailey and in today's episode, I'll be getting to know Simon Severino who is the CEO and founder of strategy sprints, which is a global team of certified strategy sprints. coaches who help their clients to gain market share, is also a Forbes business council member, a contributor to the entrepreneurs magazine, and a member of Duke corporate education. So Simon, hello, and a very warm welcome to today's episode.
Simon Severino 0:51
Hello, everybody excited to be here.
Tom Bailey 0:54
Great. Thank you Simon and just of interest for I guess, me and the listeners whereabouts are you in the world right now?
Simon Severino 0:59
I'm in Vienna, Austria right now.
Tom Bailey 1:02
Fantastic. But that's not where you from originally, I'm writing thinking.
Simon Severino 1:06
I'm an Italian. But you know, geography is is is irrelevant. Yes. The internet in the morning, I deal with Shanghai, then London, Zurich, and then afternoon, San Francisco, Los Angeles. And then I go cook, cook for my boys. Geography for me,
Tom Bailey 1:26
it's just got us so much closer to the world hasn't in terms of that global reach and connection. Fantastic. And thank you so much. I wanted to share a little bit more about it before we do get started. So Simon helps business owners in SAS and services discover how to run their company more efficiently and increased sales. He created the strategy sprints method that doubles revenue in 90 days, by getting business owners out of the weeds. The title for today's episode is how to double your revenue in 90 days. And Simon's gonna show us how to do that in just seven minutes. So question, one for you today is who are your ideal clients.
Simon Severino 2:06
We work with software builders, and professional services, consultancies, marketing agencies who have an online business. And we work with the owner. Plus, the sprint team is one person from sales, one from operations, one from marketing. So if it's a solopreneur, we help them hire their first virtual virtual colleagues. Yeah. And, and then we help them tackle each each of these areas, marketing, sales and operations
Tom Bailey 2:38
arising thanks so much. When you think of your typical client that comes towards you, what would you say is the biggest challenge that they face before working
Simon Severino 2:46
with you? Scaling is the growth is the biggest challenge. And that means they run out of time, they have just 24 hours in a day. And what should I do? There are so many moving parts of 12 problems to solve which one to solve first. And yeah, I've just 24 hours, should I run my podcasts, etc. Time, time is the main concern, and they become the bottleneck for their own growth, they're still doing fulfillment themselves. So if they're a management consultant, they are still consulting. And so while they consult, who is working on a joint venture system, who is working on writing a book who is working on strategic partnerships, not and that's, that's the main problem we get, we need to get them out of the weeds, free up 10 to 14 hours of their time, in the first two weeks, so that then we can work on their business on improving operations on improving sales.
Tom Bailey 3:48
Correct. And ultimately, if they're not working on their business, and they're stuck in the weeds, what impact can that have in the short or long term on their business?
Simon Severino 3:56
It's dramatic. So imagine you are right now an agency. Let's say you are doing 30,000 per month, and you are three people. And two of you are really doing the work. So you get a client, you do the client work? Yeah. All right. I, let's say you're doing your 30,000 per month, but it's just project after project. So you don't have a reliable, repeating sales situation. You don't have a revenue stream. You have just a couple projects. You have maybe five clients. Yeah. Now while you are solving your client's problems, who is solving your problems? Now the world is changing all the time, the life of your clients changes. Now these projects will be over in January. And in January, you have no projects, because nobody was working on the sales pipeline. Correct. And that's the cycle that is risky, and especially in this year. So revenue is important. The revenues Then, but also the savings system, the investment system, and you need all the three to have self healing mechanisms in your business. Yeah. If you don't have all the three in place, then it's just dangerous to have projects and jump into projects.
Tom Bailey 5:14
Yeah, of course, it makes complete sense. So somebody listening that is reflecting and thinking this sounds like to me, what's that one piece of advice that you'd give them to really help them just get started?
Simon Severino 5:25
The first one is to write down how you're how you're spending your time. Yeah. And if these tasks give you energy or take energy, and if these tasks are high leverage or low leverage, low leverage Are you are posting on LinkedIn, you are editing your video, high leverage is you are talking to big strategic partners. Yeah, you are talking to your next key sales higher. These are high leverage activities.
Tom Bailey 5:56
Yeah, so it's doing that audit of your time effectively, and figuring out which ones of those tasks that somebody else could do for you, and which ones you should really be focusing your time on. So given that, then what valuable resource or where can we point people to help them get started in solving this problem.
Simon Severino 6:15
So we live this period of open source. Yeah, we have 274 tools and templates and swipe copies for our clients. And, and we share many of them on our website. It's strategy sprints.com. And you can find there dozens of tools that are open source, so everybody can use them, can improve them. Everybody's learning from it. And we love that that's our spirit. We think that the world is ready for a truly collaborative endeavor. And the world is now like Lego, you have some Lego pieces, I have some Lego pieces, we come together, we can build much bigger things.
Tom Bailey 6:58
Yeah, I love that. And so let's build some Lego together, go to strategy Sprint's dot com, and I'll put that link in the show notes as well. So people to click on that and dive in. So question for you, then Simon, what would you say is one of your greatest either, let's say mistakes or learnings that you've made either in life or in business? And what did you learn from it?
Simon Severino 7:19
Biggest mistake not buying Bitcoin 12 years ago?
Tom Bailey 7:24
Yeah, of course. Yeah, I think a lot of people will really be thinking that right now as well. Yeah. Awesome. And the last question for me today is what is the one question that I should have asked you today that we haven't and would also bring some great value to our audience?
Simon Severino 7:40
You have you have asked a lot of questions. And maybe, yeah, what is one thing right now that people should avoid if they run a business? Yeah. What is that really, really avoid not not getting your numbers every seven days, I want you to get your marketing numbers, sales numbers and ops numbers every seven days, just three numbers that will tell you 80% of what you need to know you need to know, are we going in the right direction at the right pace? And you want to see the the weak signals quickly? Pick three marketing numbers. For example, how many people were on our website today? How many want to work with us? picked three sales numbers, number of discovery calls demo calls that you had this week? How many did you convert? And how many pounds euros dollars? Did you? Did you close in deal flow? And then some operations numbers? What is your NPS Net Promoter Score of this week? How many client referrals did you get? How many client complaints did you catch in the in the first 14 hours? These dashboards, create a simple spreadsheet and have this as a live a real time dashboard in front of you. I don't want you to run a business without this. Otherwise, you're flying blind and it's easy to do. It takes you half an hour to build.
Tom Bailey 9:01
Yeah. Great, great advice. And like you said, it's the it's the lifeline. It shows you exactly how the business is pulsing and it's so important to do it on a weekly basis. So amazing. Simon, thank you so much again for your time today and following along sharing such great value with our audience.
Simon Severino 9:18
Thank you, everybody. Keep rolling.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
