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The $100 MBA Show
MBA2724 The Fastest Way To Grow Your Business In 2026
00:12:20
Wondering what really drives rapid business growth? Is it another marketing hack, or something far simpler? If you’re tired of chasing the latest promotional trends and hoping they’ll finally move the needle, this lesson is for you.
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Opportunity Builder Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Everyone thinks that the fastest way to grow is some new marketing hack, a new ad strategy, a new social media trend, a new funnel, a new AI tool. Nope. The fastest way to grow your business is actually brutally simple. Make your product 10 times better than anything else out there. I had to learn this the hard way because if you do that, your business will grow whether you're good at marketing or not. The truth that people don't want to admit is that marketing doesn't create growth. Marketing can't cure a bad product. Marketing amplifies growth of a good product of a great product. Your product is the engine of your business. Marketing is the gasoline. If your engine's weak, if you're driving like a Toyota Echo, you can pour as much gasoline as you want. It's not going to go anywhere fast. But if your engine's powerful, you're driving a Porsche. Just a tap of the gas pedal will send you flying. Welcome Back to the $100 NBA Show. I'm your host Omar Zenholm, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday and Friday, to help you start, grow and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask if this show has helped you in any way. Leave me a quick review you could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no fluff practical business advice that you're getting from the show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Most entrepreneurs spend 80% trying to grow, but the fastest growth honestly comes when you stop trying to grow and you start trying to be great. The fastest growing companies I've ever built or ever coached all have one thing in common. Their product made people say wow. It stops customers in their track and makes them say I need this. Growth is just a side effect of excellence. There was a time when I was growing my software company, Webinar Ninja, where I hit a wall. I hit a plateau. I was really burnt out. I was exhausted, I was frustrated. I was trying to market my way to growth. I was doing one marketing activity after another. And then one day I realized it's not a marketing problem. I stopped and sat with my team and we all admitted our product needs to be better. Not just more features, but the whole experience. How customers use our product, how quickly they get a win from our product, how well we support them, how we onboard them matters. How clear the interface was, how intuitive the workflow of getting to creating a webinar was, how fast the software felt for the user, how stable it ran, how reliable it was. All of these things gave our customers confidence. So instead of another Facebook ad, we rolled up our sleeves and improved the product. Every day we tried to make the product better than yesterday. And you know what happened? Growth referrals, word of mouth testimonials, great reviews. More people started to use our product and when they used it, we had better retention, higher LTV lifetime value, lower churn, lower support tickets, more trust from our customers. And that's exact growth that you want. All right. You want growth that's real because you can market your business. But if your business stops growing when you stop marketing, that's a problem. Your product should be selling itself to some degree, even just a little. Business should be growing and you should be getting more and more sales just based on the merit of the product. And then if you want to make it grow even more, marketing helps. But if marketing is the only thing that's saving you from going out of business, you have a product problem. Imagine you're trying to build a giant bonfire. Marketing is the gasoline. The product is the wood. Most entrepreneurs have tiny Piles of sticks and they want to create a big bonfire. They're dumping buckets of gasoline onto these piles of sticks and it just doesn't work. But if you have huge solid logs of wood in this fire and gasoline and you light it, you have a major bonfire that's a real product. A product that actually is burning off its own merit. To go back to the bonfire analogy, you know, if you have a pile of really solid wood and a bunch of gasoline, all you need is a tiny spark and then boom, you have a huge fire. But if you have tiny sticks and you pour a bunch of gasoline and you line and match, it's going to take a while for that file to grow. And you have to keep on feeding it and feeding it and feeding it until you're exhausted. The great thing about bonfires, especially big ones, is that it tracks a lot of people. They what's that fire? Let's go and check it out. Same thing in your business. People start to gather, people start inviting other people. Hey. People start to talk, people start to share. And your fire grows because your wood is great, which is your product, not because of the gasoline. I think I'm exhausting all my metaphors here, but I think you get the picture. You always hear this quote, the best product doesn't always win. That is a lie told by people who don't want to do the work. The best products do win consistently across all industries. For example, Apple computers. They make the most reliable, stable, virus free computers on the earth. They last for years. They rarely break the resale market of these computers. Computers that are 5 and 6 and 7 and 10 years old still sell on ebay and Facebook marketplace. That's why they are number one. That's why they're the most valuable customer tech company on the planet. Let me give you another example. Michelin starred restaurants. People think it's all presentation and hype. No, the food is phenomenal. I went once to a one star Michelin restaurant in Hokkaido, Japan. It was one of the best meals I've ever had. It was delicious. Every bite was like an incredible experience in my mouth. My mouth was kind of in pain afterwards because it was working overtime. The taste buds were really stimulated. Everyone's deploying AI agents now. But here's the thing. Sometimes they mess up, they delete the wrong files, make changes you didn't authorize or just go off script, leaving you stuck trying to figure out what went wrong. Unless you're using Rubrik agent cloud AI is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. But can you control the risk? Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that allows you to monitor, govern and rewind AI agent actions. One platform to help you unleash more agents faster without the risk. You need full visibility into your agent's actions, enforce policies, quantify risk, and undo destructive actions to data. Rubrikrik Agent Cloud gives you AI resilience and the rewind happens fast. We're talking minutes, not hours or days. Rubrik Agent Cloud gives you that safety net when you're experimenting with AI, so one mistake doesn't tank your whole operation. If your business relies on AI agents, you need the ability to monitor, govern and rewind their actions. Right now, my listeners get exclusive early access to Rubrik Agent cloud. Head to rubrik.com that's R U B R I K.com OnDeck is built to.
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Example Number three Singapore Airlines they're not number one because of marketing. When's the last time you saw a Singapore Airlines ad? They treat you like royalty on the airplane. Doesn't matter what class you're in. The service is flawless, the food is exceptional, the product is superior to other airlines. Their business class is like ranked number one every single year. Like the business class C is like a love seat. Two people can sit in this business class seat and that's why they dominate. Great products always win because customers aren't idiots. They know quality. They recognize it. They feel the quality. They talk about quality to their friends. They stay loyal to quality because they feel like they're getting a good value. They feel like they're actually getting what they're paying for. And they tell their friends so. The fastest path to growing your business in 2026 is simply this. Improve your product every single day. Ask yourself these important questions every day you get to work. How can I make my product faster for our customer? Meaning they get the value as fast as possible. How can I make it easier? How can I make it clearer easier to use? How can I make it more delightful? How can I make it more effective? How can I make it more reliable? How can I make it more useful? How can I make it more obvious that this is the best choice? If you make your product 1% better every day, your business will grow 10x faster than chasing the next market marketing trick. I'm telling you, the reason why people don't talk about this is because it's not sexy. It's not going to get headlines, it's not clickbaity. It's just the truth. And it's kind of boring, right? That you have to work on a better product and make it better and better every day. You got to just put in the work to make sure that you're better than your competition. Because a superior product is hard to ignore. So let's put this into real action. I want to give you a daily checklist. Number one Improve the product itself. Fix any issues the product might have. Flaws, bugs. Upgrade the interface or the user experience. It doesn't matter if you're selling courses, coaching or a software product, or you're selling physical goods, they're interacting with some user experience, either a physical store or an online store. There is a way for you to upgrade that experience. Streamline the steps. Remove any friction from the customer from making a decision and buying. Make sure you're crystal clear on the value that you're adding to their life. That means improving the copy on your website. Number two, improve how customers use the product. How are you onboarding them? Can you improve the onboarding process? What kind of emails are they getting? What kind of prompts are they getting? What kind of tutorials you offer so that they know how to use your product properly. Are you reaching out to customers to make sure they're getting a win? A better first win moment is a better experience for the customer. Meaning that you want to make sure customers immediately see the value of what they just bought in the first few minutes that they interact with your product. Why? Because you want to remove all buyers remorse. You want to make sure that customers don't have any regrets that they made this purchase. This applies if you have a physical product or a digital product. Number three Improve how you support the product. Faster Replies this is a game changer. When I was running Webinar Ninja, our software company, the industry standard for our competitors was replying to customers within 24 hours. Some of them took 48 hours. We were replied in less than a minute. So if they sent us an email or a chat within less than a minute, sometimes 30 seconds, that shocked our customers and they're like wow, this is amazing. I'm going to just stay for the support. Or even people that are asking questions that are not customers yet they see that this is the type of support they're going to get. Have more empathy with your customers when you support them. Make sure that you recognize if they're upset or if they're having a hard time and walk them through step by step and make them feel like they're a champion. Personalize the help. Don't make it generic. One of the rules that we had in customer support in our opener Nature Days is there's no generic applies. There are tutorials that our support agents were able to use like a sop, but they had to reword it for that customer. Don't be a robot. Better guides to help them through the way is also very helpful, like support tutorials. And then Step four Improve outcomes. Make sure your product actually delivers on the promise. Make sure it actually transforms their experience in some way. Customers don't buy software or a book or a course. They buy outcomes. What this thing will do for them. Give them outcomes more reliably and you will grow automatically. I'm telling you, think of your own purchases in life. The courses that you bought that you really loved. The programs, the software, the physical products. Why did you love it so much? It's because you actually got what you intended to get when you bought it. You got an outcome and you told other people about it. So the fastest way to grow your business in 2026 isn't about promotion. It's about obsession. Obsessing over your customers over quality, Obsessing over results. Obsessing over being the best in the opinion of your customers. Do that and your competitors won't know what hit them. If this episode has given you clarity, send it to a fellow founder who's stuck in the marketing hamster wheel. I'm sure they'll appreciate it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Your product is the engine of your business. Marketing is the amplifier. Build an incredible engine. Build it well. Be relentless with making it better every day. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to the podcast. Hit, subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. Whether it's Apple or Spotify or ever, you listen to podcasts by hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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