A (0:00)

Hey everybody. I'm really excited about this episode. I'm giving you a behind the scenes look of one of my favorite frameworks, the Step Change Growth framework. This is something that's in the vault of work smarters. It's also included in my new book, rewrite your Rules, which is out on April 1st. It's just around the corner, so please make sure you're pre ordering. If you love the podcast, if you love my show, if you love these ideas, you're going to get all the behind the scenes of how I built Blavity, all the ups, down the downs, but most importantly, the tools, the mindset, and the frameworks to help you master yourself to be able to grow to the next level. I can't wait to hear from you. And I can't wait to hear about your Step Change growth goals after you listen to this episode. So make sure you're tuning in right now and leave a review and a comment below. Hey everyone, I'm Morgan debon, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success. With permission from no one else. In this video, we're going to talk all about the Step Change growth mindset versus the incremental mindset. So this is all about setting ambitious goals for yourself and how businesses grow quickly by actually taking weird plateaus along the way. So when you first started off in business, you probably were like, all right, I want to make $10,000 a month because I'm trying to quit this job, so I need to make X to get to Y. And then you probably started to just chip away at it and say, okay, well this month I'm at 2000, so I need to get to 3000. And this month I'm at 3000, so I need to get 3500. But you probably saw your revenue go up and down where you're like, okay, I'm at 3,000. Now I'm at 3,500. And then something didn't pan out and now I'm down to 1,000 and now I'm back, right? And so you're going like this, which can feel challenging and definitely disappointing when your income isn't stable when you're first starting out. And that's how most entrepreneurs start. They're trying to quit their job and replace their income so they can Go work full time or they're taking side gigs so that they can offset any income losses that they don't have. Having a full time job. Now this works, and this is something that I did when I first started my job at Intuit. I was working and then I started Blavity and I was like, all right, I gotta quit Intuit and get to Blavity full time. And I gotta figure out how to make this money work. The thing about that mindset is that it works up until a certain threshold and then at some point you're gonna plateau and your revenue's gonna plateau and it's gonna feel like you're hitting up against the wall. And the reason for that is because the activities, the products, the business model that you have today is not actually designed to scale beyond a certain threshold because you're limited by time, you're limited by resources, you're limited by maybe how many people you have to actually do the work. Like let's say your therapist is like, you can only take so many appointments in a day, you can only work so many hours in a week. There is a plateau. So if you keep going, you're gonna feel frustrated because you're not able to actually increase and scale your income or your revenue fast enough. You're going to hit a brick wall. And this is the incremental mindset. This is the mindset of I'm just going to keep trying to go from 3,500 to 4,000, 4,000 to 4,500. That's incremental impact. I want you to throw that out the door. Okay? You signed up to be a wordsmart member to join this community of people who are ambitious because you don't want to make incremental improvements or baby steps. Your success, your. You want to have leaps, fast, quick jumps in income and revenue. And that is the step change growth mindset. So I'm gonna show you a quick diagram of what this looks like. So your incremental change is like this, right? You are going baby step, boop. And then you're there for a couple weeks, a couple months, and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go from $3,000 a month to $3,500 a month, or $10,000 a month to $15,000 a month. You're making incremental steps, but that doesn't work because you're not actually fundamentally changing the dynamics of your business to be able to reach the next level. So what I recommend is actually step change growth, which is that you're Going to have your revenue. Let's go back to our $3,000 a month example. You're gonna stay at $3,000 for a while. Two months. Three months. And while you are at your $3,000 level, you. You're going to figure out and work on how to optimize your team and optimize your time and optimize your tools so that you can run $3,000 in your sleep. You're not working that hard anymore. You start. I'm hustling, I'm learning. I'm figuring out how to make this a scalable revenue source for our business, for myself. And then you're literally getting your hours back by working smarter, which we're gonna talk about constantly in this program. And while you're doing that, as you get more time, you as the CEO, are gonna spend your extra time that you've now gained by being smarter with your team, time, tools, et cetera. You're gonna take all that time and you're gonna invest in the next part of your business that's going to jump your revenue up to a much higher level. Okay? So you're gonna be flatlined because you're treading water. And then all of a sudden, you're gonna speed up because you've increased your price. You've added a new product, you have added a new team member. And so your revenue is gonna go from 5,000 or $3,000 a month all of a sudden to six, because you've been chill. And then all of a sudden you release something new. And then now you're at six. You're like, okay, I'm at six. Now I'm at a new level. So I'm gonna continue to stay at that level. I'm gonna master this level. I'm gonna automate it. I'm gonna get my time back. I'm gonna figure it out. And then now I've got my time back. Now I'm gonna figure out how to go to 6 to 12. So going back to our therapist, if you're a therapist, you're like, okay, I'm gonna add more clients. I'm gonna add more clients. I'm gonna add more clients. I'm going to raise my prices, but at some point, you're gonna plateau. So then it's like, okay, I'm gonna hire another therapist. Okay, cool. I'm going to offer group coaching. Okay, cool. I'm going to start teaching workshops for corporate clients and their black ergs. I'm going to offer more products and services that are scalable. But it's going to take you a couple of months to build that curriculum for the ERG program or whatever. Do you get what I'm saying? That is the difference between step change growth and incremental. Incremental. You're focused on these little baby steps. Raise my prices, get more clients. And you should do that. If you're not maximized here, you should do that. Okay, but that's not going to make you a bajillionaire. That's not going to help you defy the odds. That's going to keep you on the hamster wheel. And we're trying to get off the hamster wheel and work smart. So that's what your step Change growth mindset is all about. And there's another video that's going to show you how to work on your step Change growth statement. So you can start to really write out how you're going to accomplish your goal, what that goal is, what that ambitious step change growth goal is. And I'm going to show you a bunch of examples of what that can look like for your business. So now we're going to talk about how to create your step change growth statement. Your step Change growth statement is basically your way of grounding yourself in your ambitious goal for the future. Not your incremental goal, your ambitious goal for the future. So it has a couple of different elements. One is where do you want to be by the end of the year? So if you're starting this mid year, you can start with a six month timeline or you can do a 12 month timeline. I recommend for the program. And for your first go at practicing this skill set, just start with six months so it's not too crazy and it doesn't feel too overwhelming. So in the next six months, I want to be making how much money in revenue or income in the next six months or in the next 12 months. Okay. And then you're going to say, how do you get there? I'm going to make $300,000 in the next six months. By what? What are the things you need to change in your business? What are those big leaps that you're going to take in your business that are going to actually drive your income up, your revenue up again. It's not going to be, you know, hire a housekeeper and save two hours a day. It needs to be meaningful, juicy things that are going to make a huge impact on your business. Hire an assistant, raise your product pricing across the board and optimize your pricing and your conversion funnels. It could be literally an infinite amount of things. And that's what we're gonna talk about through the next videos. But the one thing that I want you to remember as a part of your step change growth goal is that you cannot go higher than your goal. In other words, whatever you set. If you say, I want to make $300,000, there's no world in which you magically all of a sudden make $500,000, you're gonna build a plan to your goal. So this is also the time where I want you to be a little uncomfortable. I want the goal to be so high that you have to change your behavior. If your goal is something where it's like, if I just made the same amount every month and just did a little bit more, I'd already hit it naturally. That's not high enough. Double it. Okay. I want you to be sweating. I want your pits to get a little stanky. I want you to be like, all right, Morgan, this is ambitious. I want you to feel slightly uncomfortable with your goal because that's going to force you to make different choices, to move differently, to let go of some things that maybe you've been holding onto and to start doing the things that you know you need to do but just haven't had the time to invest and how to get those things done and to get them started. All right, so let's go through some examples. This is your step change growth statement. You start with, I want to be at XYZ revenue by the end of this year. And to get to XYZ Revenue, I need to first task, right? I need to do this, this, and this, and this. So let's go back to our therapist example. Let's say you're a therapist and you are hustling in your business. You're accepting clients, you've done all the incremental things. You've raised your prices, you've maximized your calendar where you're seeing as many clients as possible possible throughout the day without getting burned out. And it's literally like there's no more hours left in the day. So how do you, as a therapist, double your income from 200k to 400k in the next 12 months? It can't be by adding more clients and raising your prices. There's only so much you can charge for therapy, right? So what do you do? You have to figure out other ways to make money. So you would say, okay, I'm going to create a group coaching program, or I'm going to create an enterprise offering where I'm going To do public speaking in corporations and black ergs. And I'm going to be an expert in that. Okay, well, to become an expert in that, I need to update my website, develop a curriculum, do outbound. I need to figure out what my pricing is. There's a lot of things that you need to do and set up to be able to do a step change growth action and actually drive new revenue in your business to get you to that 400k. A therapist would use this example and say, I want to be at 400k by the end of the year and to get to 400k by the end of the year, I need to release a group coaching course where I'm going to be able to scale by having 20, 30 members a quarter. I'm gonna charge this price to get there. And in order to do that, I need to hire a virtual assistant, I need to get a curriculum designer, and I need to allocate two to 10 months to 10 hours a week for the next three to four months that I actually have time in my schedule to run the program. But now we need to go figure out how you're gonna accomplish all of those things. But the beauty of the stepchain growth statement is that it helps you narrow In a lot of times as entrepreneurs, we try to do all the things and this helps say, okay, but what is the critical thing that I can do to go from X to Z? How am I going from 200k to 400k? I'm only going to do these things. And when I start to veer from these things, you have to ask yourself, is it taking away from your step change growth statement, Is it going to help you make incremental changes in your business, or is it going to help you make that giant leap that you're looking for? So I want you to write this out, I want you to revisit it constantly. Put it on a sticky, put it on your mirror, put it on a sticky, put it on your laptop. Make sure you're sharing it here in our membership community so people can give you feedback and our coaches and advisors can also give you feedback as well. Lesson one in milestone five of master your growth is all about sprinting. Sprinting is this idea of being able to set a time frame of when you are going to do work and when you're going to test different things in your business. And then running those tests, getting a result, and learning how to fail faster. As black entrepreneurs or women entrepreneurs, a lot of times we have a resistance to failure. We have been Trained to think that failure is actually a problem and that it's a sign of weakness. And as entrepreneurs, failing is actually a part of the learning process and a part of the journey. Throughout these different milestones that you've been doing over these last few months, you've probably noticed, oh, man, I tried to hire this person and it didn't work. What do I do? I've tried to pivot my business or add a new revenue stream, and it didn't go according to plan. So I want you to start to think about all of the things that you can test in your business. Everything from your sales team structure to the pricing of your different products and maybe even your marketing campaigns. And what we're gonna do is set up our first sprint. And to set up a sprint, what you're going to do is identify a period of time. I like to do two week sprints. And for those two weeks, you focus on one hypothesis that you're trying to test. So let's take for example, a, let's say you are a makeup artist and you are building out your makeup artist clients in your city, and you think that I can increase my average revenue per customer. Right. You go back to your work smart pillars and master your revenue and you say, I'm trying to increase average revenue per customer. It's like, okay, great. So I'm gonna test how to get someone to come back more frequently. So I'm going to test a membership where you'll pay an upfront fee of $1,000. And then for $1,000, you can get your makeup done at least once a month over the course of the year. So what normal people would do, not the work smart way, the non work smart way would be that somebody actually then goes into a hole and they spend two to three months building this product, they film all this video, this content, they make all these assets, and then they launch. And either it succeeds or it fails. If it succeeds, great. If it fails, you've now wasted two months and you're behind on your step change growth goals. So the work smart way in doing the sprints is how can you test this concept, this idea that you have, this hypothesis that you have in the fastest way possible so that you can decide if you should keep it going or move on to the next idea. So with our makeup artist, what I would recommend is that she would say, okay, I know I want to try to get people on this membership. Well, the people who are most likely to get on a membership are going to be people who, looking back at My data are people who have booked with me multiple times in a year, right? So, okay, let me just send an email to people who've booked with me more than once in the last six months and say, hey, I'm gonna offer this membership. I only have five spots available. This is the price. And see if people even open the email. See if people click the email, right? Because then you're gonna be able to track your data along your funnel. If people didn't even open the email, it wasn't enticing enough for someone for an offer. If people open the email and clicked and then got to the pricing page, the landing page, and didn't book it, maybe they still have more questions, maybe the pricing is off, but they were interested in it, right? So you want to test different hypotheses along the way and then optimize your funnel before you go and make all of the materials and all of the things. So that's an example of how you could do a sprint for two weeks, have an idea, you get it out into the marketplace, and then you test and see what the results are. And you really try to get very granular on your data of what success looks like. Okay, let's go through another example of how to run a sprint. Let's say you're a media company and you want to figure out how do you get more traffic to your website or to your blog? And I have a hypothesis that if I post more on Instagram, I'll get more traffic on my blog, right? So what would you do? You would identify, okay, what is the type of content that I wanna make, or what's the content I already have, maybe on LinkedIn or on a newsletter or my podcast that I can reuse for Instagram so that you're not burning too much time and resources. And then you're gonna say, okay, for the next two weeks, I'm gonna post every single day on Instagram and see what happens and try to drive people to my website. And then you run that test, you track your data, and you track your data with a very clear window. Now, you don't go run a bunch of Facebook ads, you don't go run a bunch of LinkedIn ads. You don't go do a bunch of tests at once. And the reason for that is because just like basic level chemistry, you need an independent variable so that you know what you can make. That success is based off of some of the changes that you actually made, not attribute that success to something else, right? So then you go and you run your test and then you see, okay, actually I tried to post every day and I couldn't. I was too busy. It was really hard. My kids got in the way and I wasn't able to actually like, get the work done. I got too distracted handling them every day. So your test might have failed because operationally execution risk not. You didn't have a good idea, but operationally it wasn't feasible. Right. And that's okay. You gotta be honest with yourself during sprints. You have to make sure that you're coming to the table with realistic mindsets. And just like in Milestone 1, you expect what's expected of you. Hopefully by reducing the timeframe of which you're running a sprint or running a test, you're actually able to do what you said you were going to do. So you're going to post every day. So let's say you posted every day. You were successful at doing that, and then there was no traffic increase. Okay, well, now you know posting every day is not going to correlate with the traffic increase. But you might also find out posting every day increased the amount of inbounds that you got in your DMs. Or posting every day resulted in you getting more followers. So sometimes running sprints can help us get other insights about our business and and help us make informed decisions about what the growth drivers are to get to the next step. Thanks for listening to the Journey podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.