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STEP TEN: THE ECOSYSTEM YOU PROTECT

Nothing retains its original form, but Nature, the goddess of all renewal, keeps altering one shape into another. Nothing at all in the world can perish, you have to believe me; things merely vary and change their appearance. What we call birth is merely becoming a different entity; what we call death is ceasing to be the same. Though the parts may possibly shift their position from here to there, the wholeness in nature is constant.”

—Ovid, Metamorphoses

In 2014, on a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I met up with my friend Guy Kawasaki at a Silicon Valley coffee shop. Guy is a bestselling author and speaker, the former chief evangelist at Apple and the founder of the Remarkable People Podcast. I had met him in one of those very 2006 social media moments—on a whim, without knowing him, I emailed a post from my blog Escape from Cubicle Nation called an “Open Letter to CXO’s Across the Corporate World.” He shared it the next day on his blog and I had my only “gone viral” moment of my blogging career, with tens of thousands of shares and hundreds of comments.

It was at that moment that I formulated the concept of “watering holes”—in 2006, Guy’s blog was the perfect online gathering place for people interested in all things entrepreneurship, innovation, Apple, and social change. By connecting with his audience, I met so many people who became collaborators, mentors, and clients.

As we ate breakfast, he told me about a new chief evangelist position he had taken at an Australian-based startup called Canva. Asking how he came across the opportunity, he said, “I do whatever Peg Fitzpatrick tells me to do.” Peg was his colleague and social media strategist, who also was doing work with the company. At that point in 2014, Guy’s goal was to help Canva get to two million subscribers.

Right away, he showed me the product and the features of what it could do. He handed me a Canva T-shirt, which I promptly featured in a picture of the two of us on social media. I was excited to try it out and signed up as soon as I got back to my hotel room (and I have been a subscriber ever since!).

Now, seven years later and with Canva at around 80 million subscribers and growing by tens of thousands daily, I wanted to get his perspective on accelerating and scaling a brand. Guy said: “I just did my small part. I don’t take credit for the work the sales and marketing team did to grow this. I did my role of an evangelist, which is to do as it says in the description: spread the good word. There are many factors that made Canva successful. But by far, it’s the quality of the product. It’s not a guy.”

What evangelism meant in Guy’s early days at Canva was to use his extensive relationships and influence in Silicon Valley to get people excited about the product. “I would show up and talk to anybody who’d listen, but I think my best practice is just get to the demo as soon as you can. I don’t believe in a lot of talking and telling the corporate story and all that kind of stuff. If the product is great, the corporate story then might matter. But if the product is crap, it won’t matter how great the corporate story is. They want to use the tool that’s easy and fast and powerful and does what they need it to do.”

Having watched Guy build community and share his thought leadership over 15 years, I think he operates with a lot of natural discernment, although he says he has less strategy than we might think. In 2009, we were on a panel at South by Southwest for bloggers who had secured book deals. An audience member asked Guy, “How do people like me get my work in front of busy or famous people?” He answered: “Some people say I have the Midas Touch meaning anything I touch turns to gold. They have it wrong. I only touch gold.”

I took this to mean he is constantly scouring the environment looking for people who are doing excellent work solving problems he and his clients are also interested in solving. If he finds something useful to his audience, he will share it. And if he is exposed to a product that he thinks is great, he just might sign up to evangelize it.

EXPANDING AND RENEWING YOUR ECOSYSTEM

You have heard a lot of stories throughout this book of business owners who have implemented the Widest Net Method and began to see a steady influx of new customers. When you implement tiny marketing actions (TMAs) consistently over a number of months, it is not unusual to experience a regular flow of opportunities and requests for proposals. Where you were stressed about not having any clients before, the stress can turn to feeling overwhelmed as you field interest and inquiries from new places while servicing your existing clients.

This period, while exciting, can also be perilous because if you do not organize, operationalize, and get some help, you risk tanking the goodwill that has been developed by delivering excellent service to your clients. I call this the “eye of the needle” phase, where you build, strengthen, and streamline your operations.

Another phenomenon that takes place at this stage is the “cocky and complacent mindset” when you suddenly either believe you never have to plant seeds again, or your success is evidence that you have 100 percent figured out your business and you are no longer open to feedback, growth, or challenge from your employees, partners, and customers. Both scenarios will eventually tank your business.

As you look at building a renewable and growing source of customers, which for some means doubling your business, and for others growing it by a factor of a 100 or 1,000 times, your job is to grow your leadership skills and build the operations of your business.

Let’s clear some space first by understanding how to pass through the eye of the needle.

EYE OF THE NEEDLE

When your business is growing, there are so many things to get done, and crushing deadlines, and kids’ homework, and dogs that need to be walked, and that thing called grocery shopping. It can feel like trying to squeeze a whole ball of yarn through the tiny eye of a needle.

There are stages of business where you just need to plod along every day to get things done. You don’t need to create undue pressure for yourself or work ungodly hours, because to do so over an extended period of time will burn you out.

In the eye of the needle stage of growth, you do need to get a lot of work done in a short period of time. Because the nature of the eye of the needle stage is that there is a big, immovable deadline that involves more than just you. Your publisher needs your manuscript. You are at capacity and cannot take any more customers, until you create some group offerings. Your membership site is shedding members at an alarming rate because you are not addressing customer service issues in a timely manner.

CLEAR THE DECKS

Anything, and I mean anything, that is extraneous to your critical eye of the needle task needs to be whacked. Sunday dinner with Grandma? She will have to forgive you. That Homeowner’s Association meeting? Hard pass. Fun projects that you love to work on? On the shelf. This is no time for fun! Clear everything that is not totally essential so you can focus on your eye of the needle tasks (really call in a lot of favors—someone else could drive your kid to school for once, your family can live on those cans of beans in the back of the pantry for a few days, or you can forgo showering for, I don’t know, three to five days.)

With this freed-up time, you are ready to dig into your busines operations.

Too Busy to Organize

Operations consultant La’Vista Jones of Thirty One Marketplace says the most common refrain she hears from prospective customers is, “I would love to put in systems, but I am just too busy to do it.” Yet if they let her peek under the hood of their business, she finds they are often manually scheduling appointments, creating bespoke proposals for every new prospect, sending contracts via email and waiting for a scanned copy back, creating invoices, and reconciling the books themselves. This adds up to hours, sometimes days, each week where they are frantically trying to keep up with hundreds of tiny details to run their business.

“It gets to the point,” La’Vista says, “where they start to experience some dread when prospective clients say yes, because it means hunting through disorganized folders and email threads to get the latest version of documents to complete the customer onboarding. They can also miss critical steps like forgetting to get a client to sign a contract.”

From the new customer’s perspective, it opens up an opportunity for buyer’s remorse. The sudden rush of excitement to make a purchase can turn into regret if the customer doesn’t get a clear confirmation of payment, instructions for moving forward, and continued prompt responses from the seller.

To prevent this from happening, you need to anticipate what their questions will be, document the answers, then automate as much as you can.

THIRTY ONE MARKETPLACE OPERATIONAL KICKSTART

Metrics and Measurement

With a great customer experience nailed down, you now want to prepare a baseline of metrics and measurement so you can have the data you need to analyze your marketing efforts.

Christopher S. Penn is chief data scientist at TrustInsights.ai. His company helps their clients understand and solve complex data issues and set up the tech stacks and foundations of search engine optimization (SEO), social, and content marketing.

When setting up the foundation for a scaling business, Christopher says to start with mapping your key performance indicators (KPIs).

For most business owners moving from startup to scaling, you would start with the thing that will put you out of business if you don’t address it, which is revenue. Then you work backwards and define the metric that immediately precedes revenue. If you’re B2B, it’s probably closed deals, right? If you are B2C, it would be e-commerce and shopping carts completed. Then you continue to work backwards to define the metric that feeds this metric, that feeds this metric, and you end up with a chain that mirrors your marketing operations funnel. And that’s kind of what you want to keep in mind at each stage of your operations to follow. What’s the number that tells you whether that stage is functioning correctly? It depends on what kind of business and depends on the kind of software you have available to you as well.

As for tools, Christopher says every scaling business needs these four marketing tools:

1.   Customer relationship management (CRM system)

2.   Marketing automation

3.   Marketing analytics

4.   Reputation monitoring

The exact tools you choose will depend on your resources available, including budget, time, and your technical aptitude. Christopher says most businesses today use the Google Marketing Platform that includes Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Data Studio.

For many business owners, even the task of backward metrics mapping could feel overwhelming if you are not familiar with it. This is why at this stage it is often a good idea to bring in a marketing analytics professional who can help you define your initial KPIs, set up your core marketing tools, and plan for regular monitoring to evaluate trends.

LEADERSHIP GROWTH AND STAGES

With your operations better organized, measured, and automated, it is now time to focus on your growth as a leader so you exercise and build the skills to manage a growing organization. I always take pause when asked in interviews (now hundreds of times) “What skills are most important for being a successful entrepreneur?” Perseverance? Analysis? Negotiation? Sales? Finance?

My answer is usually some version of “All of them” and “It depends.” The skills required for you to be successful in business have a very tangible side to them—all businesses require operational strength, marketing savvy, emotional intelligence, financial literacy, systems thinking, and sales skills.

There is also a very personal side to skills development as a business owner—the leadership skills you must exhibit and own to provide what your business needs from you.

This is the greatest source of angst, and also the greatest source of relief, for navigating challenges at different stages of growth. The leadership skills and perspective that get you launched in business are not the same as those that will get you through more mature stages of growth. Here are four key leadership skills that match phases of small business growth:

1. Grit and Determination

Half of my life, I have helped people take action on ideas that have been in their head for years, like starting a business, changing careers, or radically changing their lifestyle. To get momentum to take the first step toward such changes, most of what is needed is good old grit. The kind where you close your eyes and hit “publish” on your first blog post. Or the courage to walk into an unfamiliar networking event and steel your smile, stumble through your introduction speech, and hand over your slightly sweaty business card.

Precision and craft do not belong at this first phase—it is about action and forward movement.

LEADERSHIP GROWTH QUESTION: What can you do to develop more grit?

2. Discernment

When opportunities start to land, instead of saying yes to everyone with a pulse and a purchase order, you need to develop some decision criteria. If you say yes to every opportunity, then you risk becoming overwhelmed. You need to put operations and policies in place. You can’t afford to throw money at problems anymore, so when you make big decisions like hiring, you need to take your time to hire the best candidate.

From an audience definition perspective, you need to get more and more clear about who are ideal and nonideal clients for you. Update your materials to be focused on the right clients.

LEADERSHIP GROWTH QUESTION: How can you be more discerning with business decisions?

3. Objectivity

When your business starts to grow and you gain more visibility and popularity, prepare for pushback, challenge, or outright rejection. At this stage of growth, you must develop thicker skin to not take challenges personally. If you want your business to grow and remain viable, you must develop comfort with handling difficult conversations. You must remain open to new perspectives if they mean changing ineffective processes and discovering new opportunities.

LEADERSHIP GROWTH QUESTION: How can you become more objective when receiving tough feedback?

4. Courage

The more years you are in business, the easier it is to get stuck in habits and patterns. You have more to lose, and you might fear destroying what you have spent so many years building. But it is at this stage of maturity that you are able to take a more active role as a mentor, both to employees and to others in the outside world.

To remain viable, you have to have the courage to explore new avenues and possibilities. To remain relevant, you have to decide when and how you will speak up in the public arena about issues that affect you, your customers, and your community.

Remember that at this stage of your leadership growth, you have already practiced grit and determination, discernment, and objectivity. These skills will help you be courageous in intelligent and effective ways.

LEADERSHIP GROWTH QUESTION: Where and how do I want to be more courageous as a leader?

Knowing where you are on your business and personal journey will help you know which leadership skills to develop. When you know where you are, you can balance not getting ahead of yourself with not staying stuck in the past.

SAFE, SEEN, HEARD, AND HONORED

We have explored a lot of marketing tools and tactics that will put you in front of people (speaking, Facebook ads, blogging, Instagramming), but how do you go from being casually linked to someone as a Facebook friend to actually being connected on an emotional level?

In implementing the Widest Net Method, people need to feel the following four things to truly feel part of your community: safe, seen, heard, and honored.

Safe

Does your business provide physical and emotional safety for your customers? Will people who engage with you know that you are concerned with their safety? This can show up as:

•   Thinking about the experience someone will have getting to your live event.

•   Thinking about how people in your community may treat someone who they perceive as different.

•   Stepping in clearly and decisively if someone is being personally attacked in comments on a post, Facebook group, or in live conversation.

•   Maintaining confidentiality in private conversations.

I want to stress that “safe” doesn’t have to imply “always comfortable.” Some of the very best community building involves real discomfort as people explore beliefs and perceptions, challenge assumptions, and explore differences.

Seen

Do your community members see themselves reflected in the images, stories, and examples you share about your business? Do they see members of their community featured and honored as experts in yours?

This can show up as:

•   Thoughtfully selecting speakers and experts for your live and virtual events.

•   Sharing case studies and stories of the wide range of your customer and community base in your speeches and writing.

•   Sharing and promoting the work of peers, partners, customers, and collaborators on social media, not just your own work.

•   Actively promoting and/or sponsoring events and projects in communities that you want to connect with, without being asked or prompted. This is because you have taken the time to follow the work being done, because you believe in it and want to see it spread.

Heard

Do you stop and deeply listen to what your community is saying to you? Do you honor the lived experience of people in your community and not try to talk over them or tell them why their perceptions are not correct?

This can show up as:

•   Being fully present and looking directly in someone’s eyes when you meet them at a conference, and not looking over their shoulder to see if there is someone else more important or more interesting to talk to. (Has this ever happened to you? It is so frustrating and humiliating. I have made this mistake in the past and really practice being present when I meet people now.)

•   Taking feedback to heart and changing policies, approaches, programs, or pricing so it meets the needs you hear from your community.

•   Not being defensive when someone takes issue with your approach or your work. You can listen deeply, reflect back what you hear, decide what feedback you will take to heart, let the rest go, and sincerely thank the person for taking the time to communicate with you.

•   Not mocking or ridiculing people who disagree with you. I see far too often on Facebook business owners who write “rants” about demanding clients or prospects. Whenever I see that, I always think, “I wonder if they realize that now every current customer and prospect they work with will think they are talking about them.” And then they may fear that if they raise an issue or ask the wrong question, they may be mocked or ridiculed too (even if you don’t call someone out by name, people will read between the lines). This is not a good strategy for building trust and safety in your community.

Honored

A true community is one where each person feels honored and valued as an equal member. Regardless of age, experience, income level, position of authority, or background, each person is valued for what they bring to the group. The goal of building community is not to create a homogenous group of people who all think and act the same, it is to create a diverse, stimulating, engaged group of people who are committed to solving problems together, in an environment of mutual respect.

This can show up as:

•   Designing events to be interactive.

•   Featuring a range of ideas and opinions from your community.

•   Treating all members of your community with dignity and respect, including the natural environment surrounding your events (clean up after yourselves!).

Weirdo in the Room

Fundamentally, Widest Net leaders want to constantly explore new markets so they develop an uncanny ability to be the “weirdo in the room.” Instead of clustering with the same group of friends who all promote each other’s stuff for years on end in a tightly controlled environment with rigid rules for participation (mostly requiring that you promote each other’s stuff even if you don’t necessarily think it works), Widest Net leaders look for places where they can learn as much as they can from customers who have problems that interest them.

The Ecosystem Map gives you all kinds of clues for places to look for interesting watering holes.

•   You might be the only graphic designer at a personal chef convention.

•   You might be the only life coach at a funeral directors’ association meeting.

•   You might be the first insurance agent to appear on a podcast about robotics.

But if you can show up and listen first, then contribute your unique perspective on solving their problem, you could find a rush of new clients.

•   The graphic designer could create a suite of menu templates for personal chefs.

•   The life coach could promote their book Recovering from Loss as part of a package funeral directors could provide for their grieving customers.

•   The insurance agent could promote a helpful risk management policy for promoters of robot competitions.

Being temporarily uncomfortable as the weirdo in the room may feel awkward and difficult at first, but you will survive. Over time, you will look forward to it.

CONNECTING AUTHENTICALLY AT SCALE

When you are communicating with hundreds of customers or connections, it is possible to build a personal relationship with many. When your community grows to tens of thousands and even millions, you need to organize your communication in a different way.

Caleb Gardner is the cofounder and managing partner of 18 Coffees and former digital director for Organizing for Action (BarackObama.com). Knowing he has managed large-scale communication for most of his career, I asked him how he advises companies to maintain a relational feel with their community and customers as they deliver content one to many. Caleb said:

I usually ask brand managers to imagine a series of concentric circles, with their most passionate brand advocates in the center, and the rest of us at varying levels of affinity outside of that, and the last and largest circle being the masses who’ve never heard of you. At each level, people want to be engaged with differently. When we’re on the outside, you have to give us a reason to pay attention. When we’ve participated in a small way, we need to be encouraged to participate in a big way. And when we’ve proven to be mission-aligned, we need to have our loyalty rewarded. Most brand managers have more data now than ever to understand our history with their company, but most are still thinking about segmentation in terms of demographics and psychographics, not in terms of how we’ve raised our hand and signaled that we care.

In his latest venture, 18 Coffees, a strategy firm devoted to building the backbone of the mission economy¹ through consulting, content, and community, partnerships are a central focus of the business. Caleb and his cofounder Robin Chung focus on creating peer-to-peer value between partners who are all working together toward the same cause. These are Caleb’s three recommendations for connecting authentically at scale:

1.   Be very intentional about storytelling as you grow. The visuals, rituals, and fables that take form when you’re small help form your company lore when you’re big.

2.   Hone in on what makes your company great, why your customers are obsessed with you—and then document and systematize that as you grow. We talk about culture like it’s a tool, but it’s actually an outcome.

3.   People talk about having a customer obsession, but I think it’s becoming more important to have a community obsession—one that recognizes the importance of customers, employees, vendors, supply chain, and beyond in your sphere of influence. When buying your product contributes to something greater than your bottom line, there’s more emotional resonance when making a very functional purchasing decision.

OPPORTUNITY STACKS

With operations whizzing and new markets being explored, you should aim to get the most out of every single business development opportunity, which I call “stacking.” Stacking is the deliberate process of looking for ways that a singular marketing activity can be leveraged by “stacking” other opportunities for reach, exposure, or impact on top of it.

For example, if you are going to take the time to do a live talk about your core area of expertise at a local setting, why not stack getting photos and a video of the event on top of it? Why not livestream the talk for your nonlocal prospects? Why not arrange to meet a strategic attendee for coffee or dinner after the event? When you look for all the possible ways to maximize a marketing activity in your business, you will have a much better return on your investment of time, energy, and resources.

Here’s a stacking example. In 2017, Susan Baier, Chris Lee, and I completed Crack the Challenge Code, a small business survey that looked at the attitudes small business owners have toward obstacles. This research is essential to do a better job in our respective businesses, since most of what our clients struggle with is not what to do (we all know we should market more consistently, write great content, build our product funnels, etc.), but few know how to do it (we get in our own way by becoming overwhelmed, feeling imposter syndrome, sticking our heads in the sand, etc.).

Putting together and executing a study of this size takes a significant amount of time, energy, and money. Knowing that, here are the stacks we used in this research project:

•   Partnered with over 100 people and groups to spread the word about the survey.

•   Designed the data collection to include both essential questions that will help business owners, but also questions that will help small business providers.

•   Included research for a new book in the survey data.

•   Secured a webinar with a small business web partner that highlighted the survey data to their thousands of customers.

•   Designed our survey output to directly feed into the research needed to design our offerings.

•   Designed our survey questions to be directly helpful to our local small business ecosystem planning, our local government, and our nonprofit and business partners that must make great decisions about resource allocation and program design.

•   Chose a topic that has multiple dimensions and will be a great foundation for our content ideas for next year.

EXERCISE: Stack Your Opportunities

ACTION BREEDS INNOVATION

Two years into her business turnaround, Karley Cunningham of Big Bold Brand decided to apply for a grant for women entrepreneurs from the Canadian government. Seeing how well her Surefire Strategy was working for her clients, she was interested in codifying and digitizing the method so she could eventually license it to professionals and organizations who worked with entrepreneurs. Much to her delight, out of a pool of over 1,000 applicants, she got the $100,000 grant.

Karley spent a year codifying her method in detail and refining it in her client projects. This was so much work and was made extra difficult by a family tragedy when her younger sister Leah got very sick and then died of cancer right in the middle of the project. Three times during the yearlong project, Karley texted me and said: “Tell me why I shouldn’t just quit the project and give the money back.” Knowing she was deep in stress and grief and in an extended eye of the needle moment, I didn’t want to force her. “Your physical and emotional health is the most important thing,” I said. “If you truly do not want to continue and it is too much, I completely support your decision. Why don’t you allow yourself to rest and take a pause and let us extended team members take up some of the slack. Then you can decide how you want to proceed.”

After each pause, and following reflection and discussion with her wife, Elise, she chose to keep going. Not because of some false sense of grind and hustle, but because she knew that her body of work had the ability to transform the businesses she worked with. She knew she would be contributing something that truly made a difference to the world of branding, and it would strengthen the work of her peers, partners, and customers in her ecosystem.

With support from an amazing working team, she completed the grant project. As soon as she was done, the world shut down during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Karley’s Surefire Strategy method helped her clients not only navigate an upside-down world but come out thriving. Her business was no exception. Because she had codified and streamlined her operations, managing projects was easier and took less time. The seeds she had planted with her TMAs continued to bring new clients and she did not experience another downturn.

In May 2021, Big Bold Brand was selected as a Top 5 Finalist for Best Innovation for Small Business BC (British Columbia) out of over 900 submissions.

Karley will be the first to tell you that the journey from stalled entrepreneur to thriving, award-winning entrepreneur was not an easy path. She put in the work every day, one TMA at a time, to activate a flood of clients and build a substantial body of work. Because she was able to overcome a downturn on her entrepreneur journey, she will now be able to help thousands of her future clients and partners with a solid methodology and saleable product. What I witnessed as her coach was leadership growth forged by heart and fire.

Karley’s business was transformed, and I was also changed by witnessing her courage. Because of her commitment to the process and many other courageous clients like her, I now know for sure that you don’t have to trade your ethics to grow a great business. You can scale your business while helping other businesses grow around you.

And you can handle just about anything when you know that you are not alone on your business journey, and others will work hard to support your success.

EXERCISE: Ecosystem Marketing Review