00:00 Navigating uncertainty in business ownership
00:26 Five Stages of the Business Owner's Journey
03:10 Founder to CEO time allocation
04:23 Stage 1: Sales Engine and market validation
08:23 Stage 2: Lead generation system for predictable revenue
12:14 Stage 3: Machine Builder with SOPs and delegation
17:05 Stage 4: Team Builder and leadership development
20:17 Stage 5: Legacy Builder and scaling options
26:18 Know your stage to set priorities
27:35 Business Alignment System map and compass
29:16 Build a 90 day business growth roadmap
32:04 Move forward with intention
Nick Berry (00:12)
The predictable path, the success path for a business owner on their business journey. I spend a lot of time trying to drive home the point about how much uncertainty and complexity and unknown there is on the path of a business owner.
because there is, and that's why it's, you know, one of the, if not the most important skill you can have is being able to navigate and make decisions and find a path with less than ideal sets of information. But not everything is an unknown. It is a game of uncertainties, but not everything has to be an unknown.
And I think one of the biggest hindrances that you're gonna find is you're trying to build and get a business up and going is figuring out where do I focus?
What should I be doing right now? You know that you need everything. You want to do everything, but you really don't need to do everything next. You usually only need to do one thing that's the most important thing to do next.
And what I've found over time is that that's a pretty consistent, almost predictable set of the things that have to be done along the way. And there is actually a success path, if you will, for a small business to go from startup to scale and running day to day without being dependent on the owner to do that. And I created the five stages of the business owner's journey.
10 years ago, because if you have that information, it's like a cheat sheet. It removes a lot of the possible variables that you're trying to consider. If, if there is a proven path out there and you know where you're at on that path, then you can start to identify.
What are the things that you need right now to move to the next step? And that's what you should focus on. That's how you find the answer to that question. I think this, the success path, these five stages, it's the closest thing that I've seen to actually getting a cheat code to running your business and growing. Because you're going to know what's next or have an idea of what's next and what to prepare for. It really does have some predictability to it.
you're not going to be able to skip these stages. can't hack your way around them. You can speed them up. That's the biggest difference in someone who is on their journey and their bootstrapping versus if they've got capital is speed. going to spend that money to make these, to find these solutions faster. And same thing, if you've been down the path before, you already kind of know what's in the playbook. So you're able to expedite the process.
when you know what you can expect, what's coming, I wouldn't say it's an unfair advantage, but it's tilting the playing field back to be less unfair to you. You're able to prepare for the challenges as they're arriving. You can build capabilities before you are desperate and need them. You'll see opportunities coming.
It really is like having a cheat sheet. And one other note about this model is that it's less about revenue size as far as the stages, and it's more about where your time spent. You're going to find that when you zoom out and look at this, really, the owner's the big lever no matter what. They're the most valuable, most powerful one that you can pull to make things happen.
And so where they spend their time is going to be the determining factor as far as to how far, how fast. if you want to think about moving through stages like maybe a video game. So, video games that I grew up playing, they're usually levels and, you'd have to clear one level before you can move to the next. Each level would have like a boss or the set of challenges and the skills you'd have to have certain skills.
to defeat the boss in that challenge, to beat the boss in that level. And the skills that you needed to defeat one boss were not going to be the only ones you would need to defeat the next boss. So you were gonna have to acquire additional skills as you go each time in order to ascend.
And it's the same thing here. for you, you reach a place where you're stuck. There's of these predictable set of problems is probably what's behind it. And so there's a solution that has to be found. And once you know what that problem is, you can go directly toward finding the solution and putting that in place. That's when you've...
acquired the skill needed to defeat that boss and then move to the next level. And I've seen this play out in franchising and licensing, building coaching businesses, building certification businesses. And some of these were like the biggest in the world in their space. Tons of small businesses, agencies, and I'm talking about thousands. We owned a B2B coaching firm. had thousands of clients that we watched and then
they learned the pattern and then figured out how to guide them through this process. And it's probably, for me, it's one of the handful of most impactful epiphanies that I had on my path. And I'll say it probably stands out as the most prominent lesson that when we gave it to those clients, like the way that it was received.
10 years later, there are some of the business owners who were in that initial cohort that we rolled this out to that are, they still talk about their business and their growth in stages because it made sense to them. It's a map.
So I'm gonna give you a kind of a stage by stage fly over and share just describing a little bit more about the challenge, about the solutions, about the state of things. So you get an idea of what the evolution looks like. Stage one is we call it the sales engine and it's all about making sales because at that point you are just trying to keep the business alive. You're trying to earn your place, your right to be able to show up again tomorrow.
It's market validation. And the market may not know about you yet, may not have embraced you yet, but that doesn't matter. Your job is to keep the lights on by going out, finding people who will pay you for your product or service. And the big challenge for you is going to be just the randomness of it. It's going feast or famine. Regardless of how good your product is, it's still probably going to feel like that. And you're trying to
find that product market fit. You're trying to find customers who will receive it well. What it really comes down to is how well you can sell that product. in this, in a stage one, you're probably wearing all the hats. You're probably, they're probably hats that you're just dropping or not wearing that you would think need to be worn. Sales are happening, but because it's through your personal effort, it's not a system. You just go grind and get it.
And you're still trying to refine your core offer, your ideal client, your value proposition. And so the thing that you need to level up and beat this boss is you need a repeatable sales process, a way that you can consistently close these new customers when you have opportunities to do that. And system is the key here. some of the key metrics.
for a stage one would be new sales, conversion rates, percentage of your revenue that's coming from your core offer or new core offer sales and goals and objectives hit in a period.
As far as time allocation goes in stage half or more of your time is going to go to sales and business development. And then almost all of the other half will go to servicing clients. So that's going to leave like a sliver for leadership and strategy. And you're really not worried about that. it's like half a 50%. It's the sales and business development half to servicing the client and 45 % to clients.
customers and then maybe 5 % thinking about leadership and strategy. And that's okay. You've got to prove that the product and service that you have deserves a place to stay in the market. Figuring out how a system for being able to close sales opportunities consistently, that is the priority. And when you do that, you're going to go from
hoping people are going to buy or feeling like you're trying to talk people into buying into being able to confidently show them the solution of their problem. You do that. You're going to move into stage two. Stage two, we call lead engine. And because now you've shown that your business can exist right now.
We know how to consistently close some sales and now we've got to get some control over creating more opportunities for those sales. It's demand generation.
in stage one and right now, probably early in stage two, we're dependent on random referrals, accidental growth, maybe luck. But we need to start formalizing the marketing strategy, get the ideal client profile honed in where it's clear, like this is the one, understanding what your buyers are thinking about what stage of awareness they're in. It's like the scaffolding of a marketing system is coming together.
The big challenge here in stage two is you don't control your lead flow. still feast or famine, even if you can close them really consistently, you're not getting opportunities consistently enough. You still have to work really hard to create those opportunities and your calendar probably reflects that. Some of the other signs are your...
And marketing efforts are probably inconsistent. I'm still jumping back and forth between, I make a few sales, I've got to service these clients or take care of something on the back end. And then I go back to marketing and selling when that fire gets to be the biggest again. In order to level up, you have to establish a predictable lead flow. You have to have control of it. And it's basic marketing systems. And I don't mean just like activity.
but a machine that's going to deliver quality, quality, that's going to.
And I'm not talking about just activities. I'm talking about a machine that's going to deliver qualified prospects and it's getting more and more efficient as you go.
You need to know what channels can I go to and what ROI am I going to get from them? And I like to look at it like, know, what if you have one more dollar, one more unit of time, if you were going to spend that somewhere to get a qualified prospect, then you should know you want to go where the highest ROI is going to be. what channel is that? What activity is that?
So for stage two, the key metrics are gonna be qualified leads, cost per lead, breakdown of your different lead channels or lead sources, knowing where they come from. Your time allocation is still pretty similar to stage one. You may be doing a little bit less on sales and biz dev and servicing clients to give yourself a little bit more time.
to think about how this is becoming a strategy, but it's not going to be much. So it's nearly identical to stage one. But once you have control of this, of your lead flow, you're starting to shift from being reactive and being opportunistic to being a strategic marketer. And you used to have to hope that people were going to find you. And even if you were being very active, it's still, if you don't have the intention of a strategy behind it,
It's still hope. And so you're moving away from being hopeful about people finding you to being able to be intentional and deliberate about creating paths that are going to lead people to you. You, instead of trying to be opportunistic in the past, now you're creating opportunities. When you do that, now you're moving into stage three, which is the machine builder. And now it's time to start.
really leveraging systems. So if you get here, you've built some breathing room. Revenue is less of a mystery, more consistent, but your time is what's maxing out. And you realize you probably feel like the bottleneck. Congratulations, you've created yourself a very busy job. So this is where you're gonna start shifting from.
the guy who does it all or the lady who does it all to building systems that do some of those things. You will need to formalize a lot of the business functions, sales, service, ops, admin, drafting an org chart, trying to figure out the company that you are becoming and that you eventually want to become and crystallizing that picture. So you'll start with simple documented processes and start hiring with intentionality.
So the putting little things together that, you know, it may start with you having this epiphany. Like I should have written that down. If you, know, if I have to do a thing more than once, I'm going to write it down so I can go back to it and I don't have to do a full rebuild. That's where system documentation will start. They don't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be incredibly well done. Get something down and just get better as you go. This is going to give you a leverage.
to build on continually.
Big challenge, it's going to be trusting the systems, relying on the systems and not just yourself. There's this habit of having been the hero. It's a trap for founders, right? Up until now, you're the producer. Your hands is where the money was made. And so you've been taught that that's how it has to be. And if you're not doing that, you will have this like sense of
being unproductive or worthless or like what you're doing is not the highest priority. And sometimes that may be true. You need to be aware of that feeling, but you need to be aware enough to recognize when it's misleading you. This habit of being the hero, the producer, like that was necessary in stages one and two. Now it's a limitation. And this is, that's what gets so many founders stuck for a long, long time. And some of them never get over it.
because they just can't get away from this. It's the dopamine release from, you know, making another sale because that's what they were dependent on for so long getting to this point. And now we're going to tell them your time's going to be valued in a different way And so it needs to be applied in different places.
So I mentioned some of the signs. I mentioned that revenue feels good, but your calendar is maxed out. You feel like the bottleneck probably feel like the hamster wheel. And no matter how fast you you can only run so fast, right? You cannot go faster than you're capable of going. So max speed is max speed. You feel like, it's time. I need to hire somebody to do this or I need a system for that.
But then just like kind of either it's a non-starter because you don't really know what action to take or you get started and then things flake out pretty quickly. Bottom line, you're drowning in operational details. And in order to level up, you're going to have to build some systems to create some leverage beyond yourself. So documenting processes, starting to hire strategically so other people who have these capabilities can
do some of the same things magnify the efforts in this direction and just beginning to manage your business rather than purely working in it.
Some of the KPIs here would be client retention rate, progress to goal on projects, targets, cash flow, profit first, capital allocation percentages, I think it's what caps, if you use profit first for cash flow management, good for you,
caps is another good set of numbers knowing your capacity as an owner and operator.
is because this is not unlimited. You're probably figuring that out. And in stage three, your time allocation. So this is where, as you get toward the end, like a mature stage three, your time commitment to sales and business development is, it may drop by half of what it was originally in stage one. So if half of your time in stage one was handling sales and business development, then in stage three, it may get down to a quarter.
of the time.
your time spent on ops and servicing clients, customers is still consistently probably a little under half. So what's increased is your time spent on leadership and strategy and building the business. And that might be up to a third of your time.
transformation that you're going through is going from the doer to the builder and you'll know that you're getting there when your default setting is no longer I'll handle it when something comes up to at least pausing to consider do I need to create a system for that or does somebody else need to be doing that those are good signs
Once you move into stage four, stage four is a team builder. And this is, the business has outgrown your ability to manage everything yourself. You've got to have leaders, not just doers, people who can own outcomes and not just tasks, and that you can count on them to be accountable. You can hold them accountable for those outcomes. This is where you truly are going to be producing results through others. You have to have, you have to strengthen your leadership leverage.
And that's going to come through recruiting, training, coaching, building a team that you can trust to execute the plan and grow delegation. It will be mandatory. It's not an option anymore. Building a strong leadership team is, is now the priority.
And your big challenge here is going to be, it's this paradox of control. You you've got to let go and you're going to be at the same time trying to raise standards while giving up control. that for, if you think about the state of mind and the habits that you have as a founder in stage one, this is very different, almost unimaginable. And it can be like a pretty terrifying.
prospect for a lot of people. you're trying to take this business that has been entirely dependent on you and you're trying to put people in a position to not be dependent on you to make decisions and take actions on behalf of you and the business.
But that's the goal is you're trying to build a team that can perform without constant intervention from you. Some of the signs would be that the demand on you is outpaced your ability to manage it. You're making key hires now and maybe are struggling with some delegation.
may have been spending too much time checking work or fixing problems, like still getting your hand in the weeds on things, even when you've hired someone else to do it. And if you're not careful, culture can start to drift if it doesn't get deliberate attention. In order moving onward in the journey, you have to go from the person who has been responsible for producing all the results directly,
to someone who is primarily producing those results through other people. And that's growing your leadership leverage.
That means recruiting, training, coaching, building a team of the right kind of people Who you can trust.
Your time allocation in stage four, still even less time on sales and business development. That's probably down in the 15 % range. Your time spent in operations, service and clients, down maybe a third of your time, maybe less than that. You know, of course, any of these things can vary greatly depending on a situation. These aren't hard and fast rules. These are guidelines.
This is a framework.
keep that in mind. your leadership and strategy should be more than half of your time now. And that is a big jump from stage one. was no time.
KPIs for this stage. They're going to be like employee performance metrics, individual and team, and monitoring market share, And once you reach the point where you're no longer a manager of tasks, You're the manager of people. It's no longer purely an operational focus. It's more
architect of culture, infrastructure, and bringing the vision to these people, this team who are capable of grasping it and then helping. They're an extension of you. You reach that point that you're moving into, stage five, which is legacy builder. you're ready to start scaling through structure. Well done, by the way.
You built an organization that is going to be able to thrive with minimal owner involvement. You're not needed in the day-to-day execution. And now you have options, options that you would never have considered possible before. You could scale up, can expand, you could acquire, you could reinvest, you could exit. It's options you couldn't have imagined. And now...
for the first time, the business doesn't feel like a job you own. Now it's an asset that you built. And so you're going to be spending your time on strategy, on vision, investing, looking for innovation, mentoring your leaders, designing the next phase, either the business's growth or freedom or yours. it's come a long way from where it was and it can,
could even be like I've had clients tell me it's kind of disorienting when you get there. It is, but that's a good problem to figure out. I do not know anyone who has been upset over being in this position. The big challenge is going to be staying strategically focused. You're so used to having this pull of operational fires. It's like, just, you know, you're waiting on that, the bell to ring to pull you back in there and
when that's not there anymore, you can lose the altitude that you need to be at. You're more likely to chase some shiny objects, maybe out of boredom. Get meddlesome in operational details, break shit. I mean, we do that. Or, you could simply lose sight of what your unique strengths are and fail to fully leverage those. Your job here is to be the visionary owner.
So the signs that you're here are when the business is running profitably with minimal owner involvement. You got a leadership team who is driving the day-to-day results. You've got a strong position in your market and you've got options. You're thinking about expanding acquisition or exit. So the biggest indicator to me is when someone finds themselves asking what's next?
And so we all want to explore that thought. But if you're not ready and you're asking yourself that question, the next day you're probably pulled back into the fires. It's when you are asking yourself what's next and then you can afford a week to ponder it without being yanked back into fixing something.
in my model, which is to get from startup scale, to where you have these options of,
do you want to acquire? Do you want to innovate? Do you want to expand? Do you want to get out?
Like those are the options that we're designed to create. So in my model you reach this stage five and the goal is to stay there. There is a model out there. The Harvard Business Review put something together in, maybe mid eighties. And it extends beyond this.
But for the most my five stages aligns with like the first, maybe half of their model. But then it goes, from my stage five, their model extends out. And it's really which choice you decide to make here. It can, forecast out what that might look like. And it's really like.
Do you want to pull back and make this about your lifestyle or do you want to plow into growth and hammer the accelerator? So in my five stages, the way that you maintain in stage five is,
embracing being that strategic visionary owner. Focus on long-term vision, on your market positioning, on the portfolio strategy. You should be thinking about the business as an asset, within your portfolio of assets and how this is building you wealth.
how it plays a role in your entire ecosystem.
A few of your KPIs here are going to be EBITDA, business valuations or like net benefit. And then the business management metrics. Your time allocation here has come a long way now. It's now you may spend maybe 5 % max of your time in sales and business development and maybe
five to 10 % in ops and dealing with clients. And the other 85 to 90 % leadership and strategy. And I'll say the time that you spend in sales, business development, dealing with clients, like it needs to be intentional. It's because you choose to, A, you don't necessarily have to, but also you're using that for at time for exposure to the market. It's market research. You're hearing what those customers or those prospects are saying.
or those competitors, what they're saying. And that's what helps you stay ahead and thinking about, where's their mind going? Where do we need to be? you use that, I think it's the Wayne Gretzky quote about skate where the puck's going. You're responsible for making sure like you moved where the market's going to be. That's how you do it is by hearing those customers. And you've effectively at this point gone from being the producer to be to the leader.
from operator to architect. now, we're trying to build a company and you have the opportunity to build a legacy. so now opportunities to continue to build, to invest, to mentor. Like what you've learned to do to get to this point, you can do it. it's transferable. You can use it over and over and over.
So those are the five stages and hopefully that gives you like a pretty good idea of the, you know, essentially what's evolving over time. think, you know, one of the most impactful benefits of the journey of having the success path for you is going to be it transforms how you approach growth. So, you you're going to be thinking about if you know what stage you're in, you know where you actually are now.
no more of the confusion about why do certain strategies work for others when they don't work for me? which ones should I be using? Which ones should I not be using? Where do I focus? You know, what's most important now? How do I set my priorities? You have an idea of what the biggest problem that you need to solve is at every point in time. Think about all of the questions that that tells you the answer to.
It's going to give you an idea of what challenges to expect next. So things can sneak up on you, but you don't feel blindsided. Like you can place it when it happens. And the growth pains are going to, some of them are going to still happen, but they're more predictable. And so you can spend your time, more time thinking about like what competencies do we need to develop right now to solve these problems? But also based on where I want to take this based on my vision, what are we going to need down the road?
And you don't spend as much time wasting time on learning skills, acquiring skills that just aren't critical now or maybe ever. as impactful as anything is, it's going to show you how you can evolve individually, personally as a leader. you don't have to wonder about it if you were, or if you didn't realize that you were going to need to evolve as a leader.
you probably were going to recognize that your role would get like uncomfortable as things went is because the business is telling you, need to adapt. And so now you'd have an idea of what adaptation do you need to make? But the journey is about building a better business and becoming a better leader. And, and every stage, the company and the owner are transforming.
together and there's a method to it. five stages is what the concept was the foundation that I used to build the business alignment system. and which that's our business growth framework and it aligns leadership strategy and systems into a coherent plan to take you down this path. I look at like leadership strategy and systems are kind of like, when it comes to your health would be your strength training, cardio and nutrition.
Sure, you can try to use one or maybe two and leave one out. You can ignore any of the three, but you're not going to hit your goals if you do that.
you can find more information about the business alignment system at nickberry.info/BAS So I'm going to give you a few different ways right now that you can get an idea of what stage you're in. The first one is one question self-assessment that it's a decent indicator, the question is, or which one of these best describes you? They may all describe you in
degrees and that's all right, but which one is most accurate? Are you hustling for every sale? Are you wondering where the next client comes from? Are you drowning in service delivery? Are you fighting fires with your team? Or are you wondering what does this all add up to? What am I doing here? which of those five questions most accurately describes you? And if it's the first one, if it's hustling for every sale, you're in stage one.
If it's wondering where the next client comes from, stage two. Drowning and delivery, stage three. Fighting fires with your team, stage four. Wondering what it all adds up to, stage five, legacy builder.
The second thing that you can do is you can go to nickberry.info/stages and you can read, I've got an article up there where you can go through and read in more detail about each of these stages. And the third thing and the coolest thing and the most valuable thing is you can get a free 90 day business growth roadmap that is individualized 100 % to you. This is not a template that
You give me your email address and I'm going to send you the same thing that 500,000 other people got and tell you that it's tailored to you. This is a one of one plan created for you. go to nickberry.info/roadmap
you're going to get your current stage snapshot so you know which stage you're at in the journey. And it'll tell you what makes you that. It's going to give you your unique growth profile. it's going to share what your current bottlenecks are that are keeping you stuck and in how to attack those things. It's going to give you your top three opportunities for immediate growth that are based on you, where you're at in the stage that you're in. So you know, where do I focus now?
And then it's going to give you a week by week 90 day plan. So that's your strategic action plan all laid out. It's got the goals, outcomes, and this is, I say this pretty often, but this plan, this 90 day roadmap is as good or better than two thirds of the quarterly, plans that companies come out of their quarterly planning meetings with.
every 90 days. And I'm not kidding. Yeah, this is solid. And people spend multiple days off site and, thousands of dollars every quarter to have one of these created. You can go and it's going to take you six minutes to fill out this form and you'll have the roadmap a few minutes later. And I mean, you'll be able to see that there's nothing generic about this.
So go to nickberry.info/roadmap No matter what, wherever you're at in this journey, the path forward is gonna be clearer for you when you know what stage you're in.
Maybe you're in stage one or two and you're just trying to survive, right? Maybe you're in stage three and you feel like you've created a trap for yourself. You've got a job. Or maybe you're in stage five and just kind of scratching your head wondering what's next.
regardless of what stage you're in, the journey is going to continue until you decide that it doesn't. So the question is, do you want to do that? Do you want to move with intention? Do you want to anticipate challenges and opportunities and develop the capabilities that each stage is going to require of you? Or do you want to keep kind of stepping through the minefield that is the journey when you're blindfolded?
Like I said, this is one of the most impactful resources that I've ever been exposed to.
And it is the closest thing to a cheat code, to a legitimate cheat code that I'm aware of as a business owner.
