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As the CEO of Kit, Nathan Barry has a front row seat to what’s working in the most successful creator businesses.
On The Nathan Barry Show, he interviews top creators and dives into the inner workings of their businesses in his live coaching sessions.
You get unique insight into how creator businesses work and what you can do to increase results in your own business.
One of the things Nathan is passionate about is helping you create leverage.
Creator Flywheels let you create many copies of yourself so you don’t get bogged down with the little things in your business. Flywheels will help you reach a place where you can focus on revenue instead of busywork.
Tune in weekly for new episodes with ideas and tips for growing your business. You’ll hear discussions around building an audience, earning a living as a creator, and Nathan’s insights on scaling a software company to $100M.
Learn how to get more results with less effort and:
Grow faster over time.
Work less hard over time.
Make more money over time.
Simon Severino: [00:00:00] I was the bottleneck and I couldn't take any more clients in. I called the business coach. I said, what can I do? 30 minutes later, we had a flywheel and that flywheel 10 days later has created 95, 000 in sales. Whoa. The number one reason creators fail because they give up too early. This is something that I see a lot of people doing every single YouTube video overanalyzed how much watch time stay time do I have?
Who cares?
Nathan Barry: Breaking it down into 90 day chunks. Spend the first 30 days on showing up consistently. Month two is like measure, iterate, and learn. And then month three is
Simon Severino: Yes. Because this is how it feels. Boring, boring, boring, boring. Whoops! Oh my god!
Nathan Barry: Okay, Simon, before I hit record, you were starting to tell me about a creator, a story of someone employing the Billion Dollar Creator playbook in a space that I was like, Hold on, just Stop for a second.
Let me record and then tell me about your yoga teacher.
Simon Severino: You would [00:01:00] never think of Sadhguru as a billion dollar creator because he runs a non profit. I went through his program. He initiated us as a yogi. We keep practicing. He says, Hey guys, let's meet online. Let's celebrate a full night. I go, all right, why not celebrating a full night?
I tell my wife, Hey, I'm out a full night. She goes, all right. Okay. Nathan, I go to this event and it has 200 million participants.
Nathan Barry: Whoa.
Simon Severino: I mean, how many participants does Taylor Swift have? I don't know, but it's not 200 million. Yes. In one event. This is a live virtual event. A hybrid. He was live. He had like a hundred thousand in front of him and everybody else in their own cities doing hops, being live and watching the live stream.
Wow. Sadhguru, you'll find him a lot on YouTube. That's how I found him. He gives like three, four or five interviews a day. Which is a thing that I am learning from him and copying from him literally, and that's why I'm [00:02:00] here. I'm, I also am on three, four, five opportunities of speaking per day. That's what I'm learning from him.
I'm trying to learn as much as possible. He runs a full organization just of volunteers. And if, if you have ever led volunteers, you know that that's the toughest thing on planet Earth. You cannot tell them what to do. They do whatever they want.
Nathan Barry: When you watch what he's doing, what are the things that you take away?
Like that you'd apply either to your own creator business or if you're at the stage of, you know, a creator making half a million to a million dollars a year that you're like, Oh no, here are the things that you should copy.
Simon Severino: I call this the hero process. I do this with all my clients and I do it myself. I literally I draw on, on a piece of paper why he is my hero and what are his behaviors.
I look at what does he do per day, him in an interview, websites, stores, [00:03:00] funnels. And so first behavior is on multiple interviews per day, every day. He doesn't have weekends. So that's the first thing that I note down. Be on as many podcasts as possible per day. Second thing, he has a core main program. He calls it inner engineering.
That's online. He has volunteers. You might call them moderators, uh, helping. Cause he has around 600 people in that core program. And then from there, he keeps us around with upsells. You can. Hey, want to learn also this method and how to detox and nutrition? And he does it in a very elegant way, one that I call a sales flywheel, because it flows easily from one activity into the next.
Nathan Barry: And so, like, when you look at his business, what are you seeing? Obviously, it's massive audience. Yeah. What do you see in actually the business model and how he's making money [00:04:00] and the inner workings of it?
Simon Severino: He wouldn't call it a business. He, he would say this is yoga and it's a nonprofit, but I think every single service based business can learn from it because what is his product?
His product is knowledge. Basically, there is a specific process. Right? He calls it asanas, so it's just a set of activities that you do every day. So it's a process in our language. And that process he codified into a program. He has recorded modules that do that. And he's teaching people on how they can give feedback on those practices.
So, everybody listening, you have a process in your head, independently of if you know it or not. You have a process in your head. So first step, you write it down. Second, you record videos. Third, you teach other people how to give feedback on that. That's what I extrapolated from that. That's how he runs it.
And then, he has events, where all the lurkers, people [00:05:00] who are watching the videos, Reading the emails, they actually come and gather and this is how he creates community, right?
Nathan Barry: Let's take a, a creator. You and I have a bunch of friends in common. Um, Ali Abdaal, Tiago Forte, so many others take a creator that's in the space and like, let's try to directly apply some of it.
How would you say like, okay, if we were applying this model to this creator, what would we do?
Simon Severino: If it was Ali, he could do the part time YouTube Academy, he could teach his moderators and how to run that and have satellite events run completely without him. And scaling from city to city, he would have a certification process.
This is how you become a PTYA certified teacher. And then they would be like a franchisee. He would be like a franchisor and that could, they could pop up in different Verticals, uh, instead of geographies, which don't really matter in his business, it will be verticals, like the part [00:06:00] time YouTuber Academy for dentists, uh, the, and, and you could go down each, each vertical.
Nathan Barry: Yeah. Cause you could say like fitness is a giant category for video creation. And so someone could build on that and say, all right, I'm going to do it just for this. Or just for food creators or just, you know, these very specific things
Simon Severino: and upsells for Ali. I mean, 80 percent of his population is very young and it's ambition people, not yet entrepreneurs, but three years later, they might be entrepreneurs.
They are still in your email list. They still like you. You are still their hero. Why not slowly upsell them to a, Hey, and you're probably planning to build a business around your audience. Now, this is how you build a business. So level two, level three, then when they, when they have a business level three, how you scale the business.
So this can be natural upsells if you want. That he can be building next, very similar to Tiago with building a second brain [00:07:00] first cohort, people who run BASP second cohort. Okay, what do you do now that you're so productive? What do you do with all this productivity?
Nathan Barry: Yeah. Let's take it further. Another takeaway that, uh, you know, we have from Sadhguru to,
Simon Severino: to creators.
One is totally tangential. He never thinks about business or money. It's just not an equation. Okay. And this is something that I see a lot of people doing. You know, they come to us because they say, Simon, I heard you can double my revenue. And then they obsess about revenue. He never obsesses about anything and in particularly not about revenue.
I don't think he runs any numbers or cares about any numbers. And I think we can all learn from that to let loose a little bit. Of the monetary component of what we do because in the end it's a resource, you know, it, it, it will flow anyways, so you don't have to obsess about it [00:08:00] and I'm a spreadsheet guy.
I see my money flows day to day, hour to hour, but we're talking about inner attachment. Am I attached to them? No. When I sleep, am I thinking about money? Absolutely not. If it's a million in my bank account or 2 million, I don't feel differently. Okay.
Nathan Barry: Okay.
Simon Severino: I want to know them because it's a resource. I have to manage every resource.
There's
Nathan Barry: a fine
Simon Severino: nuance that you're
Nathan Barry: getting out there because on one hand, you know, everyone's told like measure what matters, like set a clear metric, manage to that, especially as you have a team, someone might be as an individual creator might spend their time and their priorities based on their day to day interests or what feels like urgent at the time.
And then as you build a team, A lot of the advice, which I think is good advice is to set clear metrics and then give your team autonomy towards managing towards those metrics. So it'd be easy for someone to hear that and think that what you're saying is conflicting or like in contrast to that. And it's not, you're talking about managing, like [00:09:00] having those metrics, but really your emotional relationship to those metrics.
Is that right?
Simon Severino: Yes. And you know, in the strategy sprints method, we all have them have one dashboard with three. Metrics and they get measured every seven days, one marketing metric, one sales metric, one ops metric, client delivery metric, client satisfaction metric. So it's three numbers every seven days.
What I see people do is every single YouTube video over analyzed to the max. They go to their website. How much watch time, stay time do I have? Who cares? Enjoy the process. The quality of your work will get better. The quality of their results will get better. Money will flow around you in a way that you cannot possibly imagine.
If you just focus on three metrics every seven days. The one that tells you if marketing is working, the one that tells you if sales is working and the one that tells you if the client are getting happier and happier week by week. [00:10:00] Just 1 percent better every week.
Nathan Barry: Yep. I think that's a fascinating example and we can go spend a lot of time diving into specific metrics, but it's probably a good transition to like pause for a second and get some of your story and your, your content.
I want to ask you in a second, like maybe give a little bit of, uh, your background and then like what your business is today.
Simon Severino: So, 22 years ago, I was somebody who had graduated in the totally wrong field. I studied philosophy and psychology and then I was like, oops, what do I do now? I don't, I don't have a job.
There is no job for these guys. And then I was lucky because the, the big strategy advisory in that time, they weren't looking at all at what you studied. They were just looking that you had the best, the best grades. And so I had the best grades, I got a job and I was now in a strategy advisory flying today to Paris to solve a go to market problem for L'Oreal, and then after three days flying to New York, [00:11:00] solving the market entry strategy problem for, uh, A pharma company.
And then from there flying to London, solving the next problem. I loved it because it was a learning El Dorado. I was always saying, yes, yes, yes. It's me. It's me. It's me. Let's go. Let's go. Trying to be in the top projects and with the biggest questions to solve. I did that. And then at some point, every Hilton felt the same for me and every airport was looking to say, this is a stupid life.
It's a great business, but what kind of life is this? I'm in planes all the time. I miss my friends. I want to hang out with my wife more. Um, and, and I said, okay, let's try this, but on my own terms. Worst case, I go back to that. I saved six months cash. I'm going to try this on my own. And so I tried it. I never used that six month cash because it worked pretty easily.
It's, it's a low risk, high [00:12:00] cashflow business. When you start a consultancy, right? You have immediately cashflow. At some point I was the bottleneck pretty soon, actually around 500 K a year. And I was the bottleneck and I couldn't take any more clients in and I said, Hmm. I had no idea how to scale myself out of this.
I knew I called the business coach. I said, what can I do? And they said, immediately, you have to fire yourself from operation sound. And I was like, yeah, sounds logical, but how to do that. We both had no idea, but we started something. And I remember walking around here in my city, in Vienna. With this big question in mind, I do this as a habit.
I take one big question and I go for a walk for an hour. The question was how do other businesses scale themselves? I walk past a McDonald's and the answer was in front of me. I was like, Why do people open up a McDonald's in their city? What do [00:13:00] they get for that money? And I was like, they get brand and processes.
That's it. The yellow thing because it's recognizable and the processes. This is exactly the amount of lettuce that you have to put in a Big Mac because they did the work and you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And there are enough people who are entrepreneurial out there and they want to have brand and processes and pay for that.
So I, I run home and I created two projects on my project list, brand processes, and that's what I did for the next couple of years.
Nathan Barry: So you're talking about, um, you know, franchising as a business model and McDonald's didn't invent, uh, franchising, but that was the, the huge innovation that Ray Kroc brought to the businesses.
Basically, how do we make it? Super, super repeatable and then really invest everything in exactly what you're saying of the brand and processes. It's interesting watching these different businesses and look at franchising. So as you think about franchising in your [00:14:00] business, because that's really a big takeaway, right?
Is that, okay, I'm going to follow this similar model. Where do you see that playing out over a long period of time? And then, then let's get into how exactly you broke down the branded processes, you know, to make it franchiseable.
Simon Severino: Yes. So I go back home, I start working on brand. I teach myself branding by watching YouTube videos, by reading great books like Ogilvy's, et cetera.
I try to understand branding for half a year. I even fell in love with branding. It's a beautiful topic and it brought back my old skills of being a psychologist because branding is all psychology and I love it. I really love it. Then the processes. So I start writing down our marketing processes, our sales processes, our ops.
That was the boring part, but we got really good at it. Took us eight months and we had written down everything. I also wrote the book, the book came out and now the method, what was officially out there. Ali [00:15:00] is chapter one, how he wanted to find the right price for the first cohort of the part time YouTuber Academy, chapter one narrated by Ali.
He's telling his, his own story there. Uh, the book was out there. Then the book rights got sold to China. So, um, China, uh, next chapter and where I am right now is looking at my own industry. Is there a knowledge worker that did it that I can basically replicate that I can learn from? So, and I found a few, there are some in my space and there is one in an adjacent space.
For example, amazing entrepreneur, Gino Wickman created the EOS entrepreneurial operating system.
Nathan Barry: It's very popular.
Simon Severino: It seems to work. Many people are happy with that. It creates org clarity, right? Org clarity. What are we doing and who is doing what? It's very similar to what we are doing, but ours is sales ops, what to do in sales and who is doing what in sales and measuring [00:16:00] every seven days.
So I was like, wait a moment. There are so many similarities. So I'm right now studying how Gino Wichman does it. And, and others, but let's, let's stay with, you know, as a good example, it's now a franchise people pay a first amount. I think it's 28, 000 to get access and then another amount per month to use brand and processes.
And then they, they say on their LinkedIn account. Hey, I'm a certified us implementer. It makes it a little bit easier for them to have their own operations up and running.
Nathan Barry: I'm just thinking about that business model because normally I would, I feel like creators would do, and many of them do this. I think about Rachel Rogers.
She's someone who has a really great coaching practice and then has certified coaches. You know, so people in her community who go through a program, you know, some of them apply to become coaches and, and build it from there. And then they, you know, are providing coaching, but the franchise model is like three steps beyond that.
As far as the, the [00:17:00] sophistication that the people really bring to it, what else is kind of different as you see sort of basically going from like certified coaches, you know, To franchisees.
Simon Severino: Yeah. There are some kinks, uh, to, to, to smoothen out and I've not solved all of them. I'm in the middle. I'm in the middle of that.
Yeah. So I'm not yet an expert in, in how to be a franchisor. Uh, ask me that in three years I can come back. Yeah. Right now I'm doing a ton of mistakes, learning from them. So what should be the frequency of head coaching? How much percentage to control? Uh, is a hundred percent of sales on them, or do we centralize part of it?
How to create referral wheels, like a referral engines in there. These are things where I'm experimenting with and running a ton of AB tests. I can tell you in three years what happens, but this is how I was the bottleneck and how I was able to fire myself because the first step is just teach others and have them make the ops.
When [00:18:00] they run the ops, now you have time. I had. 40 hours per week to work on the business. So now I'm studying different chisels, becoming good at that, uh, making the IP more and more defendable, thinking about IP lending, which is totally passive. I see some people lending the IP to the Googles and HubSpots, et cetera, and they just pay per seat.
I'm studying that if that's applicable to us.
Nathan Barry: You said something about like, you know, switching to work. Okay. Uh, on your business rather than in it, anyone who's read, uh, Michael Gerber's, uh, the E Myth, fantastic book. What are the specifics that you see the creator should do to make that shift from. Like getting out of operations and really working on the business instead of in it.
Simon Severino: This is what I do and and and what I do with our clients, too. I I use the daily flow It's a simple tool where I map out what how did I spend my time today? 8 8 a. m. I did this 9 a. m. I did this and in the end [00:19:00] it's asking me Simon of these tasks, which one will you delegate tomorrow and simon if you would leave more intentionally and freely What would you do tomorrow?
So I take five minutes to reflect on that. I write down one task, for example, bookkeeping. That's what I will delegate tomorrow. And the other one, if I would live more freely. Hmm, IP lending. I don't have to have an answer, but I sketched one word. I don't know yet exactly how to do it, but I've decided.
I've wrote it down. I close my day. I close literally my computer. I go and play with the kids. And then the next day. It's fleshed out on the daily flow, so I come back, I know what to attack. And you know what happens? Just because you have committed to one thing, by writing it down, you have told your brain, I will solve this.
And now, overnight, sometimes, yeah, it still, it works. It connects the dots. So, after three, four days, I'm [00:20:00] talking to somebody, and then, boom, it hits me. You have a good bookkeeper, uh, can you, can you introduce me? I want to delegate my bookkeeping. So that's the first, uh, habit that I would install as a, as a creator, write down every day.
How have you allocated your time and what will you delegate next? This is the core habit. And from there, everything will pop up.
Nathan Barry: Yeah. You're not trying to solve it all in one go. You're not saying I was operating like this, scrapping all of it. And now I'm in this other world and I only do things you're, you're just iterating gradually into it and letting things, you know, surfaces as they're like uncovered over time.
Simon Severino: Exactly. And I use this tool every day myself. People can download it also on strategysprince. com. I use it every day. I'm still doing my thumbnails for YouTube. And as I was writing down, come on, Simon thumbnails, so something will still come up [00:21:00] and, and you will find stuff to delegate even, even five years from now, wherever you are now.
So it's really a process, uh, get into enjoying this process.
Nathan Barry: What's something that you've, you know, either helped a client with, or, you know, a friend of who's another creator, something maybe that they've ended up delegating after following this process that. I don't know. They thought they never could.
Simon Severino: Yeah. All the time. So, um, they say, ah, Simon, yeah, I want to delegate, uh, editing, uh, my YouTube videos. But every time I do that, the quality is miserable. I keep firing them. I keep having this back on my lap. And so I say, okay, what about if we try? Tell me. If I'm your editor, tell me exactly what the best video looks like.
And they told me this for five minutes, and I was just recording it. And I gave it back to them, transcribed, and cleaned up. And I said, this is the process. Give them this process. They gave the [00:22:00] process to the editor, and voila, it worked. There is only this little boring piece that, myself included, we try to skip it.
The boring part of writing down the process. And I agree with you all, guys. Yes, this is boring as hell. That's not why we are entrepreneurs to do boring stuff, but once you have to do it only once, then you write it down, you can tell it to the camera and let's have it have your assistant transcribe it and then hand it over the quality that comes back will be higher and now you don't take it back on your desk.
Nathan Barry: Yeah, I like it. I mean, I do that all the time. Of saying, Hey, this is what it should actually look like. Here's how to write in my voice. Here's how to like the way I like things edited, all of those things. And it's usually recording a loom video and then walking people through it. My team actually now has a document that my, um, Kara, my head of content made.
She's gotten very good at writing in my voice, you know, as I'm writing, uh, video scripts and course training and even like social media content. Right. For this podcast episode, you know, [00:23:00] we're going to come out with a whole bunch of clips. I'm not going to be the one writing those individual clips or like the captions on it or that sort of thing.
And so Kara went and made not just a, a guide to writing in my voice, but then also like a whole bunch of do this, not that examples. And so, you know, over time as the team, as a social media team went to create a post, she then rewrites it, but then she put it in the dock of saying like, cool, here's a firsthand example of like, you might want to do this, but here's the Nathan version of it actually.
And so now when we're onboarding a new writer, you know, or a new team member. There's so much information for them to go through, like training and very practical examples. And like, it just removes those bottlenecks.
Simon Severino: Another thing that I would say is simplify. So when I started out, I had, you know, 274 ways of doubling revenue, but I was confusing everyone.
And so the people in the program, we were measuring [00:24:00] the NPS, net promoter score as our ops. Number of each week and they would say, yeah, it's great, but it's confusing. And I'm, uh, I have to simplify again. I went back, simplify still. Oh, it's too much. Oh, I have to go simplify. And now the 90 days print is just three chapters, three months, month one.
We only increased by 25 percent the price. Month two, we only increase by 25 percent the win rate month three, we only increase by 25 percent the frequency of the sales. That's it. Have I confused anyone? Nope. And then you add those three. 25 percent and they compound to 99 percent so you have now factually doubled the revenue.
It took me six years to get to this simplicity, so sometimes it takes long, but that's the work. Simplify it so that it fits on one page, and when you have simplified it, now you can have [00:25:00] an incredibly complex program in the background, but you don't confuse people. And this is step one, because as soon as you have that, now you can teach it.
And from teaching it, now you get to certifying and all the other, um, loops and all the other scaling options. But the first thing is simplify it.
Nathan Barry: Just as you're talking, I'm thinking a lot about my flywheels course. There's so much that you can teach and there's so much more that I want to teach on business models and team structure and all the things that professional creators need.
But really, I'm probably at this point, even as I've simplified it quite a bit, still teaching too many things and too many high level concepts when really I need to like maybe run a 90 day process on getting people a single flywheel, right? You know, month one, we're going to define it. Uh, month two, we're going to operationalize it and then month three, we're going to, you know, uh, like further refine it and then scale it.
Exactly. We're probably teaching [00:26:00] half the material and probably getting double the results, uh, with our students if we did that. And you have an upsell for later. Yeah, that makes sense. I think actually a trap that creators fall into is they associate the amount of content with the value delivered. And so you'll see this on sales pages, you know, for someone's, um, whether it's a 250 course or a 2, 000 course, they'll talk about the features, you know, which is like 20 hours of content or, uh, you know, 200 pages of, uh, Workbooks and materials and all of this because they're trying to justify why you should spend 2, 000 to purchase this thing.
And really like none of that matters. It's actually a benefit. If you're like, Hey, this is really, really short and it's the outcome that will get you, you know, and we're able to achieve this outcome with, you know, 76 percent of our students.
Simon Severino: I had the exact same experience. I was telling everyone, Hey, I built [00:27:00] 274 templates and swipe copies for your sales and marketing processes.
And they were like, Oh my God, that's so much work. And then I said, okay, we're going to do three things. Increase by 25 percent the win rate, the price and the frequency and you just have to put in one hour per day for the next 90 days. It also sounds very believable. I was saying the same thing, but it feels very different.
Nathan Barry: Yeah. I'm just thinking about the believability in that. You know, cause if you're like, I'm going to double your business and all that, it's like, look, look, man, I get DMS every day on Twitter where it's, you know, it's some conversion rate optimization person. Who's like, do you want to grow your business here?
You know, we'll 4x your leads. People often say like, we'll double your MRR in 90 days. If I want, I always laugh, I don't respond, but I laugh because I'm like, I don't think you know what the MRR of my business is, you know, like, That, that would be a, that'd be amazing if you could add 3 million in MRR, but [00:28:00] what you're talking about is you're saying, Hey, we're going to get a 25 percent increase in this metric and then in this metric and then this metric, like even just from a sales perspective, it sounds so much more believable and achievable.
Right? Like, Oh, you might have a case study where for these clients you're able to double, but That's not realistic for my business would be something that'd be common for someone to think.
Simon Severino: I get it asked a lot is that someone that sounds too good to be true and say, okay, let's, let's, let's sit down for a moment and break it down.
Okay. What's the price that you're charging right now? Okay. Do you, if, if, if you increase it by this, do you, how many clients do you, how many no's will you get? Do you think? And then we map out that first part and it's usually realistic. And easier than they think to increase by 25%, but you have to improve positioning first.
And that they think improving positioning is complicated. I show them the six things to do to improve positioning. And they go, Oh, I can do that probably in two weeks. Then we move to the second part. How do you [00:29:00] increase the win rate? I asked him, what's your talking time in a sales call? They go, I don't know.
And I say, well, let me, let me tell you, you will be around. 60 percent to 80 percent talking time, like most sales recordings that I get. And that's why your, your win rate is probably between 10 percent and 20%. And they go, that's exactly my win rate. And then I say, okay, if we get your talking time down to 28%, your win rate will be more in the seventies, uh, than, than in the, in, in the sixties.
And they go, Oh, That's, that's how easy it is. I said, yeah, it's one part. Then there are, there are eight other parts, but this is the first part. And, and Simon, how do I get my talk time down by having better questions and then shutting up and listening and they go, Oh, I can do that. So, so, so I will give you my sales recordings and you, you help me to have better questions and to shut up more and say, yeah, exactly.
That's month two. And we create your sales playbook where you have strong questions that your closers are going to ask.
Nathan Barry: Yeah. [00:30:00]
Simon Severino: My closer. So it's not just me. No, first you, but then we multiply you because the same thing other people can now do. And you will teach them. And then part three, what's your sales length right now?
They go are six months. Okay. So because that's your email list. Okay. What's the frequency of the emails that you send every week? Okay. What if you send two per week? Uh, can we create more points of value? And if that doesn't work at the beginning of the funnel, can we go to the end of the funnel and say, okay, you came for this, but what else do you need?
And do you want to stick around for the community? And would you be willing to pay for having access to the other clients? So we find upsells extension selling cross selling upsells and they go, Oh, well, that's also realistic because I could keep more of my clients. Actually, I don't have much to offer after what I'm doing right now.
And so after all of that, now it doesn't sound spammy anymore. It sounds like actually, okay, there is a process there.
Nathan Barry: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense of how. How do you break that down? And you're very focused on the outcomes. And even just as you're talking through it, it's one of those things that [00:31:00] as someone who's done a lot of sales, you know, I'm like, yeah, I know that each of those things would work.
You know, as you're talking about talk time on a call, there's absolutely an inverse correlation between your talk time and your close rate, which is the opposite of what a lay person or a, you know, a junior salesperson would expect.
Simon Severino: Exactly. The more junior they are, The more they, they tell stories and the more we coach them, the better their questions become.
And then they shut up for the next 20 seconds.
Nathan Barry: Well, let's, uh, let's use that as a transition to talk about flywheels, particularly in sales. And you've got some really interesting processes here. How do you think about bringing these? Um, it's like sales flywheels into a business. So
Simon Severino: building on, on your philosophies and Jim Collins philosophy that the sales flywheel is something that you do, and then it flows automatically into the next thing and it becomes easier and easier from there.
I was looking with this question in mind with my own team on our own processes. So every 14 days. We look at these boring [00:32:00] processes, the marketing processes, the sales processes, the ops processes, with three questions, basically. First, what can we simplify for the clients? Can we cut something? Then, second question, what can we simplify for us?
Can we make any cuts for us, for our team? And then the third question is, how does this flow easily into the next value creation activity? Now this sounds theoretical. Let me give you an example from two weeks ago where we look at those three things in our own processes. So we don't know the answer yet when we start that session, but we do it.
And we look at the marketing processes. Head of podcasting is Lou. And so Lou starts reporting about the current state of processes. And then he says, what could we cut? And he said, probably we can cut this part and that part is okay. Cool. Do it. And then he says, and then the question, how can we make it easier to go into the next step?
He says, Simon, I don't have a next step. I said, Ooh, what happens after? So Lou, [00:33:00] you are getting me on four podcasts per day. Okay. What happens after that? And he goes, nothing. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. Are you measuring the downloads from, from each? No. Okay. So let's add in, in your spreadsheet, let's add a column, which, um, which says number of downloads per podcast that Simon was on.
And then Michelle, what could be the easiest step to your part of the marketing process, which is partnerships. We think for a couple of minutes and then Michelle, Goes, Simon, what if we pick the top three podcast hosts based on number of downloads because that there, there is a resonance between your audiences there and then those top three, they get the power hour with you, which means exploring strategic partnerships, joint ventures, etc.
And I said, Michelle, this is genius. Lou, can you do it? Of course I can do it. Simon, in an hour, I will implement it. I didn't know 30 minutes before [00:34:00] what to improve. But 30 minutes later, we had a flywheel. And that flywheel, 10 days later, has created 95, 000 in sales. And there's weeds coming from the podcast.
Yes, it's not a plant. Activity. I do podcast to learn about, uh, things to, to have sparring with smart people like you to learn from the best and to learn about myself because I know what I think after I've said it. But what happens is that Michelle then follows up on these hosts and say on the top three and says, Hey, do you want the power hour with Simon?
And by the time that she follows up, they have already gone on my calendar. And they say, Simon. And I look at the Calendly and say, what do they want to talk about, Michelle, maybe that that is a power hour and said, no, no, no, there's they are. They want to explore a sales acceleration for their own team because you're talking 45 minutes to somebody that's you are creating [00:35:00] value or not.
Nathan Barry: I mean, I found that when growing ConvertKit is that. I would often have authors on my own podcast or be a guest on theirs. And then afterwards people would say like, oh man, like we really, I don't know why we're still on MailChimp. You know why we should switch over to Converta. And the goal was not of going on the show was not to close that one co-host or or whoever, but it happens.
But it happens because you underst spend that time together and people wanna work with people that they like, they trust and they think are smart. Podcasts are one of the best ways of, of demonstrating that. So
Simon Severino: yeah, it works very, very well. On both sides, both being a host and being a guest, it creates these effects.
It was also my experience.
Nathan Barry: I'm curious about that. You know, if someone's listening, they're saying, all right, I'm going to go on way more podcasts and I'm going to make this a part of my flywheel. And I've watched people do that, right? Two people that I think have done it very well are Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell, where they basically say, Hey, I'm going to go on tons of podcasts, [00:36:00] particularly in person podcasts.
Dan Martell bought a jet specifically so that he could go from where he lives in Kelowna, British Columbia in Canada. And which is very remote and hard to get to. And he's like, I'm going to, you know, buy my own plane so that I can, you know, go to all these shows. And I watch him. It's probably every other week, maybe, maybe at least once a month that he is going somewhere.
He was going to LA Phoenix, something else and doing 10 podcasts in two days. And knocking them all out in person. And he's seeing a huge return in his business form from it of like those clips, drive all of the video content for his social media and everything else from there. So I've seen people make these big investments.
What have you implemented in the actual processes to book far more podcasts and be discerning on which ones to go on and all of that?
Simon Severino: Yeah, the first effect that I've seen also both with Dan Martell and Alex Hormozi is they became amazing communicators month after month, year [00:37:00] after year. They are now really good.
You give them a stage, they absolutely crush it. And that comes from a B testing all the time, high volume, high volume pitches. Cause you are pitching all the time basically. And you are getting immediate feedback from the eyebrows of, of the host, if that works or not, if they're bored or if they're excited.
So that's a B test, a B test, a B test, a B test. If you want.
Nathan Barry: I think also like rehearsing those clips, like hanging out with Nick Huber. And Cody Sanchez, who I think are two of the best people at speaking in tight soundbites that deliver a lot of value. And I was talking to Nick about this. We were actually right on a golf cart at a resort, like going from the house.
We're staying into the gym and I brought this up and I was like, How do you get good at this? And he just stops the golf cart. And he's like, you do it a lot. And he just pulls out his phone and he goes, Hey, I'm here with Nathan Berry. Uh, who's, you know, the creator of convert kit, blah, blah, blah. Um, Nathan, what's your biggest tip on growing your audience go, you know?
And I'm like, uh, [00:38:00] uh, okay. So the, the thing is, you know, teach everything, you know, that's the, you know, like launch into that. And hit the point that he was making is you just do it over and over again. And you put in these And then you get to the point that you have, you know, it starts as like four soundbites, but then eventually you're going to have 50 soundbites that you rehearse and they're in a library and all of that.
And then you'll become this person that on the fly can share great information.
Simon Severino: Yes. And one of them will catch fire and you don't know in advance which of which, which it is. So some friends will tell you. Oh my God, that was amazing. And you will go, what? That one? I did that on my morning. That was the quick throw away.
And they will go, yeah, but this is when I feel you most. Okay. Noted a B test. First, first insight. Then you, then you put it on X and, and it catches fire on X. You did hundred similar ones, but this one catches fire. [00:39:00] So you start learning about, Ooh, what nerves are here that I'm hitting? And from there, you are now, you are now iterating and that's your flywheel philosophy, you are iterating.
Now we come back full circle to the beginning, where I told you that Sadhguru is one of my heroes that I'm studying and replicating because he is on three, four interview stages every day, and he's in his sixties. Now, most people, when you go on tour, will ask you, how the hell can you make that from an, without burning out?
And, and many people tend to burn out. So it's important to look at this. The question is, how can you enjoy the process? How can you make it fun? And this is the part where forget the analytics of that week. Make that week as fun as possible. If you like flying there with a jet, fly there with a jet. [00:40:00] It's not my definition of fun.
My definition of fun is playing with my kids, then being on three amazing podcasts, like the billion dollar creator. And then playing with my kids again and then working out for an hour and then cooking. That's my dream life. So how can I make this week enjoyable? This is the most important question for you.
And what is the minimum set of KPIs that you want to implement? Three. Three is the minimum. One for sales, one for marketing, one for ops every seven days. The rest, just enjoy the heck out of the week. You will be at your highest energy. It will resonate the most. More people will want to have you on, on stage, on board.
They will feel that you are enjoying it. And they will go, please, Nathan, take my money. I want my money to be in your hands. because it seems to get more in your hands.
Nathan Barry: I like it. You know, if we're talking about a flywheel, the biggest thing that I see that makes a difference in a flywheel is how long can you keep it running?
And most [00:41:00] people are focused on, you know, the quick wins. What, what results can I deliver this week or this month? And the real magic of the flywheel is how can I run this every single week for five years or more? And just get these like compounded small gains, even if the flywheel never improves, just the fact that you stay consistent on it puts you in the top 10%, you know, of results, uh, probably in your market or industry.
But then when you get that like optimization step, you know, in your loop closer, then. Yeah. And you know, you're getting better every week, even if it's the tiniest bit better, then you're going to get the really, really big compound gains.
Simon Severino: Absolutely. Yes. I learned compounding from my personal investing portfolio.
It started at minus 50, 000 and it's now at a million dollars, just my, you know, stocks and crypto. But you see the compounding. Over years, and then you go, Oh my God, that's what people mean. You don't feel anything. You don't feel anything. You don't feel anything. It seems [00:42:00] like stale, but then whoop, what's going on here.
And then it accelerates in, in, in the very end of the compounding effect. And the same thing is with posting on LinkedIn. It feels boring. But keep doing it every day and month two, you will see impressions going up. Month three, you will, you will see people starting a ton of conversations with you. And most people collapse after 25 days.
They say, I tried LinkedIn. It doesn't work. Instead of having a 10 years perspective and say, how can I make this fun for me? You know, it feels enterprising and boring. Okay. But this is where the money is. So let me enjoy the heck out of this.
Nathan Barry: Yeah.
Simon Severino: What's been
Nathan Barry: working for you on social growth in particular?
Is there one platform you're focused on? Is that LinkedIn or.
Simon Severino: Yeah. What's LinkedIn has been our focus all the years. And now that LinkedIn is a self running. [00:43:00] A strong channel for us. I want to build out now X and YouTube, but LinkedIn has been our main focus because we are in the B2B space and this is where the B2B happens.
So we were there and we have tried so many things. The only thing that's really important is post every day. Once a day, something that is. Relevant to them, timely and valuable. You do this every day. Plus we have a little trick where we put ourselves in support groups with, with our bodies and they will keep us accountable.
Simon, you didn't post for two weeks. What happened? And so. Uh, daily committing to daily, basically building in public. Cause when you're posting daily, you will get extremely vulnerable, extremely open. And that's the point. That's the whole point. Be real, um, share the failures, share what's actually going on.
This is what, where my hero is Ali. [00:44:00] Uh, if you remember Ali a couple years ago, lazy Ali versus productive Ali. Oh my god, that was genius. Uh, the lazy part of me. Oh, today I didn't do anything is fantastic. That's the way to to, to be as a storyteller, right? So I will share, Hey, this month I had a bad sales.
Yes, I'm a sales coach. I'm your sales guru. Yeah. And I had a bad salesman and this is what I'm doing. So be very open, build in public, not just the successes, but the actual happenings be real. That's what we long for real people and real journeys. And so that we can be, uh, literally as we are and have a safe space to, to, to communicate what's actually going on and be better and better every week.
Together.
Nathan Barry: Yeah, I like it. I mean, you mentioned a couple of things that have been my mantras in, uh, My creator journey, which is teach everything, you know, create every day and work in public. And those things. Um, they sound really simple and basic, but if you [00:45:00] actually do them and, and apply it for a long period of time, the results are amazing.
And so I think about, okay, what's the flywheel. If someone's saying, I'm going to focus on LinkedIn, I'm going to focus on growing an ax. It's like, great. What's the flywheel. That's going to guarantee you can post every single day. That's just, and actually if we put this into the, you know, sort of the 90 day strategy sprint model, it's like, look at month one, all we're going to do Is we're going to just post every day and build a system that can get us to post every day.
Simon Severino: That's it. No, I want them. Plus we put them in a group with 20 others who are also in the sprint and they will keep them accountable. They will push each other because you will have days where you don't feel like, but your buddies will, will, will not.
Nathan Barry: The other thing that, I mean, this is the thing that I feel like every professional creator knows and internalizes.
And then all of the beginners and intermediates say like, no, it shouldn't work that way or whatever else. But all the algorithms really reward early engagement [00:46:00] and the way that everybody gives the algorithm what they want, everyone that you're seeing that's grown to a meaningful level, particularly on LinkedIn and X is they have engagement pods.
Which is a very fancy way of saying you have a text thread with a bunch of your friends who are trying to grow on the platform and you say, Hey, I just posted this thread on X. We guys engage with it or your friends come in and write a thoughtful comment and say like, Oh, this is a great thing on sales training.
I'd really appreciate that. Here's something that I leveraged in my business. It not only makes the content better, but it tells the algorithm like it feeds this. I think people hear that and they're like, Oh, engagement pods. That's like gaming the algorithm or whatever. And it's like. Look, this is the way that, that all of that works.
And if you're trying to, to grow on a platform and you're doing it entirely solo, you know, you're off climbing Mount Everest without any support, like go get the Sherpas, go get the team, get some buddies to go climb with. It's going to be a much [00:47:00] better experience if you do that. And it's much more fun, much more fun and way more likely.
To succeed, right? Like
Simon Severino: when you know in advance that somebody will comment, you feel much more at ease with posting daily. We are running eight, eight of those pods right now. And because otherwise people in their first years of being a creator, they just stop posting. But if you put them in those environments and they know exactly, okay.
I'm going to post something and I know it's getting 30 comments now. They are more likely to keep that flywheel up.
Nathan Barry: Yeah. That, that consistent execution flywheel over a long period of time matters so much. So breaking it down into 90 day chunks, what we were talking about is, uh, if you, you know, spend the first 30 days on showing up consistently and building that, that habit and that process with a community.
Probably the second one is probably measuring. That's probably where I would start. Like month two, you can actually.
Simon Severino: Yeah, it [00:48:00] will, it will fly in your face. Some of those things will work. It's just 1 percent of those, but they will work. And so you will want to investigate why is this one working? That's, that's the second iteration of the flywheel.
Now, now you're onto something. Um, for example, recently I made a post on, on X and it got 18 times more. Impressions than everything else. I was like, okay, what is this? And I started investigating it and the whole team we put in half an hour and say, okay, what do we learn from this? What, what do we replicate?
What, what do we put on repeat? So that's your next iteration. Now you're onto something, you put it on repeat. Now this will be become part, maybe a format in your podcast. It may be become a series of emails. It may be even become a service or product. Cause now you're onto something I'm trying to put the sealer in my head in real time.
Nathan Barry: I think what it is is, you know, basically post content show up consistently. [00:49:00] Month two is like measure, iterate and learn. And then month three is either what, you know, here's what you're doing with the content, how you're going to repurpose it, turn it into other things, or how you build a back end funnel.
Like what you're actually going to drive the leads to. Cause I think people start to focus on the funnel and the system and all of that when it's like, no, you weren't even showing up consistently. So you, you can earn the right to build the funnel, you know, in the, the sales process when you've. Actually demonstrated that you're going to do months one and two of showing up consistently and then iterating and measuring
Simon Severino: and this is probably the number one reason if creators fail, they fail because they collapse too early.
They give up too early. If you look at all the names that we mentioned, Ali, Tiago, et cetera, they are. Years in the making and their first years, you might not have known them, but they were posting very, very regularly already in those years when they weren't superstars. And, uh, they just had [00:50:00] a tiny community.
Um, but they did not stop showing up at some point. It's boring for you. It feels like, Oh, I'm repeating myself. This is boring. And I still have only. This, this little audience persevere. Okay. Make it fun. Make it enjoyable. Stay there because compounding effect, this is how it feels. Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring.
Whoops.
Nathan Barry: Oh my God. That is, that is absolutely how it works. Well, uh, you've got a lot of great content that you've put out, um, that people should follow you for where, where would you like to direct people? You know, if they're looking for creating those, you know, those compounding results after showing up for a long time.
Simon Severino: So on YouTube, I've started sharing my journey of all the mishaps and all the inside of the things that I'm learning.
Nathan Barry: See the rest of us, we just nailed it from day one. No, I'm kidding.
Simon Severino: Well, I'm, I'm, I'm effing it up every week, multiple times. [00:51:00] And the most shareable, the most relevant stuff I share on a YouTube channel, that's called Simon Severino.
And also I'm sharing many, many very quick snippets on X. At Simon Severino, but really where people can get most bang for their buck is if they either buy the book strategist brands, or if they go to strategistbrands. com and download the daily flow, this one habit that I'm still doing every day that will help you find what's the next step for you to delegate because this is the core engine of everything.
This is the, the micro flywheel in, inside of, of your life for the next 10 years. Sounds good.
Nathan Barry: I love it. Well, Simon, thanks for coming on and we'll have to hang out in person sometime and, and uh, riff on creator businesses as well. Would be lovely. Sounds good. Well, good to chat and we'll talk soon.
Simon Severino: Thanks, Nathan.
Nathan Barry: If you enjoyed this episode, go to the [00:52:00] YouTube channel, just search billion dollar creator and go ahead and subscribe. Make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also who else we should have on the show.