[00:01:17] A.J. Lawrence: So today’s guest is pretty interesting. He’s been a managing director of a company. He’s been a sales guru, helping many people grow their sales capabilities. He’s been a turnaround and an exit specialist. Now, he is a speaker and author and he invests in other small businesses and helps the entrepreneurs grow. I think we’re gonna learn a lot today, so let’s welcome John F. Kettley to the show.
[00:01:45] Hello John. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate you being here. I was just telling the audience a bit about your background, how I saw you in the Harbour club, in their course, and then kind of dove a little bit into your background.
[00:02:01] As you help companies turn around, you help them build up their things and kind of find clarity. So I was just really fascinated about all the different things you’re doing, but before we kind of expand on that, can you maybe share with us where you see yourself as an entrepreneur these days?
[00:02:16] John F. Kettley: That’s kind of an ongoing and developing thing to be honest with you. I’ve had a career of building businesses to sell, retired two or three times now, and I’m now looking that we’ll run a 24-month strategy and then I’ll take another version of a retirement. Will I ever retire? Probably not. Businesses once it gets into the bones, that’s where it stays.
[00:02:40] So, probably a bit like a Jim Rohn, not that I compare myself to him but I’ll do this right the way through to the end. But certainly over the next few years, we are building companies to sell.
[00:02:52] A.J. Lawrence: Now that you’ve been building on the sell and you’re looking on this 24 sprint, cuz you help other people kind of find their own purpose. What is it that you feel that you’re kind of bringing to them that helps them get to that next level? And then you participate in also then.
[00:03:09] John F. Kettley: I guess probably the best way to share this is to come back and tell a wee story. Now all through the 80s and 90s, my main focus was building businesses to sell. Very fortunate, was able to retire back in 2006, took a few years out, and then the recession really kicked in the global recession of kind of 2008, 2009, 10. And the phone started ringing with people that I’d just done business with and I’ve always been a serial networker. And so the phone was ringing and it was _John, could you come and have a look at this? _And that’s how I fell into turning companies around, kind of for the last probably 16-17 years now. It’s conversations that lead to either turning a business around cuz somebody’s in trouble, they’ve lost their way, or sometimes with businesses that come up for sale and the owner just needs some help to realize the asset that they’ve been building over those years.
[00:04:05] But one of my real passions is psychology and it’s working out with a business owner what’s in their mindset. So there’s a dual passion, the passion of finding out how people tick, that’s just an ongoing passion of mine to learn how people tick, and how to help people that are generally adjunction in their life to see the path.
[00:04:30] And it’s funny before we came onto the conversation now, you and I were talking and how easy it is for a business owner, entrepreneur to lose their way, to see a shiny object and then see a second shiny object. And, oh, all of a sudden you’re kind of 30 degrees off the path of where you were intentionally going. So hopefully that kind of explains a little bit about my perspective. For me, it’s really about helping people to get where they want to go. The business part of it is a natural bolt on it, just happens.
[00:05:04] A.J. Lawrence: Are there specific types of businesses that you look to help, or is it just sort of more general or is it specific types of businesses?
[00:05:12] John F. Kettley: No, not at all. The businesses tend to be owner-operated. I generally don’t deal with companies that have got lots of initials. I like to deal with a business owner, someone who owns the business outright, because you can get decisions made. You can be a speedboat in a sea of tankers while they’re all taking 20 miles to turn left. I’ve turned, left, turned right and turned back again kinda thing.
[00:05:41] So I only deal with business owners, the subject matter doesn’t really matter to me, because business is business is business. Whether it’s recording studios, the motor industry, I’ve had clients from one side of the planet to the other and ash handling business that works with power stations all the way through to sandwich shops and everywhere in between really.
[00:06:05] A.J. Lawrence: That was really cool. This is what’s so much fun because so often, and definitely when you’re from one country or another, you know the realm being, oh, these types of businesses or businesses like my country, but looking at broad world there are so many different types of businesses around there. You say you like to work with one business owner businesses, cuz it allows you to help them make the decisions faster. Is there like a size of the business? Is it sort of like early stage?
[00:06:34] John F. Kettley: I generally don’t work with early stage businesses. They’re normally established businesses from about five years onwards. So they’ve gone past the startup phase. The reason I don’t tend to work with startups is that those business owners, I’m approached on a regular basis by those, but they normally have such a fixed picture in their mind when they are in that first kind of four to five years old. That they’re not really open-minded enough to kind of take on a third party perspective. Quite often they’ll say, yeah, but what we really wanna do is X. Yeah, but what we really wanna do is Y. Okay, that’s cool. I’m here if you wanna pick the phone up further down the tracks, that’s generally how I’ll leave that one.
[00:07:19] No, anywhere up to I guess 25 million, something like that is normally where I tend to live. Because once you get much beyond 25 million, they tend to start to bring on all the initials. Up until that point, that’s just the arena that I sit in. So whether it’s a siding company in Florida or a construction company in London, generally speaking, when that owner has made the decision that they want to take that up to a 100M+, I get involved in those businesses, but in the transition from taking them from that 25 to a 100 million.
[00:07:55] So, as an example, we’re just dealing with a prototype company here in the UK that are looking to run the M&A route and take over multiple businesses across Europe and state side. And our mission is to take that to a 100 million within the next four years. It’s just under 20 at the moment, so hope that gives you a snapshot.
[00:08:18] A.J. Lawrence: Some pretty big growth there. I like your kind of description of early stage, I always call it, they haven’t made the mistakes yet to know what they don’t know, go make some mistakes and then we can talk.
[00:08:30] John F. Kettley: I think it’s when they get in their mind that they’ve got a certain path they want to tread and 9 times out of 10, they’ve come outta the corporate environment or what we call in the UK, the PAYE mindset. And there’s a huge difference between the PAYE stroke corporate mindset and the mindset of an entrepreneur. They’re very, very different things. And so when you get startups by people that have worked within X or Y organization, they’ve gotta go through that time period to evolve as a business person and realize the world’s a very different place than they thought it was when they worked in the engine room of Google or Apple or wherever it was. It’s a big difference.
[00:09:15] A.J. Lawrence: Let’s say someone does come out of that. They get through that first stage and they start realizing the world isn’t perfect or isn’t structured. What’s the best way for someone to then work with you? Someone comes through, they have a business that’s good, but it’s not hitting all the strokes. How could they best work with you?
[00:09:36] John F. Kettley: It’s a bit of that old saying. I generally come across people when I’m out networking, which is obviously not so much as that’s happened in the last couple of years. Although probably done about three or four deals in the last 12 months off of a social media app called Clubhouse.
[00:09:51] A.J. Lawrence: Yes. I remember you say I was impressed. I ran away from that group, so I’m glad, you know.
[00:09:57] John F. Kettley: But generally it’s a phone call from someone where they’ll say, look, I was talking to somebody they’ve introduced you, and pretty much immediately they’ll give me the scenario. So they’ll say, you know, we’ve built the company up, it’s turning over 500K or 5 million or 25 or whatever that is. Again, in terms of the numbers, that’s not really the thing that inspires me personally.
[00:10:19] It’s really about where are they in the journey. And if they’ve got to that point in the journey where their mind’s opened up to the point where they think, you know what, we need a bit of help here. And funny enough that actually takes people to get past their own personal ego to say, you know, I will go get some help and they start talking to people that they know _who do you know that we could talk to that got experience in X or Y_ or whatever. That’s when the phone rings.
[00:10:47] So if someone’s got a business out there, they’ve reached that point where they’re on the hamster wheel. Every day they’re waking up and they’ve got a ton of stuff to do, that’s the marker. When as a business owner, you wake up and it’s Tuesday and you’ve got a whole ton of stuff to do. And then it’s two weeks later on a Thursday and you’ve still got stuff to do, but you’re not getting momentum. It’s not growing, but there’s a ton of stuff. That’s the point to bring somebody in. And put it on the table, and just say to him, look, here’s where we are, here’s where we wanted to go. These are the challenges that we’ve got at the moment. Can you just give us that third party viewpoint? Just look at it from the helicopter and tell us, are we on course? Are we 20 degrees off course? Where are we?
[00:11:31] So that’s generally the point that I’ll come in is when someone wants that third party perspective. And because, and I’m just gonna be honest with you now. Anyone that’s been in business for quite a number of years, that’s done maybe multiple subjects. When you come in on the helicopter and you look at it, you can see it really quick, like really quick. So to be honest, it’s not rocket science.
[00:11:54] A.J. Lawrence: No, it’s funny. Somehow I went from a chemistry degree to becoming a coder and I wasn’t a great coder cuz I had never really studied it, but I actually knew it. And back in the early 90s, that was still kind of like walking on water. But I remember, as hard as it was for me to code, I could look at other people’s code and be like, oh you have an open bracket. You know, it’s that like when you’ve done something enough and then you take your own ego out of it, all of a sudden you’re like, oh, why don’t you have this? Oh, did you see you missed that? Yeah.
[00:12:29] John F. Kettley: Yeah, and you know what? I’ve just got a flash into my head. It’s a, a fellow that I used to spend some time with some years back and he was a coder. He wrote operating systems for banks. And we came in, in the early hours of the morning from a night club, this was the 90s, and he started coding. And so I’m looking at it and it just looked like the matrix to me, is what it looked like. I later found out he was in a bit of an ambiguity in so much as that he’d stop, he’d look at the code and he’d rock back and forward. And what he was doing he was running the code in his head.
[00:13:04] And I believe there’s not too many that can do that, but that’s what he would do. He’d know that the a forward slasher was missing or a back slash or whatever it was, but yeah, he is jumping off and taking the helicopter view. That’s what helps us to create momentum.
[00:13:20] A.J. Lawrence: A little inside baseball, cuz this gets, you know, getting a little geeky. In the early 90s, a lot of times you were taught to run the code because rendering the code was so slow compared to now where it’s like, oh, you press, hit, everything runs. Back in the day, even webpages I remember, even just coding, could take a couple of minutes. So if you were edit, change, edit, change, look, change, it would take you forever.
[00:13:45] I could run small things in my head, nowhere near an operating system for a bank. And they’re the more fun. Beyond this ability to kind of have the experience under your belt, to be able to bring different concepts to the four for them. What do you think has helped you most in your ability to be this turnaround expert here?
[00:14:10] John F. Kettley: To be honest with you, I think it comes back to the amazing guy I met in the mid eighties. I was probably only in my early twenties then. And I’d left school at 15 cuz the ADD and the dyslexia, just, it didn’t fit with Academia, unfortunately.
[00:14:26] And I met this guy. He was an ex F-111 fighter pilot, spent two years in the Vietnamese POW camp up to his neck and mortar, had a few stories to tell. It was out in Germany, bit of a bizarre story, I was selling Jeeps and Harleys to the US Military on Ramstein Air Base. And in the training that he was giving, he spotted that I had the ADD, which means that I’ve always got three or four things that are running at any one time in my mind. And he gave me a technique back then, the helicopter technique. Every time you get an overwhelmed moment, do a mind map. Now I do it mentally, but a lot of people use mind maps I’m sure, where you can just put the whole thing out and just see it.
[00:15:07] And for me, that’s always stayed with me and with every single conversation I go to, every business that I look at, I instantaneously run through a sequence of questions that touch all of the major points. So if you figure that in most businesses, it’s a little bit more than a triangle, but you got the three points of focus, which is sales, revenue generation, service delivery in the bottom left hand corner. And then the right hand corner, you’ve got the financial engineering of a company.
[00:15:37] So I always look at a company from that three-sided triangle. Has it got a robust sales strategy? Has it got a robust marketing strategy? Has it got a robust delivery mechanism? Is the financial engineering geared to help that to look? So that’s how I look at a business, at any business, every business. Is the focus of the business too geared to one side of the triangle or to one point of the triangle? Cause obviously we need that to be in the center of the triangle and not over towards one part more than another.
[00:16:13] Once you look at that most business owners that are trying to scale a business, and especially if they’re trying to blitzscale it, quite often, they’ll take their eye off of the delivery side. They want a blitz scale, so it’s all on the sales. That has an impact into the financial engineering of the company. So it’s constantly looking, trying to get that happy medium between scale delivery and finances, cuz obviously when we’re scaling a business, even if we’re blitzscaling a business, we still need to make sure that we’re not overtrading cuz over trading can kill a business just as quickly as a – well, you end up with a cash flow lock. It’s the same deal.
[00:16:52] A.J. Lawrence: You get so successful that you don’t have any success anymore.
[00:16:56] John F. Kettley: There you go. there you go.
[00:16:59] A.J. Lawrence: And there has to be a British equivalent, but we have a famous sports figure in the US, Yogi Berra, baseball player. You have these Yogi isms, they call ’em, but it’s like, the one line that came to mind was no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. You know, it’s just like, there’s, too much going on, too much. So therefore it’s gone, the success.
[00:17:19] I’ve lived and worked a bit in the UK and I always find it funny. It’s like, how can we share the same common language, but so much just doesn’t
[00:17:30] John F. Kettley: I know, it’s nuts. It’s funny cause I lived in the states for a number of years. And like you say, it it’s the same language, except that it’s completely different. I think that’s one of the reasons why when you see British companies go to America with grandiose ideas and they crash and burn and American companies come to the UK and they crash and burn because culturally it’s just different. So you’ve gotta adapt to their way of thinking, if you see what I’m saying.
[00:17:58] A.J. Lawrence: Yeah, no, my first experience in that in the late 90s, I was some hotshot agent. I had already crashed and burned my first company, sold it to a company that promptly went bankrupt. So then I was working for some agency and I was over there and I landed this huge deal in the UK for cable and wireless, UK, of all things, we were going back and forth on everything.
[00:18:23] And then we had to, oh yeah, we’ll do three levels. Da, da, da, you know, something. Yeah. Three levels of insight, you know, this death pack and like they jumped on it and I never was like, wow, that’s only like, that’s not that much work. Why were they so excited? Literally the fact that 0, 1, 2, 3 where in the US it’s 1, 2, 3 when you talk about levels, that was about 600K of work and I had agreed to for my poor company, the differences there.
[00:18:54] Given that it is what you do, we’ve talked about the types of businesses, the triangle thing, even though in my mind, I love the symbolism of the helicopters. Geez. It’s like the rotor or the P you know, but the triangle. Definitely as a project manager back in the day, I always remember that you get to pick two. I like that.
[00:19:15] How do you keep that balance there? Now that you’ve used this to help you gauge businesses and how to help you work on your skills of how to help them, what would be the main advice you give to businesses? We’re more than starting up. We have a business we’re not hitting all three parts of the triangle here. What advice would you give them?
[00:19:37] John F. Kettley: Go back to the playbook. That’s the first place to go back to. Every business needs three playbooks. You need the master playbook. You need the marketing playbook and you need the sales playbook. And the master playbook business plan if you like, details what is it that we are setting out to achieve?
[00:19:55] So I think the biggest mistake that most businesses make is trying to build a business. I learned by the school of hard knocks, and approaching the door of bankruptcy on a couple of occasions. Never build a business, only ever reverse engineer a business. So what do I mean by reverse engineer?
[00:20:15] Whenever I start a business, whenever I take an interest in a business, I’m already thinking about how I’m exiting it. If you think about old businesses, really, there are only two types. There are either lifestyle businesses or their business is being built to an exit. This is for business owners. I’m not talking about the big corporates and all the rest of it. Cause well, they are. They’re lifestyle businesses for the corporation.
[00:20:40] So the first thing we do is we’ve gotta go back to where we started. What are we setting out to achieve? What did we set out to achieve? Sands that have fallen through the glass quickly has seen us go off course. Where are we now pointed?
[00:20:55] Pretty much all business owners start the business or buy into the business based on the idea that they’re gonna become super successful. Well, that’s just like setting sale from Portsmouth for the Americas. And saying, well, the Americas are the success. Then you get halfway across the Atlantic. And then someone says to you, so whereabouts are we going in America? It’s a pretty darn big place. It could be Nova Scotia, it could be Jacksonville, Florida, or it could be Venezuela.
[00:21:24] Well, that’s the same thing when people say, well, I wanna be a success. I want the business to be a success. Well, okay. What does it look like when you’ve won? What does it look like when it’s where you want it to be. I mean a visceral vision of what it looks like when you’ve won. So that’s the point that we have to go back to. It’s okay, we are where we are, but what is it that we want to build? Now that we’ve got back onto that point, then everything starts to slot into place because then with the master playbook, you start putting in all of the milestones to get you to the next point, the next point, the next point, and so on. That then reflects back into the sales playbook, and of course the marketing playbook.
[00:22:05] My advice to anyone, go back to the start. Pull out that business plan that is getting dusty in the drawer. Have a read of it. You’ll laugh. Everyone does. And then when you stop laughing at what you initially wrote three years back, five years back, you’re gonna go, oh, okay, let me rewrite that. Let me rewrite that with what I know today. Cuz the only constant is change and the speed of change in a connected society is getting faster and faster and faster. So the things that we thought six months ago don’t apply today, let alone two years ago. I mean, if you look at the quantum shifts across the business landscape that we see today to how it was in October. I mean in October, we still were worrying about another lockdown and here we are in March and the world’s kind of saying, I think COVID, that’s only over in Hong Kong, isn’t it? Cause it’s just no one’s wearing a mask anymore. So yeah, my core of the advice is go back to the start.
[00:22:59] A.J. Lawrence: That’s an interesting piece cuz I’ve heard this from other successful entrepreneurs like yourself. And when you start working with people, is there sort of a rhythm to re-evaluating? Because obviously there are EOS, there’s OKR, there are quarterly you know. But what I find is a lot of times how you bring them in. How you make them live within an organization is more important than I think the structure. I think you can choose any structure as long as it becomes part of the organization, but like, how do you try and keep that going back to the playbook become part of the ongoing experience not just a, oh, when you’re panicking.
[00:23:42] John F. Kettley: There’s a fantastic book called The Big Five for Life by John P. Strelecky. It really is a phenomenal book. It’s a great business book but it’s actually written like a novel, which is why it’s so readable. And the main points in it are around the central character. Within that book, he talks about the purpose for existing. I think that that’s a really crucial point for us in the business.
[00:24:09] What’s the purpose of the business? Why does it exist? Are we passionate about that purpose? If we’re not passionate about the purpose of the business, that is an absolute parallel to where we want to go, we’re kind of in trouble. And we need a culture, we need an ethos, a feel, the mission statement needs to resonate with the business owner and of course, with everybody that’s in the business. Which is why when we’re interviewing for team members to come on board and that’s right the way through the business, there’s an interesting part of that book, where he talks about the receptionist that’s in this huge reception area. The person that came on was the perfect person, because she was the director of first impressions.
[00:24:53] Which I really liked because the person really liked embracing new people. So there’s a cultural piece to every business and if the business owners and all of the lead management, and as that trickled right down to all of the team members are not culturally bought into the play, bought into where the company’s going, what it is that they’re doing, that’s when it can get in trouble.
[00:25:15] So coming back to the playbook again, I think it is really, for me, always about deep diving into the business owners and the core team to see what is it that they wanna achieve in their business life. And how does that match with where the business is going? So for me, it’s always the mind behind success because if the mindset’s right, the business is right every time.
[00:25:38] Making money is relatively easy once you’ve got the mindset that when you wake up on a Monday morning, you’ve got a smile. You want to go do it and grab it by the lungs as it were, and, and just run with it cuz you’re excited with it. So there needs to be the passion with it. If it’s a fairly digital thing, we look at it and 1 and 1 is 2 and 2 and 2 is 4, that’s very hard to create growth. That’s very difficult to push a wheelbarrow uphill when it’s just stuff you do. That’s dangerously approaching a job. No one wants to do a job.
[00:26:12] A.J. Lawrence: I’ve created a gazillion extra hours of effort for myself, just so I don’t have to do a job. So yes, I completely agree there.
[00:26:21] That’s fascinating because you’ve touched on different aspects of having this vision and then setting everything towards it. You even talked about defining the success of the business versus engineering it and how you’re bringing it in. And now that you’re talking you’re on this 24-month sprint, time is a fleeting concept.
[00:26:39] Now that you’re looking at this sprint before your next kind of transition, how are you defining success for yourself?
[00:26:47] John F. Kettley: It’s defined in three different ways. I would be lying if I didn’t say that one of them was financial. So I’ve set a financial target that when we achieve where we wanna be in 24 months time, that’s gonna result in the finances that are gonna afford certain things in life.
[00:27:05] The second part is that I want to, I’m actually quite passionate about making a difference. So the legacy side of things, I was never old enough to have children. So I was always the kid in my house. So my legacy, like kind of help him others to see a different way. What I mean by a different way, is that pretty much every business book that I’ve read or listened to kind of comes at it from the digital lingo. And I’m not so sure that that works. I think you create extraordinary success when you get comfortable in your own skin, when you are comfortable with who’s looking back from the mirror, that’s where it starts. You have to be comfortable in your own skin. And once you look in the mirror, you ask a set of questions and answer those sets of questions.
[00:27:53] So for me it’s who are you? What do you do? Who do you help? What’s gonna make a difference? So for me, success is making a difference in other people’s lives. So one of my passions that we’ve had for about about 10 years now, the Sales Masters Guild, we teach people how to become unbelievably clear about what they want.
[00:28:13] Once they become clear about what they want. And when I say what they want, devoid of outside influence. I think those that are trying to make something happen for other people are the ones that often leave themselves behind. And that’s what makes it difficult for them. But when you become truly authentic, comfortable in your own skin, that’s the point where you start to make great things happen. To achieve the extra ordinary, you have to do that. It’s just the law. That’s just how it works. To build a business that makes money, well, that’s easy cuz you just need the passion within a particular sector or the passion to want to achieve something within a specific sector.
[00:28:50] So one’s financial, one for me is passing on the knowledge. And in passing on the knowledge, helping others, by default to achieve their successes. So one of my pet projects is the TAGS program and the Titan program. So the Titan program is about releasing the Titan within helping people to get that fusion between mindset and business tactics. We get the mindset right. Then the tactical engineering part of it, that’s easy. Anyone can learn that part of it.
[00:29:20] And then the TAGS program is teaching consultants, advisors, how to turn a company around, how to do that quickly, how to grow it, how to scale it, how to sell it. Cuz in the 2020s, we’re in the decade of the baby boomers retiring. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of business owners who are now in their late 50s, early 60s. They want out, the next generation don’t want to take it over because they wanna create a squadrillion of an app. They don’t wanna do dad’s or mom’s business. So how are they gonna get out of it?
[00:29:54] So that’s really where my project for the next two years. We’re acquiring businesses that we’re rolling up to sell on under an SPV, a special purpose vehicle. We’re in the turnaround space with clients directly. And then in passing the knowledge on really. The next two years is about passing the knowledge on as much as the other things.
[00:30:14] A.J. Lawrence: This has been great. Thank you so much. If the audience wants to talk to you about their business, about things, if they’re not happy with where things are going, or if they wanna learn more about, like you said, passing on this knowledge or even your own other efforts, where should they go find you?
[00:30:32] John F. Kettley: Best place to start would at johnfkettley.com. You can reach me through that. Email me direct by all means, that’s a great place to start.
[00:30:42] A.J. Lawrence: We’ll have that in the site for the show notes. John, thank you. And I really hope I can get you back on, especially as you get further into this sprint cuz I would love to see how far you go here.
[00:30:53] Because like I said, I saw class in the Harbour club, and I’ve been reading on some of the stuff. I just love a lot of your thought process and it’s helping me as I kind of figure out the structure I want. But you know, obviously from listening to this, I’m going to be putting a little bit more into ‘my own definition of success is going to be here’. Get it to lock down a little bit more. So thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:31:16] John F. Kettley: Thank you, A.J.. It’s been a pleasure.
[00:31:19] A.J. Lawrence: I really enjoyed having John on the show. He’s really just a super nice guy and how he was walking us through the different things he was taking on and how he works and what he looks for and what he shared with us. Just super nice.
[00:31:32] I love his concept of a 24-month dash. Often when we talk about time constraints, we really kind of look at 1 week sprints, 15 days, a month, a quarter. And then we talk about big, long, let’s set a 3-year or 5-year or 10-year, or, you know, our lifetime goals. I kind of like the play of a 24-month dash. Now he was jokingly calling it for mini retirement, but it’s still, there’s so much that can be done during that period. But the sense of urgency he’s adding to it.
[00:32:09] I’ve talked to a few other entrepreneurs who use that type of concept, and it does take work to kind of create the consistency of urgency. But that is a really powerful thing if taken appropriately and consistently executed on. I also think when we look at how he focuses on what is the transitional entrepreneur, I talk here on the show a lot about it being that like upper six, low seven to middle seven entrepreneur, that’s like, wait, the things that we’re working before when I was getting the business going now we’re not having as much impact. Or there’s so much more I need to do, how do I do that? I like how he kind of puts it around five years.
[00:32:53] Because I think from a lot of my experience, it is usually there somewhere 3 to 6 is what I’ve seen, but still five years is a good thing. And it’s like more focused on almost the learning experience than in that type of situation for the entrepreneur that he can kind of work with and help.
[00:33:14] So that’s a very interesting way about looking at it and just also because when we go out there and create our businesses and try and grow them and move them along, one of the things that so many people forget is the longer you’re in business, the more likelihood you are to continue in business. It’s not guaranteed, but it is more likely. And also the more likely you are to actually grow your business as you go along. Now, once again, that’s not guaranteed in all this, but it is just so hard to keep a business going when you get started, that if you are able to still have a business that can keep you going in a legitimate manner, you have something pretty good.
[00:33:58] And so that’s a really good point to kind of look for help. And then that like last way of how to look at when it’s time for the extra voice or if you’re a business, he talks about it as being the momentum is gone. That’s kind of cool because we talk about concepts of creating evaluation cadences, looking at our metrics, re-evaluating what we’re doing is, the humans running the business, etc, on a cadence.
[00:34:30] But what’s kind of cool is using this momentum. And we’ve had other guests talk about how they’ve reached a point where the momentum just seemed to go. And they used that to deep dive into what they were thinking about for the business. Now, that’s really cool that John’s talking about this also, because that’s something that maybe we should take into consideration.
[00:34:54] Sometimes it’s not just about our monthly or weekly, our quarterly, our annual goals and all this. It’s what’s happening here in the moment, adding that extra layer. And then that’s something where maybe it’s time to re-evaluate what we’re doing, maybe it’s time to talk to someone like John. These are the cool things that we can do as we’re trying to grow our business and just get that extra little bit of being deliberate in how we grow.
[00:35:24] All right, everyone. Please go check out johnfkettley.com. He has lots of great stuff to share. And if you’re interested, I recommend having a conversation with him. He’s a great guy and he can really probably help your business a lot. All right, everyone, if you liked today’s episode, please leave us a review.
[00:35:43] Go let us know how we can improve. Let us know what we can do to make this show better for you. And please go check out beyond8figures.com. Sign up for our newsletter. So that way, the next time we have another guest, you’ll be the first to know. Have a wonderful day. Thank you so much for listening. Bye bye.
[00:36:05] This episode of Beyond 8 Figures is over, but your journey is an entrepreneur continues. So if we can help you with anything, please just let us know. And if you like this episode, please share it with someone who might learn from it. Until next time, keep growing and find the joy in your journey. This is A.J., and I’ll be talking to you soon. Bye bye.
