Achieving Exponential Growth: Unleashing Success with Simon’s Strategies

Achieving Exponential Growth: Unleashing Success with Simon’s Strategies

Sean: Hey, guys, welcome back to the show. It’s me again, Sean Si, aka Mr. CEO of 22, your host at the Leadership Stack podcast. Today we have with us the founder of Strategy Sprints. His name is Simon Severino.

Simon teaches about growth strategy in MBA courses across Europe. He hosts the Strategy Sprints podcast, so you might want to tune into that right after the show. He is a TEDx speaker and a contributor at Forbes and Entrepreneur magazine. Simon, thank you so much for being here on the show today.

Simon: Hey, Sean. Hey, everybody. Thank you for having me.

Sean: Awesome. So, Simon, what led you to do what you do now that you’re teaching MBA courses, that you have strategy sprints?

And I was checking out the website earlier before the show, and I was thinking to myself, what this guy is doing must have helped a ton of people because you got a lot of testimonials there. But what led you because not a lot of people would suddenly think, Oh, I want to be a business coach.

I want to help other CEOs out there. What led you to this place where you are? And tell us about the journey.

Simon: You know, 21 years ago, I was exploring, right, what is my superpower? What can I contribute here on this planet by having, you know, multiple different jobs?

And then at some point, it clicked, Boom. I did fall in love with one particular topic, the go-to-market topic. How do we enter a market? How do we crush it in that market and how do we stay in the market? It was so intellectually stimulating when a team says, You know, I have to be better than my competitor, we have to find a different angle.

I love it because there is no answer yet, but everybody is super committed and it’s super relevant for everybody. So you can charge whatever you want for that question if you can solve that because it will be, you know, 3X, 5X, 10X results for them.

So I said, I love this. Let me get good at this. I will do this just every day for the next 15 years. Fast forward 21 years later. I’m still doing only this every day. The only thing that’s changed is I’m not the operations anymore. I’m not the coach anymore.

I now coach the coaches and have a team, a global team of coaches doing that so we can talk about the entrepreneurial journey, right? As a leader, you start doing something, but then you become a team leader, company leader, etc.

I went through different transitions and now am the leader of the company. I’m the CEO now and I have different tasks, but the passion is still the same. Helping people crush it, how they enter the market, how they stay in the market and how they beat competitors, how they eat the lunch of their competitors, and how they make sure that competitors cannot eat their lunch, that’s strategy.

Sean: You seem to me like you’re a very competitive person in a way, and I wonder why you like this so much that 21 years later it’s still the same thing that you’re doing only now you’re running a business rather than being the one man person, one man team?

Simon: Absolutely.

Simon: Every high performer is competitive and every competitive person wants high performance. That is the nature of entrepreneurs. They want to create something out of nothing. They want to solve problems.

That’s what drives us right? And that’s what creates all this energy. And that’s why other people want to chip in and say, Wow, I want to be on your team. I want to be on this mission. I want to contribute to this train that’s running. And so the train gets usually started by this passion of an individual, and then it becomes a team. It becomes a company, it becomes something global because of this energy.

And yes, there is a positive competition in it. How can we improve stuff? How can we make the world a little bit better? How can we build something more useful than what we have right now? These are all competitive moments.

How can we build it better? Right? You have to have some form of drive to build a company. You remember Elon Musk said building a company is like chewing glass while somebody is throwing a brick in your face. And so there is enough headwind you wouldn’t do that. You wouldn’t build a company if you are not driven.

After all, it’s meaningful to you, because it gives you energy. After all, it gives your life meaning and direction. Awesome.

Sean: So, Simon, you’re, I think, the first guest I have here who started as a coach and now you are the coach of coaches leading your organization. I’m going to take advantage of this and ask you some very pressing questions in my head right now.

It is not easy to build a team of coaches. How did you start and when did the idea of, Hey, you know what, I can hire someone who will be able to coach other people in my stead and pay that person, but at the same time make money out of it?

When did that start for you? How many years have you been doing coaching before you started doing that?

Simon: I started in a global consultancy and learned the craft after, I think 1617 global projects. I know, okay, now I can do that. I was running the whole project from A to Z, and so I said, okay, now I know how to do it. I can do it on my own.

Saved six months of runway and then pulled the trigger, and did my own thing. When you do that, you quickly realize, especially if you are a professional service, high ticket business, that we’re talking strategy advisory here, you get pretty quickly to 300,000, 400,000 turnover per year and then you realize that’s it.

I can do 300,000, 400,000 now every year. But if I do more, I will not get to 500. I will never get to 600. This way I will just get a heart attack. That’s it. You cannot do more of that. And so that was the situation when I realized something in my business model is broken. So I have five clients this quarter.

I’m doing well in terms of revenue, but I’m just in planes. My life is boring, non-existent. I have a good income but zero life and don’t even have time to spend that money to enjoy it. So something is broken here and this is something that many professional services have. You are either in the project now, you are solving the problems of your client or at some point, the project is done.

Now you are on the beach, you are between projects and now you start going, Oh, I have to bring in the next client. So now you do sales and now you get three new projects and then you are underwater again just solving their problems.

You don’t do any sales. So that’s a typical situation for professional services. The problem was for me, first, I cannot do more of this. Second, if a new project comes to me, I have to say no and I don’t want to say no. That’s not the idea. Right?

I want projects and now somebody asks me for work. My dream client asks me and I have to say no because I’m full. It’s not a smart situation. And then on top of. When our first child was born he said, I want to be more home.

I don’t want to be in planes all the time. So I had to find a better model. I booked a business coach. I said I’m stuck. I hate this situation. I want to be more with my kid who’s coming, but I can’t because I’m solving client problems all the time.

I don’t have time to solve my problems, improve my business model, improve the way I charge, or separate my income from my time. These were my big problems. How can I do that? And the coach said, Simon, you have to get two levels above fulfillment.

And I said, What is that? Sounds great, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. And they go, You are now delivering. You need somebody else delivering so that you can do the leadership work and the leadership work. Simon is vision, hiring, firing, performance, and culture. Those are the only five things that the leader does.

So we have to fire ourselves from operations. You don’t coach anymore. We have to fire ourselves from marketing. You have to hire marketing and you have to fire yourself from sales. We have to hire salespeople. And was like, Oh my God, it’s completely different to everything that I’m doing this week. And so I knew, okay, something has to change.

I don’t know how. So let’s get a business coach. Let’s do this together. I hope they have a process because I don’t have one. And so that was helpful. And then tell my wife from next week I’m firing myself. She goes, “Are you kidding? We’re having kids.

You fire yourself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And don’t worry. Don’t worry. I’m just not bookable as a coach anymore. We’ll make even more money. And she goes, How is that possible? I said, Don’t know, but I will find out.

Sean: Good thing you didn’t say because you will be doing the work.

Simon: So the next Sprint client comes in and says, Simon, I want to double my revenue in 90 days. Is it cool? Yeah, come in. When do you want to start? Next Monday, said Cool. Here is your coach. It’s Rudy. And they go, Fine, absolutely no problem.

So I went back to my wife and said it was no problem. Nobody misses me. And so that was my biggest learning if you are a founder and a passionate individual, you think that you are the reason why people book you.

That’s not the case. You are the entry point. I can trust somebody. I can trust Sean. I can trust Simon. So that’s my entry point. But actually, why I am here as a client is I want the problem solved. Like I want to improve my sales or reduce my costs or get my time back.

That’s what I want. And I get this from the process, from your process, and everybody has a process. You know, yoga is a process. Ayurveda is a process. French cooking is a process. Everything is a process. And you can change the French cook and it still works.

You can give me a cookbook and I can cook myself because I have the process and that’s why I wrote the strategy Sprint book because it’s the process of how you run a company, how you market, how you sell, how you onboard clients and how do you keep them longer and how you hire and how you fire.

That’s all in the book because people need the process. And that was my big realization as a leader. It’s not about you. It’s about the process. And so a good leader is serving the people and the team and himself and herself by working on that process, by curating the process, improving the process, giving it water like a gardener.

Every day you pass by, you give it a little bit of water, a little bit of minerals. You make sure you remove something that shouldn’t be there. That’s how you curate a garden. Same thing with the business. Your business has six Simple elements: Awareness, interest, engagement, closing, delivering, and retaining.

These are the six trees in your garden. Your job as a leader is to not get caught up in the details, but every day to look at the whole garden. That’s what you call strategy. That’s why it’s strategy sprints. You look at the whole garden, not at the single tree.

You look at the whole garden and say, okay, who needs water today? And then you pass by and give it some water, give it some love. You cut a little bit. That’s the job of a leader.

Sean: That’s amazing. That’s a good analogy.