Joshua Macleod:
There’s kind of a general societal view that businesses who make a lot of money, do that from magic, when the reality is they figured out the secret magic to understand a customer.

Podcast Announcer:
Welcome to the Growability podcast, your home for leadership, management and marketing education, where we teach business and nonprofit leaders, the necessary habits to make your organization thrive. Today’s episode shares the second step in the 12 step Growability model, how to attract customers for your business or nonprofit. Here are your hosts, Joshua Macleod, and Bernie Anderson.

Bernie Anderson:
Last week, we talked about your vision, your mission, your values, why it is that you’re doing what you’re doing. Because our model is based on a tree, I have this whole jar of acorns here. I love what you say about acorns, Joshua, because the acorn goes in the ground and then it has the potential.

Bernie Anderson:
Every single one of these in this jar has the potential of becoming this monster tree that is 80 feet deep, 80 feet tall, 80 feet wide, and will produce in its lifetime, 15 million acorns in a lifetime. Right? Just astounding. So here’s my question for you this week, Joshua, what is the second step of the Growability model?

Joshua Macleod:
So this morning I was out on my walk. Actually, every Monday morning, I go out and clear the head and start the week and pray and go out on my little walk on the Monday morning. And I saw an acorn that was sitting on the sidewalk. I know about our episode today. And I’m, that acorn has all the potential in the world, but only if it gets put in to soil. So this week we’re talking about the soil, which in any business is your customer. If I have all the potential in the world and no customers, I don’t really have any potential.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah.

Joshua Macleod:
The potential actually comes when somebody believes in your product enough to pay for the value that your organization creates. I think there’s kind of a general societal view that businesses who make a lot of money, do that from magic.

Bernie Anderson:
Yes.

Joshua Macleod:
So if I am a telecom company, if I am a stock broker, whoever I am, the airline industry, the cell phone industry, the TV industry, if I’m Sony or Nintendo, the concept is they figured out the secret magic to make a lot of money.

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
When the reality is they figured out the secret magic to understand a customer.

Bernie Anderson:
That’s right.

Joshua Macleod:
But even more, more than that, even more than understanding a customer, what they have figured out is they figured out how to add value to a customer’s life in such a way that it’s worth paying for. So if we think about the way that our world is created, an acorn has unlimited potential. And I think every person in a sense really has unlimited potential.

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
But the potential of the acorn isn’t fully unlocked until it finds the right soil.

Bernie Anderson:
That’s right.

Joshua Macleod:
So every leader, everyone who is in a leadership position really needs to discover not only what is their potential, what is their acorn, but also where is their soil or in other words, who is their customer?

Bernie Anderson:
Yes.

Joshua Macleod:
The reason that we need a customer, I think we need a customer because I think our potential is unlocked through service.

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
When you look at that acorn, that acorn doesn’t stay the same, it grows. It has a shell and it has to break out of its shell. Leaders, like that acorn, we have to grow, we have to break out of our shell and we have to deepen and grow.

Bernie Anderson:
It’s good.

Joshua Macleod:
Humans don’t grow through selfishness. Humans grow through selflessness.

Bernie Anderson:
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Joshua Macleod:
What if God made the way that things are so that humans would actually learn to be fulfilled in service?

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
What if business wasn’t just about exploiting people? What if business was training to serve people. And in the training to serve people, you get the reward of abundance. But what if the whole point of abundance wasn’t to have abundance? What if the point of abundance was to go and to give and to serve? So I guess, the question is Bernie, is there a way to build an organization that creates abundance all the way through?

Bernie Anderson:
End of last week, I was walking and thinking about this whole narrative, the narrative or the metaphor, it’s actually a metaphor. The metaphor for business, business is about winning. There’s an element of truth to that, right? But business is about winning. It’s about coming out on top. It’s about making the money. It’s about making sure that we are the best, we’re the brightest, we’re the richest, we’re the wealthiest, we are, we’re winning.

Bernie Anderson:
That’s the metaphor, it’s competition. I believe that a better metaphor for the context that we’re in is that business is actually about cultivation instead of competition. Cultivation means that we put the seed in the ground and we let it grow. And we work on an ecosystem where not just my business, but everybody else around me is benefiting from what it is that I’m doing.

Joshua Macleod:
So the pushback to that, then Bernie is, yeah, good luck with that because the world is competitive and your campy ideas are just going to get destroyed by the ruthless person that has a better sign or a better marketing plan or more resources or more money than you that can actually edge you out in the market. And we’ve both experienced that. There’s a lot of truth to that.

Bernie Anderson:
Sure, absolutely.

Joshua Macleod:
So what I would add to that is that if you don’t have wisdom in your cultivation, you’re done at step one.

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
We tend to pat ourselves on the back and say, I’m the best hotdog stand in the world because I have this really good cultivation heart. But if we’re not able to be in the marketplace and be competitive, it’s the pipe dream that we talked about a long time ago.

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
So balancing both of those things is important.

Bernie Anderson:
Well, and when you’re growing a tree, there is a competition in cultivation, right? There are certain trees that make it and certain trees that don’t make it because of positioning. So, I mean, there definitely is still a piece of that there I think. But you’re right, it’s with wisdom. So actually Joshua, let me just ask this question then.

Joshua Macleod:
Sure.

Bernie Anderson:
We’ve been so philosophical today. Whoa. Let me just ask you a super practical question then. How does a business find customers?

Joshua Macleod:
Well, Bernie, we talk about a lot the statistic that eight out of 10 small businesses fail. The two businesses out of 10 that succeed are those who figure out how to build value into their organization. So let me provide kind of like a step by step guide that’s very big picture overview of the process that we take at Growability to define who your customer is, to define what the value is that you’re going to make. So the first thing that we do at Growability is we look at Maslow’s hierarchy, is some of the value that is created by your organization in health and safety?

Joshua Macleod:
This is the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy. The second question is, is some of the value created by your organization by belonging and confidence? So are you creating some kind of value of the tribe here, where it’s, people like us do this. And then the third question is, is there any value in your organization that is in achievement or altruism, reaching a high potential, being the gold medal winner or in serving others and impacting communities and things like that? So first we kind of look at very big picture.

Joshua Macleod:
Next, we start getting specific on that value. Okay. So let’s say you’re an organization like Nike, where we have health and safety. We also have belonging and confidence. We also have achievement in altruism. Okay. Does Nike, are they providing value with cost or speed or reliability? Kind of like the big three, we’re cheaper, we’re faster or we’re more reliable. And then secondarily, maybe it’s more of your niche market. Well, we do this easier or we are hard to copy or we are more flexible. We have more options than somebody else. And then third is kind of like, okay, we’re going to do this more beautifully.

Joshua Macleod:
So it’s going to give you more status or it’s got more emotional appeal or it’s got more aesthetic. So there’s a lot in that, but here’s the big picture. This is the core value. Then the secondary set is okay, let’s define that. And what I’m really trying to do is I’m trying to say with the resources that you have, how can you serve and add value more effectively than anybody else who is doing this?

Bernie Anderson:
Okay.

Joshua Macleod:
Because if you can’t add value more effectively than anybody else who is already doing this, you probably shouldn’t start that business. You should go join with somebody who’s doing it more effective than you. Why start something that’s not going to be adding more value to the world? If somebody else is adding more value, go work with them. Don start a business.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah.

Joshua Macleod:
Don’t run an organization. Once I know what our core product is, what our values are, what specifically our values are, now I’ve got to ask the question, okay, who is in the market that will actually pay for that value? And so we go through the process of creating customer personas. So customer personas are people who are in a market or in an area or a group of people who pay to have a need met. And we’re asking questions like, what’s the problem that your value helps them overcome? What is causing that problem? What’s their environmental problem? Let’s really get inside the mind of the customer.

Joshua Macleod:
What are the effects of the problem? What are the negative things? But then we talk about, and we’ve done entire podcasts about this, the big three. What’s your competitive advantage? What’s your convenience advantage? What’s your consistency advantage? Once I have my core value that I can charge for figured out. Once I have my core customer that is really into and pays for that value figure out. Now I look at my markets and locations, where am I going to be doing this?

Joshua Macleod:
How many cities am I going to do this in? How many people am I going to be able to serve? Who are the competitors in that market? Who are my direct competitors? If I sell pizza, what are the other pizza shops in the area and who are my indirect editors? So this is, if I sell pizza, who are the other fast food places in the market? And then we dive in and really become great at doing customer surveys with the people that are buying our product.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah.

Joshua Macleod:
When you look at the overview of what happens in the Growability customer section, we’re doing the service of learning. I think anybody listening to this that doesn’t really own a business or run a business, they’re kind of, “Well, duh, of course.” What’s crazy is how not well, duh this is in the market.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah.

Joshua Macleod:
Because when you go to start and run your business, or when you’re operating your business has been running for 20 years, there’s so many things that are going on. I’ve got to have my taxes done, I’ve got to have my, here’s my new website update. I’ve got this customer complaint. I’ve got to go to this meeting. I’ve met this person. I go. You’re running around. And oftentimes, you lose sight of, wait a second. We only have a business when we’re providing value to a customer.

Bernie Anderson:
Right.

Joshua Macleod:
If we stop providing value to a customer, our business is very short lived. We’re going to crash and burn. As long as we are continuing to add value to a customer, our business is really going to grow. Staying in that symbiotic relationship of serving, meeting a customer need, getting feedback, looping back around it is so critical.

Bernie Anderson:
The symbiotic relationship between seed and soil.

Joshua Macleod:
Yeah.

Bernie Anderson:
That’s gold important.

Joshua Macleod:
It’s important. That’s important.

Bernie Anderson:
Yeah, it’s important. So, all right. Well, we are out of time today. We would like all of you to remember that you are doing better than you think, and you have more potential than you know, and we are so grateful that you were growing with us at Growability.

Speaker 2:
Thank you for listening to the Growability podcast. The mission of Growability is to equip leaders to flourish in their life and work by developing vision, rhythm and community. To discover if there is a more excellent way to run your business, visit growability.com and speak with a certified Growability coach. Bernie and Joshua are also available for speaking engagements, workshops and conferences. Subscribing to this podcast helps Growability equip throughout the world, and we appreciate your support.