Fast and Furious Ways to Grow Your Business

Today’s Centre Stage member guest is Bob Joseph, Founder and President of Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. whose mission is to guide, train, and support learners in Working Effectively With Indigenous Peoples®. Bob is a World Member of The Association, doing business from Saanichton, British Columbia. In this episode, Bob shares his entrepreneurial success in growing his business with a team of dedicated professionals through building strong relationships with their clients and by breaking away to do things differently. You can check Bob and his team out at https://www.ictinc.ca.

Be contrarian. Look for opportunities to go ‘against the flow’. If everyone else is ‘going west’, consider the value in ‘going east’ and doing what others are NOT doing. Following the crowd is not a sustainable growth strategy. Look for ‘outlandish’ solutions to problems people have and you may be surprised with the results you get. Non compliance is an audacious source of being different and exposing growth opportunities. In this episode, Roy and Ian explore why ‘doing a 180’ to common traditional ways is an excellent way to step away from the common crowd and grow your business.

Building a strategic plan for many small businesses is typically a challenge. The process can be time consuming, expensive and lacks the credibility to convince a business leader that the strategy will actually make a difference to their business’s performance. In this episode Roy and Ian break down in detail Roy’s Strategic Game Plan—SGP—process that was instrumental in helping Roy’s internet startup organization achieve A BILLION IN SALES. The SGP is simple to develop, it can literally be done in 2 days or less and it’s inexpensive compared to traditional planning methods.

BUY LOCAL campaigns stress the importance of having consumers support their local businesses. It keeps local businesses healthy and keeps local economies growing. But at the end of the day, businesses, regardless of whether they’re local or not, must EARN the consumer’s business by providing something unique and DiFFERENT compared to their competitors. In this episode Roy and Ian explore how businesses can stand out from their competition and achieve superior revenue growth by drawing on Roy’s experience and achievements in taking an internet startup to A BILLION IN SALES!

In this show, Roy and Ian explain why delivering what people expect doesn’t raise eyebrows; rather it confirms the lack of originality and herd thinking. If you want to stand out and be noticed in a way people CARE about, look for ways to SURPRISE! them. It’s a proven technique Roy used to get to A BILLION IN SALES, and it will work for you.

Frontline employees are often regarded as being on the ‘bottom’ of the organization chart, and yet their role in the execution of the organization’s strategy is absolutely critical to achieving superlative performance. Breathtaking performance is achieved when the frontline executes your strategy with flawless precision. In this show Roy and Ian discuss the challenges frontline employees face and why it’s incumbent on leaders to spend more time with them. Roy explains that audacious leaders dedicate copious amounts of their personal time to help frontline people, finding out what’s getting in their way and helping them. Listen to your frontline and watch your performance soar!

How to Be Different Tip #11- Create an Audacious Brand. In this episode Roy and Ian unpack what’s required to break away from traditional branding methods which focus on what organizations produce rather than how they are unique and stand out from the crowd. An audacious brand answers the question “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?”. This podcast will show you how to create a brand that will dazzle your customers and launch you on a growth trajectory you won’t expect.

In this episode, Roy and Ian discuss the reality of ‘Dumb Rules’. If you see a rule or policy that customers hate, find a way to eliminate it or at least change it in a way that makes it less offensive. These Dumb Rules find a way of destroying customer loyalty. Be brave. Be different. Cleanse your internal environment of things that don’t make sense to customers.

In this episode Roy and Ian introduce and discuss the benefits of Abound, powered by the Business Association with its roots in North Delta Canada. Abound delivers all the business services and tools members need to grow their business for a single annual membership fee. The NDBA is the ONLY association that does business this way.

In this episode, Roy and Ian discuss the importance of being ok with doing imperfect things and not spending trying to achieve perfection—‘perfect’ doesn’t exist in any event. Move from thought to action as fast as you can. Try different things and keep moving. Speed is a competitive advantage over those that ponder too much.

In this Center Stage podcast, NDBA Member Jason Roberts, Men in Kilts, shares his unique approach to creating change in their organization. Driving change from the perspective of what improves the lives of their employees is the basis of the Men in Kilts culture and everything they do. A remarkable way to implement change in a highly unpredictable environment.

So many organizations today offer special deals to attract new customers and leave existing customers out in the cold. In this episode, Roy and Ian break down why this marketing tactic makes little economic sense. It completely disregards loyal customers who have been supporting the organization for years, it reduces brand value and it adversely impacts the organization’s culture which now shouts out that getting new customers at any cost is a priority value.

Of course, education is essential to preparing everyone for a rewarding future. But, In this Audacious Learning podcast, Roy and Ian discuss why there comes a time when the textbook needs to be put down in favor of Roy’s practical breakaway moves proven to grow to A BILLION IN SALES in the real world.

In this Audacious Learning Ways Show, Roy and Ian break down what organizations need to do to be more open with their customers, to find ways to engage them, not control them. A ‘Say YES’ culture is a competitive advantage that will dominate forever.

In this Audacious Learning Ways podcast, Roy urges all organizations to STOP! benchmarking under the guise of innovation. Benchmarking—copying ‘best in class’—might help you improve efficiency, but it won’t make you stand-out and be different from your competition. Be a Constructive Emulator. Find an amazing idea and morph it into something different that works for you. Add your own cool twist to someone else’s cool.

In this Audacious Learning Ways podcast, Roy exposes the surprising truth that if you have an amazing recovery after a customer screw-up customer loyalty actually increases! To take advantage of this opportunity, organizations should have a recovery strategy in place for when you screw a customer over (and you will). RECOVERY = FIX THE PROBLEM + SURPRISE ‘EM (with what they don’t expect).

In this episode, we discuss why your product isn’t all that important. Customers expect your product or service to work as promised. But what they (unfortunately) don’t expect is to have an amazing experience when they engage with you. If you can take their breath away with the way you treat them, they will NEVER leave you and will tell others how great you are.

In this episode, Roy and Ian discuss what it takes to create your differential advantage. NEVER use words like ‘better’, ‘best’, ‘leader’ and #1 to describe who you are or what you do. You need to be the ONLY one who does what you do to be truly DiFFERENT. The ONLY Statement is the way to do it.

In this episode, we discuss what being different IS and what it is NOT. It’s NOT about someone’s DNA—what they are born with. Being different is about what they choose to do uniquely to satisfy the needs of OTHERS.