FIR 105: Evergreen Your Business With 7 Tips !!

Financial Investing Radio

Your business is running, you are making sales, but you'd like to Evergreen your business. What are some tips for Evergreening your business? Is there anything you can do to reduce the time and effort to Evergreen your business?

Hi Everybody, this is Grant, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. All right, so today we are talking about evergreen? And particularly, how can we fast track key characteristics of our business to evergreen them? Now, the question might be what is evergreen? Well, the purpose of an evergreen business is to make a long term difference for your customers, right? It's a we want to be able to establish enough value over time, so that we can get that into as many customers as possible. Now finding the recipe is you know, to evergreen, especially when you're an early startup phases. And that's a challenge. Right that that certainly takes a lot of time. I actually think that the phrase evergreen is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that sometimes we think well, it's long term, right? The evergreen is long term. But perhaps it's not the length of time that you know that the solution is relevant, but rather the business's ability to adapt. I'll give you an example, an obvious one that we're all familiar with. Amazon started with books, right? And went to well, in all Heck, what aren't they touching today, right. So they evergreen books long enough to open other avenues. And then they pivoted. And so what we're talking about is the ability to deliver sustainable value to customers long enough to let us pivot and continue to serve them. Now that's evergreen. And it's not just the original solution, right? But it's the ability to sustain value, and then pivot to deliver new value. Now, today's easy to use AI, it actually fits squarely in the middle of this using business insights to find the sustainable value. And then recognizing when to pivot either to add more value, or to change out of the value that you're currently delivering. That is core to the use of AI today in our businesses.

Hey, I was looking at a article recently, this was from entrepreneur.com. They said that, you know, there's four kinds of online businesses. This is what they're describing. Here's the four categories, ecommerce. And so that includes groups, right like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, SAS. So that's like Google Drive, and Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office 365. We all know those. There's a content style online business. So this is, you know, the New York Times or nerd wallet or wire cutter. And then the fourth kind is digital service. So that's better self betterhelp, gingo, things like that. So ecommerce, SAS content and digital service. So when we think about an online business, and we think about, alright, what would I do to create an evergreen kind of business, knowing that I got to sustain value long enough to provide enough value so that I have the flexibility and ability to pivot to add more value to our customers? All right, this article stated, this is interesting that evergreen niches never go out of style, right? So this ecommerce, SAS content and digital service those four areas, from from the argument is never goes out of style. Here's some examples.

There's the ecommerce example of Life Fitness, they manufacture extra exercise equipment, Heck, even in the world of COVID. That is, of course, become a massively booming industry. There's others such as you know, the here's a SAS example. The company example is lose it. That's a subscription weight loss program. And then there's content style, a business PC gamer, right, where they review all the latest games. And then let me give you one here. This is a digital service like lynda.com. Now that one's actually a little old, because that's an online education group that actually was bought by LinkedIn who then was bought by Microsoft. But the point is, and I agree with him, you know, those kinds of niches, ecommerce, SAS content, and digital service, those are four kinds of online businesses. And if you want to build an evergreen style business online, you would look into those four categories. That's kind of interesting. So I transition to was thinking more about, alright, what does it mean to evergreen? Let's say that we choose something within one of those areas. And it doesn't have to be an online business. But let's say that it is, what would be some additional techniques that we could do to actually evergreen the business? What are some of the characteristics of it, I looked into something from a CEO has an excuse me, his name is Dave Horton. He's a CEO of tugboat Institute don't know if you've ever looked into any of that stuff. Fascinating, brilliant guy, right? He's, he's got this.

In fact, he made this interesting statement, right, I was reviewing some of this stuff. He said, wealth is a byproduct of an evergreen company. He goes on further to say that evergreen businesses are led by purpose driven leaders highlight that, I think that's critical to in fact, in order to sustain something like a business over a long period of time, hence, evergreen, and hence deliver value over time. There's got to be a purpose. In fact, I think if you ask Russell Brunson, he would go further to say it's not only purpose, he needs to give your people some identity, right, that something that they can connect to and relate with as well. Anyway, back to Mr. Dave Horton, all right. evergreening a business, right. It's it's led by purpose driven leaders. They've got grit, and resourcefulness, you know, to provide the ability to scale. Alright, that makes a lot of sense. Now, one of the things that I noticed that Mr. Horton pointed out, which I think is pretty cool. There's seven characteristics of the Evergreen business, right? So these are the things about the business that give it the best chance of evergreening. All right, now, Mr. Horton does a lot in terms of venture capital. I'm not, I'm not here to say if that's good or bad. I've been involved in startup companies where we had venture capital and others where we didn't. So it just kind of depends. Now, let me read these off. These are actually pretty cool. All right, because he says, look, you know, often entrepreneurs feel under resource, right. And so they often end up needing some sort of venture capital work. But I think the the work that Brunson and those guys do is awesome in terms of helping you not to have to rely on that at all times.

All right, let me get to the seven. Here's the seven characteristics of a company. So let's say you've got your company, what what do I need to have in terms of these qualities within my company? To help me evergreen number one purpose? Alright, so I already hinted at that one, right? Being passionately driven by some compelling vision and mission, right? What's your Why? What's your cause? Right? Number two, perseverance, having the ambition and resilience to overcome obstacles, and keep pursuing that mission into the future.

Number three, people first, boy, this one gets a lot of lip service. But now a lot of companies don't actually make it that way. People First engaging a workforce of talented associates who excel as a team and are motivated by the mission and the culture. In fact, there is one startup company I worked with in Silicon Valley. I joined real early in the days of it, there's just a handful of it. And they said, You know what, yeah, the resumes interesting, were more after aptitude. They would hire aptitude. And then they'd say, we can we can tell you, you know, train you on the job, that your ability to be creative, etc, etc, they had this set of characteristics that were that were crucial to them. I loved it. Ultimately, we grew that thing to a very large organization, we sold it to IBM. So I think they were on the right model their people first they were awesome at it.

Alright, here's another one profit, okay, this is number four profit. The key point here is don't mistake profit as the purpose of the business, but recognize that it's essential for survival and independence. And it's the most accurate measure of customer value delivered. All right. I agree with that. But I love how it's, they say it's not the purpose of the business. The purpose of the business is to deliver the value into the customer.

All right, number five, private. This is an interesting one because it talks mostly about your ability to create a network of other companies that are around you, that support you, and that ultimately help you to deliver what it is you're taking to the market.

Number six, paced growth. This is a critical one. I've seen organizations that growth Too fast, and then their internal operations and business processes can't scale to support it. So it's actually getting the right pace of growth. Obviously, there's the other problem, which is not enough growth. But this is all about having the discipline to focus on the long term strategy, right, where you're balancing, short term and long term performance.

All right, and then the seventh one, very interesting. It's around pragmatic innovation. So this is all about having continuous improvement processes built around taking a very calculated risk approach to innovation. Now, my experience has been that AI applies to several of these, I'll call out two of them. The two I'll call out is paced growth, and pragmatic innovation. In my work with AI, some, some groups I've seen will go apply AI. And if the model says, hey, it's 90% probability, then they'll just run to it and go do it. But they won't take into consideration the impact to their business processes, so needs to be applied intelligently. The others around pragmatic innovation, here's the key thing about AI, when you're going to use it to help build and grow your business and to evergreen it, you actually want to take reeds from the AI on a continuing basis.

You don't want to overdo it, like, you know, looking at the cake in the oven too often kind of thing. But hey, you know, every couple months, you're going to be watching, all right, what has changed, has it affected our model, etc. and take those insights early. In fact, you'd rather know those insights early rather than later. So AI plays a role in evergreening our business. Alright, a couple things I wanted to point out here. Many evergreen companies, you know, they'll bootstrap or they'll sell fund and never require institutional capital. But what I've noticed is that those that practice these principles, these seven principles that I talked about these characteristics, and use AI on a continuing basis over time, you'd never you the bad practice is you go run the AI once and then forget it. And that's a recipe for failure, right? That's not that's not the right way. Because just as Amazon is no longer just all about bucks, right? You would no longer do that with your AI, don't just run it runs. And then and then leave it as is because your business and the world and the context around it will need to change just as Amazon's changed, and so forth. So always make sure you're keeping it up to date and fresh. So these seven characteristics around evergreen in your business are foundational to actually growing to a point where you can take your hand off of the wheel a bit, but still stay in touch with AI that's reminding you on a continual basis. All right, pivot here, make this adjustment there. All right, everybody. That's it. Thanks for joining. And until next time, fast track those seven characteristics with AI to evergreen your business.

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