Are You An Alpha Entrepreneur?

Alpha entrepreneurs all have one thing in common: they know it’s not about the revenue.

If you’re focusing on the money coming into your business, you’re missing out on some of the biggest opportunities for growth.

Don’t believe it? In this episode, Chris shares what happened to his first business when he changed his target from more revenue to more market share.

You need to hear this if you’re ready to make huge moves in your market, regardless of your industry.

Tune in and follow the exercise at the end to take yourself from novice to alpha in one simple “A-ha!” moment.

Either you’re an alpha entrepreneur or you want to be. The only difference between those who are and those who aren’t is knowing the few actions that create the most growth in your business.

In this Episode:

• The huge difference between novice entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, and alpha entrepreneurs
• Are you relying on the same systems and people during each stage of growth? Here’s why that’s a problem
• What alpha entrepreneurs focus on instead of revenue that helps them grow faster in a year than most companies grow in a decade
• How changing their focus helped Chris’s health club develop a message that put half of their competitors out of business in two years
• Make this list right now to start creating the system that’s going to skyrocket your company’s growth

Find out exactly what aspect of your company is the current weak link that, if fixed, will help you scale faster and more successfully.

Go to BuiltToGrowReview.com and see insights on how to fix everything that might be out of whack and holding your back — for free.

Enjoy the show? Check out the most popular episodes of Built to Grow!

• Get Better Results from Every Meeting
• 8 Mistakes I Made Scaling My First Business
• Where Millionaire Entrepreneurs Put Their Money

Transcript:

Alpha entrepreneurs see businesses completely differently. They think differently, they play this game differently, and they get far bigger results, and they sit back and they wonder why so many “successful” people are still struggling. Now, if you’ve been in business for more than a year and you haven’t surpassed the million-dollar mark, or you’ve been in business for more than five years and you haven’t surpassed the $8 or $10 million mark, then something’s wrong. And that doesn’t mean that you’re not successful, it means that you need to learn what the few actions are that drive the majority of growth in your business.

Novice Entrepreneur Versus Alpha Entrepreneur

Here’s a differentiator: A novice entrepreneur sees themselves as an expert. It’s their business, it’s their baby. Every single win is their win. And the “successful” entrepreneur sees themselves as entrepreneurs, right? They’ve made it big in a very small pond. Maybe they’ve mastered marketing or product launches or whatever it is, but they don’t understand that, as they grow, things break.

And the same systems that got them to $1 million, they just can’t get them to 10 or 50 or a hundred million dollars. And the same people who got them here today are not the same ones to get them to the next level. So growth always comes in chunks for them. It’s big for a while and then something happens and it either slows down or it crashes.

But the alpha entrepreneur, on the other hand, they think like a CEO.

They’re the visionary, they’re not the implementer. They’re growing a brand, not a business. And they don’t just hire warm bodies to fill spots in their company, they develop leaders to run things for them. And they know that, people with that mindset, they’re not born that way. They’re made.

Shift Your Thinking

When you shift your thinking, it’s kind of like this a-ha moment. The decisions you make are better and the results you get are better. The growth in your business comes far faster. We can probably spend, I don’t know, three or more hours talking about the CEO mindset and how you can use that mindset to grow any size company more in a year than most companies grow in a decade. But for this particular episode, I want to give you just one key concept and if you embrace this one concept. As simple as you may think it is, you’ll be able to grow faster and in a more predictable way than you might even think is possible.

Most entrepreneurs focus on what? Growing revenue, right? Alpha entrepreneurs don’t just focus on growing revenue, we focus on growing market share.

Big difference. Big, big difference. Everyone on our team knows who our top competitors are and how much of the market they control and how they control it. That way my team has a clear target for who we need to take down because we could grow a company faster by taking market share than by constantly running promotions to boost sales. And every single large company knows this.

Grow Your Market Share

When I was in the health club industry, one of my locations had five other clubs within a mile. All fighting for the exact same people. In the health club industry, we market to about everybody in about a 10-mile radius.

So everybody in that 10-mile radius was being marketed to by about six health clubs. In that 10-mile radius, probably 20% of those people knew that they wanted to become healthier. They knew that a health club was the place to do it. So we were all, all six clubs, marketing to that 20% of people who had that mindset. After a couple of years or so of being in business, everybody in that area knew exactly who we were. They were already a member of a health club.

So I got my entire team together. All hands on deck, all minds on board, and we sat there in a mastermind room. We got together in our war room. We went over everything and we strategized and we tried to think outside the box. And our goal was to figure out how to grow our market share.

And we came up with this very simple concept that everybody who was in that 10-mile radius who already knew that they wanted to become healthier and knew that a health club was the place to do it, they were already members of health clubs. So all of our marketing was falling on deaf ears, right?

All of our marketing is falling on the other 80% and every health club did about the same thing. Mot these exact words, but something like this: “Hey, put down the donut, get your fat butt off the couch, get into your car, drive to this very intimidating place. Come in, stand in front of a personal trainer, have them critique every flaw on your body, and then go into a sales room with a salesperson who’s going to hardcore sell you into a membership that you’re probably never gonna use.”

It sucked because we were forcing the 80% of people who didn’t want to be part of a health club to buy membership. And that’s what everybody was fighting for. These six clubs, including mine, were fighting for people who didn’t want to be part of a membership.

Provide Value to Your Customers

So what we ended up doing was a very simple launch and we created two messages. The very first message, we ran this on flyers and in newspapers and on local radio and on local TV. The first message was, “Hey, if you are a member of a health club and you’re not happy with that membership for whatever reason, maybe you’re not getting the results you want or they don’t treat you nicely or they don’t have free towel service or free coffee service or maybe it’s dirty, whatever it is. If you’re not happy with your health club membership, then bring it in to us. We will buy it from you. So you get a membership to our club and any time that you have left on that existing contract, we’ll buy from you and put it onto that contract with us.”

The second message that we put out there was, if you have ever been a member of a health club, yet you did not renew because you didn’t like the health club for whatever reason. Maybe they weren’t nice to you or you weren’t getting the results you wanted to get or they didn’t give you a free towel service or free coffee service or maybe they were dirty, whatever it was. We created this laundry list of great things that we gave to our members. Which I knew that most clubs didn’t give. And that’s what we put on there. We said, “If you were a member of a health club and you did not renew because of one of these reasons, then bring your old contract into us and we will give you 50% off of any membership that you buy from us.”

Who’s On Your List?

And what ended up happening was, within two years, three of those health clubs went out of business because we stopped focusing on just revenue and we focused on gaining market share. You need a list of your top 5 or 10 competitors. I don’t care what industry you’re in, I don’t care what you do for a living. You need a list of your top 5 to 10 competitors and you need to know how much of the market they each control and how they control it. Because when your team understands who’s on your list, then it’s a simple chess game. You need to decide who on that list you’re going to target, learn as much about them as possible, think outside the box, and get creative with new ways to market better and smarter than they do.

Now, everybody listenning to this has one thing in common. Either you’re an alpha entrepreneur or you want to be. The only difference between those who are and who aren’t is knowing the actions that create growth in business. But when you figure that out and you consistently take actions, you’ll make more money and more profit. You’ll reach more people than you ever thought possible. If you’re company is doing over a million dollars and you can handle additional growth, go over to our website. Apply to be in our next group of Club 28 clients. Because our clients’ average growth has been over 210% year over year, and you should be next.