Hey Accelerators! 🚀 In this episode of “Zero to a Hundred,” we’re joined by Jim Padilla, global impact strategist at Gain the Edge. Jim has helped businesses generate over $250 million in sales, and he’s here to share how you can build scalable, predictable revenue while creating a culture that drives long-term success.
🔹What’s on the Menu:
- How to build repeatable revenue systems that scale. 🏦
- Why client acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are crucial for growth. 🔄
- Proven strategies to shift from operator to visionary in your business. 📈
🔥 Why Tune In?
- Jim shares his 25+ years of experience in helping entrepreneurs create thriving, de-commoditized businesses that lead their markets. Whether you’re at the early stages or ready to scale, these actionable insights will help you take control of your business’s profitability.
💬 Gem from Jim: “Profitability isn’t something that happens to you—it’s something you create by design.”
📞 Get in Touch with Jim:
📧 Contact Jim directly at 916-587-1946 for a call audit or business consultation.
Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s accelerate your business from zero to a hundred! 💥
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Building A Scalable And Profitable Business With Jim Padilla!
I am very proud to introduce Jim Padilla, who is the Global Impact Strategist for Gain The Edge. They are a leading sales system that has created over a quarter of $1 billion in sales for the clients that they have worked with. We are going to cover some crucial topics that are going to help you grow your business. We are going to talk about everything from creating predictable scalable revenue to providing services to your customers beyond what your current offering is and most importantly, defining who your actual customer is so you marketing to the right target and you are growing your business exponentially. I am very excited to share the network I have built on my entrepreneurial journey to help you grow your business and become way more profitable. Let’s accelerate together.
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Jim Padilla, welcome to the show. It’s so good to have you.
I’m so glad to be here. I love the title.
What You Can Control
You are going to take our audience from 0 to 100 or maybe some of them are at 10 maybe some of them are at 60, but we are going to get them to 100 and we are going to talk about the things that you need to be doing within your business to accelerate revenue and create more profitability. There’s one question after the conversation we had. I want to start with the key things that we have complete control over in our business and that we can do to increase profitability.
There is a lot. The main thing is that you get to adjust the revenue. The actual thing to dive into before you even get into specifics is remembering that you do hold the control. You get to determine profitability. Profitability is not something that happens to you. It’s something that you create. It’s been crystal clear that revenue is not profit. It’s understanding that you have to make sure that you are delivering with profitability in mind.
This means that I have a client we were working with who was selling a $2,500 program. After we broke it down, it cost her $2,700 in change to fulfill. It doesn’t take much more than first-grade math to recognize that the more of them you sell, the less money you have, but she’s wicked smart. She’s a doctor and a PhD. She’s a brilliantly smart person.
We get caught up in pricing what we think the pricing is supposed to be instead of putting together the numbers that make sense to give you the opportunity to fulfill greatly at what you do and have money put aside to pay your taxes to invest in growth to invest in the development of this particular program and money set aside to continue to grow your business. A lot of times people say you want to be profitable down the road like you lose money on this one and make money on that one. You should be profitable at every step.
You said that you hold the control and let’s be frank. It seems like there are so many macroeconomic issues that we, as business owners, have zero control over. Can you give me some specifics? If somebody’s looking at the framework of their business, it’s going to be different for each business, but are there General things that we should be looking at that we can control or take back control of?
Pricing is one from. Expenses matter. You have to pay attention to them, but you can only control them to a degree. I would say if you are going to focus on what you are spending, then make sure that your team and even your clients are involved in that. If you can paint a vision of where we are going so that you might be worried about this particular season so that in this season, you are going to adjust prices up or down, which could affect, if you have prices, it can affect your customers. If salary, you’d be amazed if you go to your company and say, “Everybody, we were asking everybody to take a 10% shave so that I don’t have to fire one person,” and watch your team rally and close ranks. Everything’s doable. You have to have a clear message and clear positioning based on what it is that you are trying to sell.
Pricing
I think that’s incredibly creative and it creates that sense of community within your team and it’s important, especially when things or you have a business that might be struggling and you are trying to get to that next season, as you said, so that’s incredibly important. In terms of pricing. I will share a story that I have experienced with some of the merchants that we work with on the payment processing side.
They would say, “I have increased my prices in 5 or 7 years.” I say, “Have your costs gone up? Have your margins continued to shrink? There is a thing called inflation and if you are not looking to increase your pricing, 3% to 4% on an annual basis, you are not going to have a business in the next 3 to 5 years because there will be no profitability.”
It’s not increasing prices to increase prices. It’s increasing prices so you are able to continue to run your business and provide a high level of service and product to your customers. If you are looking at it from that framework, is there a structure that we should be considering as business owners when it comes to pricing our product or service?
The first piece is that you need to make sure that there’s enough to deliver upfront. There should be enough in this for you to test and tweak things as well because you are going to be growing your product and your service offerings for the clients that come in the door. The other part that you want to think about is having a lifetime journey already pre-planned so that you understand that whatever it costs you to get a client on the front end, the more of them you keep over time, the less that cost that hits you on the front.
Your client acquisition cost can go down over time if you are intentional about it, so you want to have that in place. Always know what the next problems that they are going to have as a result of you solving their problem or what other things they will need to be able to get a result faster or easier. Some people can take the core product and get the outcome. Other people will want assistance. They might want some hand-holding some guidance. Great. That doesn’t mean it should be free.
This is called business. There’s no guilt or shame. If you want to give it free, great. Make sure you are doing it profitably in other areas, but if somebody wants to go faster because they need accountability, you don’t give everybody accountability and eat it as a cost. You sell people the accountability who need it. You sell people speed and process if they need it.
CAC + CLV = Fuel
I love the idea of solving one problem at a time as a business owner for your customers. It also creates a journey that you go through with that particular customer. I have read a lot about this in what Dan Kennedy teaches and it’s the idea that we graduate from course to course and college or we go from 3rd grade to 12th grade in grade school and it’s always about that gradual appreciation, so you have a longer-term client. You talk about something great, which is your CAC plus your CLV equals fuel. Can you walk us through how that equation works in any business so we can have longer-term clients?
Your CAC, for those who are not aware, is Client Acquisition Cost. Everything costs you something. You might not be aware of it because you might not be paying attention to it. First thing, please make sure you know what that is, and here’s a hint if it’s about here or almost it’s not a number. It should be $27.35 or $1,000.16. There should be a number, and if it’s not, then you need to find it.
Everything costs something. You might not be aware because you are not paying attention to it. Share on XYou are forgiven. Put this one going forward. Know the CAC and then understand, once you’ve acquired that client, what is the value of that particular customer or client to your business over the lifetime of your business? It’s going to be somewhat of an approximation if you haven’t already done it. For some companies, it can be $800. If you are selling something high-end, it could be tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The number is the number. The only play is important is that you know what your number is. Here’s how you start determining that. What are all of the problems that you can solve along the way? Are these problems that you have a solution for? Do you want to sell them? Just because you can solve it doesn’t mean you want to solve it. The key is that you get it solved and I have plenty of partners who come in to smooth out operational processes.
We know how to do it. We can do it. I don’t want to do it. We bring in partners who do that and they are already built into the journey of our lifetime client. They are typically not going to see them on day one. They are going to see them 6 or 12 months down the road, depending on where they are in the journey. That’s the whole key. If you are the expert on the problem, that means you should know everything about the avatar, everything about the problem, and everything about the solution or you are not the expert on it.
I hear a lot about CAC and the customer’s lifetime value. What do you do if your business or product indicates a short lifetime value of the customer to continue to gain new customers every season, year, or few years?
The reality is there’s no such thing as a problem that does not come with an adherent. Once you solve it, it does not come with any new problems at a higher level. Every single problem opens the door to a new problem at a higher level. The choice you have to make is whether you want to solve it. If not you, then somebody else is going to be solving it for them and I would prefer that you hand them off to that person or solve it yourself because there’s a good chance you already know how.
When I was in mortgage up until 2008, when I took a bath, I was bringing people. We brought a lot of people to the Sacramento Area from the Bay Area. What I did was I had an entire network of businesses and solutions for any new family. I say, “You only need to know one cell phone number and that’s mine. You dial 916-806-9118 and I will point you to the best transmission shop, the best daycare, the best Little League, the best barbecue places, the best haircut, or anything you need. I’m the only person you ever need to call.”
Was that more work on my part? Of course, it was, but do you know who people call when they need something? They call me because I put it in front of them. That should be every business owner’s goal. Have them call you and then you could be the switchboard if you want to connect them to all kinds of people, but if you are not a valued asset that is irreplaceable, then you are a commodity, and you have to make a choice in this business or in the economy that we live in.
That’s quite interesting, creating the extensions in your business. You had stated that as business owners, we solve one problem or 2, 3, or 5 problems or we solve 1 or 2 problems, and then the next problems that come up, we might not necessarily have the capability or the desire to solve them, but we have people within our network that we can pass them through. That’s how you gain credibility and stay relevant in that customer’s life over the long-term and it’s also how you get referrals. In essence, you are never leaving your customers alone, you are alone with them throughout the journey and that to me is brilliance.
That’s at any level of any business and I can already hear because I talk to people about this all the time. You have a gym. I don’t want to do any of that stuff. I want to do my one thing. That’s great, but I promise you that if you give five minutes of thought to anything that they have to experience later, you want to be the person they can come back to get some reaffirmation and guidance. If you are only going to do one thing, then 100% of your job will change from the solution provider to a massive generator, and that will mean that you will spend your entire career trying to find elites.
Business Ecosystem
Your ecosystem as a business owner, can I throw out an example? What if you are a restaurant and you are the top Italian restaurant in your neighborhood? Are you only solving one problem in terms of providing food for a hungry patron or is there a way to create an ecosystem outside of that?
Everything is limited to your creativity. If I were consulting an Italian restaurant here in the Sacramento Area, I would say, “Do you want to serve Italian food or do you want to create an exciting environment and atmosphere that people can be transported to Italy when they are in your world? One of the ways you do that is by having them come to your restaurant. Another way you do that is by having great affiliate relationships with catering halls.
Another way that you can do that is by partnering with the local community. Whether they are going to do an event where there is going to be a taste of the town and they want to give a flavor of Italy.” You should be the first person or the only person on the list that they would call because you create the taste of Italy versus you wanting to provide Italian food.
It’s all about how you position it and how you message it. It was going to determine everything. I would want you to be the Italian ambassador to the city and you put out marketing, content, and media that talk about the taste of Italy no matter where you are in the world or what it would be like. Nobody makes it like Mama used to make it. Let everybody know what it is like to live in Italian flavor in whatever city they are in or particularly in your city. The whole choice is yours or you could say, “We sell the best spaghetti.”
I thought I was going to have you in the restaurants, but you slam dunk that and I will tell you why because you got my creative brain going. Aside from catering the events, I was the ambassador to Italy for that particular city. You mentioned working with community events. You can do things like raffles, and once a month, a business wins a catered lunch from your restaurant.
You can do one single annual family trip to Italy that is paid for by one of your patrons who does a raffle on an annual basis and you do an event every single year that is based around Italy and somebody wins that free trip to Italy and you get pictures from it. You can market and advertise it. That is going to set you apart from everybody else in the marketplace. I thought I had you in restaurants, but that was a great response. Now I see why you are on the edge, my friend. You know what you are doing.
To add a little one plus to what you had. You can take a giveaway trip to Italy, and that would be amazing. What else would be amazing is to have your preferred patrons pay for an exclusive wine-tasting event in South Italy. I’m making this up because I have never been to Italy. They could pay for it. They could pay for a five-star exclusive resort that includes anything from wine tasting to mountain climbing and whatever it is that you want to do with your patreons. You live a dream life and your patrons get to pay for it.
That’s what’s so cool about that with branding, and then as the business owner, you are getting your vacation in there, but you also take a camera crew with you or at least somebody with a camera who can document it with the film and some video, and then you’ve got marketing content around that and it’s so unique. You create much deeper relationships with your customers and then they truly are along on the journey with you over a much more extended period and you would if you were going to a restaurant to have Italian food.
It’s opened my mind up because even in my business one of the things that I have realized and it’s one of the reasons why the show came about, is a lot of the merchants that we work with build great relationships with us. They will ask us for advice on somebody to help them with business development, somebody who is a tax expert who can help them, or an accountant somebody who can help them set up a new LLC. A real estate advisor. All these different services were asked for and they do call us and we want to help them and that’s why we are getting the message out to a lot of the groups and people that we already have relationships and work with.
Unique Selling Mechanism
That’s been one of the biggest value adds and business builders for me because the referrals that come out of it have been massive and then people look at you, especially when you are continually putting out content as the expert in business finance real estate, whatever it may be. Those are key things to set yourself apart. Let’s say you are a business and you want to create that unique selling mechanism for your services or what you do. How do you define your core values around that so that you are consistent and replicable?
We very much focus on core values as a set. We like to attract our clients’ customer base with people who believe in what we believe in, and that is why we start creating tribes. You start creating a movement, and then the more that you can create, the less of a commodity you are, and then you are not comparable apples to apples to other people.
When you start attracting people who believe in the same core values you do, you can start creating your own tribe and movement. Share on XThe other thing to be mindful of is that you are creating culture. Culture will always overrule even the systems. Culture is everything. When your culture can be, we do the best for our people at all times. Your culture can be that we go the extra mile. We will drive it to your house if you need it. Your culture is set and that’s what people want more than anything. If somebody wants a transaction, they are typically going to go either for the cheapest or for the most expensive, depending on their desires.
Other than that, they buy from people that they align with. They buy from brands that make them feel good. Your job is to consistently message what you stand for and what you believe in and share your core values so the people understand it. In our world, ownership results in partnership. Simplicity is our core value because it’s vital to us. We let everybody know that when they come in, they understand that we take ownership of everything we do, but we also expect you to 100% own everything you do and say so we have clear commitment and communication.
If you can’t do that, and you want us to do everything for you, then great. We are probably not going to be able to work together because I can’t work with somebody who won’t take ownership of their part of the relationship. I don’t judge it. It doesn’t fit for us. The other part is making sure that you are always selling the experience and selling the outcome. Don’t sell your product. Your product doesn’t matter, and it can change.
If you say my merchant service provider, my machine, or my bank is the best. That’s wonderful, but what happens if you find a better one you want to switch it? Now you have to convince people why you left the best to go to this other thing. First is coming and saying, “When you work with Jarrod, your financial needs are taken care of and now your bank is an extension of you instead of you being an extension of the bank.
You said something important and I want to touch on this and I want to make sure that the audience learns that your product doesn’t matter. Please elaborate on that.
It’s as simple as I can. Your product doesn’t matter. The only person the product matters to the most is the person who created it. We all tend to get very emotionally connected and romantically involved with our product because it’s our baby. We spent hours, days, and years in the basement cultivating this thing. We think it’s amazing and it is only because of the solution it provides or the experience that delivers. That’s the only thing your customer cares about. They do not care about how much horsepower is in a drill big of a hole. They want to know what they can do with the hole when they have it.
They go to the Home Depot to buy a drill. I don’t care about the name brand. They might be married to it, but that’s because the brand did its job. When you come in you don’t say, “What drill do you want?” You say, “Why do you want a hole? Is this one hole or are you going to hold the one hole forever or are you going to have something you are going to have many holes? Does this hole need to hold something? Does this hole need to provide something?” You need to be able to see through it. Do you need to be able to hang something on it, or are you going to cover it up when it’s done? You need to know why they want the hole, not what they want with the drill.
When you know what they want with the whole, you know how to provide the service or product that’s going to be right for them. You are solving the real problem.
You are delivering the outcome or the experience.
Best In Class Vs. Class Of One
While we are on outcome and experience, there’s something that I want to touch on because you used apples-to-apples in terms of comparison, and I want to touch on apples-to-apples versus apples-to-orange marketing. Before we go into that, talk to me about the difference between best in class and class of one.
We tend our model as we work with world-class businesses or those who want to be. Our mission is to move them to best in class. The ultimate mountaintop experience in our world is to get you to be a class of one. When you are world-class, that means you are doing things at a great level. That already separates you, but there are still a lot of people who are doing that. To become the best in class is good, but it still says, “You are better than the people who are like you.”
When you are a class of one, the biggest advantage is that you are not comparable to somebody else because as a class of one, like us, we are a sales consultancy. We are delivering and growing saleable businesses that are decommodetize class of one. Therefore, the way we position it, how we design it, and what we do are not comparable apples to apples because nobody is going to put a similar bid on the table compared to what we do.
They are going to be so different that you can’t compare them. You are going to have to decide. Is this the experience you want? Is that the outcome you desire? Do you believe we can get it to you? You are not going to be able to stack it up against somebody else’s chart and go, “Price. This guy is cheaper.” That ain’t going to work.
I have started to make shifts in our business and our marketing. I use these real-time examples because, first of all, I learned so much, so this is awesome. This is an education for me by doing the show alone, but I have shifted because of the comparison aspect. It’s how your payment processing business compares to others, and I don’t even focus on that anymore. I won’t go into it because it’s not a sales pitch.
I’m providing a solution and value and if you see that solution and that value works for you and you like who we are you are going to work with us. In terms of comparison, I have gotten away from BoxFi compared to Stripe, Square, or Helcim. I have now gotten into what our products and services do to save you money, and if I can increase your profits by 15% overnight, would you like to learn more about what we do? Then you say yes. I compare that 15% not to what other service providers are doing, but I compare it to what you would have to do in your business to increase your profitability that much.
How much time is it going to take? How much money is it going to take? How long is it going to take for that profit to increase? We have programs that can do it overnight. If you invest in marketing and advertising, it could take six months. It’s all an investment of time and a considerable amount of money in hopes that your margins start to shrink as your revenue grows and those new customers come in. What changes the conversation and to your point, it helps decommodify me within the industry when I’m giving them real-time comparisons and they start looking at a very different way in a different package from others in the marketplace.
It’s funny because sometimes it’s as simple as stating the obvious that most people don’t state. We customize our recruiting process for every salesperson that we recruit for you, and so does everybody else, but they don’t say it. You claim it and you own it. It’s overstating the obvious and it’s simple. It’s also stating the things that nobody else does but you.
I grew up in an abusive environment and spent time in foster care on the streets and gangs in jail by nineteen. The first 25 years of my life were a violent, frenzy, and crazy whirlwind, but I learned everything. I knew almost everything I needed to know about entrepreneurship and sales for the first 25 years. I learned how to read the room because I had to go into every room I was in to figure out who’s friend, who’s foe. Who’s an ally and who’s an adversary? How do I bend their will in my direction so that you find me useful as an asset and that way I can stay safe?
I didn’t know that 25 years later, I made millions of dollars teaching other people how to do the same. Read the room. Bend people’s influence in your direction, and then set up a structure and a strategy to make that happen. That’s part of the uniqueness built into all of our sales processes, which makes us uniquely qualified people to say, “What’s your niche?” I don’t have one. It’s like I step into anybody’s niche and anybody’s business.
Once your core story, we can unpack all of our systems and strategies to customize the growth and insights you can put in place to serve your clients uniquely. We have decoded it and systematized it to make it unique. Is it something that other people do? Sure, but nobody talks about it that way. You have to be able to use your insights and your personal history. The things you know and the things you do that also accentuate your brand.
Human Experience
Thank you for sharing that story because it’s an intimate personal story, and not everyone’s willing to do it. I thank you for that because it gives the audience insight. If we step back, we have questions. We are having a conversation and taking it to a different realm for a second, and it’s understanding people.
What you said by sharing that story is that you have an intimate understanding of humans and psychology. How do you take that and equate that into your business to make sure that you are focused on what your customers need because it’s not about you? It’s not starting like, “This is the history of our business and we have been in business for 50 years. We have done this and this.” At the end of the day, your customers want to know that you are going to be able to solve their problem. How do you take that human experience because we have it with our family and friends? A lot of people approach it and think it’s so separate. How do you combine the two and build a better and more profitable business?
You have to understand all of these gifts that you’ve had in your life. It’s like the rough childhood that I had. It was God setting me up for an amazing future. They are learning experiences of things that I never would have gotten had I taken a different path. Your job is to figure out what those gifts are, everything you’ve ever encountered, or everything you’ve been challenged with or blessed with, and how you would turn those into a win.
Your wounds become your wisdom. Your mess becomes your message. All of that. It is your job to take it and then insert that into the process that says, “I’m unique because our brand was built on the fact that I had eighteen kids fighting for dinner scraps.” I know how to get to the core of what matters, if that was your story or somebody who worked on the sunup to sundown.
They still had to go to school, get an education, and take care of their sick mother so I can say you will understand the art of multi-tasking and setting priorities and ways that nobody else had to because your life and death depended on it. You can tell your own story inside the business not to make it about you, because we are trying to make saleable companies. If it’s about you, that company is not saleable, but it has to be how the brand started and built upon it.
Tell your personal story inside your business not to make it about you but to show how the brand started in it. Share on XLet’s dive into that because there are two schools of thought. If I backtrack, I made a statement that it’s not about you. It’s about the customer, but then you also want to build rapport with the customer throughout the journey so they understand your story and relate to you because it’s one of the best ways to sell in business.
How do you balance the two again? I don’t completely get rid of my story. I’m in payment processing because I had a business fail miserably. I lost seven figures and I had to fire a lot of people and it freaking sucked. Through that, I realized my lack of resources at the time, or maybe resourcefulness at the time around the finances of running a small business, is what crushed the business.
I like being solution-oriented. We provide payment processing services but to your point, people call me for so many other things that add value to their business because they know my story and they know that I have a lot of resources. When do you introduce that story to your customer in the messaging? It is about them, but then they understand who you are.
I believe that you inserted it from the beginning. Ninety of the companies who come to us are not going to exit, but everybody we work with understands. That’s the journey we are on. We are here to get you self-sufficient. It’s not about exiting companies because, at the end of the day, I will be honest, I don’t lose sleep every night wondering if you are making sales. I do lose sleep every night wondering if you are handcuffed to your business, if you don’t have freedom, if you are able to get to your kid’s soccer games in a year, if you are fighting like hell you are growing your business, but all is doing is minimizing your bandwidth in ruining your joy. Those are the things that matter to me because you are never going to beat the greatest problem solver, leader, or innovator, and you will changer that you can be until you are standing at freedom.
Freedom is when you have a business that’s saleable because it’s most profitable, pleasurable, and simple to run. That’s when I know you are doing this. You love it because you now have a choice to leave it and that’s how this world gets better. I have five grandkids and the sixth one is on the way. I used to be interested in you having a wildly successful business and changing the world. Now, we are committed to it, not just interested, because we need to leave a legacy for my grandkids and their grandkids. That’s what this is about for me. If you want to make a lot of money, let’s take a ride, but if you are free, I’m your guy.
Asking For Support
Talk me through one of the most challenging situations you’ve dealt with for a client that has come to you who was not at that point where they had freedom in their business and what you did to turn around their business so they realize the desire and the freedom that they wanted.
There are so many that are similar. We have somebody who came to us whose $5 million company is trying to get to $15 and wildly intelligent and working a butt off, but all the plates were spinning and everything was full. There was no room on the plate for anything else. We had to take all of the energy that she was putting into this business and channel her into being the visionary and expert in applying her wisdom while we were building systems, strategy, structure, and process underneath her without trying to slow her down. You can’t park them. They are climbing a mountain.
Being able to help them understand that they can let go and that they can trust. It’s not something you can do. Something they must do in order for them to get to that mountaintop. They are going to have to trust that somebody else can think as fast as they can, that can move as fast as they can, and that can fill in all the gaps because sometimes it’s even about why we know more than them is that we can put all the focus on the things they don’t have time to focus on.
Show them that you know where they are going because you’ve helped others get there before and you know what pitfalls and the potholes in the roads and you’ve already got solutions for them for partners who do so that the next month is going to be a plan to journey, and we already know what’s going to happen and you are going to win.
Repeatable And Scalable System
Let’s say we have a business owner who is constantly working in the business on a daily basis. They are successful in terms of their revenue. They are doing $5 million to $10 million a year. What are some of the key systems they need to put into place to move from being the operator of the business? To the visionary of the business. Beyond the systems, what should their mindset be?
They need to have clear, repeatable and predictable revenue generation systems. There needs to be something that somebody else could step into and operate besides you because the business is running on founder magic and is in trouble. That means directly tied to you. You need to have back-end systems that will continue to guide people and sell people into other solutions that will make their journey easier, faster, more enjoyable, and, ultimately, more profitable.
A business running on founder magic is in trouble. Share on XWhatever that means. If you are in the health space, give them the health and the freedom and the things that they need, but you need to make sure that there are things in place that are going to help people replicate you. If you haven’t figured out what you do that is replicable then that needs to be addressed right away because we are all replicable if given the right system, right structure, and enough time. You have to find those pieces and if there’s one, once we do, you find a little piece of you that’s the most magic and that’s the part that can’t be replicated. That should be ultimately the only thing you are doing.
Give me an example of a business you’ve worked with and whether it’s a product or service business, how you helped them design a repeatable, scalable, and profitable system.
We work with a lot of service-based companies, so people who are selling a future are more intangible. Usually, it comes in the form of consulting, coaching, client calls, meetings, and your brain power. Taking expert businesses that come in and decoding all of the things that they do repeatedly and being able to put them into systems. We call it Doctor Ozzy because Dr. Oz for those who don’t know, was a world-class cardiovascular surgeon, that only 200 people in the world did what he did.
A sixteen-hour procedure where he would fly in on a helicopter for twenty minutes in the middle of this sixteen hours do the magic piece that only he could do and then he flew out and then his team had to open him up and put him back together, and he made more money than everybody in the whole place because he was a rare commodity. In your business and you as a business owner, you have that as well.
If you are touching too many things it’s because you haven’t figured out the things that you shouldn’t be touching so that you can lean on the things that you should only be touching and then deliver SOPs, rules, processes, and procedures so that makes it easy for other people to be able to execute on all of those things. Whether it’s operationally, financially, sales, team development, or whatever it is. That’s all duplicatable. We have to be able to pull you apart from it and get you to the place where you can believe that other people can do what you can do and probably better. Even if they can’t usually do 80% if somebody could do 80% of you consistently every day all the time, is that going to be better than what you are doing now because you haven’t even had the time to do it?
If you want to build a profitable business, you have to dissect what you do as the operator and create a system around which someone else can replace you. There might be 1, 2, or 3 things that are unique to you and your ability, but for the rest of what is happening in your business on a daily basis, you have to create a system, write it down, map it out, and work with your team to figure out who can take on those tasks so you, as the business owner, can start to become the visionary.
Two Business Extremes
Work on building the business, and do not get stuck in operational lag on a daily basis that draws you down and takes you away from growing an extremely profitable and successful business. Let’s talk about the commonality you see in business owners coming to you. What is the biggest common trait or issue that is challenging their growth that’s in the way of them being the best that they can be?
The top two. They all fall into these two umbrellas. Either a new level or a new devil is a real thing. Every time you get to a new level, you have never been there before. Therefore, you don’t know what to expect. The better you can be at making quality educated guesses is going to help. Most people assume they already know and they run into problems. The other end of the spectrum is people who let their history determine their future.
Here’s how I have done it in the past. The problem is in the past, you weren’t at the level you are at now, so how you did it didn’t matter. It only matters that you did it because you have the confidence of knowing that your process, your ability to move forward and trust the decisions can produce for you, but you cannot look back and say, “This was the limit of what I created the last time I did this. I can’t expand beyond that.” That’s simply not true.
Times have changed. Technologies changed. The world before COVID almost has nothing to do with the world. After COVID, there are so many variables at your fingertips. There’s also a lot of distractions. That’s why it’s vital and clear to know where you are going. What are the gaps in your getting there? What are the problems you are going to have to overcome to make it happen? Only then are you looking for solutions. Wake up in the morning and go, “What can I do with AI?” That will get you into a rabbit hole that you may not ever get out of.
I listened to a YouTube short of a young gentleman who I respect and he’s very good and what he does but he talked about how he doesn’t believe in impostor syndrome. You have to go out there and do it and then you don’t suffer from impostor syndrome. The reality is if you haven’t done it and don’t know how to, some people do have a challenge getting over that hurdle and getting to that next level, and that’s okay. You do have to take a shot, try it, and learn from the process.
Don’t be afraid of your point, “I have done it this way for the last decade and it’s worked.” If you are at a new place in your business and you have to explore new things, embrace it and be okay with being uncomfortable because it’s the only way in which you can grow. If you are someone who prides yourself on being successful and hardworking, you might suffer from a little bit of imposter syndrome, but that is temporary. It’s something you get past once you learn that skill set. To your point, it’s brilliant. You have to push through, but you also have people around you like you who can help you grow and get past that next level.
Also, understand that the quality of your feet back is directly related to the speed of your feedback. As an example, if you are going to test something. You can test something by throwing $5 a day at an ad and see what happens or you can $500 or $5,000 a day and get Amazing amounts of feedback right away, or you can take $5 a day over the course of a month or two and slowly build up feedback.
You can take a chance on something again. Be smart. It will take silly, stupid risks but educated, calculated risks. I’m assuming everybody reading this is on that train, but you want to make sure that you get as much feedback as fast as you can because I will say that my wife and I have the biggest reason for our success aside from our ability to attract amazing humans into our world team clients alike.
We have a massive bias towards action. When we see something we run and then the moment it breaks we have feedback, and then we take the wisdom gained from that feedback and apply it immediately and then do it again. We have failed at more things in a year than most people will ever even attempt. That’s probably our biggest secret to success.
Domino Effect
I could not agree more. Fail quickly. Learn the lesson quickly. Don’t repeat the same lesson, and that’s how you learn and grow your business. Before we get to the rapid-fire section, I want you to talk to us about the domino effect.
There’s a professor. He’s a goofy little guy. I corresponded with him a little bit, but he does this exercise, which takes a 5-millimeter 1-ounce domino. He can only stand up with tweezers because it’s so small and then there are thirteen dominoes in succession. The 13th element is 100 pounds and 4 feet tall. As it went further, five more would have been the size of the Empire State Building in weight and thousands of pounds. No matter what, the only effort required to knock over the 100 pounds 4-foot domino was whatever it takes to knock over the lead domino because if you would do this effectively, you find out what outcome you need, and then you need to know, “What do I need to solve before that?” You line them up so that in succession, your effort is in a well-placed and well-pushed domino and it does the rest.
In that example from the 1 domino to the 13th domino would have been 2 billion times amplified. Two billion times output for one unit of input. I can’t promise you that, but what I can promise you is this is going to be a heck of a lot easier for you to get at least one unit out. For every one you get in, which is most people’s immediate goal, you should be looking for how I put it in 1 unit and get out 10, 20, 100, or 1,000. That takes simplified thought, not crazy strategies. Most of you are doing this instead of lining up the right dominoes because it’s too much work. You are running to that end of a domino and putting all of your effort into knocking over a 100-pound domino, which is going to be a lot harder than knocking this one over. That’s the concept.
Thank you for explaining that. That’s a great example. Getting to that first domino is key; for some business owners, it might define who your client is. I will caution business owners. A lot of people are targeting the right client. You might think after 5, 7, to 10 years you’ve got the right avatar, but it could be completely wrong. You need to sit down and look at who you are servicing and then once you know exactly who you are servicing, that’s how you start to see your business multiply.
For me, the majority of my business comes from referrals and good referral sources. Once we have that referral source, we have warm and hot leads, and then from there, we keep getting referral after referral and the business is growing and growing. I pivoted from going directly to the customer to going into that B2B referral source. It’s unprecedented the growth that I’m seeing and it wasn’t instinctual for me. I realized that my client was a middleman. My client wasn’t the end user.
That is 100% my Philosophy. If you look at my calendar, there is zero outreach prospecting time for customers. I spent all of my time prospecting for partners. If you knock on ten doors, you might get a client, and they might be a great client. If you have to go knock on the next ten doors to hope to find another client. I knock on the same ten doors, and I’m looking for a partner.
When I find a partner, it opens up the door to hundreds or thousands of clients, and then I go find another partner who also up the doors with hundreds or thousands of clients. I’m continuing to compound my prospecting in ways that most people are never going to do, and it changes the game for everything. Everybody I meet, like, “How can I make you a hero to your audience? How can I help you serve your people?”
Rapid-Fire Questions
You are amazing. You gave so much information. We are going to do our fun little rapid-fire question. You are going to give me quick answers. I know you don’t know these questions. Let’s dive in. Rabbit or turtle?
Rabbit.
If there is a zombie apocalypse and you have to leave your home and protect your family, what is the one weapon that you are going to take with you?
My 9 millimeter.
What is your favorite business phrase or quote?
It’s not what you are saying. It’s who you are being while you are saying it.
How are you implementing AI into your business?
Two awesome things. We have a voice automated assistant that is setting appointments to qualifying calls for us which you are super pumped about. Massive leverage and opportunity and quality touch. I will leave the number for you. Please call and see how it works for you and get on my calendar. Also, what we have launched is our edge sales call audit process. It’s taking our hundreds of thousands of sales conversations. $500 million worth of sales made at our thousands of sales call audits take all over frameworks that we have used for that put it into the knowledge base inside of AI.
Now, AI is doing our call audits so we can do them at scale at volume with quality and then deliver to you a training plan any sales process. That’s the lead domino. If you want to know what’s going on in your sales process, lead domino gets a call audit. From there, we can diagnose everything that’s going on, map out, and clear a plan for your success.
What is one of your top business books that entrepreneurs must read?
I read a book a week. 10x Is Easier Than 2x is one that we are studying with all of our clients. That’s a big one because it is a true statement. Most people we meet who have generated $10 million. The only reason they didn’t generate $50 million is because they didn’t plan for it. That’s a tough thing to live with when you get there.
If you are a small business owner and you are doing $10 million in annual revenue, and I walk through your front door, and I hand you a $300,000 check. What are you going to advise that business owner to do with that $300,000 to double their profits in the next year?
I would go all in on optimizing your partner network. Turn that into resources, strategy, and systems that lead all the ideal partners to bring their people to you, like the Pied Piper.
What is the one thing that you had to overcome in your business to turn it into the success that it is now?
Two things I will put around equal status. One, I had to recognize that the more I know, the less I know, and the power of prayer. You got to bring God into your business. You are working twice as hard or ten times harder than you ever have to without God in your business.
You have to work twice as hard than you ever have to without God in your business. Share on XEpisode Wrap-up
That was incredible. There are so many good takeaways and many excellent shorts we are going to have for social media with these little tidbits of advice. Tell the audience how and where they can connect with you.
I’m going to give you my cell phone number. Shoot me a text. Ask me about Jenny, who’s our automated assistant. If you are interested, I will shoot you her number if you want to find out about a call on it or put my brain on your business. I love to know what everybody is doing so I can be in the know on the new strategies that are going on, so 916-587-1946. That is my cell phone number. My team doesn’t answer that. I do. I’d love to hear from you.
Readers, you learned it here from Jim Padilla. Thank you so much for joining us on the show.
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About Jim Padilla
Meet Jim Padilla, the Global Impact Strategist behind Gain The Edge, where cutting-edge sales systems meet visionary leadership.
With over six decades of sales expertise, Jim and his wife Cyndi Padilla, have made a multitude of businesses soar to new heights, generating a quarter of a billion dollars in sales.
Their secret? A blend of precision sales strategies and inspirational team-building, making them top leaders in the industry.
Jim’s mission? To free entrepreneurs from the grind, unlocking their potential for impact and success.
When not crafting business breakthroughs, Jim is usually at the driving range, where every swing inspires an idea better than the previous one. But his greatest joy? Spending time with his wife, daughters and his five beloved grandchildren, the heart of his inspiration.