Back in 2003, I was flying high with my own small business, called Image Cake.
We were the first ever online bakery sending custom cakes throughout the country.
I had even developed some of the first technology to put a photo on top of your cake and people were wild about it. I won the Crystal Apple Award for that. I even beat out tech giants like Samsung and Sony.
Business was great that year.
We had some of the world’s top companies as clients: IBM, Sony, Microsoft. And we had major celebrities ordering our cakes, like Jennifer Lopez and Jay Z. Imagine making J-Lo’s birthday cake…
I thought, “This is it. I made it!”
But the truth is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know when it came to growing a successful business.
I assumed that what got me to that point would just get me to the next level.
But I was wrong.
None of my growth was predictable and I couldn’t sustain it.
Plus, I was over-worked, over-stressed, and I felt like I was losing control of my life.
You probably know what that’s like, right? You’ve had some really great quarters or maybe a great year or two.
But then you don’t.
And that’s when good businesses fail. We see it all the time. And if they don’t fail, then they continue to eke out a living, never reaching the level you dreamed of.
That’s what happened to me. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And the result of not knowing was really bad.
Like, living in my sister’s basement bad.
$35,000 in debt bad.
And newly married, expecting my first child, without a paycheck bad.
I was utterly depressed. I sold my old Star Wars toys on eBay to get by.
But after that failure, I was determined to learn what I didn’t know.
But who could I learn from?
Who knew how to grow a company year after year?
The best companies in the world knew.
So I decided to work with them.
I started in my own backyard with Mohegan Sun, the largest and most successful casino in the country.
Fast forward to 2009 and I’m working with some of the biggest companies in the country – Google, ADP, Ford to name a few. I was managing over $400 million dollars in marketing. That was the year I won Google’s Agency of the Year Award.
And over the past 20 years, I’ve worked with over 10,000 small businesses across dozens of industries. And I’ve worked with over a dozen Fortune 500 companies.
More often than not, none of them had the best product or service in the market. That’s not what made them successful.
What made them successful was Growth Compounding.
As Carol Roth said, “Many businesses fail because the owner wasn’t willing to invest and wasn’t educated on the difference between spending money frivolously and investing money into the business for growth…”
We spend money frivolously on advertising because it’s the only way we know to grow.
And despite being continually disappointed by the results, we keep doing it.
But when you make the decision to start Growth Compounding, you are deciding to quit doing what wasn’t working and to start doing what is proven to work.
- Growth Compounding brought in $317b a day for Ford
- Growth Compounding brought in $24m a day for ADP
- Growth Compounding brought in $3.5m a day for Mohegan Sun
It doesn’t matter what your revenue goal is. But if you want to achieve it, you need to start Growth Compounding now.
Otherwise your growth is just a hope.