no. 152 on the Inc. 5000, lessons learned

Summary

we made the Inc. 5000 list a second time, number 152 this year, up from 447 last year. nobody asked, but I’ll tell you what I actually learned, because the award itself is largely irrelevant.

1. customers don’t care. nobody hires you because you got an award. but the team cares. families care. it’s a great internal moment, a signal to the people who built it that they’re part of something serious. that’s why we still apply.

2. fast-growing companies still have problems. don’t read about the Inc. 500 ranking and think we have it figured out. we have plenty of broken things, stressful mornings, hard conversations. it’s the work, and the work doesn’t get easier as you grow, just different.

3. leverage is the real skill I’m starting to understand. leverage of time, of money, of audience, of partnerships, of talent. every problem can be solved with time or money. once you internalize that, you stop pounding the pavement on things you should be paying to collapse.

4. product is everything. at PT Biz, 100% of mastermind members at minimum recoup the cost of the program. the average member is making over $5,000 more per month within three months, and over $8,000 more by the end of year one. expectation is a 350% ROI. that’s the bar.

5. track every customer outcome. don’t say you have a great product, prove it. pull the numbers. show the spread. if the numbers are bad, fix the product. if you’re not willing to track them at all, you don’t have a real business yet. try harder.

Transcript

the award is for the team, not the marketing

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Welcome to the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And today I’m going over my top three lessons and making the Inc 500 for a second time. So we did make it in 2022. We were number 447. We made it again this year.

We are number 152. So I’m going to go over my lessons learned, but I also going to talk about the, the award a little bit because these awards don’t actually matter that much to me. And to be honest, they don’t matter that much to the business partners. I have two other business partners at PT biz.

It doesn’t matter that much to us overall. So why even apply for stuff like this? Because at the end of the day, it’s all the same. Like the business is the business. We help who we help. We make what we make. Why does it matter if we have an award or don’t have an award? Because really an award like this, it’s 100% internal.

Like our customers don’t care that we have been nominated or awarded being one of the fastest growing companies in America. They don’t care. A customer only cares about, Hey, I have a problem. Can you help me with my problem? I don’t care how fast your company is growing. So it doesn’t really help from a marketing perspective, but the main reason we apply for these awards and are interested in them is because it’s part of the journey.

I think it helps our team realize what they’re doing and the impact they’re making. The work that are putting in is bigger than what most companies are doing. And they’re a part of that. I think it’s great for our employees to know that and to know that they’re part of a bigger mission and they’re part of a serious company.

I think those things are important. I think it’s important for family, like family members who really don’t even know what the hell I do or how I do it. They get to see some recognition, share that with their friends. For my kids, they get to see me get an award, things like that. So it’s more about everyone else on an internal basis, but not an outward marketing basis.

fast-growing companies still have problems

Really it doesn’t help get more customers at all, but I do think it helps as a retention tool if you’re looking to hire talent and also keeping employees around. They realize they’re part of a serious company, a fast-growing company, those kind of things. So those are the only real reasons we apply for these.

Now if you’re wondering how they calculate it, I can read their little blurb here. So it says companies on the 2023 Inc. 5000 are ranked according to percentage revenue growth from 2019 to 2022. So it’s always like this shifting multi-year gap. It says to qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31st of 2019.

They must be U.S. based, privately held, for profit, and independent, not subsidiaries or divisions of another company as of December 31st, 2022. So the minimum revenue required for 2019, so if you were to have started in 2019, you would have had to have made $100,000 at a minimum. By the way, these percentage growth increases can be ridiculous saying, oh I only made $1 my first year.

So you have to have made a minimum $100,000 in 2019. And then the minimum for 2022 is $2 million. So you had to have made that spread. You had to have gone from a minimum of $100,000 to over $2 million in gross revenue. And that’s just to make the 5000 list. So 1 through 5000, they list companies, we’re number 152.

So that’s how they calculate it. So you’re aware of what it is and how it works. Now I want to go over just my lessons learned and having achieved this for two years in a row. One might be a surprise to some people, and so again, we’ve done this our second time. If you want to hear my top three lessons from my first time we did it, go to episode 23.

These are going to be different lessons. But the first lesson I learned or wrote down for this time was, you can have one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. and still have problems. And that I cannot overstate, and I want to make sure everyone is aware of that. Like just because we got an award or we’re a fast-growing company, it doesn’t mean that everything is just happy-go-lucky, easy, smooth sailing.

It’s none of that. I think it’s very challenging whether you’re starting as an entrepreneur or you’ve been around for a long time. There’s always problems. There’s always something to figure out. There’s always a hurdle to get over. It’s just getting up and getting over and reacting quickly to those things.

understanding leverage

There’s always going to be a problem. I don’t want you to assume that I don’t have problems in my business. We have a lot of issues, things that need to be worked out, stressful nights and mornings and days. All that crap is stuffed in here. Don’t think that there’s any kind of fantasy world where you’re running a business where that crap’s not going to happen.

It absolutely is going to happen. It’s going to happen even at a larger scale, the bigger your company gets. That’s the first lesson. You will have problems. You will always have problems. It doesn’t matter where you get. The second thing I wrote down is I think that I’m truly starting to understand leverage a little bit more.

You can leverage multiple different things. You can leverage your time. You can hire an employee to do tasks for you. That’s a form of leverage. You’re using your money to hire an employee to free up time so you can leverage yourself into doing other bigger tasks. I’m learning how to do that better with a team.

I’m not just talking about delegation. I’m talking about strategic partnerships even between other companies, being able to leverage a position you’re in, to form new businesses, make new deals, grow at a faster rate. I’m learning a lot about leverage and also leverage of talent, which is more hiring people.

Leveraging of money. I always say you’re either going to pay with your time or money. I’ve always said that and it’s so true. Anytime something comes up, if you have to solve a problem or you want more customers or whatever, if you want it to happen at a faster rate, you can pay with your time. You can pound the pavement, put in more work, put in more hours, or you can pay with your money to collapse that time.

That’s about as detailed as I can honestly get, but I just think if you understand leverage as a concept of how you can leverage your time or your money to get more time or to leverage the size of your audience to help other people or start other business opportunities, start to look at your business that way.

How can you leverage what you have to catapult you into new realms, new opportunities, those kind of things. Leverage has been a huge one over the last year, something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Now the last one is very similar to what I said in the first episode, but I want to go into a lot more detail, and ultimately one of the things I said is you have to be very focused on your product.

the 100% roi product

You have to make sure that you have an awesome product or service, but I want to give context on that today because we just pulled a bunch of numbers. One of the things that we do at PT Biz is we run a mastermind. People pay an annual fee. They’re in the mastermind. They learn how to grow their businesses.

We teach them how to do that, and there’s a community of people all doing the same things. But when I say what’s a good product, what do we have? What is a good product? And it’s something we’re focusing on a lot right now to make it even better. Like we’re just focusing a ton of our time right now making it better.

Over the next six months, it’s going to be completely transformed and even more amazing. But let me share some results so maybe you can take this to your business in this mindset. So here’s the data our team pulled just in the last couple weeks. If someone comes into our mastermind, they have an expectation of ROI.

They’re going to spend money for this annual program, and they expect, hey, I better be making more money because I’m spending money. A hundred percent of the people who come into our program, at a minimum, ROI the cost of the program. Like at a minimum, a hundred percent. That’s a hundred percent success rate.

That’s crazy. So that means whatever they pay to be in the program, they at a minimum make that much back in growth of their business, at a minimum. Now let’s talk about what the averages are beyond that. In the first three months in working with us, because it’s an annual program in the mastermind, the first three months, an average practice is generating $5,365.15 more revenue per month.

So that’s, if they were making $10,000 a month, by the third month, they’re making $15,365.15. They’re making, on average, over $5,000 more per month, three months into working with us. Six months into working with us, the average practice is generating $6,134 more revenue per month. And then at 12 months into the program, so they finish their first year, the average, again, I’m going off of average here, the average practice is generating $7,979.89 more per month than when they came in the program.

So again, if you came in making $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month into our program, the average at the end of the year is an increase of $8,000 per month. So if you’re making $20,000, you should leave our mastermind program making $28,000 on average. A lot of people making more, and some people making a little bit less, but that average comes out to $8,000.

track every outcome

That’s what I’m talking about with a good product or service. So everyone who works with us is seeing a result, at minimum the ROI, all of them, and they’re making a lot more money. So those are the kind of the results that are on the line. And so I want you to think about that in your business, whatever your business is, are you getting a result?

Are you truly satisfying the customer? Are you delivering on what you promised? Because we track more than any business ever that I’ve seen. We track everything that we possibly can, and we want to make it better, and I want to make this better. I feel like we could make it even better. But to put that all in perspective, when someone’s coming in to work with us, the expectation, the average expectation is a 350% ROI.

350% ROI. Just think about where you could do that, where you could go invest $10,000 right now and make 350% on your money. You can’t find that anywhere, but you can find that in business mentorship programs like what we provide. And I’m not selling my services at all right now in this podcast. I’m letting you know what it takes to run a good business, what you should be looking for, what data backs up what you’re doing.

What data could you pull to present to other customers and say, no, I have a good product. I don’t need you to think that I have a good product. I want you to see that I know I have a good product. It’s just a matter of whether or not you want to be a part of it at this point. Do you think you’re better, worse, or average?

Because if you’re average, you’re making 8K more per month when you leave. If you’re above average, you’re making more than that. If you think that you’re below average, yeah, you’ll make less than that. Where do you think that you stand at the end of this year with you putting in the work? It’s so much easier to have conversations with customers when you actually know you have a good product or service.

And it’s not just some mission statement that’s ultimately BS, but you don’t actually know if you’re helping anybody. Track it. Track everything. Track the outcomes of everyone who you work with and see if you actually have an awesome product. If you don’t, change it. And if it’s too hard, try harder.

And if it’s too hard, try harder.