what are the chances of doubling your business

Summary

my son William flipped a coin eight times in a row and got heads every time. the math on that is about 1 in 256. statistically improbable. then he did it again. and again.

people throw the same statistics at entrepreneurs. only 4 percent of businesses ever hit 1 million in revenue. less than 1 percent hit 10 million. the implication is that you’re playing the lottery, so you should temper your expectations.

that frame is wrong. business growth is not a coin flip. it is a skill stack. product, marketing, sales, leadership, hiring. every one of those skills is improvable. every one of them shifts the odds in your favor when you get better at it. William didn’t get lucky. he had figured out how to throw the coin so it landed the same way almost every time. he was cheating gravity with practice.

do the same thing in your business. get noticeably better at one of the levers every quarter. the statistics stop applying to you. the 4 percent club is full of people who treated business as a skill, not a wager.

Transcript

introduction to the concept of probability and its relation to business growth

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. What are the chances of you growing your business? Like if you’ve been working at it, you’re trying to grow it, like, say, what are the chances of you growing your business 2x, 3x, 4x, like, what do you think the legitimate chances are of you doing that?

This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I want you to think about that for a minute. And while you’re thinking about, hey, what do I, what I think my chances are of doubling my business, like try and try and put a probability on it. You know, but probability is a funny thing because I understand the point of probability and the math behind it, but it doesn’t always work out that way in business.

story of a coin flipping game illustrating random probability vs. controlled outcomes

Like probability, when there, when it’s not just chance, when there’s preparation involved, probability doesn’t really make sense. So a few months ago, I was sitting in my kitchen with my two boys and we were moving. There weren’t a lot of things in the house, but we were looking for a game to play.

We were really good at making up games and playing all sorts of crazy stuff. But the only thing I had in one of the empty drawers in the house had been cleared out was a quarter. And I was like, hey, boys, let’s play a game where we’re going to flip the quarter. Each person gets to flip it 10 times, and the most you get in a row, like say you get heads three times in a row, two times in a row, whatever, whoever gets it the most in a row is going to win the game.

And we just did this for a little while. Hours and hours, but like maybe, maybe we did this for 30 minutes. And you know, probability math was slapping me in the face and slapping Graham in the face, who’s my middle child, to where we would flip it, we’d get like two in a row, maybe three in a row, and then it’d be heads, heads, heads, tails.

discussion on the illusion of probability in business and how experience alters outcomes

You know, like we, it just kept falling off. Like and we were, we were falling, adhering to the laws of probability, you know, that would say like how many you should get over the course of 10, maybe we’d get four, you know, something like that. And you know, and I get it. I get how probability math works.

If you know, we flip it 200 times, it’s going to eventually be, eventually be, you know, the math will come out to being nearly 50-50. And at the same time, if we’re just talking about before the coin flip actually happens, yes, you just have a 50-50 chance. I get all that. But William defied the odds and he got heads eight times in a row.

He flipped a coin and got heads eight times in a row. I did the probability math on that. There’s a less than 1% chance of that ever happening. There’s a less than 1% chance if you’re doing 10 flips, like as your control, and trying to get the same one in a row, like 80%, he got 88 heads out of 10.

strategies for scaling your business by focusing on key growth areas

That’s insanity. Less than 1% chance. Now that is crazy when it comes to actual probability, right? But say that’s all we ever knew. All we’ve ever known were the 10 flips that he did, and that’s all we could ever observe. We might look at mathematics a little bit different, differently than just like, oh, well, no, it’s 50-50 chance every time.

And that’s how I want you to look at your business, okay? When we talk about growing your business, or we talk about scaling your business, there are only so many things that you can do. And so it might feel like it’s a coin flip, or it might work, or it might not work. But as you gain more experience and you start to learn from mistakes, and you start to learn what works in your market and what doesn’t work in your market, you get, you’re no longer a coin flipper, right?

You’re not standing there with like a 50-50 chance every single time. You’re doing the opposite, right? You’re shifting the odds in your favor by putting experience behind the coin flip. Like if we knew there was some way to like grease the coin or flip it a specific way or a specific height to where it always did what we wanted, like if we knew that there was that possibility, that’s what you actually can gain as a business owner.

how to apply lessons learned to consistently beat the odds

So my point in telling you all this is business math is more like William flipping that quarter. It’s more like we can do what has a less than 1% chance of success, and we can repeat that over and over again because we put experience behind it. And if you’re wondering where to put effort in to go for these 1% wins, these less than 5% chance wins, all these like things, it’s how do I improve my product, how do I improve my marketing, and how do I improve my sales?

So how am I getting more leads in the door? How am I converting them? And then how am I taking really good care of them? And I’ve talked about these things all the time, but like once you really start to focus on those areas in great depth and great detail, you’re starting to focus on these 1% shots where you’re always going to be successful.

And so when you do want to leap into a new market, or if you want to open a new business, you can take all this experience, and you can do it again, and you know exactly how to shortcut success, and you know all I need to do is I need to focus on how to get leads, and I need to focus on my sales process, and then I need to focus on taking care of my customers

closing thoughts on shifting from a game of chance to strategic mastery in business

to the best of my ability.

And that’s it. There’s not a lot of complicated things in business, but people like to overcomplicate it. They like to think that they’re just flipping a coin every single time. If you’re turning on Google ads, or Facebook ads, or you’re doing some sort of new marketing campaign, you might legitimately think that there’s just some sort of chance, luck will have it, right?

But it’s not. It’s not. It’s a lack of experience or a wealth of knowledge coming in with you that’s making the right decisions to be able to repeat the success. And so what you need to do is know that if you’re focusing on those three things, and you’re writing down what works, doesn’t work, over and over again, or at least keeping a mental note of these things, you can start to shortcut success.

You can start to do it faster. You will be in business longer. The chances of you doubling, tripling, quadrupling your business become so much stronger, even though in like legitimate, if we were to just look at the numbers and be like, okay, well this amount of small businesses fail every single year, and specifically in this industry, we could do all that math, and the math would have, you know, the market cap size, all this kind of stuff would be like, well, given your business and your demographic and your local market, you know, the biggest you could ever be is this, you know, $200,000 a year.

But that’s not the game we’re playing, okay? We’re playing a different game. We’re playing the coin flip from William game where we actually can manipulate it and do things that have a less than 1% chance of happening because we stick with it longer. We know how to move the needle. We’re playing an unfair game.

All you have to do is stick with it longer than everyone else, focus on the things that matter most, and then you can actually play a different mathematical game. You’re going after these 1% shots, and they work out, and you get surprised that they’re working out over and over again. It’s because you’re focusing on the right effort.

All math would say it’s not possible, that you can’t do this, but you absolutely can. You just need to focus on the right things, learn the lessons, and then apply those lessons the next time. There is no failure. There’s only what did you learn. If you want to take that mindset, you’re going to have to try harder.