Growing and Scaling: Interview with Kent Billingsley, Founder and President of Revenue Growth Company
I recently went one on one with Kent Billingsley. Kent is the founder and president of the Revenue Growth® Company, where has helped over 1,000 organizations in 36 countries. Kent has also served in executive and leadership positions in several billion-dollar firms.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here?
Kent: I think because I’ve spent almost three decades as an international speaker, business transformation consultant and now author. Over my career I’ve helped thousands of entrepreneurs and employees become millionaires and multi-millionaires by helping them redesign their companies to create more wealth inside their businesses. The “redesign” effort is where my title "revenue growth architect" comes from.
My Revenue Growth architecture work started about 25 years ago when I began by leading transformation teams inside strategic business units. These units averaged about a billion in revenues with several thousand employees. My role was helping these large corporate organizations optimize sales, generate greater revenues and scale profit production. My focus was on helping businesses find ways to double and triple sales, revenue, and profits without using more money, time or effort doing it. Basically, how to achieve “no cost explosive profitable revenue growth”.
In late 2002 I started my own business transformation practice helping companies all over the world, from start-ups to billion-dollar firms achieve explosive growth and extreme profitability. In that time, I’ve transformed organizations in 36 countries. I’ve been fortunate to work with some entrepreneurs and clients on their businesses every week for five years or more. That embedded experience gives me insights and knowledge from helping companies go from pre-revenue to being worth tens of millions.
Adam: What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Kent: I think one of the greatest challenges in my career was after leading consulting teams on major projects for several years I was promoted to Chief Strategy Officer CSO and Chief Marketing Officer CMO of a billion dollar technology services company EDS/HP in the Pacific Rim. It seemed like overnight I moved to Hong Kong and instead of leading 15 person teams, I was now responsible for teams in 16 countries with hundreds of direct reports. My consulting team budget had been about $1-2 million and now my operating budget was over $55M in my last year.
What made this so complex was having teams that spoke different languages, different cultures, different religions, different time zones, and a wide range of unique labor laws. The first six months were a 24 by 7 levels of stress with sometimes thousands of emails a day, meetings at all hours of the night (with the states and Europe) and travel to get to some offices over 14 hours by air.
The first conference call I had with the country teams which spread from China to Japan and from Singapore to New Zealand lasted almost eight long hours. This call was a nightmare for me and my teams. It took me about six months to get that 16-country conference call down to 1-2 hours. Learning how to lead large international teams spread across continents took me about 2 years to really catch my stride. Looking back I made a lot of mistakes but worked hard to grow through them.
This stretch experience was instrumental in helping me take on explosive growth with complex organizations and not be phased by the levels of challenges and effort. I believe that is one of the reasons that when I hear someone complain about how hard it is to do business in the states I just shrug my shoulders remembering how it is to do business in foreign countries with culture, time, religion and laws all being different.
Adam: What are your best tips for very early stage businesses?
Kent: Learn how to make money. Not burn money. Too many entrepreneurs and business leaders live the “spend money to make money” and they burn through all their cash or take on equity/debt capital. But what I find is most business leaders never learn how to actually make money or what I call create wealth inside their business.
Creating wealth is when you can scale sales, generate huge revenues and produce ridiculous profits without spending money, burning time, or wasting resources doing it. Anyone can burn money to grow, but learning how to achieve top line without burning bottom line is what makes companies so valuable.
One of the ways I’ve helped so many entrepreneurs become millionaires is to get them to learn how to leverage parts of their company that are sleepy. Meaning parts of the business that could help generates sales, revenue and profits but aren’t. For example, effective perfect client targeting can be one of the most effective ways to generate huge sales and spend very little doing it. Another is how to scale sales against assets. For example, in one situation the salespeople would sign an average contract of about $200K dollars and I helped one salesperson sell a $13M dollar contract. With their normal quota that would have taken about 17 extra salespeople. That is scaling to avoid massive sales expenses which eat profit – thus creating business wealth.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key elements to growing and scaling a business?
Kent: Let me answer that in two parts. The first part about growing a business the secret is not to be so focused on “business growth”. Business growth usually means getting bigger. And by bigger means adding more clients, more contracts, more products or more service, and more locations, etc. That is growth by adding. A business can become bigger and by some accounts better, but that is not how I measure business success – creating wealth.
A better approach, a key element, to growth is to focus on “revenue growth”. By that I mean scaling growth of top line (sales and non-sales revenue) against every asset in the company. One example, leaders should measure each year if their business is generating more revenue per client or just adding more clients. When a business adds a good thing – a client – it also adds a bad thing – more layers of costs. That’s not how to optimize profitability.
Which brings me to the second part of your question. Scaling. Scaling can have two meanings. The first is can you “build out” a part of the organization to maintain growth or continuously exceed targets in all areas – marketing, sales, and operations? The second meaning of scaling and the one I use to create company wealth is about business growth versus revenue growth. Let me use marketing as an example. The question becomes can the Marketing department scale? Can they produce more high quality leads this quarter than last quarter? Yes or no. An even better or higher measurement of scaling is can the marketing group increase quantity and quality of leads without spending more time or money?
Adam: What are the most important processes and methods entrepreneurs should integrate into their businesses?
Kent: The easy answer are the core processes, methods and methodologies for sales and delivery. However, any process that helps create new client demand is critical. And second any process that helps convert that new demand into customers, contracts, and cash.
I’m actually certified in process performance and process engineering and I will say professionally that most companies have steps and actions, but don’t have great process and methodologies. In addition, most large corporations have taken good process and perverted them into bureaucratic procedures that wear employees out.
Having a really strong sales methodology is critical. Most companies that have implemented a third party and big name brand sales methodologies have implemented steps and actions to chase pursuits. That is flawed. You must have a sales methodology that have phases which build compelling multi-level value propositions and link them to levels of influence. That methodology must be strategic and holistically tied to all parts of the enterprise.
Adam: What are mistakes and pitfalls should entrepreneurs be on the lookout out for and how can they avoid them?
Kent: Wow, there are so many but let me give you a few major mistakes that are based on last century thinking and are still being used because they sound clever and they sort of work. But clever doesn’t create business wealth.
“Spending money to make money”. This flawed philosophy will never optimize growth and profits creating maximum cash on hand, cash flow and working capital – or never optimize creating wealth for them, employees or stakeholders. Entrepreneurs need to learn how to “make money without spending a dollar”.
“Sales is a numbers game.” That is saying you just have to join in a lot of sales transactions. That’s fine if you like burning through people, eating profits, and more than half the time destroying your brand. A superior approach is “sales is a ratio game”. That means focusing on conversions not transactions. In addition, “sales is a numbers game” will kill a company competing in complex sales.
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Ha. Almost everything in a business will at some time become “broke”, weak, or non-value add. A better approach is to be continuously adapting your business and model to stay or even ahead of competitors.
Another mistake and maybe the biggest is being delusional about what it takes to win business and grow today. Far too many entrepreneurs are still living the “superior product, service or customer experience” will make my company successful. We’ve had many entrepreneurial clients become millionaires and multimillionaires with okay products, good services and limited experience. The reason? They don’t waste a fortune chasing the pursuit of perfection. In many cases good is good enough.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of hiring and team building?
Kent: Stop hiring employees and start hiring talent. Never hire another employee again. You must define what a talent is in your company (based on competencies to a role) and how to measure them in their role in your company and only hire them. But don’t overpay them. Real talent wants to work in a system where they can earn their rewards. If a candidate is too focused on size or amount of salary don’t hire them.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Kent: Leaders today have to be much better at “systems thinking”. In the past, as I was taught and developed as an executive leader it was “managers lead the head and leaders inspire the heart”. That’s great, sounds good and sold millions of books for those authors. However, that is so flawed because people (employees and talent) only make up about 1/9th of the system that produces quality growth in a company.
My focus is helping transform leaders today to understand they “own the system” – they own everything in the environment that determines success or failure for their people and teams.
Decades back when I was in complex big ticket technology services sales and was fortunate to be shattering numbers I had a great relationship with my managers. We had both defined and demarked the roles. I would work the “outside” and they would work the “inside”. In other words, I would handle everything regarding prospects and clients. They would handle all the barriers, hurtles and resistance issues on the inside of the corporation. With that model, my sales conversion rates on multi-million dollar contracts was right about 80% for six years.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Kent: First. Mutually work to solve complex problems. Anyone in a leadership position must be “entrepreneurial” and find creative, innovative and cost-effective ways to solve simple and complex problems. I believe the value of any leader or employees is based on the level, size and complexity of problems that person can fix.
Second, Focus on value, value, and value. Another key point is to make sure that everything you do and everything you say adds value. Too many entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders act business, promote busy and reinforce busy. They must learn to focus on quality production – value – not activities or actions.
Third, communicate and compensate. Make sure that to all stakeholders, constituents, and those people connected to your eco-system you effectively communicate to them. In addition, make sure people are recognized and rewarded. Rewards are not just money and dollars, but adulation and recognition. Be lavish in praise.
Adam: What are your best sales and marketing tips?
Kent: Stop marketing and stop selling. Not to be glib but I’ve been delivering business transformation and performance optimization work for almost 25 years around the world. That advice is how I’ve transformed thousands of organizations around the world into high performance and target shattering teams.
Here is what I mean. Most leaders and teams focus so hard on marketing their products and services through all forms of digital, traditional and physical methods and mediums. Companies spend billions to tell the market and prospects what they have and what they do. The flaw in the approach is the buyer doesn’t care about what you do. They only care about the impact, the change, the difference in what you do does for them. Simple concept almost never applied.
Stop selling means the same thing. 99% of all sales and salespeople focus on three main strategies to be successful and it’s really sad. They focus (and a fortune of training dollars wasted) on product, price and personality. Product (offering) here is what we do and have to offer. Price. This is our price, unless it’s too high, then we will lower it to win (buy) your business. Third, personality. Sales people have been taught (like I was forty years ago) that “people buy from people they like”. That’s crap today and especially in a complex sale. Prospects buy because you have what they want or you offer a great deal (back to #2 lower price) for them.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Kent: Money, success, rewards, and riches should all be the by-product of solving problems. Ross Perot Sr told that to me in 1985 and I will never forget the meeting and time I heard him say it. It has helped me have a long and wonderful career helping so many people become successful.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Kent: Yes, one last thing. It is essential today that entrepreneurs learn how to transition from just starting, building, and growing a business. They must stop focusing and accepting incremental results. That is old school and last century. The focus today should be starting and leading companies by delivering extreme value and creating wealth immediately. They must move from accepting incremental to demanding optimized results.
The old approach was trade products, services and time for dollars. And then hoping to make money or be successful someday. Tens of thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs were following that model and the pandemic has closed their businesses forever.
What is allowing business leaders to survive and thrive even in Pandemic times is designing the company to deliver value and achieve wealth in parallel. You can’t try to run and grow a business hoping for success, you have to design success – making the most profits possible - in it from the beginning.
Every business leader must start immediately to unlock the wealth, the “cash in the walls” of their business from day one. However, there is no longer a golden key or lock (best product, superior service, greatest customer experience). Instead of opening a padlock to riches, they must understand that today a company’s wealth and their future fortune is protected by a “combination lock”. It takes knowing and following the right sequence, turns and know the right numbers to open this kind of lock.
That means following a proven roadmap to optimize sales, revenue and profits using the fewest resources, least amount of time and no money doing it. There is no recipe that will guarantee that an entrepreneur or a new business will be a success. However, there are proven formulas and methods to create much greater wealth inside a company and not lift a finger doing it.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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