Simon Severino is an entrepreneur. In the past 19 years, he has helped B2B businesses around the globe double their revenue in 90 days. He has helped thousands of entrepreneurs achieve financial freedom. His mission in life is to open the doors to success.
“Freedom is when you are in action, but you feel that you are doing the right thing… and you can take things as they come”
In this episode, Simon Severino talks about how to expand a business successfully using his own variety of business growth strategies. Find out some of the unique and successful business tips and ideas he has to offer in this podcast.
“It’s really important to stay true to what your purpose is and do not start too many things at once… It’s easier to stay in momentum when the stone is rolling.”
Website: https://www.strategysprints.com/
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/strategysprints
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonseverino/
John: Thank you for listening to The Business Sphere. Don’t forget to share this episode and subscribe. Joining me today is Simon Severino, a entrepreneur with 19 plus years of experience. Simon is an entrepreneur, which helps reach financial freedom and double business’s revenue in just 90 days. So, I’m interested to learn how you’ve done it and excited to have you on the show but before we start, maybe share with the listeners how you got to this position and your backstory?
Simon: Hello, John. Hello everybody. Yeah, I’m Simon Severino, I’m in Vienna and I do only one thing since 19 years now and it’s just really helping people double their revenue and I’ve found a way to do it in 90 days because we’re a full team now we’ve done this 1600 times, we have templates and swipe copies ready in the Sprint University. That’s what makes it even easier and people ask how is it possible that you double in 90 days? It’s not, it’s not very har I’m happy to unpack it bit by bit here during this conversation. Sometimes we even quadruple when you do one thing for 19 years in a row and you do just that one thing, if you just improve it by 1% every week, how good will it get?
John: Exactly. I mean you have a system processes right? You’ve been doing it every day for 19 years. So, I am so you know, maybe share with listeners how you came to this kinda arena? Because helping entrepreneurs. But when you first started, how did you get the ball rolling? Did you work in corporate before you started your own company?
Simon: Yes, I was in a, in a global consultancy and I was a junior consultant and then Senior Consultant, project manager, Senior Project Manager, etc. I did the whole career, traditional career and then I said “Alright, now let’s go and do this with our own flavor and with our values.” and so I started strategy sprints and I was the only one consulting and then we were a team of consultants and then, pretty quickly. I was the bottleneck of my own growth, of our own team because I was still doing the work myself. So, I had to fire myself from operations and become the coach of the coaches so I created a franchise model I started teaching. My colleagues like I was teaching the clients the same program. I built a program with templates and videos explaining it and a curriculum and that became the certification. Now, we have certified strategies, prints, coaches from Singapore to Los Angeles and they’re crushing it and basically they are helping people have more time and more reliable sales more time means we want them to have 10 to 14 hours per week available to work on the business.
So, we have to free them up from the weeds because we want to work with them on form fit and function of their sales systems on form fit and function of their marketing systems. So we have to get them out of the weeds, this is month one then in month two, we optimize sales this is where the doubling part kicks in. We have three strategies, we want to increase their conversion rate by 25%. So same number of leads but a higher conversion rate, we want to increase the frequency of their sales by 25%. So an we make it shorter from a sales time of months to a sales time of a couple of weeks and then the third piece is increasing the price by 25%. Which sounds hard, but it’s really easy because they are usually not perfectly positioned. So, there are eight things that there’s eight small tweaks in positioning that we do with them and then you can charge 25% higher price without losing the pitches and so, when you do these three things when you increase them by 25% frequency price and the conversion rate then now you have revenue plus 99%. So, you have basically doubled the revenue and then the last month is really just okay, now we have a cool machine that works when they sleep that works when they are on holidays. Now it’s time for marketing, now let’s get out there, let’s pick one to max three channels, where do people really hang out that are your ideal clients and now let’s really improve every single part of that marketing piece, now let’s go out and tell everybody about your offer.
John: That’s very intriguing and interesting for our listeners. So, can you share with us like, who is your ideal type of avatar? And some you know results in case studies or share with us some of the stories behind it because even before you moved away from doing it yourself you had to train your people to get on the business, not in the business right? So, if you don’t mind sharing some of that information that’d be great, Simon?
Simon: Sure. So we work only with b2b teams that are doing more than 35k per month being it per month or MRR monthly recurring if there is a b2b software team and they are sprinters, means they build more than they talk. These are the three things you know no excuses people who deliver. These are the three things because you have different kinds of people’s out there and even in entrepreneurship you have many that are like wonderful dreamers and then you have executors right? We work with the executors and they know who they are.
John: And is there a, because you mentioned 90 days it sounds very you know fast for a lot of people that have been working on their business for years and they come to you and they’re like, wow this sounds very compelling you know, what are some of the certainties that you can you know even if it’s a lift of 25%, it’s better than 100% right? What have you seen on average? Because this is a pretty good track record if you’re able to, you know back it up.
Simon: The average is a sales increase of around 256,000 additional sales per sprint to around 400,000 additional sales per sprint and the, the typical situation is they say “Oh my God, I was doing the wrong things, I was doing too much marketing before I had a conversion machine. So I was pulling leads in starting conversations, but this conversation would not turn into a project, into deals. So I was wasting money, many of them are wasting money on paid ads, many of them are wasting money on you know running podcasts, many are wasting money on being on social media because before you have that machine that converts a conversation into a client you shouldn’t do any social media and you shouldn’t do any spending on marketing. So first, do sales and operations and when you have that machine that converts attention into interest into engagement into a working together, then you start doing marketing and usually they don’t have that in place and so, and I was the same I didn’t have that in place but I was running Facebook ads, of course they wouldn’t convert and I wasted a ton of money and where do we learn that? We don’t learn this in school, we don’t learn this in business school, really there is no, you have a ton of books here. If somebody would read all of them and then summarize yeah, then you might have the blueprints now in your hand but yeah it will take you like five years.
John: And this is great that you’re unfolding it all because a lot of business owners think they can do it themselves and it’s gonna save them money but most importantly, it’s time if you’re able to shrink time and figure out someone that has a proven track record and this is the reason contractors exist. If you build a home there’s plumbers, roofers, there’s window guys or flooring guys. It’s the same with business, a lot of people are afraid to take that step for mentoring or coaching or trying to figure out how to scale their operations in sales and marketing or, you know HR or for what I do is SEO because it’s a very skilled specific task, niche specific and like you mentioned conversion rate optimization. Understanding where your ideal avatars, customers are locating and navigating throughout the entire engagements process to then hit them and drip them with information and content to get them in the funnel to then cultivate interested parties when they’re ready to buy and that’s the challenge for a lot of business owners because they feel you know, you put this thing out there and the floodgates are gonna open or you put social media posts and you pay ads and you do some traditional media or online media, you invest all this money and nothing happens, crickets happen and you know, you just want to break even. Yeah, it doesn’t even break even and so they get frustrated, they give up right?
Most people would just give up because then they are like totally against that platform medium. But if you have a proven system like you mentioned, proven track record and like you mentioned, b2b, SAS type businesses 35,000 or 30,000 a month or 35,000 a month recurring revenue is ideal for you right? Is there a specific niche or industry that you go after? Like I know you mentioned like, SAS software but what about like the SMB’s? Because most of our listeners are you know mom and pap family run businesses. They do generate 500 and a million a couple million dollars $20 million revenue but they don’t have that recurring type of business model, What would you provide for them?
Simon: So, the strategy Sprint’s does not work for B to C but it does work for every b2b business that is above at, or above 35k per month. So if it’s an agency, marketing agency it works, if it’s a professional service it works, if it’s an educator, we have blockchain educators, we have solopreneurs but they are b2b businesses they sell to business owners, then the sprint can double, can double their revenue.
John: And like you put a minimum, how large of a company have you worked with before as well? And do you still have that 200% increase in 90 days for some of the larger companies?
Simon: We do, we work with most of the brands that you know, we work with publicly traded companies that are worth 1 billion, we work with European unicorns, and when we do that, we segment. So we work with four people, the manager of that one country of that company, or of one product of that company in one region. So we segmented and the sprint for 90 days, we improve only one product in one country with a team of four, managing director or product director and then somebody who leads sales, one who leads marketing and one who leads the operation. That’s the sprint team is always owner, operations guy, marketing person, salesperson, this team of four is always the sprint team, and then on our side, there is a team of Sprint coaches, and 274 templates and swipe copies so that they get all the goodness that you have around you. All this beautiful knowledge that people have acquired in practice. It’s distilled for them so that they can get done faster.
John: Amazing and typically, on average price point and you know, what kind of commitment because after 90 days, what happens? Is their recurring kind of business model for you for maintenance, or what’s your kind of business model?
Simon: So after that, they don’t need us anymore. They are independent, they have now five to nine key systems installed, like a client onboarding system, an NPS system, a referral system, a sales system, a marketing system, they continue working, they don’t need us afterwards. Some of them they book a second sprint, but it’s just for fun, hey, we would miss the sprint coach. If they were not here, our meetings are better. So we don’t really need them, but we missed them. If they are not here. Our meetings are fun, because there is this external pacemaker and they challenge us. It’s cool. We feel like athletes having such a performance coach, right. So sometimes they book a second sprint, but the idea is in 90 days, you get key systems installed and they continue giving so you don’t need us anymore and you just run the systems and you improve them, refine them along the way, the more you learn. That’s basically it and then The price point is 1/10 of the additional sales they will get. So, if in week zero, when we do the three goals into pre numbers for the next 90 days, we say, okay, we can with these three strategies and the three habits that we install. If we can get to 400,000 in additional sales, the price of the Sprint will be 1/10 of that, which I think is fair. So that price will be 40k for a sprint. It depends on where we can bring them in terms of sales and what their ambition levels.
John: That’s pretty interesting of a business model, because that’s holding you accountable to actually achieve the success. So then everyone is going after that target, versus a pay first model, which there, then comes in onus of what happens when there, it doesn’t achieve. So it’s interesting to hear that because everyone operates differently. So do you work with customers in Canada, as well as the US, Australia, Asia, etc? Like Europe? Where are some of the your clients like globally, because I know you’re in Europe right now? What about North America? What about like, Australia, etc?
Simon: Our clients are in Canada, in New York, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, Miami, Zurich, Berlin, London, Singapore, Shanghai, Thailand.
John: So how did again, I know you got this going? Right? Like, it must have been challenging early days to get your foot in the door, getting out there getting known, if you don’t mind sharing with some of the listeners, like, what did it take you to get to where you are, because a lot of business owners have been struggling, or last couple years and even they’ve been running this you know, hamster wheel for 510 years and it’s been plateauing instead of a growth of say, 20 or 30% Annually, like they’ve been plateaued. How did you get to where you are today?
Simon: I picked one topic, which was the topic of strategic go to market and that was important and then I had three habits and three strategies. The three strategies were increased, only doing things that increase my frequency, conversion rate and price and not doing the rest. So I’ve never been doing many projects at once, I always had one focus and one thing to do this week. The second thing is the three habits that I, my daily habit, weekly habit and monthly, it’s the same thing that we share with our clients and implement with our clients. My daily habit is writing down Hi, how will my flow of tomorrow be? What do I do six in the morning, 7, 8, 9 and then in the evening, I asked myself two questions, what will I delegate more and if I would live more freely and more intentionally, what would I do tomorrow? Then I design the day of tomorrow and I stick to it. So that’s the daily habit and from there, I learned what to delegate, outsource, what to cut, what to automate, etc. This is important because this becomes the next piece in my sop manual in my manual of all processes that we do. Then the second thing, the weekly habit is every week, I get reported the ops numbers, the marketing numbers and the sales numbers and very simple numbers. It’s three numbers each, it’s on a live dashboard, I always see current number, target number and gap. It’s visual and when I was a solopreneur, I was reporting the three numbers to me like it was a team and now it’s a team that is reporting the numbers to me. Same thing and then the third. So this way we take decisions based on facts and not on narratives.
That is important, many people out there they fly blind. You asked them about, how many people were on your website today? ”I don’t know” how many of them are interested in buying from you? “I don’t know” I will get in one month I will get the report from my HubSpot. Oh, yeah, you take decisions every month? They don’t, right? How do you take a decision right now if you don’t know that. So getting signals early, for example, when the when LinkedIn algorithm changed we saw it very early in this dashboard and we said oh our LinkedIn activities are not working anymore. Is there something going on and then two weeks later, we realized oh, there is a change there. Everybody is affected, but we had 14 days to react. So this is important to get the weak signals and not to be surprised by things changing outside. Get the weak signals and this is what we do with the weekly habit and then the monthly habit is a competitive analysis. What are our top three competitors doing? What can our clients do? Instead of working with them in working with us, what else can they do? They can maybe hire Mike the intern or they can do nothing, or they can do it themselves. So that’s a half an hour competitive analysis per month and with these three pieces of daily habit, monthly habit, daily habit, weekly, monthly habit. I can control the 10% controllable, everything else is not in my control and this is the way how I stay on track. I stay focused and the rest is just keep rolling, being healthy, of course, eating well, exercising daily and sleeping enough and having friends and family and life, because that recharges and makes sure that I can show up every day.
John: Yeah and balance is so key, right? And I think most business owners get into business, not knowing what their end goal is, right? Like, we all want a better life, whatever that may be happier, spend more time with family and friends, go travel, go do things, right? But they then get so caught up in their business and they forget what’s important. Like family relationships are all broken, because there’s investing so much time and energy in the business. So I actually, I totally agree where you’re going. Because two, three years ago, I implemented a lot of the SOPs for onboarding, sales, marketing and create frameworks and videos and like kind of blueprints that you mentioned, but on my industry level, right? Because I was like, going to a lot of conferences and learning about what goes on in different agencies, and how it would work for mine, and then specialize and really refine it. But you know, a lot of people don’t have that time to then step out of the inside grind of it all, to try to implement it themselves. I made a point to do that, so that I can free up more of my time and just put people in place like this, who not how can I book, just get people who are experts in what they do and implement it. So that it frees up your time and what you do is amazing, because you’ve built a business of coaches and experts, and you have all these frameworks already implemented. So it saves people so much time, gives them so much freedom and when you hire people in house, you don’t even know their skill set. There’s so much time, you know training them seeing if they’re even smart enough to do what they say in resume, right, versus a proven track record and that’s why like a vendor, a consultant or someone that has results, proven results, with testimonials, case studies can guide you so much faster, quicker and yes there’s a little bit of a fee, but how much money and time are you saving all of it, which frees the business owners so much time and stress. So what you have is amazing I love, I love it. So what’s in store for you? Because I know you know now that you’re coaching your coaches and you’re growing that end of the business, how’s life? Like what are you up to nowadays?
Simon: I’m, I just wrote a book. It took me 18 years to practice the things, to apply the things and then the best 12 blueprints that would work for you on how to do marketing, how to do sales, how to do operations, how to do hiring, I put together in a book that’s coming out next week and it’s called strategies Sprint’s and it’s published by Cochran page in London and I’m quite excited we will launch it at the growth Festival which is the two days, nine speakers amazing event and the bonus will with the book there. But you can order it. It’s a preorder everywhere where you buy books and it’s called strategy sprints and yeah, it’s 200 pages of my best blueprints. It’s a great bang for the buck. If you cannot afford a sprint coach to implement these things with you. Grab the book, implement them, great bang for the buck.
John: Amazing. I mean that’s, I’m in the process of just finalizing my own book and you know, just like you it’s now focused on things that you always want to do, that you never had time to do. So, you know, if you look at bucket lists especially during this pandemic, people kind of had to realize what they’re doing wrong in their business, analyze what’s happening and where they want to be and if you can focus more on self awareness of, you know, your business or life and relationships or whatever it is. It’s gonna make you happier in every aspect of life. So the book launch, the business is growing. I imagine Simon and your happy family is good.
Simon: Yeah, the cool thing about firing yourself from operations is you get back 40 hours, 50 hours per, per week per week of your life. Now, part of that is that I am now able to exercise daily and to have more time with my family. I have two small kids and I enjoy them now much more. The other part is, you know we are entrepreneurs, even if we are retired we always want to do stuff, we cannot stop doing stuff. So of course, I started writing a book. I put my YouTube channel from weekly to daily. I’m going live on YouTube every day and answering questions around revenue systems investment systems. My YouTube channel is called Simon Severino if you want to hop by and so I am of course fully active, but it’s just from eight in the morning to 6pm. That’s and there is a limit and this is much less of course, than what I was doing in the first three years of building my business, right? That was non stop and so now I have more balance, I drink less coffee, I drink more tea that has helped me and I enjoy doing things like learning how to write a book, learning how to go live on YouTube, new skills that are fun, being on three, four podcasts per day, like right now here with you. These are things that now I have time for and I really enjoy, it doesn’t feel like work, we are talking does this feel like work? It doesn’t for me, it’s talking to cool people.
John: And this is where you then enjoy being an entrepreneur and a business owner, right? But a lot of people don’t really get it and they all envy where you’re at and it was not easy. There’s a lot of work. But the end goal of it all is getting your set itself away from the operation. So that frees up time to do things that you actually enjoy. That might not even be money focus, revenue focus, profit focus, it’s both things that you always wanted to do which is exercise. Like, I just signed up for a marathon Spartan tough mudders just because, New Year’s resolution. I gotta commit to getting a little bit healthier. Things like that really motivate me now because I have time to then invest in eating healthier, exercise and myself. When people aren’t aware of what’s important, they start, you know, eating a lot of bad habit foods, right? Soda’s and processed foods and then you sleep last because you think you need to work longer hours to do things and it’s really detrimental to you because it’s stressful. So if you have all the operations in order, the process systems in order and you’re able to walk away from the daily operations and have people in place or systems in place. It’s the best feeling to know that you don’t have to be there and it’s still running.
Simon: Yeah, when we start our businesses, we start them because we want more freedom and then quite the opposite happens. Instead of us running the business, the business is running in our life and our friends say, Oh, you’re working a lot. Are you okay? Oh, we missed you at the tennis club or the soccer round or whatever and so, at some point the mindset is, oh I have to hustle, I have to hustle and it’s true. The first couple years, until you get to 35k per month, you have to put in the volume, yes. But the volume on the right thing, don’t do marketing, do just operations and sales. So having a great service or product, improving that and also starting conversations around that product so that people use it. These are the two things to do and yes, do them in volume. The more hours you put in there the better, of course during the first years until you hit this 35k. Then it’s really different then it’s about regaining your time, your freedom, otherwise you will burn out. So now it’s about much more like you said, I liked that you said it self awareness. Now it’s about integrity, pattern integrity. What do you stand for? There is one question that I really like and if you think of your period where you were really under pressure and you were down and beaten up and remind yourself, what did you find in that state that is really important to you? I can tell you what I found, I was beaten up during the pandemic, I had such a bad month and everything was going, not well and I said to a friend of mine, I said you know what, I’m gonna rise to the moment and my mission in life, is to turn on lights and to open doors. That’s what I do, I open the door, I turn on the light. So this moment will pass, nothing can stop me and I just felt it, you know, it was just true and that, and then the month was not even a full bad month, it was just two days later everything was fine again. But the lesson was, I felt inside the core of my integrity, of what my purpose is and this is the most important thing, when you get to that core, to that moment and I hope you don’t have to have a bad month to feel that. If you can feel that and you have clarity around that? Everything else is just not distracting. Just do every day something around, productive in something around, say it’s around this core thing that is important to you, show up every day and deliver that, in the spirit of that, in the service of that and that will create meaning and meaning then creates freedom, because freedom is not lying on the beach the whole day, that’s boring. I do that every summer and we are all bored. After three weeks we all go Oh, come on, let’s go back home, it’s boring, No no we have one more week , No it’s boring Papa it’s boring! I don’t want to be happy all the time, can we go back home? So that’s not freedom. Freedom is when you are in action, but you feel that you’re doing the right thing that you are in flow and, and you can take things as they come and you turn them with your superpower, you turn them into a slightly better thing and that’s, that’s your thing.
John: That’s amazing, I know, I really wanna thank you for the time and the value that you’ve added to all the listeners. I think we’re gonna be connected because I really like what you stand for, your values, the culture that you’ve brought to your own business and I’m excited to purchase and read your book as well, because I’m an avid reader. I love just absorbing content and then picking one or two bits that I never implemented and trying it, right? But it’s all about taking action, it’s all about. Whatever you do? You got to be a doer, right? You can’t just have a lot of information, overload and not do anything with it right?
So action is what it is all about taking action to reach out to Simon, he has this amazing program and his book is coming out. So I’m excited for you, check out your youtube channel, I’ll have all the links in the show notes. Final word Simon? Words of inspiration like, if you don’t mind offering some wisdom to some of the listeners right at the end, that would be amazing.
Simon: I’d like you to do one thing, write down all the things that you have on your plate right now, all the tasks that you have to do and then cut them in half and then look at them and cut them in half again, and I have a template on our website that you can download for that to make it easier. It’s on strategysprints.com and you can download it, I use it regularly because in the spirit of what we, what we said it’s really important that you stay true to your integrity and what your purpose is and do not start too many things at once because otherwise you lose energy. So, stay on that thing and that creates momentum and that regains actual energy, it’s easier to stay in momentum when the stone is rolling, it’s easier to roll than to stop.
John: And there’s a great book for that The ONE Thing from Garry Keller. I love it, it’s a you know really gets you really focused on that one thing every single day, that task gets you really into it and this is beginning of a year. There’s always going to be these goal sessions, monthly, quarterly so get into that habit of really pushing yourself, striving for a better future, better life. So, I really want to thank you Simon, really appreciate your time, great insights, I know we went a little bit over but hopefully I didn’t hold you back but I’m gonna have all the show notes with all the links in the podcast. Thank you, Simon.
Simon: Thank you, John. Thank you everybody. Keep rolling.
