Brant Cooper - What Are You Doing to Move Your Needle?

Hey friend, I know how this feels. Waking up exhausted after multiple trips to the bathroom and feeling embarrassed by sudden leaks. I used to be constantly on edge, searching for a restroom whenever I was out. Then I discovered better woman. I was skeptical at first, but two months in, everything changed. I experienced improved bladder control. No more heart-stopping moments when I laugh or sneeze. Less urged to go, deeper and more restful sleep. I finally felt like myself again, confident and in control. Better Woman is natural, effective, clinically tested, and trusted by women for over 25 years. Ready to take back your control? Head over to Bebetternow.com to order your supply today. That's Bebetternow.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Uses directed individual results may vary. Hi everyone, it's Bill Black, the exit coach from the Exit Coach Radio show. You know, one of the biggest questions I get on the show is what exactly goes into a business exit plan and when should I start creating mine? Well, I always tell people that the best time to start was 5 years ago, but the next best time is now because you never know when you might need it. So we put together a free report that describes what an exit plan is and what you should know. You can get it free by texting exit plan with no spaces to 44222. That's exit plan to 44222. Again, text exit plan to 44222. Welcome to the Exit Coach Radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. And thank you for listening. It's always a pleasure to have you here. I'm gonna take a short break. I'll be right back. Hey, thanks so much for joining me today. My next guest, a very interesting gentleman, Brent Cooper. He's a New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of Moves the Needle, and Brant is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur, mentor who's leading organizations out of the mental industrial age of asserting power and control methods into a culture of creativity, innovation, and lean methodologies to offer new value to customers, overcome growth plateaus. And empower individuals to make innovative changes. And he runs a team of four to produce a $2 million revenue stream, and Brent Brent can talk about his success milestones such as IPO acquisitions, rapid growth, as well as devastating failures. So we're going to talk about all of that. Brent, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here. Yeah, my pleasure. Really interesting background that you have, and I've been looking at your website. It moves the Needle, and it looks like you've come up with a really, really interesting business model here. Tell us a little bit more about you and your background and the book and the company. Yeah, sure. So I, I, I come from a Tech startup background. So I lived up in the Bay Area, really a broad-based experience in a number of startups that achieved those various milestones, including, like you said, uh, the crushing failures. Those tend to be my, my, my companies, I think. Uh, but so, you know, out of the dot-com busts, so early 2000s, there were a number of people that were Looking at the startup realm, looking at the Silicon Valley style startups and saying, hey, you know, why are we teaching startups and small businesses to look like big businesses. Big businesses actually struggle when it comes to creating new products and services for a market. And so there were a number of people that were writing about that. Uh I ended up writing the first book that talked about customer development and lean startup and product market fit and those type of things. And it sort of launched this whole new career ended up writing the Lean Entrepreneur, which is a deep dive into those practices, how to run experiments, how to understand your customers deeply, how to use evidence to cut through your own bodies, and at that time launched moves the Needle and basically our take there was to go and teach all of these entrepreneurial spirit methods to large enterprises who base. A vast amount of uncertainty and that's, that's kind of how the context I use that. When you know, execute. You know how to execute, go do it, and you, you'll see growth. But if you can admit to yourself parts of your own business or even your customers that you don't know, you're not sure about, well then you have to use these different methods, this entrepreneurial spirit, in order to learn what works, and then you can go execute on what you've learned. Uh, so we bring that to to large enterprises now and It may be an interesting business model, but I tell you it's tough. It's tough to get these, uh, these, uh, you know, big ships to change course a bit. Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, can you imagine starting your business 30, 40 years ago before internet, before, you know, email and text and all of these things that are wonderful now to really allow us to even outsource things. Well, that's what I'm coming up against with a lot of the business. I talked to and a lot of our listeners that are basically started their businesses when that was state of the art. You had, you had an assistant or a secretary, you had a typewriter, you know, you had, you wrote letters, you waited for responses. I mean it was, it was a pretty very, very different time and a lot of these owners now. A brand are now thinking about boy, maybe I can sell that business or transition out of it and I'm still entrepreneurial. I want to start a new business and now I've got all these cool tools at my disposal that I can use. I would start my business a lot differently now than I did 40 years ago. So you're helping people to really understand how to, how to do that, right, and outsource and like you said, be a lean entrepreneur. Yeah, well, what's interesting about the your take on that, which I think is, is spot on, is that the need that these entrepreneurs, these business owners are addressing. Uh, didn't change a whole heck of a lot, right? So, so ostensibly they, they understand the need of their customer of their market segments, how we solve those needs changes over time, and I think in this new world, this digital transformation age that we're in, uh, the change is going to be constant. And so to me, there's a mindset that needs to be developed that As an entrepreneur, I'm always looking for how am I going to have to evolve? How am I going to have to keep changing in order to keep up with uh the different ways our market segments can address their needs. And so, you know, it's a crazy amount of competition, uh, our customers actually have more choices than they've ever had. They have more information on products and services and companies and when companies, you know, mess up, it's all over social media. And so our customers are super agile, and they can change their choices overnight. And so really the mentality, rather than just thinking about going from, you know, sort of the slower static world to one that's digital, our mindset needs to be agile just like our customers is, and we have to be able to pause, take in new information, and change what we're doing based upon that new information. Good point, good point. And the problem is for a lot of owners is they're already, you know, I had 11 guy said, you know, my business is like a game of never ending whack a mole. I go in, my assistant hands me the hammer, and I go in and I start whacking on whacking moles, you know, a whack a mole game with problems all day long. I walk out and give her back the hammer and go home. There's, there's already so much going on. It's like trying to trying to plan your exit route right in the middle of a hurricane. So for a lot of these owners, they need resources like what you've put together to help them understand what some of Resources might be because otherwise it's there, you know, hey, there's so many different ways to use social media, virtual assistants, all these different types of things, and most baby boomer business owners don't really have the time to figure out where to go to learn all that stuff. So I think you've created that as a central place where they can learn that, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that, again, I think you're spot on there, and I think that so the philosophy I look at this is that, that, you know, entrepreneurs that get out in front so that they're being proactive and not reactive are ones who where they can delegate what's known to other parties and their job is to go deal with the uncertainty in the world and to do that proactively. And in order to do that, you have to take all of the things that have already been figured out in the business that are routine. Um, and you have to hand those off to somebody else, and that can be, um, you know, virtual assistants, it can be hiring, uh, contractors, it could be some of these outsourced companies, um, and all of that stuff is so, you know, less expensive than it was, uh, not that long ago. Um, but we need to be able to hand those, those different organizations a blueprint. Go do this. If you look for opportunities to improve it, that's fine. Come back to me and ask me, but I need you to just go execute on it the way I've already figured out. And I think that that type of philosophy that that the execution part is handed off to others, and I'm going to go deal with the unknowns in my market, the unknowns in what's changing and how we should be addressing our customers' needs. How do I get out in front of that is, is just fraught with uncertainty. And so that's where we really want to get back to our entrepreneurial spirit in order to learn how to, how to figure that stuff out. I'm interested. How do you view COVID as an accelerant for some for people using some of these technologies and really creating new disruptions as we're experiencing with the huge unemployment that we're looking at right now and what that might look like, you know, a lot of these jobs won't come back because now people are using the technologies that have existed, but they've resisted using until now. Yeah, it has been accelerant to the disruption. I, I don't think it's, uh, you know, I, I, I don't think it's the cause of disruption to me, the cause of the disruption in society and in the economy is really the, the trans, the transformation from, uh, the industrial age to the, to the digital age. Um, I think it really brings home, uh, the uncertainty that we're all facing. Uh, you know, I talked to these large enterprise leaders and they're like, oh, we can't do innovation right now. We have to buckle down. And I'm asking, well, what do you mean by buckling down? What are you buckling down in? Oh, you know, we have to go back to what we know. And I'm trying to point out to them, listen, your customers are different now. Your small businesses have gone out of business. Your consumers don't have a job, they don't have money. Everything that you thought was true 689 months ago has changed. And so you have to go back out and relearn how to address those. And, and I think that that's true with entrepreneurs of all sizes. It's really a time everybody's comfortable with all of these tools. Get start doing Zoom calls, start doing webinars, be, you know, start getting your customers online with you, and you'll learn so much about them that that what you're, you're able to figure out is what are their new needs that you might be able to address based upon your expertise in your products and services or how can I improve my existing products and services that better suit the state that my customers are currently in, um, and so I think that. Even if people are sort of uncomfortable with that sort of technology, to me, it's just It's accelerated like you said, you have to jump in now. You have to just go for it. And I think that maybe there's comfort in the fact that the people on the other side of the Zoom call are probably new to this too. I was doing a keynote the other day in the middle of the night and, uh, and my daughter comes stumbling out of the room and, and, uh, you know, making all this noise in the background and I'm all like, hey, I'm right in the middle of a keynote. These people on the line are laughing at me because they're like, welcome to the. Welcome to keynotes in the pandemic world, right? So, you know, in the past that would have been a very controlled environment that I had, and now it's like not that controllable. And so we have to, we have to learn to sort of roll with it and if we're not comfortable with these digital tools, we really will be left behind and so you might as well dive in. Yeah, in a lot of ways it's it's humanized business interactions because everybody's got that, I think, to some extent they've got the dog barking or the doorbell ringing something. So what I really like what you had to say there, but what I wrote down was instead of going back to what you know, you need to move ahead to what's new and and and not hesitate because that more than ever. A things and I think at an earlier guest on here and she said, you know, I think we all thought that COVID would be a 90 day, like a 5K run, and now it's turning into a marathon and we better start instead of winging it that oh we'll just do, we'll just do new stuff until we can go back to normal. We better start realizing that this is normal, this is the new normal. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I was one of those people back in March. I'm hearing all these people say, oh, everything has changed forever, you know, and I was super skeptical. I, you know, I, I certainly remember, you know, 9/11 and there was a lot of talk about how everything is going to be different and, you know, very quickly. Uh, the government, the big companies and others are, are tried very hard to get consumers back to the way everything was before. So back in March, I was a little bit skeptical too, and a lot of companies were, hey, let's just wait this out and see if this just ends, um, and I, I'm full on board now that it's like, no, this, this is fundamentally different, uh, and, and, you know, again, uh, people. You know, you're not alone. I mean, everybody is facing this newness and, and let's go make something positive come out of this and, and uh the possibilities of boy, like you said, a kinder business of kinder interactions. I mean, there's just all sorts of things that we can do in a positive way, out of, you know, which is what is a pretty horrible situation. And so it's really on us, you know, I I, I go through this thing in my life. I, I, where, I forget that things are up to me. You know, in other words, uh, uh, people with entrepreneurial mindsets, obviously, they go out and they start their business and they and they, they're going out and they create value for their customers. And they can get, you know, they do that for 10 years or 20 years, and then they look at the world and they go like, wow, man, everything has changed, you know, boy, somebody really ought to do something about this. And it, it has to reoccur to me. It has to reoccur to me. Wait a second, I'm that person that's got to go do something about this. And, and so I think that people that have started their own businesses that are natural entrepreneurs or even those that just like. You know, fell into entrepreneurship, need to go back to that and go like, wait a second, it is on me, and not only can I go out and be proactive about it, but I can figure out how to create new value in the world again. And not only does it make the world a better place, but it, that's how you grow a business. So I think people should, yep, just go for it. Tell us a little bit about the startup Blue Book. Yeah, so I, uh, 10 years ago I mentioned I wrote that book, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development that uh that talked about lean startup and customer development and product market fit and a lot of these practices that are kind of buzzwords now. They're, they uh, they've been around for quite a while and so. Uh, really what I've done with my pandemic time, among other things, is, I wrote up the 10 year anniversary of that book. So I've added in some things like jobs to be done and Design Thinking and agile, and it's really and it's designed to be an easy read. It's a high level look at those things and how they work together and how you can apply them to going out and discovering and creating new value. Um, and so, uh, I put that up. It's a, it's sort of an early adopter edition of that book now on Startup Bluebook.com. And I have some tools and templates and videos for people to uh to use along with the book, um, hopefully to, to, to again help people go out and discover how they can create new value in the world. And I think a lot of people are, at least that listen to this show, Brent, are really interested in, you know, what's next in their life, you know, a lot of people are been doing their business for, like I said, 30, 40 years. They're like, OK, I'm ready to start exploring what's next. I still feel like I have a lot of life left. And I just want it to be a new, modern, different. What's out there? What what should I be thinking about? And so you, you build this as the quick reference cheat sheet for startups and enterprise innovation, which I think, you know, it's, it's in, it's in demand these days. So I applaud you for what you've done here in creating these things and the lean entrepreneur, let's talk a little bit about that before we, before we part ways today. Yeah, sure. So the Lean Entrepreneur came out in 2013. I was fortunate that it hit the New York Times bestseller list. Uh, it's a deep dive specifically into some of those topics that I touched at a high level in the Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. So the lean entrepreneur is a deep dive into how you interact with customers and learn from them, how you run experiments to validate or invalidate your assumptions. So the idea here is entrepreneurs, you know, uh, ideas are, are usually pretty easy. The tough part is uh trying to pick those ideas or among those ideas or trying to figure out whether it's worth investing the time and money and energy into ideas. Well, so you can go through this process of documenting all of your assumptions around what needs to be true for this idea to be successful. And the idea is then you can run a series of experiments like purpose-built experiments, literally the scientific method, uh, on these assumptions in order to point you in the right direction, that yep, this idea looks like it's got legs. Let's go run another experiment and see if, uh, if we should continue to pursue it. And so you're really thinking about, you're sort of thinking about this as both an entrepreneur and an investor, because you're likely at this point investing your own time and money and energy. And so, Can you separate your, you know, wear these multiple hats? One is the entrepreneur, hey, I've got this great idea, and the other side is the investor saying like, OK, well, prove it. Show me something. And so the, the messages around the experimentation is, how do I generate evidence that would convince the investor in me that I should pursue this idea. Um, and so again, that the lien entrepreneur is sort of a deep dive into uh, into those tactics. Uh, Brent, we're, we're strangers no more. I'm, I'm really happy that you came onto the show and I've been talking with Brent Cooper. You have a lot of great ideas and you get them into projects like in writing and your website. You're very, very creative. I really enjoy the way that you speak about embracing the future, and I think it's something all of our listeners can take away a lot of. You for I'm going to put links listeners in our show notes at exacoachradio.com for the book The Lean Entrepreneur for Brant's website Moves the Needle and the startup Blue Blue Book. You can find all of those on our website. So go look at that after you listen to this. And Brand, I want to thank you for coming on and helping our listeners learn more about what they need to do to move their needle. Yeah, thanks so much. Uh, it was a fun conversation and I really encourage your, your audience to reach out if they want any more, uh, you know, if I can answer any questions or if they need any help thinking through something, I, you know, I respond to all emails, LinkedIn and, and whatnot so. I do encourage people to, uh, I'm here, I wanna be a resource to help people through these, uh, through these times and, and I think entrepreneurs are the backbone of the economy, and so I think you do great work and, and I'm here to support your listeners. So, uh, yeah, thanks again for having me on. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Hey friend, I know how this feels. Waking up exhausted after multiple trips to the bathroom and feeling embarrassed by sudden leaks. I used to be constantly on edge, searching for a restroom whenever I was out. Then I discovered better woman. I was skeptical at first, but two months in, everything changed. I experienced improved bladder control. No more heart-stopping moments when I laugh or sneeze. Less urged to go, deeper and more restful sleep. I finally felt like myself again, confident and in control. Better Woman is natural, effective, clinically tested, and trusted by women for over 25 years. Ready to take back your control? Head over to Bebetternow.com to order your supply today. That's Bebetternow.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Users directed individual results may vary.