Attention CEOs, are you struggling to scale your business? If you are, you've got to focus on the five universal growth truths. If you've forgotten about them or you never learned them in the first place, don't worry. We've got them for you on this episode of your Daily Dose of Dave on the Inside BS channel.

Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth and this is only the seventh time I've tried to get the opening of this episode right and we're going with whatever happens next. We are here with you every day of the week.

We're here every day giving you great guidance to help you take your lifestyle business and turn it into a fantastic investment that can run without your day-to-day involvement. In fact, it can build so much enterprise value that you can have as many options as you want when you're ready to exit. That's why we call ourselves the Exit Success Lab.

Nikki G and I will be here on Wednesday with a fantastic interview but for today we are focusing on the universal growth truths. As you're growing your business, you are going to be mired in a million details. You are going to be focused in the day-to-day operations of your business and as you're growing you can get to five maybe even seven million dollars in annual revenue just by sheer force of will and the ability to operate a fantastic business.

Maybe you're good at sales and you're good at your product development. Maybe you're great at customer service and you're great at product development. The key thing for you is getting the product right, making sure your customers are happy and that's what your day-to-day focus is on.

Then when it comes time to scale your business beyond five million to ten million or twenty million, you need to focus on the things that I'm going to share with you today. I call these the five universal growth truths and while that's difficult to say, it is essential that we talk about these things today because you're busy running the day to day and you're not thinking about the overall strategic nature of your business. So let's get back to basics and talk about universal growth truth number one.

And that truth number one is that you must take consistent action to grow your business every day. You as the CEO, not your sales team, not your VP of marketing, you as the CEO have to take consistent action every day. If you want to scale your business, you've got to focus on growth activities for at least a portion of your day.

That means blocking out all distractions even if you're only dedicating an hour to it. No social media, no interruptions, whether you're actually reaching out to new leads yourself, calling them on the phone or whether you're sitting down with your team and refining your business development practices or whether you're brainstorming new ideas for lead generation. You've got to make growth a daily habit.

You as the CEO prioritizing growth is essential for the overall growth of the business because your actions demonstrate to the people who are your department heads or the people who are your front line employees, they demonstrate the priority of business development to these folks. They demonstrate new client acquisition as a priority. I'll give you an example.

Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx, built her entire empire through relentless daily action. She dedicated time each day to cold calling retailers. Think about that for a minute.

She's the CEO of Spanx. Before it became the overwhelming brand that it became, she was cold calling retailers. She got rejected all the time, but she kept pushing forward.

This consistent effort eventually landed her product in major stores, paving the way for her billion-dollar business. She got her distribution by pitching these people herself. The Sarah Blakely Spanx example is the perfect example of a CEO's effort.

You don't get retail distribution by hiring a company to buy shelf space for you. Not initially. You don't have the money to do that.

You get retail distribution by working hard, by being persistent, by banging on doors, and by demonstrating that you have the grit that it takes to withstand thousands of rejections. Universal growth truth number two is develop systems. To scale, you need systems.

Imagine you're running a factory and your business processes are the assembly line. Everything from customer onboarding to marketing campaigns should follow a repeatable system. Step by step should be scripted out.

It should be tested by the people who are actually doing the jobs. Then you should update these systems, these processes, so that you have solid business development systems that work consistently. Let me give you an example.

Sweetgreen is a fast, casual salad chain. They grew by developing highly efficient systems for sourcing local ingredients and ensuring consistent customer experiences across locations. What did they do? They had people out in the field making these calls, visiting these places to source the local ingredients.

When they found places they liked for the local ingredients, they created step-by-step guides, systems, and processes to ensure that the customer experience was the same from one location to the next. Their technology-driven operations, like a proprietary app that they developed for ordering and tracking orders, allowed them to scale while staying true to their core values. You should start by mapping out the core activities in your business, then ask yourself, how can I automate this? Is there a way this can be delegated beyond the level of myself and my senior team? If so, what are the steps that need to be taken in order to delegate it? If it can be automated, what are the systems that need to be in place to automate it? What is going to be the return on investment for those automation systems? Keeping in mind that a scalable business is built on systems and processes that are captured and written down and then refined over time continuously.

Systems and processes will be the thing that gets you a premium for your business if you ever decide to sell. If you don't want to sell, systems and processes will be the number one thing that enables you to step out of the day-to-day operations of business. Universal growth truth number three is that you must measure everything.

What gets measured gets improved. Every action you take to grow your business must be measured. If it's not, you shouldn't be doing it.

I'm going to say that again. If you can't measure it in business development, if you can't measure it in sales, if you can't measure it in marketing, you shouldn't be doing it. This is true whether it's tracking customer acquisition costs, monitoring social media engagement, or analyzing sales conversion rates.

Data is your best friend. It tells you what you need to do more of, it tells you what you need to do less of, and it tells you how much you should spend. Here's your example for this.

Warby Parker. Those of you who wear glasses, you know a lot about Warby Parker. They're a direct-to-consumer eyewear company.

They track every aspect of customer interactions. They measure their conversion rates in their virtual try-on feature. You can pick your glasses online, upload a picture, and do a virtual try-on, and they can determine how many of those people convert into customers and whether the experience is right for them or not.

They fine-tune their process, and they improve customer satisfaction rates and sales rates by looking at the data each and every week. This data-driven approach has allowed them to scale quickly while maintaining high-quality service. They notice if particular frames are not converting, and they switch those frames out.

They notice if people dump out of the sales process at a certain point. They call those customers. They ask why they left the website at the point they left, and they make modifications so that they fix the problem forever.

If you want to be like Warby Parker, you need to make the same adjustments based on the data that you're using to track what's going on, and you need to measure everything, every step along the way. Let's say you're running an ad campaign. Instead of just hoping for the best, you want to set key performance indicators, KPIs.

You want to track your leads. You want to track your conversion rates, and you want to track the overall return on investment of the ad campaign. If the ad campaign generates leads and the leads don't convert, you know you have a problem with your sales process.

If the ad campaign doesn't generate leads, you know the problem is with the ad itself. This is the value of measuring, and it's the value of using data to run your business. Scaling a business without measurement is like driving with your eyes closed.

You wouldn't do it there, so you shouldn't do it in your business. The next universal growth truth is test before you invest. Before committing significant time or significant resources to any strategy, you need to test it on a small scale.

Testing saves you from costly mistakes, and it helps you find what resonates with your audience. Here's an example. Everlane is an ethical clothing brand.

They tested their concept of radical transparency. This was a concept where they told their customers how much it costs to source the materials for their products, and they told their customers what their profit margin was, and they told their customers every little thing about their supply chain and where their clothing was coming from, and they tested this radical transparency with a small audience before they launched it brand-wide, and the overwhelming response from that small audience was incredibly positive. They shared their pricing.

They shared their production costs. They shared everything with their customers, and they overwhelmingly loved the idea. This response validated the approach, and now Everlane has built their brand on this cornerstone of radical transparency.

If you're launching a new product, start with a small test group. If you're crafting a new marketing message, you've got to A-B test it with different audiences. The more you test, the more precise your approach becomes.

Testing one variable at a time, making slight changes, and then when everything is positive, rolling it out brand-wide, rolling it out in a big way. Think of testing as your business GPS. It keeps you on the fastest, most effective path to your destination, and then your fifth universal growth truth is be patient.

Scaling a business isn't a sprint. It's a marathon. You need to be patient.

Expect to see consistent growth over time, but not overnight. If you're doing the right things, if you're implementing systems, measuring results, testing strategies, success will come. The example that I'll give you here is an example that I love.

It's RX Bar. It's a protein bar company that started as a small business in a guy's basement, and I'm not joking. Actually, it was in the basement of his parents' house.

This is a guy who was a gym rat. He was a CrossFit nut, and he had an idea for a different kind of protein bar that included only the best ingredients and that was in alignment with the dedicated effort that the CrossFit community was putting into their health and wellness. He wanted to put the same effort into creating a protein bar, so he started making these bars in his parents' basement.

He would package them up and give them out to people in CrossFit gyms. As he was handing these out, people started coming up to him and asking to pay for them and order more. He couldn't keep up with the demand, so soon he and his partner ended up renting out a bigger kitchen and then scaling, and then they struggled for years to get placement on supermarket shelves.

Getting distribution was a nightmare for them, so what did they do? They sold out of the back of their cars. They sold to CrossFit gyms and had CrossFit gyms sell on consignment. They sold wherever they could, and then finally they were able to sell themselves into a retail distribution deal, and four years later they sold their protein bar company, which was the dream of a guy who loved CrossFit, which started in the basement of his parents' home.

They sold that business for $600 million to Kellogg's. That's not an overnight success. It took them 15 years to get to the place where they were able to get distribution and have the brand on supermarket shelves.

After they got the distribution, that's when they were picked up by a huge serial conglomerate. Those are your five universal growth truths. Those are the things you should focus on when you're scaling your business.

I'll recap them for you right now. Focus on growth every day. Build reliable systems.

Measure everything. Test before you commit. Be patient and persistent.

Applying these principles isn't just about growth. It's about creating a business that's built to give you the most options for your business, whether you want to sell or you just want to have an investment that continues to throw off cash and develop generational wealth for you and your family. Your action item for today is to review the five universal growth truths and return to them.

Bring your business back to basics and focus on each of these every day moving forward. I'm Dave Lorenzo, the Godfather of Growth. This is your Daily Dose of Dave and we will see you right back here tomorrow morning at 6 a.m.