In this revenue-focused episode, Kyle Mealy, CEO of Next Level Coaching, shares how he specializes in helping small B2B businesses between $1M and $10M achieve their next profitable and predictable revenue level.
You will discover:
– Why, as entrepreneurs, we never graduate from taking courageous action, and how does that courage change shape over time
– One simple exercise you can do to scale your revenue dramatically
– Why you need to stop talking about sales and what you should do instead
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with a a an acquaintance, and I would dare say friend of mine, the one and only Kyle Mealy, who is a fractional chief revenue officer, who helps in professional service and recurring revenue businesses between $1 million and ten million he helps them find profitability and growth. He offers fractional Chief Revenue Officer services designed to give affordable executive leadership to small businesses. His company, Next Level coaching, has a 100% success rate in doubling top line revenue in three years or less, including an average first year growth rate of 30.4% and 10x profitability. Kyle has previously sat in the COO CEO and CRO seats with businesses ranging from startups to over $26 million in revenue, and he is here with us today. Kyle, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here. I feel like we’ve chatted about like a dozen times, but we finally got to hit record. So I want to jump in, because reaching a million dollars is no easy task, right? A million dollars in revenue is quite an accomplishment as it is. Very few businesses make it this part. But the kind of dirty secret about generating a million dollars, like lots of people want a million dollars, and then they get there and they realize it’s actually not a great place to stay. It tends to be very unstable. It’s a ton of work to generate a million dollars. It disappears really quickly with all the expenses. And so if folks who are not there yet, it’s okay. It’s a great milestone, but very quickly you’re gonna realize we’ve got to keep this thing going. So my question for you and all of that is, let’s say we’ve got someone founder doing a million dollars, proud of it, rightly should be. But what’s the mindset shift? The primary mindset shift they need to make to move their company from that million dollar company to 10 million in annual revenue.
Kyle Mealy
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I’m glad we get to click Record and have this conversation, and I’m very grateful to be here. Yeah, the goal for me, simply, is help listeners make those shifts and provide some actionable insights. And so I’ll start right in with the let’s call them the million dollar founder. They’re probably sitting in the marketing and sales seat, and they’ve probably figured it out. But it doesn’t mean it’s reproducible. And so the first question I would ask them is, how is it reproducible? And if the answer is, well, then that’s the first mindset shift is, how are we gonna we’re gonna bottle you up.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, and that’s so true, and it it’s surprisingly difficult, right, especially to do on your own. And this is why I love when folks like you can come alongside, because some of our folks may have heard of joharis window, but there’s this idea of things that you know, you know, you don’t know. You’d know you know that don’t know, does it whatever, whatever, but what I’ve found in this process that makes that that mindset shift so hard, is what you don’t know that you know, right? There are so many things that are just kind of intuitive, all right, about like, what we’ve learned, but we didn’t really realize we learned it. And so we give it to someone else and say, Go sell. But we don’t give them the rest of that knowledge. Have you run into that? And if so, what are some steps to kind of track that down and actually codify it?
Kyle Mealy
I love this, the Johari Window. I have the exact same issue describing and I can’t remember all the pieces. I’ve got a simpler way of putting this exact problem that you’re like, right around the edges of it’s the label. It’s reading the label from inside the jar problem. Usually these CEOs founders have made it work, because generally, and E Myth, a myth, kind of confirms this. They’re the technician, they’re the subject matter expert. They are the the wizard behind the curtain, usually up until that is certainly that million dollar mark. And this definitely expands beyond the up to 5 million, I feel like it’s true there. And so they’re in the jar trying to shout what they solve, but they can’t read the label and make it really simple for others to understand what’s in the jar, what is their special sauce, what makes them unique and and what problem they actually solve? Because along the way to a million, they’re usually having to, in some ways say, Yes, we can do that. Yes, we can. They have this kind of awful aggregate. So I think one of the simplest ways that we actually make an impact immediately on business owners who are in that 3 million who kind of are like, well, we can do this. We can kind of do that. Well, we’ve done that before, is it’s a very simple whiteboard exercise. Tell me the client you love, tell me the three clients you love, love, love. You just want to work with them. They’re fun. Tell me the three clients you the most successful with. Tell me the three clients that you are the most profitable with, and when you write those three out. Now do the inverse. Tell the clients that you hate. Tell me the clients your teammates hate. Tell me the clients that are the most annoying and that you aren’t very good. At and all of a sudden you get a lot of clarity, you know who we need to be talking to. And then when you can do that now, we can start to write the label of what, what is the secret sauce? And that’s the start of codifying.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true. One of the things that I have found is, and for our listeners who are familiar with the predictable success model, a lot of times that that million dollar mark is around the early part of fun. So we’re getting out of this early struggle, fight for survival. And that early struggle, fight for survival is all about saying yes, right? I mean, it doesn’t matter if they even complete the sentence, you’re right, we’re saying yes, you have a page. Yeah, I’ve got it. I’m in. We’re in, and what I’ve found is you will fail that stage if you don’t say yes, enough, right? So for many people, it’s necessary to go wide, but for everyone who does that, it is necessary that to then narrow down again once you get to this point. And I love the exercise, because I think it’s such a simple way of understanding what we do need to start saying no to so that we really can say yes to the right things. Would you agree?
Kyle Mealy
Oh, I couldn’t agree more. I love your guys’s model and kind of the approach to the fun and getting towards Whitewater. And I heard it another way of, kind of wading into it, is this first million is this massively courageous leap from a from an entrepreneur. But the danger of that million is there is success behind it, right? You’re so successful that you stop doing the thing that got you there. And in entrepreneurship, it’s really that courageous leap. And so you never really leave courage. There’s never a destination. You never really get there. It’s just this repetitive cycle of stepping back into the courage. And so the courage here might be saying no to clients that you before were saying yes to because that’s kind of that next wave, and it’s and it’s being honest with what you’re really good at. And that’s, yeah, it doesn’t seem like it’s scary, but when you kind of have come from scarcity into some abundance. It is scary all over again. So I’ll totally agree with you.
Scott Ritzheimer
Such an unbelievably good point, because the courage early on is to say Yes, right? That is the courage thing, right? But then the courage at this next stage is to say no, right? And so, you know, it’s crazy, and it’s really it does a number on your head when you’re sitting right there in the middle of it. And again, going back to your reading from the inside of the draw. This is another way that that plays out. Is you might be sitting there thinking, Yes, we are courageous. We are saying yes, but the real courage is actually narrowing your focus so that you can make it reproducible.
Kyle Mealy
This is the secrets of the high demand coach. And guess what? You need outside perspective to read the label on the jar. And that is also a big, scary stretch to have somebody else tell you about your business. And guess what happens between the one and 10, it’s when they start to get outside perspective. It’s when they start to have somebody tell them these things that maybe they know intuitively or they believe deeply, but it’s so easy to say, I believe it. And then, you know, you turn off that, that part of your world, and then you go back into the work. And then you’re worried about payroll, you’re worried about cash flow, and the fears come in.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true. So once you decide to to grow revenue, right? We’re at a million dollars, we get new, fresh vision for 10,000,001 of the things I found is like, it’s like, yes, we’re in. Let’s do it. And then the next question is, what do we do? Right? And it’s not for a shortage of ideas, right? We’re talking about like, visionary leaders that are founders, that they’ve got ideas until the next century, but I found a real challenge going, you know, just piggybacking right off of our last conversation is figuring out which ideas to actually focus on, right? How do we actually move the needle? How do you help folks figure that out?
Kyle Mealy
Yeah, there’s a couple of ways to do this, and I, you know, especially in modern B to B. I really teach marketing plus sales equals revenue. Let’s stop thinking about the language of we need more sales because the the language there tells us to get more sales people. And that’s when I think you alluded to this already. We go higher. That’s, you know, $50,000 person off the street to go pound on doors and in Call, call everybody they know, and give them a tiger a laptop, and say, Go get them Tiger. And then nothing happens. And then the visionary, the CEO, goes, these sales people suck. And it’s like, no, no, you’re approaching the problem the wrong way. Well, fine, we need more marketing. I need more people on my website. So they spend a bunch of money on a website, bunch of money on an agency, and they’re back to square one. This is what, this is the this is the thing. So fundamentally, I say, hey, let’s do a revenue cascade. So let’s do a diagnostic of from the moment someone even thinks about your brand, or here’s your brand right the furthest way out in the top of the funnel. And then we stack your marketing funnel right on top of your sales pipeline. And like an MRI, we take lots. Little slices of everything that happens between the moments that they hear about you to the moment they sign on the bottom or in the dotted line. And with that piece of information, we can start to make really strategic, surgical decisions that aren’t always expensive, that aren’t always bringing you know, like a a gun to a knife fight or a knife to a gun fight.
Scott Ritzheimer
We had a guest on the show way back first 10 or 15 episodes, something like this. And he was also familiar with predictable success. And one of the things we did is, kind of walk through the different stages. What do you need? And one of the things that he said that was fantastic is, especially early on, that first million it’s you can actually get distracted by too much marketing and and marketing in that stage really is sales support. But what I’ve found, and I think one of the biggest challenges that you’re, you’re kind of referring to here, is you can’t scale without it, right? Like you go to 10x that again, you go to multiple sales people, if you just try and add a bunch of sales people, and you don’t really generate any kind of business for them or with them, right? Depending on your model, either one is fine. Then again, it’s never really going to get past what the founder or a person can do by themselves, and you never really actually grow revenue, even if you have someone else doing it?
Kyle Mealy
I couldn’t, yeah, I couldn’t agree more there. I think marketing evolves just like the business evolves, right? Marketing early on is word of mouth. It’s having a cool logo, like, how many founders sit there and worry about the logo for, you know, 18, you know, hours, and it’s like, but, but in that early stage, it’s it’s so just like you putting yourself out there, right? It really starts with you putting yourself out there, and then as you get to this one to 10, it stops being about you, it starts being about your customer. And how do you start to morph the message less about you and more about the customer, and also do it in a scalable way where it doesn’t require your voice, and that’s the that’s so difficult to manage, and that’s that’s kind of that label on the jar problem, too. Most of the visionaries I know, the CEOs, I know they can talk about their product forever, but they don’t know where to start talking about the product, and if we would. So that’s what we generally do, is help kind of build a so we have a very simple system behind us that we put in place there to help extract that information and then put it into a sequence that makes sense, that can be executed on and and pushed out there at scale, in a process way, in a cheap way.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah,
Kyle Mealy
That’s that shift they have to take.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So good. So Kyle, you kind of already mentioned some of already mentioned some of this, but there’s a question I like to ask all my guests, and just to see if there’s any anything else that we can pull out of out of you here, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching and listening today knew?
Kyle Mealy
I’ve, I’ve kind of given it away already, but I so deeply believe it is that we cannot keep thinking of, you know, especially in this one to 10, B to B professional services, that there’s a marketing thing and a sales thing. Stop calling it sales. Stop calling. Think always in terms of revenue. And so I teach it as we should be playing Moneyball. If you guys are familiar with Moneyball, that’s the, it’s the Billy Bean concept where he had the Oakland a Oakland Athletics, the baseball team with a very tiny payroll, but they were trying to play and, you know, find talent and go, can build a team like the New York Yankees, who had a, you know, 5x their payroll. But in small business, we don’t. We have to be like the Oakland Athletics. We have to focus on analytics, and we have to find cheap moves. And that’s our that’s our job. So, and the way to do that is start thinking differently about our language and not say sales, say revenue.
Scott Ritzheimer
Kyle, there’s some folks listening to this. They’ve been banging their head against the wall for a long time, and finally found an answer to the challenge they’re facing. Where can they where can they find more out about you? How can they connect with you to learn more about the work you do?
Kyle Mealy
So spew all my thoughts all the time on LinkedIn, so that’s an easy one. Connect with me there. Our website is readyforthenextlevel.com. Because they’ve been banging their head against the wall wondering what to do. That’s when you know you’re ready for the next level. Haha, couldn’t resist. I’m a marketer at heart and on there, I highly recommend you find the revenue cascade. It’s just election ready for the next level.com/revenue-cascade. It’s a diagnostic tool. It is a I don’t even require any email, because I want everybody to have it. You just take it and use it, because you’re going to start spending way less money on stupid marketing and way less money on stupid sales, and you’re gonna start thinking holistically about your marketing and sales revenue.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Kyle, thank you so much. So glad to have you on the show. Feels like it’s long overdue, but I’m glad to have you here. Those of you watching and listening today, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much. Much out of this conversation, as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care. Bye.
Contact Kyle Mealy
Kyle Mealy is a fractional chief revenue officer who helps clients in professional services and recurring revenue businesses between $1M and $10M find profitability and growth. He offers Fractional Chief Revenue Officer services designed to give affordable executive leadership to small businesses. His company, Next Level Coaching, has a 100% success rate in doubling top-line revenue in 3 years or less, including an average 1st-year growth rate of 30.4% and 10X profitability. Kyle has sat in COO, CEO, and CRO seats with businesses from startups to over $26M in revenue.
Want to learn more about Kyle Mealy’s work at Next Level Coaching? Check out his website at https://www.readyforthenextlevel.com/revenue-cascade
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