10xing Your Results

How much time do you spend thinking about leverage? High performance marketers spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Leverage is what you need if you want to take what you’re currently doing and 10x it. In other words, to scale.

I encourage my team to always consider what their projects will look like if we were to amplify their output by 10 times. Sometimes I’m met with a look of terror and that’s a good thing!

Better to walk things through before we make the jump to the next level. If we can’t 10x something, then it may not even be worth doing.

On my team we try to think in terms of experiments instead of campaigns. A campaign has the connotation of one and done, and there’s little leftover to leverage. What I’m looking for is what’s going to give us an edge on our next one?

Systems and automation are key

I don’t want to have to continually start from scratch. I want systems and automation – that’s one of the best ways to leverage your capacity as a business.

A lot of times we’ll try an experiment on a small scale and we’ll get a great result, but there’s no available way to 10x it. It’s a bit of a letdown, and that’s why I try to bake in scalability from the beginning.

Usually, when I’m thinking about 10xing something early on in the process I want to figure out what the true bottleneck will be and mitigate against it.

I like to outsource things whenever possible and have people on my team manage them for me. When you build a system like that and try to 10x it the bottlenecks become clear.

We can’t expect our outsourced teams to handle everything with as high a level of quality as our core team.

So we determine what tasks we assign for the ones that don’t need to necessarily be at a 100% quality level in order to produce the ROI we’re looking for.

Other times we realize that we can’t get past a certain bottleneck and we have to just move on.

 

When And Where To Use Leverage

There’s really only two inputs in marketing: time and money. In order to gain leverage, we need to be 10xing our result without having to also 10x our inputs.

Sometimes you do have to increase your inputs a bit to get to the point where your results start to compound.

Paid advertising is a great example of where you can apply 10x thinking in your business. We have paid ads that we’ve been running for years without changing a thing. A lot of people will tell you that you need to be constantly changing creative, targeting…everything! It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it system, we’re monitoring it, and we do make tweaks from time to time.

But there’s a huge advantage to us to have all this additional capacity available since our ad funnel is fully leveraged. This frees us up to work in other areas and create even more leverage.

 

Action Steps

  1. Run small experiments in your marketing, and consider how to 10x these tests.
  2. Think about where the bottleneck will be when you scale and work to mitigate against it early on in the process.
  3. Decide what your priorities are and if you are going to leverage for money or time.
  4. Find a system like paid ads that can be fully leveraged to offer you greater capacity.

 

Result You Will Achieve

More capacity in your business and better ROI on your market by always focusing on 10xing your results.

Mentor: Adam Blake

Chief Marketing Officer of Thrivehive. Adam Blake currently serves as a Professional Advisor at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center where he advises early stage startups on marketing, sales, financing, technology, and general business issues.

This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.