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In today’s episode, Allan welcomes Shawn Dill with the Black Diamond Club. The Black Diamond Club is a community of like-minded entrepreneurs and service professionals, who are committed to building a bigger business, higher incomes, and better lives. Allan and Shawn discuss the difference between growing a business and scaling a business, and why it is important to invest in yourself and relationships in order to achieve success.
For more information, visit https://blackdiamondclub.com/
Shawn would like to invite everybody to contact him by email, he has an Amazon best selling book called None of Your Business. If you would like to get a copy, send him an email at Shawn@BlackDiamondClub.com
Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I’m Allan. I’m a family man and attorney and an entrepreneur. Each week, we provide resources and advice to help build your business. Are you ready? Then? Let’s go. Everyone, welcome to the business growth pod. I’m your host, Allan Draper. I am excited to welcome Shawn Dill. And he’s with the Black Diamond Club. The Black Diamond Club is a community of like minded entrepreneurs and service professionals who are committed to building bigger businesses, higher incomes and better lives. Man, that’s music to my ears. All right, Shawn, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, Allan. It’s super great to be with you super excited to see what comes of this.
Yeah, absolutely. So tell me a little bit about yourself. Tell me about the Black Diamond Club. You know, I have quite a few service business entrepreneurs that are listening. And you know, we want to hear about what the Black Diamond Club does.
Sure, well, first of all, I’m a chiropractor by profession. I haven’t actually been in practice for a number of years. I do own along with my wife, Lacey book, a chiropractic franchise, we have offices across the country. I have been in chiropractic for 26 years, I’ve practiced in Costa Rica, I wrote the law that regulates chiropractic, their move back to the United States started the franchise, and one of the things I discovered is that, you know, the world’s greatest service providers, the people that are the most skilled, the most talented, most of them actually live in relative obscurity, simply because they do not embrace the concepts of marketing, sales mindset, they shelter themselves from the world, because they don’t want to be entrepreneurs, they don’t want to be business owners, they think that’s kind of taboo. So we’ve developed the Black Diamond Club to help them shine, to help them to fall in love with the idea of being an entrepreneur, so that they can reach more people make a bigger impact and create the lifestyle that they actually deserve.
Yeah, we, you know, on this podcast, we talk a lot about the E myth, right, we talk a lot about Michael Gerber. And his work, we talk a lot about people that they, they kind of fall into entrepreneurship, they don’t go seek it out, they’re good at something, right? They’re a good technician in their field. And then all of a sudden, they find themselves running a business and, and trying to scale it. And it’s not the same thing, right, you can be very good at whatever your skill is, whatever your experiences, and learn that you have some hurdles, when you when you start a business
100% you know, I say there’s a big difference between working for yourself and being an entrepreneur. So a lot of people maybe they had a job at some point. And they’re like, you know what, I hate this, I hate having a boss, I just want to work for myself. But what happens is oftentimes they just went and now they’ve replaced themselves with the boss. So the boss is now them. But they still do the same thing, right? They show up at nine o’clock, they want to leave at five o’clock. And they don’t really enjoy or even want to deal with any of the parts of managing, administrating running a business. Being an entrepreneur means that you actually embrace those things, right? So that you no longer are just your own boss, but you actually embrace the concept of being a visionary casting a vision leading a team, that team might be just one or the person, that team might also just be yourself. You know, you mentioned the E myth where maybe you’re wearing all three hats. But it means that you’re embracing that leadership role, and that you’re willing to step out of just being your own boss there. For me, there’s a distinction between those two things. And I think that if you’re just your own boss, you are just as handcuffed as if you are working for someone else.
Oh, 100% You know, when I started my first business, so I was practicing law in Phoenix. And I gave that up, thank goodness. And I became an entrepreneur. And I started a pest control company. That was my first business. I moved to Detroit, Michigan started a pest control company that’s still around today and across the United States. But I always tell people that I was practicing law one week, and I was treating homes spraying for bucks the next. But I think the difference is I wasn’t I didn’t start a pest control company because I was a good technician per se, like I learned kind of those skills and that information. But I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And so I started there. And then I went into, you know, the bug industry. And, you know, I think it’s such a, it’s such a tough hurdle for them to overcome. And I know this is ringing true with so many of my listeners right now, right there. The reason why people listen to me is because I help them one start companies and to grow them. And starting sometimes is it can be I know, I know, they’re not gonna like hearing this, but it can be the easier part, right? It’s once you get into it, and you’re like, Okay, now what do I do? I hung a shingle. Now I’ve got work to do. What is it about these quote unquote, technicians, right? somebody that has a particular skill that really trips them up when they’re going from starting to the actual scaling process?
Well, I’ll actually put it in the in the three phases. So I think there’s startup I think there’s growth, and then I think there’s scale. Right? And I think there’s a clear distinction between growth and scale startup is, you know, and there’s a lot of people that are frankly, just addicted to startup, right? That’s the high adrenaline, that’s the person that just loves the thrill. I mean, there’s big risk, you don’t know what you’re going to be doing. I mean, it’s so for a lot of people, they love that for a lot of people, that’s the worst part, right? Because they don’t like that instability, the long hours, who knows what I’m going to be doing, once we can get basically, I think you’re in startup mode, until you can crossover out of the red and into the black. And then you have produced enough revenue enough profit to where you’re able to live right before that, like you’re just eating ramen noodles. And look, every successful entrepreneur has the stories right when they were in startup, and they were trying to make ends meet, then comes growth. And I think one of the things is, is to draw a distinction between growth and scale, growth is very linear. And what oftentimes happens in growth is it’s an awful lot of dollar in dollar out and you’re trying to produce an ROI, I might run marketing initiatives and find initiatives that are working. And then if they’re working, what I need to do is I need to push more dollars in a lot of people in order to grow, you need to hire more staff. So I have an outlay because I’ve hired the human resource. And then from that outlay, I start to get an ROI on that. Scale is more of an exponential growth rate scale is when I’m talking about maybe duplicating myself, so I could bring on more technicians and now I’m able to provide more service, I could also then duplicate the business, I can go into multiple units. And then ultimately, I might even find myself in franchises where I’m ultimately scaling because now other people are investing and I’m getting multiple units out there. And I’m getting a revenue uptick based off of the work of other people. That’s not necessarily dollar in dollar out. In fact, oftentimes in scale, it could be no money in and then many dollars out. But in order to get to scale, you have to have a provable model, which means that you had to have gone through growth. And in order to get to growth, you have to have survived a startup.
Yeah, I love that. I mean, you know, in order to scale there’s, there’s so many things that are required, specially regarding systems, right, you’ve got to get to a point where, with these crucial systems, you can basically rubber stamp stuff. And I think it’s a great idea, even though you may not necessarily have a franchise model, but to think of it like that, to, you know, approach it to the point where you’re like, Hey, this is how to do it. Right? And, and you can basically hand those instructions over to a manager, somebody that’s skilled, and they can replicate it, right? They can replicate that experience for a customer. I love
that I think that systems are critical, every system and this is where, frankly, when you have a solopreneur where you wore all the hats, most of the time you don’t have systems because it’s all in your head. So for the listeners, I would say critical that you’re documenting everything that you do. I mean in today’s world with technology, a lot of stuff is happening on the computer, you can do a screencast a loom and just document that throw that up in Google Docs or somewhere in a Dropbox and now that that can live into perpetuity on how you are doing a certain thing. Another tip I think is super important as you begin to grow with more human resource always stress test your system so what that means is if I am in charge of payroll one day Allan I have you do payroll and I just give you I give you the the SRP the systems that we’ve created, and I tell you read the document and you run payroll. Now if you are not able to do that, then I don’t actually have a documented very well do I. So stress testing your systems is also critical because of course, I know how to do it, I wrote it down, I think I have a system, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone else could do the system. You know,
I think that is a great idea. And I have, I’ve never heard of that, right? We, a lot of times we’re so focused on, especially as entrepreneurs, hey, we’re just trying to get through the day, right? And, and me, you’re basically creating no way a quasi problem for yourself, you’re saying, Hey, I’m going to give the role to somebody else. And this reminds me a little bit of what Tony Shea was doing, may he rest in peace, one of my mentors, somebody I thought was a visionary, and did so many great things. But he always advanced this concept of allowing people to do different things, get hired for one thing and end up in a different department. And I always thought that was a little weird. But this idea of a stress test, I think this is fantastic, right? I think we struggle so much as young entrepreneurs, people that are early on, we struggle so much when we lose somebody, right? We lose a key a key person, and, and their creativity and their personality, those things are essential to our company, those things, a lot of times we can’t replace, but just getting the job done with this process that you recommend. I think that’s fantastic. Now, I think with early entrepreneurs, you still got to pay the bills and keep the lights on, right. So that we kind of focus on, but we go through cycles throughout the year, you know, hey, I’m not super busy this week. Let’s give it a shot. Right? I think that’s I think that’s a fantastic idea that I would recommend to all my listeners, they’re in a position where they have a little bit of breathing room, right? They’re trying to go from, okay, we’re comfortable. We’ve been in business, maybe a year or two we have we have revenue, we have, you know, a backup plan. Now let’s test ourselves, right, let’s test those processes.
100%. And I think that’s one of the things that stops people from being able to scale, you know, back to your original point of systems, is they think they have systems, they attempt to maybe launch a satellite, or maybe you’re in Detroit, and you attempt to open pest control in Indianapolis, and it doesn’t go that well. Maybe it even fails. And people are always like I you know, I don’t know. And typically what they say is you can’t find good people. But and oftentimes what it is, is you just never gave the good people the tools, aka the systems, the protocols, the esops, in order to execute on what you were doing in Detroit. And so that’s if you’ve experienced that maybe to where you’ve tried to scale and you’ve not had the best of luck at it. Oftentimes, I think that you just don’t have your systems documented. And train training is a key component too. You can’t just give somebody a document, and maybe they weren’t trained on the systems. That is oftentimes, in my opinion, probably the number one obstacle to scaling.
Man, the more I think about this, and I I am one for hyperbole, but this is and maybe it’s just because of how it’s hitting me for the businesses that I own. This is one of the best ideas I have heard from any guests on my podcast. I think this is fantastic. And I’m actually going to call the CEO of a set of my companies right after this and say, Look, how do we do it? How do we get this into place? Because I think so many times, we focus on people, and we blame people when it’s not the person that’s at fault. It’s the process.
Absolutely. I mean, people just try to do the best they can with what they’re given. I mean, they have a job. You know, in this case, we’re not talking about entrepreneurs, we’re talking about people that came in to actually fulfill a purpose with their job. And we’ve got to give them the tools that that they need to be successful.
I love it. Let’s talk about the Black Diamond Club a little bit. You know, let’s imagine, Sean that we have an entrepreneur let’s say they’ve got a year under their belt. They’re generating maybe a couple $100,000 in revenue a month. How does the Black Diamond Club get them to five $600,000 a month?
You know, I think that it’s interesting it seems like entrepreneurs and most businesses the holy grail you know we’re trying to track down a seven figure profit seven figure income I think that another discussion to be had especially amongst entrepreneurs as we need to have seven figures of active at least coupled with seven figures of passive income. So what we do is we teach people the marketing and sales concepts that are forward thinking if you will, outside the box Look, I hope that you know, if you’re saying look, I never thought about a stress test with my systems. What I what I hope also rings true is that almost all great business advice is counter intuitive. Reason being is because if it was intuitive, we would have been doing it anyways. So I always feel that I’m willing to pay money for people to give me counter intuitive advice. And what that means is we’re looking forward We’re being predictive. In the Black Diamond Club in February of 2020, we began to speak about adjustments that would have to be made to everyone’s business due to a pandemic, that quite frankly, people thought I was crazy. I’m talking about February of 2020, before even the borders were closed here, and you know, the information that we were receiving was that this was a big deal. And so we had to start to talk about adjustments. Well, here we are, late 2021. And I think there’s another issue that’s arising, that is actually a bigger threat to, you know, entrepreneurs in the service world, which is the pending economic correction that basically has to happen, based off of all of the things that we’ve done to get through the pandemic. Well, again, we’re going to have to adjust our businesses. Now, this is counterintuitive. Why? Because most people and probably 95% of the people that listened to your show, they did really great over the last year, but they did great in an artificial economy that was propped up by stimulus money by people not having to work having time to spend. And so sure, if you had a great year, I congratulate you. But frankly, I think that you had a great year, when it was cherry picking. Now over the next year, I think things are going to get a lot more difficult, we’re going to have to see at some point a rise in interest rates, we’re gonna have to see a dip in the housing market, this forbearance needs to end, the middle classes going to be squeezed. So if you make the majority of the lion’s share of your revenue off of the middle class, or you’re going to have to be adapting over the next year, coming up. And so those are the discussions that you would hear in Black Diamond Club, things that are counterintuitive about how you might modify your marketing, how you might modify your offerings, how you might modify your sales process in order to get ahead of the curve. So we’re not being so reactionary to things that are that are coming at us on a day to day basis is we’re trying to navigate our own business.
I love that because you know, one time I was I think I was speaking with it was an insurance broker. And we were talking about general liability insurance. And there was she had a question for me that I didn’t know the answer to. And she said something like, in order to start a business, you have to know everything. She said the word everything. And I thought that was kind of interesting, because if that were the case, no one would ever start businesses. But early entrepreneurs have such a hard time seeing what’s in the future, right? Being able to know like, and that’s why I think mentorship and surrounding yourself with successful people or people that are maybe a step or two ahead of you is so important. This Black Diamond Club allow I talk a lot about finding a good mentor and and learning from them. does it allow for those relationships where, you know, you can ask some questions that you may be nervous to ask in, you know, a group setting or something like that,
oh, 1,000,000%, we have Black Diamond Club coaches who do offer one on one coaching, we have group coaching, we have accountability groups that they don’t pay anything, they just formed their own accountability groups. And you know, to your point of having great mentors who can see ahead, you know, one of my most valued mentors, Jay Abraham, has a book called The CEO who can see around corners. So I think it’s not just seeing ahead, but we need to be able to see around the corners, right? So it’s, when I’m moving ahead, it’s what’s around the corner that I cannot see that attacks me, that surprises me, that throws me off course. So I also think you want to have mentors that are able to and that’s again, goes back to counterintuitive, because they’re telling you about things like Well, I know that you’re doing well. But we might want to make some adjustments now for a recession, and you’re like, give it we’re not in a recession. And so the ability to see around that corner is is extremely valuable. And the other thing is, like I have just learned from the school of hard knocks, it’s so valuable to pay. For that advice. You can read Facebook posts, and blog posts and listen to podcasts. You know, we have our own podcast, this podcast phenomenal, and it gives you information. But it gives you information, honestly at a superficial level, because you and I are having a discussion. But we know nothing about the actual granular things that are going on in each individual listener. And so paying for particular customized personalized advice is extremely valuable, because it allows you and it affords you the predictive nature to be able to forecast the changes that you need to make and I have to tell you as soon as you’re no longer reactionary in your business, and I just think about it if you’re listening like are you making or do you feel like every day you’re reactionary, like oh, you know, oh, this person is missing. So I had to do this or all of these things that we do in business to no longer be reactionary provides you so much comfort and ease and your ability to navigate and grow.
Yeah, I love this. You know, and I love this concept of paying for help. At some point you have to invest in yourself. And when you start putting your money on the line and saying hey, I’m worth this, I’m worth this Development I’m worth worth this class, I’m worth this program or whatever, not only, I think there’s a lot of reasons why those that setup works, I think there’s more pressure like, Hey, I paid for this, it’s not some YouTube video that I can just watch for free, like, I actually need to focus, I need to bring my a game, I need to put energy into it and behind it. But I think it’s I just love what it does for the perception that somebody has of themselves. And as entrepreneurs, we suffer so much from imposter syndrome. It we, you know, each time we get to the next level, we feel like we don’t belong. And if we’re putting money, where we need to, and that’s in ourselves and developing ourselves, I think that goes away a little bit, I think we can surround ourselves with successful people, and get to the point where we feel like we we belong, which is, that’s a huge battle that every entrepreneur needs to needs to win.
Well, I got to talk to you about how you figured out how to make yourself feel like you belong these you just keep elevating, I remember recently I was at a mastermind, where I mean, I think I was the I was the poorest person in the whole room, the least successful person in the entire space, and it’s uncomfortable, but what you do is you remind yourself, and my good friend, Scott Duffy, he was on our podcast and did an exercise and I’ll share it with you because it was it was so impactful, where he talked about write down, like literally take a moment right now and write down the name of the five people that you hang out with you, they say you are the average of the five people that you hang out with. But now let’s go one step further. And let’s write down next to each name what you think they make, right? So what you think they make, and then add up the five numbers and then take an average of it, and see if that’s approximately what you make. And so a lot of us are trying to elevate, but we have that imposter syndrome. And we’re frankly not willing to change our environment to elevate our own selves to where we’re trying to go. That’s maybe the anchor that’s holding you back.
Yeah, 100%. And when you’re, when you’re finding programs, like the Black Diamond Club, these other programs that you actually pay for, you’re changing who you hang out with, which is it, which is a really, really big part of growing personally developing and getting to the next getting to the next level. And I think a really big part of it is and I talked about this a lot I talked about when you compare yourself to others, it’s not always bad. Sometimes it’s good. Because if you look at somebody that that maybe isn’t a place where you want to be someday. What that does, if you look at it through the right lens with the right perspective, it tells you this is possible. Sometimes all we want to know is is it possible. And when you surround yourself with successful people, you realize that key fact like hey, he did it, I can do it. And so that seems like it would be an invaluable asset of the Black Diamond Club.
Absolutely. You know, and one of my favorite questions is, you know, what makes them so different? You know, what makes you know, they’re not smarter than you. They’re, you know, what makes them so different? I gotta tell you, oftentimes, it’s the relationships, it’s relational capital, you know, so I love the advice invest in yourself. The second piece of advice I would say, is invest in relationships. We don’t really invest a lot in relationships. JOHN rulan, author of gift, ology talks about ROI, our versus ROI, the return on relationship. And if we understood that, I think that we would modify maybe some of that stinginess that we have our sort of resistance to giving to appropriate gifting to invitations, if you really pour into relationships, now you’re beginning to elevate, right, your your five people that you hang out with, and then they’re being drawn and drawn along in that week. So when you look at like, what makes them so different, one of the things that I have found almost always is well, they have different relationships than I have
100% I love that concept ROI. That’s fantastic. Shawn, I could talk to you for several hours where our time’s up where can people find out about the Black Diamond Club about all the great things that you guys are accomplishing?
Well, hey, first of all, I want to invite everybody to contact me by email, we have an Amazon best selling book called None of Your Business. If they’d like to get a copy, just shoot me an email Shawn@BlackDiamondClub. com
I will send you a free copy of the digital file of the entire book. You can have that for free. And of course, by saying that BlackDiamondClub.com that’s where you can find information on all the great things that we’re doing.
Thanks, Shawn is a real pleasure privilege. You can really tell that you have vast experience in being a business owner and a coach and it’s a it’s a real honor for us to have you on our show.
Well, the honor is all mine. Thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing your audience your influence with me. Absolutely fantastic. You rock. Thank you so much.
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