Achieve 10x Growth: Proven Techniques for Entrepreneurs and Startups w/ Nader Sabry

the fish the most nutritious one is the Sardine so it's a little tiny one and sardine gets eaten by another fish and it keeps getting all the way up to the shark and you'd think the shark must be the most vegetative one because they're so dangerous but really if the Sardine didn't exist the little tiny one the shark wouldn't be able to do the job that it does and so take that analogy in the business right the large sharks need small little sardines uh in order for them to get vegetated and grow and so that's how the explosion of exponential growth uh kicks into play but there is a science behind [Music] it super welcome to Super entrepreneurs podcast I'm your host Shahed danani today we have with us nather Sabri nather has been described by his peer as the guy you don't want your competition to hire for his Innovative growth strategies that have propelled businesses to unprecedented success thank you so much for coming on our show it's a pleasure thank you thank you for the invitation and thank you for having me my pleasure a lot of people may not understand there's an art to it they they may think that you're just being overly excited and maybe trying to manipulate something but I'm very much excited to learn more about this concept of 10x growth hacking so can you define in your own words what it means in the context of business and why has it become such a the buzzworthy uh Concept in the entrepreneur world yeah absolutely so we'll break it down into two parts growth hacking and 10x so two two completely different things but they interconnect with each other in a very interesting way so we'll start with growth hacking so growth hacking is something that's been happening for a very long time actually so it sounds really new because it was only coined like a decade and a half ago which sounds like a long time ago but isn't and it was essentially because you have a group of of people who were applying these really Advanced strategies to grow companies out of the blue and so they were just like they had these phenomenal growth patterns and there was very little to understand how it was happening so it we just called growth hacking but in reality growth hacking has been happening across all Industries at all levels and it's been happening for a very long time so in my book Ready Set growth act one of the ones I talk about to demonstrate this is McDonald's roughly I think it was maybe in the 60s it was McDonald's had actually invented the Billboards on the freeway which was not the billboard itself but they invented the the drive-thru right so the Billboards didn't exist so they' actually go build them put them then they put a picture of a burger and say hey come through the drivethru and they we put it in a place where they knew there was a lot of traffic so people coming home at 5 6 7 p.m. would see that know hey I can pick up I can pick up some food on the way and so that precedent had not existed that strategy wasn't there and they essentially invented that and developed that uh growth strategy over many years everything from not just being drive-through but 24-hour drive-thru and simplifying that so it starts in a really simple Place traditional businesses can do it but those who are the best at it and best known for it are tech companies and it's not just because they are tech companies it's because there's something in the mindset and the C around tech companies where they are more adapt to dealing with growth hacking than a more traditional business and that would launch us into the 10x conversation basically where so 10x is I've been challenged many times before and there's actually a science behind it and before I go on by the way so growth hacking we now refer to it as a growth science because it's been developing I'll give a bit more story behind that a bit later on we'll jump into the 10x part which is gets a lot of people excited so 10x has been something something that's been way overused as a concept and it's it's really interesting because it get people drawn in but there's an actual science behind it and it stems from the growth Sciences itself and there's some actually some old but not so popular interviews with Steve Jobs okay so believe it or not he goes actually quite deep into this and you won't find many of these interviews they're out there and he starts talking about the philosophy of incremental Innovation versus taking a leap and being uh Innovative and you'd say every time we do this we want a 10x we're not looking for a 1x we're not looking for a 0.1 we're looking to 10x and so to do that we need to have the systems we need to have the mindset we need to have the technology in order to do that and that was the thinking around it and the same thing when it comes to a business so when I walk into a a company especially the larger companies who have incremental growth patterns it's instrumental that it's embedded really deep inside them and it's because it's culturally developed like that so when you go to Harvard Business School they don't teach you the growth Sciences they're starting to teach it now but you'd be taught how to grow an organization incrementally so you'd be logic yeah exactly so You' be like sticking to the Excel sheet let stay between the lines kind of no offense to any of that that that's all good stuff but that doesn't work alone excitement there exactly see it comes down to top down and bottom up growth so 99% of what an organization would do is incremental and bottom up grow anything so the secret is I say anything starts with an re so restructure rethink reorganize reoptimize all that means is you're re resourcing so I'm using the same resource but I'm using it in another way and there's nothing wrong with that you need to be using that type of growth but it's only incremental it won't give you exponential growth or the 10x you're looking for in order to do that you need to be looking at things very differently you need to be looking from the top top down type of growth and that is essentially breaking the boundaries of the existing Revenue you have and that's identifying models and new ways of being able to use the of course existing resource but also creating new resources out of them so let's let's put into a practical example when you look at an organization like alphabet their growth because as they get bigger and bigger comes from Acquisitions right and so in order to have that mindset that agility and be able to grow exponentially and continue to do that they can do it the same way they can if they were to buy a company or invest in a company they can do that and that's where the cbc's come into play and the whole Innovation uh ecosystem so if any of you are listening who are playing in that space this is a a very good way for you to plug into some of the larger targets and organizations who need you because they need you to grow and so there's an analogy and and ask people like hey what's the most nutritious fish in the whole fish ecosystem and if you just keep going down the food chain of of fish the most nutrition one nutritious one is the the Sardine right so it's a little tiny one and sardine gets eaten by another fish and it keeps getting all the way up to the shark and you think the shark must be the most vegetative one because they're so dangerous but really if the Sardine didn't exist the little tiny one the shark wouldn't be able to do the job that it does and so take that analogy in the business right the large sharks need small little sardines uh in order for them to get vegetated and grow and so that's how the explosion of exponential growth uh kicks into play but there is a science behind it and when I first started to explore it I started to ask myself some very simple questions that I do discuss in my book things like why does one company grow and another company doesn't grow and I looked over the last 25 years in building companies and investing in companies and why would some grow and why some would grow and it sounded really simple and it got the rolling but there was a lot more to these patterns things like why would a company start not growing and then eventually grow and why would one not grow and continue not to grow why would one grow and not grow and then I would look at the different variables and start to analyze different companies that I've worked with and other ones out there and building the data around it to understand the different growth patterns and that's where I started to understand the growth Sciences in a much deeper way and work with clients and educate people on how that would work in an organization for you so as I did that that the first book I wrote was which is this one here it's ready set growth hack I don't know if that hits on the screen there but there you go so what happened next was that that wasn't enough because as these unicorns and and Fortune 500s and and different people reading it there like there needs to be more to this like we get it what's the next thing to this and so then I looked at developing a methodology which is called growth thinking and growth thinking is essentially think of it like design thinking but for growth a visual approach to a structure to being able to develop a growth strategy and then apply it and be able to do the next part of it what happened was that it started to get popularized and then it started to get used at some of the big universities like Harvard now it's not part of the curriculum but part of the tool set they used and you there was people wrote different articles about it and they started get a little bit deeper into it and then I challenged myself I said what's the next level of disrupting this and that's when I created something called the 10-day growth hacking Challenge and it's a million-dollar challenge broken down to $10,000 challenges and we would use this methodology to show anybody through educ tional video so you can watch it all for free on YouTube and we can talk about it at the end but it's an excellent resource for anybody that's listening so if you're in the back of your mind you're now like dude I'm too small or my industry is too narrow or things are too complex or I don't have the resource like everything that you're thinking about now that there's an objection to you'll actually see the truth of how it actually would work with normal everyday entrepreneurs of all walks of life that have used this in its work and we did that intentionally people from all over the world different levels of growth people with different backgrounds and we challenge ourselves by bringing in the growth thinking to actually show and we demonstrate it through these uh videos so every Contender has five videos and there are five contenders per season and you can go through and watch that the secret to watching these though from an educational perspective is don't go look for an entrepreneur or a business as similar to yours so if you're in the healthcare industry don't go look for the healthcare guys they'll be there but what you want to do is you want to be learning from other parallel Industries people who using growth Sciences in order to be able to grow in their Industries in their ways and being able to take that and understand how it would apply to you and your in your industry because that will spark a much higher level of creativity that you can tap into exponential growth oh that's wonderful so when it comes to the thinking part does it involve thinking big thinking very differently so how it's not necessarily big it's good to Great think big but the way you need to look at it is looking into the Unseen so I'll give you a really good example so the one of the first things that happen when I meet a client for the first time they usually would talk to me about some benchmarks or measures that are quite standard in their industry right and they say we're not doing so well at this measure and we want to get better at it but our competitors are doing a B and C levels on on on the following measure and now tell okay what if that measure isn't really the reason why you're not growing or what if you were to create a whole new measure or what if there was a measure you didn't look at that you need to be looking at and so the first problem is the mindset because they' be like our industry just works like that if your industry just works like that and you stick to the same way of doing things you're only going to grow incrementally right you're just going to compete on price doing it faster better easier or Price these are just the general parameters you're going to be using you're not going to grow exponentially so to think about it you got to be thinking about going into the unknown and the unknown is a very scary area for many people okay it's like I'm not going to go and take risk and and the biggest risk of risk is not taking the risk itself in fact I I found that the 90 plus perent of the growth strategies that we develop come completely out of the blue and out of blue like in the unknown areas okay and I'll on the challenge there's some excellent examples of this one of my favorite examples is we have a guy named The Iceman so he's like Wim Hoff he is he actually beat his record but not officially and he trains people think mind over body and he'll train you how to do breathing techniques and then he puts you into the ice and then he tests for how long you can stay in the ice and he needed to grow his business right for ice therapy and so what we did is we started experimenting by changing the color of the water some completely no one in the industry had thought of like why would you change the color of the water and this is a hack that comes actually from one of my clients in some other industry like completely different industry so we experimented with different colors and we found that the color blue a specific type of color blue would actually psychologically make people last longer in the water then we started to identify what Essences would work with it so through the manipulation of color and and people would normally last longer and have a much better experience using his service and they he was able to yield a premium almost three times more than anybody in the industry because of the experience that he was able to give now there's a lot more to it than that you can watch and see the details and how we built on that to grow exponentially so the purpose I'm telling you this is it can be something really small and simple and usually is but most people are overlooking it and the funny thing is that he's been doing this for three years now nobody has actually decoded it so the life cycle of a growth hack I call it like a growth hack is like milk it has an expiry date and so naturally the best growth hacks in the world are secrets no one is going to really tell you about them yeah NE what percentage would you say this process is mindset and what percentage is strategy I would say 15 to 20% is mindset I don't want to underplay it because it's really important the way you think determines everything moving forward including your strategy the remaining would be 30% would be strategy and and the last 50% is execution and the vital secret behind the execution is the ability to learn and quickly and that stems from a very interesting experience I had working especially with Fortune 500 so I'd be hired to come in to help them grow walk into the boardroom and I call them I call this the boardroom ego so you walk in and I'm here to help solve a growth problem but everybody seems to have the answer when I'm in the boardroom I was like oh we understand and we know and all that and and and it's a very difficult situation to breakthrough I learned a very interesting way to break that sounds mindset too it is mindset yeah like we we know our business better than you but we just need your help which doesn't make any sense and I like it's comical CU like why do you need me obviously they do and I'm here so we might as well make it work so I get everybody at the table to agree to a statement and that statement is let's all agree to the statement that I don't know okay and the power behind the idea is let's quote unquote I don't know is it only leaves one thing in front of us and that's experimentation right so if we don't know we need to experiment to find our way and that opens up our mindset to looking at things not just in a different way going to places we never try exactly that's where you find the growth yeah so from what I'm hearing it sounds majority mindset you can change it you can move it change the terminology whatever but it comes back to the human being behind it you know what they look at as logical or what they look at as illogical what they think that they're able to do and not able to do what execution should I do this maybe I shouldn't Maybe maybe I'm not able to so there's a lot to do with the energy behind that human being that will take these Creative Steps and these things that they would never imagine otherwise that they would do for example the way we enjoy the the skies now was illogical something that was created out of being illogical having that belief the inner mindset that no wait a minute if birds can do it we can do it same way 10x the growth hacking is you got to have that belief is just I just feel like it's mindset y so belief is such an interesting thing because a life experience that I had so the most interesting professional experience I had was working with NASA okay and when I went with them we were talking about Spirit the connection of spirituality and technology in space industry and it's it's the strangest combination in the world and so here I am being inaugurated so much alignment though there is but but it's not so obvious immediately and so it was scary for me because um being inaugurated the first day um I'm going to talk to these 800 scientists and and and and engineers and here I'm going to talk about something completely way off base right and to my surprise okay and this was the most enlightening thing that I had in my whole experience dealing with them was that if you're going to break break the boundaries of Science and Technology you must believe because there's nothing else in front of you but Bel there's no precedence there's no Benchmark there's no measure until you get to it faith and belief yeah yes exactly even tech companies you mentioned some billionaires or some of the largest startups you'll hear stories about them going on those Retreats for psychedelics for example and connecting to the spirituality and getting those downloading those ideas because I I feel like there's an alignment between science and spirituality maybe science is catching up the more science digs in the more there's alignment which is just so cool yeah right yeah that's like when I I I went down the path of meditation and it didn't work out very well for me like sitting still and just kind of it just wasn't working you got to do it you got to keep doing it trust me if you hang in there and the people that I work with we always tell them listen you only dislike it or not like it because you have this image or this concept in your subconscious about it but if you start telling yourself you like it and you start gravitating towards give it a try over time you'll start noticing wow like we've seen this they start things that they never thought that they were like they love and then the ones that they love they don't like anymore you have that power to make those changes in your subconscious mind right absolutely absolutely yeah that's when I discovered Jose Silva who talked about the idea of different types of meditation so it's not like the one path and he talked about the idea of tapping into energy the yeah the energy waves right the Delta the alpha beta Delta brain waves the waves exactly so there all this information floating around you and so when you're buzzing and you're tapping into those energies and that's where some of your intuition actually potentially a lot of your intuition can actually come from some people called leadership from the field right and so from the field some and and like a the quantum field or there's different words for it right exactly so something is coming through this energy field but it's also a form of meditation and then when I learned about that really opened me up and then I discovered dispenser Joe dispenser who also from that school of very good yeah and I was like dude now that's more I'm still learning I'm still learning I'm no expert in we still learning yeah deep Transformations happen you feel like the personality you have is just a per personality based on the environment that you were brought up in and I read somewhere I mentioned in another episode too but you might find this fascinating as well that we have 8 billion plus worlds and he said how come it was in a podcast or something I can't remember where I saw it and he said how come and basically they're saying every individual has their own world their own experience every single human being has a completely different experience of the world how they perceive it how they engage with it when you shift that personality you basically create a new world and and what I'm seeing is that's the 10x the growth hack that's the Quantum Leap that occurs yeah yeah exactly so excited man yeah this is awesome it's fascinating cu no matter how much you learn you find out how much you actually don't know and it's this consistent pursuit of learning and and just being open to the world around you so at some point like I was trying to discover my own purpose uh and so I went down the path start with why and and and Simon s like is brilliant I went through his course and everything but I came up with nothing at the end and I was like this appointed I was I came a little bit depressed I was like come on man am I Really Gonna live life without purpose and then I had discovered the most fascinating part which was my purpose was to discover the purpose and that's what really opened me up to exploring things on a completely different level and in a much deeper way you on that consistent pursuit of purpose because sometimes we're not just built to do one thing we're built to do multiple things and multiple things at different times as well bit difficult to grasp initially but yeah we have incredible levels of potential we just hold oursel back we could be our worst enemy it's unfortunate because a lot of people that go into business or entrepreneurship there is so much excitement what you do for your family what you could do for others what kind of Legacy you can leave there's a lot of emotions behind entrepreneurship but when they get into it they realize wait a minute I know all these strategies but nothing is freaking working what the hell's going on and you get into that really frustrated existence and then something happens someone says something then you realize wait a minute I got to go within there's a foundation I need to look at but Co brought that realization there's a lot more people realizing it since then but before covid that awareness wasn't there I feel no big time you touched on something very interesting so when I first started my career I was failing for one of those actual reasons so I would go read a bunch of books and I'd listen to a whole bunch of things I'd go to consultants and everyone would give you a formula this is the way it works and then you go exactly and I go and I do it and either I don't get any result or some minimal result in comparison to the promise and I'd be disappointed so I'd move on to the next one and the next one and the next one and it just wouldn't work and so when I wrote my book the first thing I tell people is I'm not here to tell you what the formula is I'm here to help you find your own growth formula and tell my clients the exact same thing so there's no set for I'm going to take off the shelf because it doesn't exist okay if that scares you then we're at a very positive point because it should scare you enough to know that you need to find confidence in yourself to start finding your own formula and my job is to help you find that formula but not to give you the formula that's not really how it works and until I cross that road I I was having mediocre results at best until I started realizing like dude I can start shaping my own yeah yeah exactly it's a superpower when you realize it yeah and not to pitch my own program or anything but it just comes to mind is that's exactly the effects that we focus on as well because we show people how to shift their Paradigm we show them how to shift who that person that they may think they are shifted to align it with what they want to create and then they start discovering their purpose like you did it's that Discovery because when you discover the purpose yourself it changes everything because now every moment is just infused with so much energy that you're just exerting energy without effort it doesn't feel like effort anymore and you just make things happen so much more easier yeah yeah that's when I learned a really interesting concept that that I created for myself it's Force versus flow so when we set a we want some we just force and force force yeah and then you can step back and be like no if what would happen if I just was to flow right flow go with the river go with the rer I think who is it Bruce Le be like the water just flow so just flow and you chist what the world will bring to oh man yeah the things you it's so incredible yeah you got to operate from your desires you just have to have that faith and belief you're just loved so much he just sends you those guidance sends you that information what you need to create that 10x growth a is that you get those Concepts you get those ideas you get those people you get those opportunities you start seeing wait a minute this is not that difficult how about any misconceptions about the 10x and the growth hacking are there any the biggest misconception is people think it's it's so complex it's for only a few people that's not true many people believe it's only for tech companies that's not true many people believe it's only for startup companies that's not true many people believe again you need like really different mindset to to do it yes you need to change your mindset but it's not impossible that's the thing so it's something that anybody listening right now can learn and it's not that difficult once you get the hang of it and you will see a huge difference in the way that you do things and it's it's just one of those one of those things you need to try is just when you figure it out you can watch all these people talk about 10x and and the growth hacks and all that and what I got to warn you about about growth hacking and I mentioned it earlier is the most powerful growth hacks in the world are top secret nobody will ever tell you them and purely because of the cono like I told you it's like milk it has an expiry date on it and they need to exhaust the potential that growth hack until it expires until they build the next growth hack and the next one but usually even when they expire they keep them secret because they build on them and so if you were to Google right now I want to growth hack whatever it is anything you're most likely defined is probably not very potent and even if you tried it you did it to the tea and you're like dude didn't work well it didn't work because it's expired it no one is going to tell you depth of it the way to look at it though is how do I learn from it what are the mechanics behind it how did they shift from a to zed or a to b or wherever they went how can I learn from that and develop from this because a lot of these growth hacks even some of the more technical ones once the hole is plugged so part of growth hacking when we teach is like the four things you look at one of them is identif identifying a hole or a gap or identifying like a connection and these exploitation are actually an invitation by somebody who hasn't built a system properly so if I was to give you the formula that everybody would know it and if everybody knew it that plug would be closed up pretty quickly yeah are there any other tips you can share for anyone listening or watching that they could look at or analyze with through their mindset or some self-reflection that they can go through about their business that could help them find some ideas absolutely yeah my YouTube channel is is all free like You' be surprised people write back to me like dude you don't charge for this said no that's all free everything after that is a different story but there's everything in there from tutorials literally what is growth hacking how does it work what are the best tools like we teach things like the 20 minute tool test right so it's not about what's the best tool it's about what can I get in 20 minutes out of a single tool that I try out that can get me to an initial result that's the best tool the tool that I told you because it worked for me it's a different story so I teach things like that then there's the 10day grow attacking challenge which I highly recommend you will learn a ton of things from people of all walks of life everything from people in the Bikini business believe it or not all the way to sophisticated Industries like fintech and healthtech and you'll see how these entrepreneurs have reshaped the way that their Industries work by using the growth sciences and it's openly available you can go ahead and and learn and you can even contact them we put their contact so you can reach out to them if you wanted to but it's a it's an excellent starting point it gets you educated it you can see the minds that's being used that you'll see how they're implementing the mindset one of the things that I learned to this challenge was that th those who had the most success had the least amount of distance between an idea and action and this will not hope happen overnight it happens over time so you do it and do it and do it and what you'll notice is the distance between the action and sorry the thought and the action get shorter and your results start to exponentially come out better and better awesome no I love it thank you so much for that recommendation advice Direction great chatting with you give meditation a try again I used to hate it too I did I actually could not sit there for that long but then once you calm the thoughts then you realize how incredible it is and I've done 1 hour ones I've done 1 hour 15 ones and you don't even realize it just changes everything and how you perceive things and it'll definitely help what you're doing so I appreciate you definitely keep in touch and if there's anything else in the future that you wanted to share please come back on awesome thank you for the open door thank you my pleasure Take Care thank you so much [Music] super super super