Free Tools: What If You're Chasing the Wrong Kind of Growth?

What if the real reason you’re stuck isn’t your strategy… it’s your filter?

In this Free Tools episode, Benj and McKenzie introduce a powerful 3-part framework that’s helping leadership teams across industries align their focus, filter decisions, and clarify what really drives their business forward.

If you're a founder, COO, coach, or team leader—this episode delivers the clarity you’ve been craving.

Listen now and grab the tool for yourself.

Sessions is hosted by Benj Miller and McKenzie Decker

The best businesses aren’t just built on strategy, they’re built on soul.

If delegation is something you’re wrestling with, the System & Soul network has more than 50 certified coaches across the country ready to help founders and teams delegate with clarity and confidence.

📅 Join us LIVE every Friday on LinkedIn & YouTube

Your weekly leadership reminder.

Visit https://www.systemandsoul.com/261

Follow Sessions With System & Soul on LinkedIn & YouTube

Subscribe to our Newsletter!

Sponsored by Fist Bump

Chapters

• 0:00 Are you chasing the wrong kind of growth?
• 1:56 The Hedgehog Concept explained
• 4:21 What are you deeply passionate about?
• 6:51 What can you be the best in the world at?
• 9:06 What drives your economic engine?
• 12:21 How to apply the filter to real business decisions

Transcript

McKenzie Decker: [00:00:00] Hey guys. Welcome back to Sessions with System and Soul. I'm McKenzie. We are here with binge. Um, so today's a free tool and I know how much you guys love a free tool. All of these tools are yours to practice right now to take back to your team so that you can get clarity in your organization, get aligned around what's most important and experience breakthrough.

McKenzie Decker: That's what we wanna help you do. So today we've got a, a tool that lately I've just heard so many of our clients talk about. Yeah. It's a piece of our roadmap. So we did an episode a few weeks ago before, I don't know, at some point in, in, at some point before now, we, we did an episode that was outlining the roadmap and all of the tools on there that help you get clarity on kind of your like strategic focus.

McKenzie Decker: Your strategic plan as an organization. This is one component on that roadmap, but it is such a powerful component even by itself. So we're gonna walk you through that today. I would encourage you right now, before we start to go get a piece of paper, get a pen. Write all this down, but start [00:01:00] brain doing some brainstorming.

McKenzie Decker: This will be a powerful exercise for you alone if you're a business owner, but for you to do with your team as well. So I'm gonna let binge get into it. You wanna tell us a little bit more about like what this piece is and 

Benj Miller: Yeah. I um, I've got a Venn diagram up here on the board if you're listening.

Benj Miller: That's, uh, three circles that all overlap and intersect and in the very middle of here we have what we call is your, your authentic power. So when we figure out. The right answers for what goes in each of these circles and can center the organization to operate around that and use this as a filter to process.

Benj Miller: What kind of opportunities should we embark on? What kind of products, what kind of customers? All of those things can run through this filter, which helps democratize the decision making across the organization because everybody in the organization. Can decide, does this decision fit our hedgehog? The hedgehog comes from Fable in the 18 hundreds by Isaiah Berlin, and it was just a clever little story about [00:02:00] this clever little fox who would wake up every morning and he had a plan to go eat this hedgehog for lunch, and he'd go and he'd execute the plan, but the hedgehog would ball up, spikes out, and the fox goes away, frustrated.

Benj Miller: He's, you know, sitting by his campfire, thinks of a brand new strategy next morning, he's excited, go executes his new strategy. The the hedgehog balls up spikes out. This goes on day after day. And the moral of the the parable is that when you know one thing and you do it really well, it beats trying to recreate a strategy or coming up with a clever new idea and constantly shifting.

Benj Miller: And so what Jim Collins then found, and he wrote about in chapter five of Good to Great. Is the companies that made the jump from good to Great had a clarity about their hedgehog concept, and in each of these circles, they were able to answer one, what are we deeply passionate about as an organization?[00:03:00] 

Benj Miller: Two, what can we be the best in the world at? And three, what drives our economic engine? Alright, so let's start with the first two. Uh, the third one uses a little bit different part of our brain, so we'll say that for a minute and I want you to think or brainstorm even better if you have something to write on.

Benj Miller: If you're driving, just make mental note, uh, or use some notes app to record some thoughts. But what are you passionate about as an organization? Maybe it's your customer, maybe it's your product. Maybe it's an impact that you're creating in the world. Maybe it's how you do what you do. Maybe it's something internal with your culture.

Benj Miller: You should be able to come up with four or five ideas here and just let those sit there. So we're gonna brainstorm that. What are you deeply passionate about as an organization? You can look around the organization and you can see I'm not the only one that cares about this. 

McKenzie Decker: The way I see that a lot of times is manifest for some clients is like.

McKenzie Decker: It's really about what they do that is so unique [00:04:00] and kind of more like kind of attached to the why they exist. Like in our case, it's like we wanna help entrepreneurs win. So we're very passionate about supporting entrepreneurs, whether they are founders and business owners, or they're business coaches.

McKenzie Decker: All those people are entrepreneurial in their pursuit. But those, those are the people. I would encourage you, as you think about this. Your passion may lie with your why or who, who you're trying to impact. 

Benj Miller: That's right on. That gets paired with what can we be the best in the world at? Don't get caught up in best in the world that that tends to paralyze people 'cause it's too definitive of a thing.

Benj Miller: But what are we really, really good at? What is the craft that we're mastering? Maybe it is the thing that we are absolutely. The best in the world or best in your region, or best in your industry at. So again, what are the three or four or five things that we can brainstorm here? And if you get an opportunity to do this with your team, that's even better.

Benj Miller: The leadership team can all spend some time and coalesce [00:05:00] around some ideas here that's even better. But we're starting with you and me here today having this conversation. So best to know once you have three or four of each of these, you can start to see how they might play together. Sometimes there's a really nice.

Benj Miller: Almost a yin and yang between what you're passionate about and what you're best in the world at. Sometimes they feel totally separated and and desperate, uh, desperate. And that's okay. They don't have to feel like they go together. You may run into something that you're like, Ooh, that could be best in the world for us, or it could be what we're deeply passionate about.

Benj Miller: And that's why we're looking kind of at the combination of how those two things go together, how they play together. One tip is if you do have something that's on your list for what you're deeply, deeply passionate about, a lot of times you'll see expressions of that both internally in your culture and in our, your operations and your team, as well as what you're doing out into the market, the people you serve, the products you do, whatever that might be.

Benj Miller: That's [00:06:00] not always, but if you see that, that's a pretty good. Indicator that, that that's right on where it needs to be. So what are you deeply passionate about? What can you be the best in all that? Any comments or clarifiers there? 

McKenzie Decker: Well, maybe, maybe one thing I, I tend to think about, like with the deeply passionate, one of the questions I'll ask Gene is like, kind of what keeps you up at night?

McKenzie Decker: Like, who keeps you up at night as you think about if you're off your goal or something, it's like, who's this gonna impact the most is really, you know, weighing on me. What weighs on you. Then as far as the, um, best in the world, I think about like, what is our highest area of skill? Like, or even like, what's our secret sauce?

McKenzie Decker: Like what's our, what even what is our proprietary way of doing this that no one else no one else knows or gets or does, like us? So I think every business has something like that. Um, and that combination is really powerful. Yeah. 

Benj Miller: One of the things that we experienced early on that had really nothing to do with our business.

Benj Miller: But when we went to Best in the [00:07:00] world, we were like, we, our team is exceptional at building, packaging and launching ideas so that other people can consume, just like this exercise. This is an RX system, Jim Collins, but how do, how do you take concepts and make 'em applicable for people? And we're really good at that.

Benj Miller: That was one of the things we talked about that could go in our circle for best in the world, just because of who we were and who we had around the table. Last box uses a little bit different part of our brain, uh, and it's what drives your economic engine. So when we think about your economic engine, it might be growth, it might be revenue, it might be ebitda, it might be a multiple, it might be something on your balance sheet.

Benj Miller: So there's, there's the thing that is your economic engine. And the question that we're actually asking is. One step before that. So what is the thing that drives that? So if I show up with a, a five gallon tank of something, it's not gas, [00:08:00] but it's something, what do you hope it is? And, and, um, you know, some people are, uh, another way to think about it is what is the limiting constraint in your business?

Benj Miller: Well, if it's, um, if it's labor. Then labor is the thing that's going to drive your economic engine. You hope that I'm showing up with five gallons of labor in the bucket. If it's, if it's leads, then I might go, okay, well how do we typically get leads? Well, it's through trade shows. Great. What happens at a trade show conversation?

Benj Miller: If we can get a conversation at a trade show, we have a great percentage that turns into lead, that turns into a customer, and that drives our growth and profitability. Okay. Let's go, let's go to leads at, uh, conversations at at trade shows. This becomes the game that we get to play at the organiz, uh, for our organizations.

Benj Miller: And there's so much clarity and a little bit of fun that happens when we all get really clear about what game we're trying to play. We're trying to hack our game. We can put all of our [00:09:00] resources, attention function into the strategy and execution of what's driving our economic engine, doing it also in light of what are we the best in the world at, and what are we deeply passionate about?

Benj Miller: So when somebody comes and says, Hey, we should really build that new product, we can go, Hey, well, is that what we're deeply passionate about? Does it hit that circle? Does it live in the circle where we're best in the world? And will it help drive our economic engine? And if the answer's yes to all three of those, there's a really good chance you should pursue that.

Benj Miller: If you're missing one, then it's gonna take a conversation and a really good reason to pursue that anyway. If it's only one or none, you need to run away. So you can stay focused on your hedgehog. 

McKenzie Decker: One thing on the what drives your economic engine, um, I, I had a session the other week with a team. And they, so they do something similar to us, like they, uh, train coaches and we [00:10:00] identified what drove their economic engine as, um, number of qualified leads from their Facebook ads, I think it was.

McKenzie Decker: So they could, they identified that pretty quickly and they're like, but it's not really working that well for us. And I'm like. Hold on, pause like that. That's fine. It is what drives your business right now. And even though it's not doing it well, it's worth noting it now. And what we've just done is identify an opportunity for, even if it's not working as well as it could or should, which I think is gonna be easy for anyone to, to point out about an economic engine.

McKenzie Decker: There's always ways that it can be done better, but there's, there is a lot of value in just recognizing that to begin with. And then maybe even asking the question like, well, what would we need to do in order to make this drive our economic engine more effectively? Or are there other things we need to start testing to see if we have a different driver for economic engine?

McKenzie Decker: Yeah. 

Benj Miller: Uh, if you're a stage one or stage two [00:11:00] company, it's, it's more like what we've been talking about. If you get to a, if you're a stage three or four company, then a lot of times these become some sort of efficiency metric, uh, you know, miles per gallon or, uh, uh, dollars per man hour. How are we optimizing the business for maximum performance?

Benj Miller: Yeah. So it is driven once you know what your economic engine is. You know, if, if we're really growth mindset versus profit mindset, those you're, you're gonna have different, uh, inputs into what drives your economic engine. So this is just gonna create a ton of clarity for you and your organization. And I don't know about you, but I get excited when I know the game.

Benj Miller: Then I start thinking about and getting creative about all the ways. We can go about winning the game. So I hope this is clarifying for you. I hope you find your game live in your passion, refine what you can be the best in the world at. And this, this isn't everything, but this is a lot to [00:12:00] get you, uh, in, in a winning mindset as an organization.

McKenzie Decker: If this was helpful to you, and I'm sure it was, we are doing a workshop series through the fall into, uh, January. We're gonna be covering concepts just like this one. We'll give you the time to sit down and work on this, and then we'll also be doing like q and a and feedback and helping you refine this and think through it a little more effectively.

McKenzie Decker: So if you want a little bit of coaching through this or you want, um, feedback as you go, we have this workshop series. We will put the link in the show notes and the chat wherever we are, wherever you're watching this, and, um, I hope we see you there. It'll be very, very helpful in getting your team aligned.

McKenzie Decker: Getting a playbook for how you talk about your strategic growth and getting everybody focused on the same page. So that's our workshop. Thanks for walking through this binge, you guys, thank you for joining us this Bumps. Thank you for helping us put our show on. They're an incredible partner and producing our content, helping us create things and get it out there into the world.

McKenzie Decker: So check them out and if [00:13:00] you need help with that too, I hope you guys have a great week and try your best to stay focused on your authentic power.