Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DUrso Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and here's a successful entrepreneur who provides insights and guidance you can use to move along your vision path. Listen to my shows at Tony D-U-R-S-O.com, or go to your favorite podcast platform such as Apple podcasts and search for Tony D-U-R-S-O. Grammarly® helps you up level your writing for your blogs, social media, books, company literature, and so on. I recommend it. I use it. Get 20% off Grammarly® premium, G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/D-U-R-S-O. Grammarly.com/D-U-R-S-O, and Harry's razors. I've been using them for years and we're giving you a trial set. I love their products. Get a five-blade razor, lathering shave gel with aloe and a travel blade cover. Harrys.com/D-U-R-S-O. H-A-R-R-Y-S.com/D-U-R-S-O. More details just ahead so please stay tuned. Today's show is about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'm going to do a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that.

Tony:

Nick Petros is the founder at Pinchforth where he works with early-stage founders to establish traction and scale (revenue & customer adoption). Here we go. Hi Nick. Welcome to our show. So glad to have you on with us today.

Nick:

Excited to be here, Tony. Thanks for hosting

Tony:

My pleasure. And I'm very curious as to what Pinchforth is doing and what you're doing over there. It sounds very interesting. You know, I'm an old-time marketer, I guess I could say so I'm really curious as to what you got, but before we jump into what you're doing now, I want to follow your journey to success, Nick. So tell us, tell the audience - which I'm now calling my Success Squad - how did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Nick:

For sure. Hey, Success Squad. I got started in 2010. Graduated, there wasn't a ton of work so I got started in sales. I really wanted to be a copywriter because I watched one too many '90s movies and thought that's where the fun was, coming up with taglines and cool advertising ideas. But I didn't have a brand bug or marketing bug. I didn't have any internships that could back that up so sales was all there was for me. I landed at a tech company north of Boston, Massachusetts in a sales role. I was sales guy number 4 at a Daily Deal website. This is back in the early, early days of Groupon before everyone knew who they were. We were a competing product, so I got started selling there. I did that for four or five months. The team grew super, super fast and I wound up making friends with the head of customer acquisition and eventually transitioned to the acquisition team and wound up taking over paid digital advertising and performance advertising for that product, and that took off. We grew a massive revenue channel for that company. The founder sold it fairly quickly after the revenue channel peak, and I learned what a startup was through the entire growth from sales guy number 4 to a team of over a hundred, I think when we exited. Caught the bug and I've been doing that ever since. So from there I left and started my own deal site. Got that profitable in eight or nine months. Had one friend working with me, helping me get that off the ground. Then I took a head of digital marketing role with a FinTech company, a local FinTech company in Boston. Harvard has an incubator program called the i-lab, and this is one of the most promising companies to raise a seed round of funding out of i-lab. So I came on as digital marketing, wound up running a pretty large international launch for those guys and was noticed through that launch by another company out of Harvard's i-lab that brought me on to be their global head of marketing. That last company was a vertical social network. So I took over growth and in its vertical, we grow faster than basically anyone else ever in that space. Today, it's the largest network of its kind in the world and it's doing pretty well on the sales side too. So after those three - one exit, one pretty massive international FinTech launch, my own little eCommerce sites, and building a network from fairly small to the largest of its kind in the world - I wanted to find a way to work on more things at once, to really, really focus on growth, eliminate the perpetual meetings that happen when you're building a really big thriving, successful company and spend more time creating value for more people. So that's where Pinchforth came from. I actually was pursuing an offer to work full time for another company in a growth capacity, but another popped up at the same time so I had two competing offers. I said yes to both. And what do you know? It turned into a consulting company and that's where Pinchforth was born. So Tony, you want me to dig into what Pinchforth is?

Tony:

Well, it's a very interesting name. Probably most of us have never heard it. It's two very good names put together Pinch forth. It makes me think of Pitchfork. Let's get into how your vision came about for Pinchforth, as well as throw in there how did that name come about, Nick?

Nick:

Sure, sure. Well, the name ties right to the vision we work with. So at the network that we led growth for, everyone always asked about the brand, asked about the logo, asked about our tagline. We went through four or five while I was there and we never really got it to stick. But in spite of the fact that we didn't really have a polished brand, we were really good at communicating the value of the product, so it grew faster than anything else in the space anyway. I think Google is pretty representative of that. I don't think 25 years ago anyone knew what a Google was and I think even still today no one could tell you what a Google was.

Tony:

It's just a very big number. I know, right but we all Google things. It's become a part of us because they created value and it became part of our life. So Pinchforth was me making up a name that was inspired by two things I love. Pinching as a sailing term. When you race, it's the way you can kind of take advantage of particular wind direction to help yourself move a little faster than your competing boats, and forth is forward, kind of representative of growth. So I basically took two random obscure names and smashed them together to kind of represent how at the end of the day, if you're really focused on value and you're delivering value, it doesn't matter what you call yourself. You can still grow.

Tony:

It's really interesting. What's the purpose behind this and why you set it up? Why is it that you get up every day to do this?

Nick:

Yeah. So this is a bit of a journey. What Pinchforth has been and what it's becoming are two slightly different things, but there are a lot of folks who have great ideas, and I think as you get started in any sort of professional capacity, you learn what you're good at and what you're not. I think this started with me figuring out that I wasn't going to be a copywriter. I'm actually not the guy with the good ideas. I think my ideas are good just like everyone else does, but I'm generally not great at coming up with something fantastic and bringing it to life. On the flip side, I'm quite good at finding ways to help other folks bring their ideas to life. Find folks who are actually good at coming up with a really unique and beautiful concept and figuring out how to give it what it needs to breathe and establish some kind of traction, grow fast and turn into a business. So that's where Pinchforth came from. I think working in house was wonderful. We do something really big really, really quickly, but while you're focused on just one thing, there's limited value you can create, and I felt the purpose or the vision that inspired kicking off Pinchforth was how can we help more of these ideas come to life? How can we help folks who have determination, have kind of a mission and a commitment to seeing that mission through, bring their thing to life. So that segues into kind of where we've been in the last two years. We started in November 2017. We are predominantly a growth consulting firm. So the distinguishment we make is that we don't do marketing. We don't come up with your branding or positioning, lest you wind up with a name like Pinchforth strapped to you. What we do really well is figure out how to deliver your messaging to the right people at the right frequency and the lowest cost possible. So we did that and we're still doing that. We have 22 projects going underneath the growth consulting bands, but what's happened has been kind of interesting, and that's what I'm really excited to talk to you about today. We learned that the key - we're skipping to the end - the secret to growing really fast and the secret to establishing traction.

Tony:

Well, we don't want to secrets yet.

Nick:

You don't want it?

Tony:

No, no, just kidding. Just kidding. Well, we do want some, but we want more of the secrets later so that people listen to the whole interview.

Nick:

Oh, sure. Well, I think we'll give the secrets on how to use it later so that's it's worth listening for. This is just what it is. Learning how to drive is a little different, but the secret, at least the one that we see is having a laser focus on the right metrics, because we see a lot of folks who say they're data driven. We see a lot of folks who actually know their numbers, but they're look at the wrong ones. You know, an example of that. If you're a software company and you charge a subscription for your service, but you spend all of your time working on partnerships with folks, for example. That's not going to drive more subscriptions for you, your registration, how you actually communicate with folks, how you onboard those folks, how you attract them. That's what's going to make the difference for you. So if you're number one, like you wake up and breathe and consume metric is not that entry point to your service. It's not going to improve as quickly as you want it to. Conversely, if you're staring at that every day and you wake up and the first thing you do is figure out how you can improve on where you were yesterday, it doesn't really matter how good you are or how much experience you have in improving that type of number. You'll figure it out or you'll bring people in who can figure it out because you'll learn very quickly that what you're doing isn't working. That sounds super over-simplistic, but extrapolate that to a bigger company. Maybe it's a 12 to 25-person business. The executive at the top of the company is looking at his cashflow. He's looking at his head count. He's managing some key strategic deals, hopefully has a sales team that can support that. But he has to have stakeholders. You cannot build a business that big without delegating some of that responsibility, which immediately creates conflict of interest. The leader of department A is gold on one number and the leader of department B is gold on another, and both of them are close to their numbers, closer than you'll ever be as the business leader. So when you ask them for reporting and they'll deliver information to you that reflects their understanding of how the business is doing, which subconsciously is always going to be biased for their own performance. So you, as the leader of the business, wind up having to translate those two different sources of information to make sense for you, which slows down your decision making and forces you to focus on things that aren't your number one metric, your number one number. So whether you're a startup trying to get something moving from zero or you're an established business that has some momentum, in every case the secret to growing really, really fast and establishing that value and market really quickly is making sure that the thing you stare at most and the thing you work on most is the thing that is most pivotal to your business success.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Nick works with companies through a value-based approach empowers them to uncover their most potent, untapped opportunities. All right. And now back to the chat with Nick. Nick, you're saying this can work for a one-person company, the solopreneur, as well as a multi-person company or a large corporation?

Nick:

Yes. All the way across the board. I can give you two stories. We have one; he's a one-man company who has actually established a brand. It's in-season now. We'll see what happens when the podcast airs; it will probably be after season, but it's one guy. He has an entire company all to himself, and he stares at his most important number, which is customer satisfaction. Good reviews are pivotal for him. He wants to make a super high-quality product that people love. He doesn't really care about how many people it or how many people think it's amazing. He just cares that his product is amazing when it's received and it's multiplying his business. He's up 5X this year. One guy started one brand in an extremely crowded market, and he's got some of the top influencers in the entire space representing him because what he made is so good and so valuable. So, laser focus, unwavering commitment. This guy is now competing with brands that have thousands of people who manage them, so that's one person. Then another company on the other end. They're also super, super successful 12-person company. It's a SAS product marketplace, that business that's developed a really, really high value service that people love, and it's a marketplace so naturally it has some of its own momentum. It doesn't really need to be promoted to grow or increase in revenue, but the business leadership can't find their source of truth. This company is fascinating, absolutely fascinating, brilliant leadership, sold a bunch of companies, founded a bunch of companies. They really know what they're doing, but because there's so many moving parts to the business, it's not practical or even possible to dig into their numbers and get one source of truth, giving them like nine different hands they have sourcing information for them. So, because they don't have that one specific kernel, they can't laser focus the way they need to be, and they're forced to kind of grow the way that the business naturally organically will. 25-person company that's processing millions and millions a year in revenue that's not growing half as fast as a one-person company, just because they can't have the same singular focus.

Tony:

We're learning how to get traction and scale with Nick Petros, and you can find him at pinchforth.com. That's two words, P-I-N-C-H-F-O-R-T-H.com. Very unique. Pinchforth.com. Nick, you're saying that these particular success stories it's one person, or it could be 12, or it could be thousands. Your company utilizes this very successful, let's call it a metric or a system that allows them to grow and scale very fast. Am I getting that right so far?

Nick:

Very close. So we actually help them one, identify the key metrics that mean the most to them. and two, we create a visualization of that information. So instead of asking folks for reports, it doesn't really matter what department you're in. We create through software or a third-party service provider, a real time visualization of that number for you so you literally can stare at it every day, react to it and make sure that it's moving the way you want it to.

Tony:

I like that. I want to find my number right now. It's downloads and downloads keep growing so I'm loving that. And by the way, officially, we're getting into your vision path here. We're going into a little bit more detail on your company. Some of the questions I may ask, you've talked about, you've hinted, you've mentioned. And if I bring up something that you've talked about, I just want to go into some deep dives. For example - and I know we talked about some secrets earlier - but I want to go into a new company. We're just launching a new company. You've got a way that they can scale at a very quick pace. So, let's have that secret, Nick.

Nick:

Yeah, for sure. Laser focus is the secret. Actually I just got out of a meeting with a new company that's about to launch and what they're doing now, which is absolutely brilliant, these guys just raised millions of dollars in funding before there are actually in market, but they're going to spend a couple of months and really lay the foundation for their launch, and that includes distilling everything they could be looking at down to the two or three key things that they need to be looking at. This new company is in the financial space and their ultimate objective is to get folks to trust them with their money, so their key metric, I think it's going to be rather unique. Their key metric is going to be how many folks who actually engage with their organization ultimately trust them with their money and then become customers. Very, very small transaction size. It's a super scalable product, but the secret for them is going to be ignoring everyone else in the world. Ignore Chase, ignore Bank of America. Ignore the million startups that are trying to compete with those giants or getting acquired by them. Ignore all the advertising that you see, which is the exact opposite of what most entrepreneurs do. They look at the world and see something they like and say, Hey, they're doing this. It must work. We're going to do it too. Logically it sounds good, but it winds up distracting you from the core thing that is actually going to move your business. And for these guys, for this new company, the engine is how many folks engage with us and actually trust us, and how do we establish more trust? Because if they win the trust argument, if they can find a way to take a consumer who's not even thinking about their product, offer them some sort of value and slowly or quickly build up some sort of trust, they'll wind up becoming the only business in the entire space that doesn't need to lean on advertising to grow and acquire customers, which will turn them into a unicorn. So the way to do that again, cut out the noise, focus on one thing, create a way where you can immediately access the feedback loop for that one thing, like what is this conversion rate? How many folks engage with us and actually deposit? What did I do today that improved that number? Structure everything you do around that one goal, and in time it will improve. Let me give you a scaled example of this. I was on a phone call a couple of weeks ago. A very, very fortunate phone call to be on the phone with the head of growth or a particular language app. You can probably guess if you look at the language apps that are growing fastest. They talked about how they went from zero to a hundred million in revenue in two years. And this is their exact approach too. Internally, they identified their metrics and they structured all of their development activity, all of their team activity around moving. The key things that they identified would get more folks to use the application, more folks to stick with the application and more folks to subscribe and buy more services, learn more languages. And they didn't have a blueprint. They had no idea how to make this work in the beginning, but they had singular focus and singular determination. So they invented an entirely new way to grow and scaled like crazy. So it can work at a high level. I think it works at a low level too.

Tony:

Nick, while you're saying all this and why you're going all this, I’m thinking of all the different moving parts that we have to do. Whether it is a solopreneur, whether it's a midsize company or it's a giant corporation, there's always lots of moving parts and if it's just a few people, you just have more moving parts to take care of yourself. Now, with all that moving, we don't always see that metric, but we may know it in our mind because we're doing this. We're answering phones, we're answering emails, we're taking care of this product, we're shipping this product we're taking care of that. It's so much. Is there a point of simplicity to always keep focused because we get distracted? This is going to be like a double negative grammatically here, but there's nobody that doesn't get distracted these days. You're full of distraction; you can't help it. This is life. Do you recommend in simplicity to keep a counter going on your screen or numbers on a big whiteboard of what's the metric in the past hour? How can we keep focused despite the fact that we're doing all these other things? Sometimes they don't even seem to have anything to do with that key number.

Nick:

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's routine and it's pattern. You know, in our case at Pinchforth, we'll build the visualization so you can wake up and stare at it every day and watch it move in real time. But if you don't have the budget for a build out like that, there's tons of ways you can dial yourself into the right number. I think from there, it's building a structure, a schedule for you around that. I'm going to risk being cheesy Tony and quoting Warren Buffett, but I read a quote - may or may not be by him; who can trust memes on social these days - but allegedly he said the difference between successful people and really successful people is the amount of things they say no to, and I think there are a lot of ways to interpret that, but my natural interpretation is focused. it's not necessarily saying no to things for the sake of saying no to more things. It's, as a business owner, understanding that you're never going to be able to complete everything you need to or should. How do you choose the right things? How do you choose the things that are most valuable to you and most valuable to the business? And we find that a lot easier when you're staring at the thing that represents your value the best.

Tony:

I like that. I like that and I've seen that before. It's something that you have to think about periodically because it's very wise, and I think the more you think about it, the wiser it gets and the more meaning you get. It's one of those where you just get more out of it.

Nick:

That was Buffett, right?

Tony:

I believe so. But then again, I know I didn't say it. I have a lot of my own quotes running on Instagram. That's not one of mine, folks. You know, part of this makes me think of Nick when you're going for that metric, you're going for that number, and if you've ever helped a podcaster, I'd love to know if there's a better number than downloads, because that shows me people like my show and it's growing. But sometimes we have to look for more ways to get that number - that metric, sale, customer service reviews, whatever it may be. Like right now, and I'm not going to mention it on air - but I believe I found an untapped opportunity that my competitors - I don't believe I have competitors - my friendly podcasters out there that also have business-type talk shows, I believe that they're not going after a particular market, which I am. And so that makes me want to bring up, does your system, which I believe is partially to some degree technologically based, do you help companies find untapped opportunities?

Nick:

I think those are uncovered as a byproduct of this singular focus.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. All right. And now back to the chat with Nick.

Nick:

You know, if you're staring at that one metric it's going to force you to sort of catalog everything you're doing to make it improve, which also shows you what you're not doing, so it's kind of a forcing function. I think that's how our work at Pinchforth expands. You start with the one or two, the most important things for your business, visualize them, find a way to track historical change, add any contextual metrics you need around them. So in a second, you can see exactly how you're doing and how you're improving, but then as you start to discover opportunities like yours, Tony that could be pursued and could drive lift, should we add things to our board or to our mix or focus that will help us better understand how things are doing? Would you permit me to venture a guess or a tactic for podcast growth, just for the sake of conversation?

Tony:

I would love it. We have a number of people in the audience that are podcasters, so here you go, podcasters. Nick Petros is going to give us some secret stuff here on how to grow our podcast. I welcome it. Let's dive into this.

Nick:

Yeah, sure. So you know, folks talk about shares a lot. It's a big metric in the podcasting world. I see subscribers and listeners and downloads a lot. You just mentioned downloads a second ago, but I think one metric that's super, super interesting and trackable today if you're using the right software would be quotes. Tony, you already have those syndicated off of your own social, but if you could find a really consolidated way to measure the volume of quotes and references to your shows on the internet, you could actually figure out a way to influence more of that behavior, and I think even more so than a review, a quote or someone referencing your show is an implicit endorsement of the content that you're pushing out to the world and also an invitation for someone to get a little more context on that by downloading or listening. So in the podcasting world, that'd be really, really interesting to play with. How do we engineer more quotes or more discussion around this thing?

Tony:

I love it, Nick. I love it. And if you have some simple ways, if I can use the word simple for the solopreneurs and the small business owners that also podcasts, we would have something really cool.

Nick:

Yeah. If you'll permit me to keep riffing here, I think one really good way to light that on fire a little bit is creating bi-directional feedback between you and your listeners. You know, when we do gross consulting work, we're doing a lot of bot building for folks, but a couple of years ago, we built a huge growth wheel by creating a forum for a business that was already producing really good content, but had no way to explore the content with their audience. And just by way of opening up that as discussion, they both discovered a lot more content they could produce as recommended by their audience, but also figured out what folks really cared about, which increased the fidelity of what they were producing and created a lot more sharing and referencing.

Tony:

That's very interesting, Nick, because I've been looking at how to get more engagement. When you podcast, you have people all over the world, they'll download your show. How do you reach them? How do you communicate them? What forum? Where do you find them? I mean, I've been trying multiple things to really get that going, and haven't found like that one big method to really push so this is very interesting.

Nick:

Yeah. A loop. I mean, again, we're still in riff mode, but a loop that could be fun for you, Tony, especially with the reach you have and the subscribers you have would be something like creating a little promo page before you do a show and giving listeners the opportunity to ask a question based on who the leader is, and just making sure that at some point during the show, you actually call out that listener and referenced the fact that they asked the question that you're about to ask the guest you have. It could create a nice wheel or expectation that if they communicate with you, which starts engagement, they'll actually be brought on air to your entire audience.

Tony:

Very interesting. That would require a bit of tech and a bit of organization because when you interview someone such as interviewing you, I'd have to promote it way in advance. I'd have to have it all set. And as you probably know, it's probably taken you close to a year to get on my show. So it takes some time and it's a huge amount of people that want to be on my show. I'm blessed with that - knock on wood - and thank God actually, who is the One that's making it all happen, but so many people want to be on the show. It's a bit to work out, but I like that idea and I welcome ideas. Anyone else in the audience that has an idea of how to get more engagement, I do get some suggestions from time to time, and now it's a matter of what would be the best that I could implement. So I am on that warpath.

Nick:

Yeah. That's great.

Tony:

And another thing you mentioned before the show, Nick. You mentioned that we are in this technology boom, it's just going crazy with all the people building and all the gadgets, and as you've mentioned too earlier in this interviews as you said there's so many companies that could provide one type of service or similar, how do you grow and scale? And you mentioned this language company or grammar company that did 100 million in two years. It seems that we've already got technology for everything, and you've got the reverse. You say the flip side. You say technology's just starting; it's booming. So tell us about some opportunities you see there.

Nick:

The opportunities in tech, I think it's more opportunity to react than just inside of the technology space. There's a couple of things converging all at the same time. On the one hand you have gig economy. So folks who are around the world can work together. Like Pinchforth, we're in nine different countries. There are 28 folks who work on the team and only two of us are in the same city, which just couldn't happen five years ago, let alone a hundred years ago. So on the one hand you have the gig economy. On the other hand, the average person has access to the factor of 10 more information than they ever did before. Just simply compare the amount you can consume on your smartphone versus what you could find in the library in 1992, but there's no line of sight there. You can access literally everything today. So more information, more access to good people, combined with a third factor, I guess the ease of building. It's cheaper than ever to build new technology, to invent new things. Creates kind of an incentive to build upon the success and momentum of those behind us and create value for folks in the present. What that means more specifically is instead of trying to invent the next new thing, instead of trying to pick one thing that will change the world, be a life altering product, why not create something that solves one small problem, one hypothesis, one small problem like this financial organization? Folks don't know a lot about what their banking products can do. They've built something that's accessible, just like a banking product, but it has a couple more bells and whistles I can't really get into on the phone. So, one really small thing, let's find a really smart way to introduce it to folks, and then instead of sticking to that one thing, let's see how they use it. Let's react to our audience. We'll use the vast resources, both human and informational that we have at our expenditure, but to build quickly and find ways to let customers actually influence the products that we're making. So that's what I see as the real opportunity. Instead of I'm going to make a Model-T Ford and popularize the automobile, it's much more nuanced. It's like, I'm going to build a better way for you to interact with digital information. So instead of staring at a computer monitor, I'm going to put the monitor inside of your glasses. So you can see 16 screens at once instead of just one. Something simple like that, put it out into the world, see how folks use it and build to improve their usage. I think that's the big opportunity today, reactive business building instead of proactive.

Tony:

And I want to learn more about reactive business building. Now, another thing I want to comment on though is on startups. I think most of us have been in startups or are about to be in startups. And it seems to me, and it may not be the big reason, the real reason they fail, but cash flow is always the most important thing. You've got to have it going. You've got to have it built before anybody else can put money in it. So you've got to put your own money in, your own pocket. You've got to really work hard and get it going. What metrics should a startup use that would give them a better chance of being successful?

Nick:

Yeah, the metric is dependent on the audience, so if you're in the financial space, you want more deposits. If you're in the software space, you want more users. If you are in the hardware space, you want more customers. I think it's different metrics for different businesses.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. But first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment. As folks adapt to this changing world, we're all going to be buying more stuff online than ever before. I am, and if you're an eCommerce seller, are you ready to meet the demands of our new delivery culture? Be ready, guys with ShipStation. Why ShipStation? Well, when you're selling online, getting a lot of orders out fast can be tough. How do you keep track of who gets what, which shipping carrier should you use, are you getting the best rates and so on? That's why you need ShipStation. It's the fastest, easiest, and most affordable way to manage and ship your orders. Just a few clicks, and you'll be managing your orders, printing out labels and getting your product to happy customers like me. ShipStation makes it easy. ShipStation helps online sellers of any size get orders out quickly, save money on shipping costs and keep customers happy. I know I said that before. Just checking that you're listening. Now no matter what you're selling - Amazon, Etsy, your own website - ShipStation brings all your orders into one simple interface, guys. It's really cool. It makes them really easy to manage from any device, even your cell phone. ShipStation works with all the major carriers, including USPS, FedEx, UPS, even Amazon fulfillment, so you can compare and choose the best shipping solution for you and your customer. They even offer big discounts on shipping costs. Now any business can access the same postage discounts that are usually reserved for large Fortune 500 companies. You'll always know you're getting the best deal and that's good, right? No wonder ShipStation is the number one choice of online sellers. You'll ship more in less time with the best rates available. Hey guys. And right now, the Tony DUrso Show listeners can try ShipStation free for 60 days when you use offer code T-O-N-Y. Make sure your business is ready to meet the demands of delivery culture. Get started at ShipStation today. Click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in T-O-N-Y. That's ShipStation, then enter offer code T-O-N-Y. That's Tony. ShipStation - make ship happen. All right, guys. Check it out and tell me how much you love it. You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Let's see what we can learn today. Today's show is about getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Nick says there's a mission behind the consulting effort too. He believes we're in the middle of an unprecedented technological building boom. And now back to the chat with Nick.

Nick:

Tony, I do think that the problem with folks running out of money or cash flow problems with early stage companies almost always anchors back to trying to do too much at once. You know, I agree to some extent you do need to get out before the market catches on to what you're doing and someone bigger either steps in and acquires you, or does what you're doing better than you do, but you can still measure that. Like if you need to grow really, really quickly, then your metrics or your singular focus needs to be on growth and everything you spend needs to influence that growth. Not just somehow, it needs to influence that growth in accordance with the goal you set out when you raised the money or committed to putting in the money yourself. So I think if you focus on that one thing, you really commit to that one thing and make sure that every time you're spending or hiring or enacting something, it's helping you get closer or above the metric that you're trying to hit, you're generally okay. We had a client a couple years ago that they have raised a million-and-a-half-dollar seed round and promptly spent a million of it on software that they didn't really need. They could have built a much leaner application and ran out of money and it wasn't because they didn't build something amazing. It was a pretty powerful product. It got great traction, great reception in the market. But when you're focused on the wrong thing, you shouldn't spend that kind of money early on something that's untested and not even live because then you have no runway and you do, like you mentioned, run into cash flow problems. So we see that a lot. I mean, we work with almost a half dozen startups today, some venture-backed, some bootstrapped and we're lucky. A lot of our founders are brilliantly focused. Some of the past companies we have worked with though, folks did what they thought they needed to do, irrespective of what the market was telling them. It cost them tens of thousands of dollars and a lot of runway or help coach your team, build the process that they need to succeed, to create a whole lot more opportunity by knocking out half your business day before the rest of the world has woken up. So that's my habit.

Tony:

You'd be surprised how many successful people say something similar, just getting up really early and more power to you guys. I've done that for many years. I don't have to that anymore. I'm sorry.

Nick:

That's why we do it, so hopefully someday we'll be able to relax too.

Tony:

There you go. And lastly, are there any great resources that you would like to share with our audience success squad?

Nick:

Yeah. So, whether you're in a marketing role or you're a founder of a company, or you're a leader of a parent business, grow.co has an unbelievable email list. it's kind of like a forum where other business leaders and marketers ask questions of one another and share tons of super valuable information. You know, grow is a pretty cool service, pretty cool platform. I'm totally unaffiliated with them too in and of itself, but that email list is super valuable, cause everyone on it is just sharing information for the sake of it. No one's really selling anything. And I think that's when you get a truth and it gives you a lot of tips to grow faster.

Tony:

Thank you so much. Once again, we learned how to get traction and scale with Nick Petros and you can find him at www.pinchforth.com. P-I-N-C-H-F-O-R-T-H.com. Nick, you've brought something new to the table that I haven't heard before about this metric, and I urge everyone in the audience that's an entrepreneur, small business owner, even if you're in a big corporation, check it out because there's really something here. I mean, to scale so fast so big. There's a lot to this and we get so distracted. There's so much going on, but gosh, the simplicity here of just that single metric, the right metric is the difference between extreme success or not. Nick, thank you so much for bringing this to our audience. Very appreciated.

Nick:

Thanks for having me, Tony. This has been a lot of fun.

Tony:

Hey, Success Squad. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I hope this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. I learned so much and I've got some great ideas about podcasting. I can't wait to implement some of them. The insights are so valuable. So how did you like it? Getting traction and scale with Nick Petros. Early on, Nick realized what he was good at and it wasn't copywriting, which he first thought was where the fun was in the corporate world. He then found he was good at performance marketing. He found he was good at delivering messages for companies to the right people for their product or service. Now think about it for a moment. If you could tell the right people about what you have, that means for more sales, doesn't it? And something like that is definitely worth its weight in gold. Do you have a laser focus on the correct data metrics for your company? How do you communicate with the right audience for your company? How do you onboard your customers? How do you attract your customers? That's all secret sauce stuff for some, and it's the world that Nick lives and breathes in. By focusing on the right metric, you can get what you want, right? And he clearly describes how the metric can be off and how it can be biased in your company, but it may not be the most pivotal metric that you really should focus on to your company's success. His examples are amazing, especially the first one of a one-man company that is super successful, where the founder focuses on only one metric, the right metric, which is taking his company to the top. And this one-man company is growing faster than the bigger company because of the ability of the singular focus on the key metric to success. This is amazing insight into growth and it's so true. Nick's company's success is being able to provide that number on a real time basis in visual form so that you can stare at it all the time and work to improve it. Brilliant! There’s so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Now grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you long to process. The free eBook is at tonyD-U-R-S-O.com and you can pick up the audio version and the training class too. Highly recommended! I created my empire in just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. And if you have any Apple device or access to Apple podcasts, please look up my name, Tony D-U-R-S-O and subscribe to my show. A kind review there will get you tremendous appreciation back in return. Thanks guys. And remember, just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show. We hope you've enjoyed this week's edition of the Tony DUrso Show with his key influencers. Be sure to tune in again next Friday at 5:00 PM Eastern time, 2:00 PM. Pacific time on the Voice America INFLUENCERS channel.