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When it comes to designing products and services, start from a place of love. And this requires you to nail down your ideal customer profile and really empathize with your customers and get into their shoes and then help them ultimately to get to the promised land. This podcast business strategy is about the lessons I learned while building Coltivar.com and turning around and growing million and billion-dollar companies. My hope is that you use these strategies to grow your business and someday soon partner with us to build a more profitable and iconic company. Please share and enjoy.

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Does love have a place in business? It's kind of weird to combine the terms love and business together, but I'm not referring to the romantic type of love where you actually fall in love with one of your employees, nor am I encouraging you to create a creepy culture where inappropriate things are happening amongst team members. Instead, I'm referring to authentic, transformative love. But here's a disclaimer, a giant disclaimer. I am not perfect in this area. Trust me, sometimes I can be impatient and unkind, but I'm working on these things because it's really important for me to embed love in my leadership style.

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But here's the good news. Despite my imperfections, I've been able to successfully use love to transform and grow companies creating over a billion dollars in value throughout my career. And you could do the exact same thing in your organization. So here's what's top of mind for me. I want to talk about how you can use love to transform your product, your sales, and your operations. So let's go ahead and jump right in. Starting with product. Imagine you're an ice cream business or a seasonal business, and you're trying to figure out a product or service to sell during the winter in order to mitigate the drop in sales that occurs because nobody wants to buy ice cream.

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Now, if this is the case, this is what most companies do out there. And you could translate this to your own business and industry. But let's just take the ice cream company example. Most companies are like, wow, we don't sell ice cream in the winter because it's cold and people don't want to buy ice cream. So let's see, what do we want to sell? Maybe we'll sell hot dogs because it doesn't require a grease trap or additional expensive equipment. So we'll just sell hot dogs to customers. That sounds like a good idea.

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Now, some companies get a little crazy and they start selling hot dogs and popcorn and cotton candy, et cetera, because those are the items they want to sell because it's easy for them. But guess what? Then their business model turns all weird. They're an ice cream shop in the summer, but then they're a hot dog stand in the winter, and it confuses customers. And this is what I call straddling in business, where you're pursuing two different types of strategies. And if you're straddling with strategy, you're going to run into a lot of issues because you can't serve two different types of ideal customer profiles, especially you can't serve them well.

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So in this example, the ice cream shop transforms into a hot dog shop. Customers are confused. They don't do anything well. And guess what? By trying to mitigate the decline in sales in the winter—the whole thought behind selling hot dogs—they actually hurt their business even worse. Okay. I've seen this time and time again.

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So how does love tie into product? Well, when it comes to deciding what products and services to offer your customers, it starts with being very clear on your ideal customer profile. That's what we do at Coltivar. We help companies nail down their ideal customer profile because by doing so, you'll uncover what is your customer's biggest pain point? What's their dream outcome? And how can you get them to the promised land despite all these obstacles and external factors that are going to come up along the way?

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So when it comes to understanding what pain your customers are in, this comes from a place of love. If you love your customers, if you want to help them, if you want to serve them, if you want to make their life better, brighter, more enjoyable, then you have to start from a place of love. So for this ice cream shop, in this example, instead of thinking about what they want to sell, okay, they want to sell hot dogs because it's easy for them. They should be thinking about what kind of problem they want to solve for their customers and then use that product as a vehicle to solve that problem.

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So here's a better way to think about it. In the winter, people want to stay warm. The problem that you're trying to solve is that sure, they want to create these great experiences. Maybe they want to treat their kids to something special, something sweet, but they also want to stay warm in the process. So maybe they take their kid to get ice cream, but the parent's like, I don't want to buy ice cream for myself because I'm freezing cold, but the kid could care less. They're going to eat ice cream anyways.

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Well, let's just say a family of two goes in, a mother and a son. Well, if the son eats ice cream, but it's too cold for the mother to enjoy ice cream, if you don't have a product to solve that problem—hence being cold—then guess what? Your conversion rate's only going to be 50%. And you could expand this example even further. Let's just say a family of four comes in and the mother's cold. She doesn't want a cold product. I can relate to that. I'm always cold.

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The father is trying to watch his diet because maybe he's training for some type of triathlon and he doesn't want ice cream. And then the kids, they're good to go. So they're going to eat ice cream. Well, your conversion is only 50% once again. But if you don't think about the problems you're trying to solve with your products and services—hence staying warm and being healthy—and if you don't design products to solve the problems of your customers, then it becomes a real issue. And this is what I'm talking about in the hotdog example.

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Now you could translate this to your business. You're probably not in the ice cream industry, but think about your business specifically. What products and services do you have and what problems are you solving for customers? And if you're offering products and services that serve you, because they're things that you and your company want to do, instead of focusing on your customers, there may be a big opportunity here.

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So when it comes to designing products and services, start from a place of love. And this requires you to nail down your ideal customer profile and really empathize with your customers and get into their shoes and then help them ultimately to get to the promised land. Now let's talk about love and sales. Now these two words definitely don't go together because oftentimes people are afraid of selling. They don't like sales. So love and sales definitely can clash.

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But if you do it in a different way, selling can actually be this really enjoyable thing. Let me explain. A while back, I did a video on YouTube called "Stop Selling and Try This Instead." And the whole point I was trying to make is that if you approach sales from this perspective, it changes everything. Now with Coltivar, the reason why I created the company is because I truly believe that business is a vehicle to bless the lives of other people. That's just for me.

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Now, some people, they use baking as a way to benefit the lives of other people, or maybe they use their hands to save lives because they're a doctor, whatever it may be. I believe business for me is the best vehicle that I could pursue to help the most amount of people. So therefore our whole purpose at Coltivar is to elevate lives through better business. That's our whole purpose statement.

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So when it comes to helping companies in their business, we have a system that rolls out in six phases. And this system enables companies to turn around, to grow and become more profitable and cashflow positive. So therefore I feel like I have this moral responsibility to go out there and spread the good news about Coltivar. That's how I feel, right? Because I know that if companies follow this process, things will radically change.

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Let me illustrate this with a story. Years ago, I was working with this company. I went into the business and it was not in good shape. They had terrible cashflow. Their profit was down. It was in the red and things weren't going well. And as a result, there was inner turmoil, especially because the owners of the company were husband and wife. They were not getting along. And I think they were on the verge of divorce.

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When I went into the company, I was like, "Oh my gosh, tensions are super high here. The business isn't going well and I need to fix things." So that's what I did. I went in and I implemented the system that I'm referring to. And guess what? Things turned around with the help of the team and these tools and everything else. Then fast forward, I go back a year later and the business is thriving. There's positive cashflow. The top line has grown.

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The same was true with their profit, and things were much better and it was transformative. Now I'm not saying that business fixes marriages or money is the answer to everything, but I could tell you if business is bad, guess what? That's going to translate to other parts of your life. I know for me, at least that's true. Like if business is terrible, I'm going to go home. I'm probably going to be in a bad mood and that's going to impact my family.

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So I don't want that. That's why I believe that business is such a powerful vehicle to change lives. So if I believe that, then I'm not selling because I'm going to companies and I'm like, "Look, I believe in this philosophy. I know that our system will radically transform your life, and therefore I have a moral responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility to tell you about this system because I don't want you to miss out on it."

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"I don't want you to come back one day and say, 'Steve, why didn't you tell me about your system? Because I could have benefited from it years ago.'" So that would be a very bad thing if I wasn't sharing the good news of Coltivar. So translate this to your business. The same thing is true. You have products and services that are super beneficial. If you don't believe that they're beneficial, then work on your products and services.

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Make sure they're solving the problems that I talked about in the first part as it pertains to your product and the love that goes into solving your customers' problems, their biggest pain points, and helping them to get to their promised land. So that's how you could transform sales and that's how you can embed love in the process because you love your customers, because you love your prospects, then you want to help them out.

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And therefore you have a responsibility and obligation to go out there and to introduce your products and services because you truly believe that they're going to solve their pain points, right? So that's what I want to mention there with sales. All right, let's talk about the last piece, operations. How can you embed love into the operations of your business? A few weeks ago, I was meeting with a client and their team.

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And we were talking about some procedures that were not being followed throughout the organization. So this is very common with companies. They struggle with processes and systems, and that creates a lot of issues. I always say, "Be hard on the system and soft on the people," but most companies don't have really good systems and therefore they're hard on the people and they're soft on the system.

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So I'm a big structure person. I talk about it all the time when it comes to strategy. I believe in putting in place a really solid structure because the structure always wins in an organization. So going back to this conversation, we're talking about operations. The employees, you know, they're not following these procedures appropriately and therefore there are some issues down the line, especially with customer orders.

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And I said, "Look, when you're talking to your team, tell them, don't just follow the process because you're afraid of, you know, retribution or not getting a raise or being fired. Don't do it out of fear." That's very Machiavellian. Instead, have them follow the process because they love their customers. And it goes back to the love for the customers because if somebody's in operations and they really love their customers, then they want to follow these procedures.

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Because they want their orders to be on time. They want to deliver an exceptional customer experience. And that's really what I'm talking about here. When it comes to operations, loving your customers, loving your company, and doing good because you come from that place makes all the difference in the world. It's a mindset shift because I can tell you there is no SOP, standard operating procedure manual.

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There's no company guide or rule book that exists out there that will cover every single scenario and behavior that exists in business. Instead, this has to be embedded in your heart. And like I said at the very beginning of the show, I'm not perfect at this. So if you meet me or if you're working with me, you're like, "Steve, yeah, you are not perfect at this." I know. I'm very well aware of my flaws. But instead, this is something that I aspire to.

And it's something you can aspire to as well in your organization. If you come from a place of love, then things change because people feel like you care about them. Your customers are going to feel like you care about them. And it's going to be manifested through your products and services and your overall customer experience and your employee experience internally.

So that's what I wanted to share with you. This is what's on my heart. Obviously, I'm very passionate about this topic. And I hope that you could take this and apply it to your company. Because if you do, I know from experience, from turning around and growing companies, it will have a radical impact.All right, that's all I have for you. I hope you have a great week. And until next episode, take care of yourself. Cheers.