Home → Products → The Durable Business → Business is a System (Part 5 of 5)

Happy Friday.

We're excited to announce that enrollment for The Durable Business is open (but BEFORE you scroll down to the enroll link, PLEASE READ THIS EMAIL).

If you've come in late, or you haven't yet read Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday's emails, do that first. Each part of this series builds on previous installments and reveals important insights about TDB.

The Durable Business distills our combined four decades of experience in digital marketing trenches into an actionable framework we feel anyone who is committed can follow and build a real business from.

TDB is our conceptual and practical answer to a simple, yet profound, question:

What would we do if we had to start over and create a business from $0 to $100,000 in revenue?

The TDB framework is a four-part momentum-generating ‘flywheel' inspired by the work of Jim Collins (described in his monograph, Turning the Flywheel, and discussed in an excellent interview with Tim Ferriss).

The four main parts of the TDB framework are:

1. Discover
2. Validate
3. Build
4. Scale & Optimize

… and there's an invisible ‘fifth part' which we'll reveal later in this email.

During the discover phase, we define a minimum viable audience (MVA) that we seek to serve, and we identify 1-3 significant problems (or meaningful desires) we can charge money to help that audience solve (or fulfill).

We then validate potential solutions — eventually expressed as mafia offers (i.e., an offer too good to refuse) — paying attention to the bright flashing indicators that our solutions closely match our MVA's needs.

Next, we build the minimum viable infrastructure required to act on insights gained from discovery and validation.

And then we scale & optimize by finding the upper performance limits of whatever we have discovered, validated, and built so far.

The magic of the flywheel is that each steps leads invariably to the next, building momentum and destroying fear and friction along the way.

TDB emphasizes (and requires) action.

It is not about theory or ideas you might decide to use someday.

Instead, we will teach the course step by step in tandem with creating a business from $0 to $100,000+ in revenue, showing our work along the way.

And, to ensure that we don't have any advantages our students don't have, the new business we create will be in a market we've never operated in, with no list, no reputation, no affiliates, and no infrastructure.

You'll likely see us fail — repeatedly — and that's OK.

Failures are expected as we iterate our way to success. It's not the failures that matter — it's what happens next. (Hooah!)

It's important to be very, very, VERY clear that TDB course content does not yet exist.

When you sign up for TDB you will get immediate access to the original version of Lean Business for Creators (LBC). Start there.

LBC inspired Jonathan Boyd's multi-million-dollar guitar business and we're confident it will inspire you too.

You'll also get immediate access to the Audience and Offer Masterclass (AOM) which will be the starting point for TDB.

We plan to release a first draft of the Discover process before Christmas. This may not happen in its entirely, but we're feeling confident it will.

We want you to start your discovery process with us at the beginning of the new year, and we'll continue to be one step ahead, so we're ready with Validation, Build, and Scale & Optimize when our students are.

This is a good time to mention that we expect students to participate, which means doing the work and following along with us to create your own business while we create ours.

We also plan to include four live Q&A calls for this first TDB cohort (one for each of the four sections). The first Q&A call will be in January 2021.

We've published a list of ‘questions and answers' on our TDB course page, and there has been a lively discussion in the comments.

If we've missed anything, or you would like to share an insight you've had, please let us know.

Before we end off and leave you to enroll (if you've made the decision to come on this journey with us in 2021), three things:

First is an exercise in allowing yourself to ‘dream'…

We'll go first.

We suspect by Thanksgiving next year, we'll have a new six-figure business. We may keep it, we may sell it, we may find someone in this first cohort to run it for us and take 50%.

Point is, we'll have an asset, which means we'll have options and opportunities we don't have now.

Your turn.

You can dream in your head, but the best place to dream is on the page, so here's a suggestion: get a pen and paper — seriously, do it now — and dream onto the page as if you were looking back from Thanksgiving 2021. This means you're not dreaming ahead; you're reflecting back because it's already happened.

Example: I've created this thing, it serves these people, I'm leaving them better off, and it's freakin' awesome. I've gone on this journey with my eleven-year-old son and thirteen-year-old daughter. We all built different businesses. Caleb has aspirations of being in a boy-band, so his business idea was to share his experience of becoming a world-class drummer. Liz, she's an introvert, a creative, a gifted illustrator. She has a course on Domestika with nearly 5,000 students, which seems weird for a thirteen-year-old having students, but this is our new reality. I'm so proud of them. As a result, the three of us have assets we didn't have back on Thanksgiving 2020.

Dream backward, dream big and bold and vividly. Remember, for this exercise, your dream has already happened.

Take a photo and snapshot your dream reflection. You'll come back to it in a year. You can share it with the group and us then if you want.

We suspect that a chunk of our first TDB cohort will have a substantial asset come Thanksgiving 2021. We would love to say everyone will, but experience suggests that's improbable.

Second thing:

Regardless of whether you enroll today or Monday (or not at all, which is perfectly OK), we'll send two reflection emails over the weekend (Sat and Sun).

They won't be about ‘what's in the box'…

We've said everything we've wanted to say already (well, once we've revealed the third thing next).

We think the two emails will be broadly valuable because they'll reflect back from decades of experience and expertise neither of us had when we started our journeys but wish we did.

OK, final thing:

We've been beating this drum for a long time…

If you've been paying attention over the three previous enrollments this year (April, June, Fall, and now), you would have seen an expression of this behavior, and there's a good chance you also felt (in your gut) the result of our actions.

These were (and are) emergent properties from making decisions about our business from the perspective of our single goal to ‘create happy customers.'

If our goal was to make the most sales, period, our upstream decisions and resulting actions would have been (very) different, and felt a lot different to you.

We're not optimizing the individual parts of our business. That's reductionist, linear-thinking, cause and effect behavior.

We don't practice that.

Business is a system…

… and in TDB we'll be teaching how the four parts work together as a system to produce results that no part of the system produces on its own.

This emergent behavior is where the real magic happens, and we can't wait to share this with you, but mostly, for you to EXPERIENCE this magic yourself through the business you build.

It's going to be hard work, for sure, but so much fun. It always is.

OK, enough said…

We appreciate you reading down this far, and we deeply appreciate the attention you gave us this week.

If you're interested in enrolling in The Durable Business, you can do that here (scroll down to the red button).

André and Shawn

P.S.

We do plan to release TDB again in 2021 but we do not know yet when that will happen. Q2 at the earliest is a reasonable guess.