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Jonathan Cronstedt talks with Jason Barnard about the Billion Dollar Bullseye.
Jonathan Cronstedt, also known as JCRON, is an investor, advisor, USA Today best-selling author, and Board Director at Kajabi. He shares the blueprint behind growing 2153% to achieve a $2B valuation within five years.
JCron reveals his controversial 7Ps Framework from his book Billion Dollar Bullseye and discusses why he believes putting people last might be the key to extraordinary growth. He explains why most companies fail at purpose, how profit protects vision, and why exceptional products naturally drive marketing success. He also stresses the critical role of prestige in customer experience, and why exceptional service can compensate for an evolving product. He emphasizes the need to master the strategic sequence of Purpose, Profit, Product, Prestige, Promotion, Persuasion, and People to create a business that naturally attracts top talent and drives sustainable growth.
Get ready for an unconventional take on scaling businesses that challenges everything you thought you knew about building a billion-dollar company. This episode delivers actionable insights from someone who has actually done it, whether you are a startup founder or seasoned entrepreneur.
What you’ll learn from Jonathan Cronstedt
- 00:00 Jonathan Cronstedt and Jason Barnard
- 01:20 How Did Kalicube Help JCron Unify His Professional Identity in Search Results?
- 01:52 How Did JCron Start at Kajabi and Help Grow It to a $2B Valuation in 5 Years?
- 02:22 What Prompted JCron to Transform His Unicorn Success Story into a Book?
- 03:05 What Inspired JCron to Develop the Billion Dollar Bullseye Framework for Business?
- 03:56 What are the 7Ps in JCron’s Billion Dollar Bullseye Framework for Success?
- 05:03 Why Did JCron Place People Last in His Billion Dollar Bullseye Framework?
- 07:31 How Do You Build the 6Ps to Attract High Performers Who Want to Join Your Team?
- 09:35 First P: Purpose
- 14:55 Second P: Profit
- 16:15 Third P: Product
- 17:49 Why is It Important to Master Purpose, Profit, and Product Before the Rest?
- 20:07 Fourth P: Prestige
- 24:17 Fifth P: Promotion
- 24:27 Sixth P: Persuasion
- 25:24 Seventh P: People
This episode was recorded live on video November 5th 2024
Links to pieces of content relevant to this topic:
https://www.jcron.com/Billion-Dollar-Bullseye-Book
https://www.jcron.com/kajabi-case-study
Jonathan Cronstedt
Transcript from Billion Dollar Bullseye – Fastlane Founders with Jonathan Cronstedt
[00:00:00] Jason Barnard: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Fastlane Founders and Legacy. I’m here with… a quick hello, and we’re good to go. Welcome to the show, JCron.
[00:00:49] Jonathan Cronstedt: So in all of the interviews I’ve done, that is the first time I have ever been sung on, and I am honored. This will now be the clip I show everybody because I have never been serenaded onto a podcast. And here we are.
[00:00:59] Jason Barnard: Wonderful. Today, we’re talking about Billion Dollar Bullseye. Now, I know it’s a book because we’re helping you with the presentation of that book through Google and the presentation of you through Google and AI, but I don’t actually know what’s in the book, which is a slightly strange situation. So can you explain?
[00:01:17] Jonathan Cronstedt: I’m happy to tell you. I’m happy to tell you about the book, and I’m happy to tell you how happy I am to be working with Kalicube. You guys to date are the only people that have been able to find a way to merge the two of me that exist, which is Jonathan Cronstedt, the name I am legally, that nobody knows, and JCron, the industry nickname that everybody knows me by. So it’s been wonderful to see those coalescence into a unified search engine presence and really happy with that. So Billion Dollar Bullseye is simple. After exiting Kajabi, we achieved a $2 billion valuation. I went and left my operating role as President and went to the Board.
I started with Kajabi as Partner and President in September of 2016. We were doing about 6 million in ARR at the time, about 25 team members. And in July of 21, when Kenny and I left our operating roles and went to the Board, we were doing north of 100 million in ARR, over 400 team members, and a $2 billion valuation with Spectrum Equity, Tiger Global, TPG, Hourock, Maratek, and Tidemark, which sounds like a whole lot of alphabet soup, but for everybody in the private equity game, those are some amazing partners. And as you can imagine, after a transition like that, I got a lot of questions. It’s like, how did you do it? What was the experience like? And what would you recommend for my business? What would you suggest? And I always joked, I said, well, it’s not like I’ve got my seven point, almost-never-fail-double-unicorn checklist, you know, in my pocket. And after a dozen or so times of saying that, I guess my subconscious was like, well, maybe you should. And so I’m walking in my backyard one day and this idea of Billion Dollar Bullseye came into my brain, and just like a good marketer, I knew if the URL was available, that was the framework I was meant to have. And sure enough, the URL was available and that actually became the book.
As I started to play with this idea of a Billion Dollar Bullseye, the thinking behind it was to teach business. And what we learned building Kajabi through a bit of a metaphorical view of the game of darts. And the belief is you don’t win by being good at darts. You win by throwing at a bigger bullseye than everybody else. And so the book walks you through the seven Ps that allow you to enlarge your bullseye as big as possible, throw at the biggest target, and have the best shot at getting your billion dollar bullseye.
[00:03:30] Jason Barnard: Right. What I really, really like about the title is as soon as I see Billion Dollar Bullseye, I immediately know that I’m aiming for something hugely valuable. And I don’t need more than three words to understand basically what I’m going to be getting. And it’s exciting, and then it’s actually scale as big as you want, as fast as you want, which entices me even more. It’s a brilliant title. And you have seven Ps.
[00:03:56] Jonathan Cronstedt: Yeah. So the way that it works is it starts dead center in the bullseye with purpose. And in the book, there’s a nuance to purpose of internal, which is for yourself, and then external, which is for your customers. Then we move on from Purpose to Profit, second ring, then Product. Those core three form the foundation of a business. So for anybody listening, if you’re wondering if you’ve nailed purpose, profit or product, don’t go any further until you nail those three. And then once you’ve got those three humming along, you move into the amplifiers, which are going to be Prestige, Promotion, Persuasion, and People, namely your customer experience, your marketing, your sales process, and the people that drive all of those systems. And one of the most controversial areas of my book that I’ve talked about is why in my mind do people come last as part of the equation? And that’s probably my most provocative perspective in the book.
But those are going to be the seven Ps that drive those unicorn outcomes.
[00:04:54] Jason Barnard: Did you put people at the end last because you knew it would be provocative or because, in fact, people do come last?
[00:05:02] Jonathan Cronstedt: No, I actually put people last because I believe that in good businesses that’s the way it’s meant to be, that I and you know, it’s one of those things, the Peter Thiel question that gets asked most often is this idea of what is something that the rest of the world holds true that you disagree with. And I think today as business owners, we all live in this echo chamber of, you know, just hire A players, just hire talented players, just hire the best people you can and get out of the way. And to me, if that actually worked, there would be way more successful businesses. So to be a unicorn company, it is 0.00004% of companies that are started. If 100% of companies are trying to hire talent and retain talent, there’d be a whole lot more companies that are that successful. My belief is that A players want one thing and that is to work with other A players on work that they care about. In a company that has thought through the systems that those A players are going to drive, because your people will only shine as brightly and perform as well as the stage that you put them on.
And if you think an A player is going to come into your company and fix your dumpster fire, you’re sorely mistaken. Because they’re going to feel like they got tricked in the interview, they’re going to bail as quick as they can. And the one thing about A players is they’ve always got plenty of options. So it’s not like just because they’re at your company, they’re going to stay forever. So to me, I feel like as a business community, we are suffering from the lack of differentiation between delegation and abdication. Everyone thinks they’re delegating, but what my opinion is they’re actually abdicating. That if I have not done elements of your job, if I don’t know it well enough to manage you, I’m basically saying I’m going to hire you and hope for the best. And that’s just a recipe to get screwed over.
[00:06:51] Jason Barnard: Right? That’s an interesting you say abdication because at one point somebody on my team said to me, Jason, you’ve just abdicated, come back. And that was a really powerful piece of advice. And from that perspective, you’re right. As I was thinking, I can just let them get on with it. This is such a huge relief. And actually I stood back so much that there wasn’t any framework and I couldn’t help and I wasn’t helping and people felt a little bit lost. But then my next question is, if you can’t have the A players at the start, how do you get to the point where you’ve built up the other six Ps when the A players want to play.
[00:07:29] Jonathan Cronstedt: So that’s actually something that I believe the only way you will ever get A players is if you continue to relentlessly focus on the things that attract an A player. An A player doesn’t walk around looking for a broken company to fix. An A player walks around looking for a company that has the foundation right. And they’re going to go faster and further as a result of joining that company. It’s almost like an A player is Michael Schumacher, you know, one of the greatest F1 racers of all time. He is not walking around thinking, boy, I wonder if there’s a Honda with three wheels on it that I can really show off my skills. No, he’s going to look for the best possible car that’s going to allow him to take his skills to the absolute limit. And so it’s like, for example, let’s just say you have an A player CMO, unbelievable CMO, unbelievable skills, unbelievable campaign abilities, proven with multiple organizations.
They’re not walking around looking for a company with no team, no resources, no ability to acquire any of those things. And going back to the day that they were in the garage where they did everything, they’re not looking for that. They’re looking for the company that has thought through. And it doesn’t mean, by the way, to your point, if you’re a small company, it doesn’t mean that I’m saying you need to have a big successful company before you can get talent. What it means is you need to have a purpose so compelling that an A player opts in to participating in that purpose with you and that you have at least shown that a player that you’re in it with them, locking arms with them. It’s not, I’ve not thought about marketing. Marketing’s an absolute dumpster fire coming and fix it. It is.
I was the original marketer of this business. Here’s what I did, here’s what worked, here’s what I believe that you can amplify and take to the next level. That’s somebody that’s in the trenches with you and wants you to win. The former is somebody that just wants to hire you and offload all the shit they don’t want to do.
[00:09:27] Jason Barnard: Right? And so it’s purpose who we want to serve or what we want to do for them.
[00:09:35] Jonathan Cronstedt: So let’s talk about the way I view purpose because I think that to me, most companies are focused on this idea of Mission, Vision, Values, Core Values. Again, one of those areas that’s just been used so much that it has no meaning left in it. But every business has it. Every business is focused on that. Well, again, if every business is focused on mission vision values, why aren’t there more successful companies? And the answer is because mission vision values came out back in the 70s and it’s completely ineffectual. There’s only two ways that most companies handle. Let’s call it the North Star. Whether you call it purpose, whether you call it mission, vision values, core values, whatever you want to term this thing that a company is striving for, that North Star typically happens one of two dysfunctional ways. Number one, it’s co created and diluted to being ineffective.
So that’s the let’s get everyone in the company together, let’s get all of the stakeholders together, let’s dilute it to be so vanilla, so boring, so uninteresting that it triggers no one in the organization and everyone agrees on it terrible idea because you spent all the time, all the resources on something that nobody will care about. The other version that’s even worse is when you’ve got a dictatorial leader that defines it in the absence of any buy in whatsoever and rams it down the throats of employees. This is the boss that we’ve all experienced who’s got a 10 year plan that changes every week depending on what book he read. And it’s a constant crazy fest that’s also dysfunctional and bad. What I believe needs to happen is purpose needs to live in two categories, internal and external. Internal is private. That’s for you, Jason. That’s for me, JCron.
That is why I do what I do. And in my world, that internal purpose can be as selfish and narcissistic as you want it to be. If it’s I want to get famous, great. If it’s I want to be ridiculously rich, great. This isn’t something that needs society’s approval and it’s not something that needs your team’s buy in. That’s purely your fuel of why you get out of bed every day. Then the external portion of purpose also has nothing to do with you and has nothing to do with your team.
The external purpose lives solely in why you do what you do, for whom you do it. This is all about the customer, the customer’s transformation, the customer’s experience. So we’ve got internal what’s driving you? We’ve got external, which is what you’re doing in the marketplace. And your job as the leader is to purpose in public, in my opinion, to take your external purpose to champion it in every medium of communication, whether that be online, offline, in interviews, in any capacity. And your goal is to have that external purpose be a rallying cry that people raise their hand, that they say, yes, I care about that. You know, Jason, I care about people having a Google image that they feel good about and they’re not confused with a whole bunch of other players. I want to be on your team and doing that. Or JCon, yes, I care about online entrepreneurs and I want them to have the best tools to build that.
So when you have somebody opt in, you get that buy in and alignment and you actually have an opinion that people get to choose to be a part of or to not be a part of. And absent that, to me the rest of it is just noise.
[00:12:48] Jason Barnard: Right. Which makes total sense. And kind of the team is somewhere in between the two in that the team have joined Kalicube in our case because my purpose resonates with them and the way I approach my life and why I get up in the morning, what makes me want to do all of this, which is a lot to do with sharing and helping and understanding that I can share the Kalicube Process with everybody. But the people I can truly help are the people who are time poor and really, really care about their personal brand and how it’s represented, as you said on Google and AI, and that the team kind of sit between the two, perhaps between the internal.
[00:13:24] Jonathan Cronstedt: It’s really to your point. This is something that in my opinion, and I talk about it in my book because I believe that if you have a purpose externally that nobody cares about, your customers aren’t going to care about it either. That if it’s not important enough that somebody says I want to be a part of that, I see the transformative value. I would tell you to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to have that packaged in a way where people are interested. Because nobody wants to be in an industrial era drudgery factory making widgets like it’s just not interesting. Nobody. You know, we deal today with the largest disengaged workforce we’ve ever faced as a society. I mean, depending on the numbers you look at with quiet quitting the great resignation, I mean you have people now reporting that 1 to 2/3 of your active employees are willing to admit on a survey that they don’t give a shit about what they do.
So today the need for a company that actually has something that resonates and people that want to be a part of it is more important than ever. But if you try to manufacture that or you try to ram it down their throats, both of which don’t work.
[00:14:37] Jason Barnard: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I get the feeling at Kalicube at least, it’s the people who are working on the team, the people who have stuck around, the people who are still here are making a lot of they really do care. And they care because I care and because they care in a similar way to me. But the second one was Profit, if I remember rightly. Obviously, we have to make profit.
[00:14:55] Jonathan Cronstedt: Profit is of the utmost important. And I know that people watching are like, wait, a software guy is talking about profit? I don’t get it. I come from the bootstrap software world. Profit protects the sanctity of your vision and purpose, that if you don’t have profit, you don’t have options. If you don’t have profit, you don’t control your destiny. As the scriptures say, the borrower is always slave to the lender. This is a situation where if you are not making money, in my personal opinion, absent very rare circumstances, you are a derelict in your duty as an entrepreneur. Now, if you’re in a binary land grab where speed is the only thing that matters and raising money is an operational advantage, think like Stripe versus Braintree and Merchant Processing.
I could be argued that raising money is a good decision. Or if you’re in a world like aerospace where you’re not going to ship a new passenger jet without raising a whole bunch of money, I could be argued that that’s the way to do it. But 90 plus percent of businesses should be bootstrapped because it keeps you honest and it keeps you connected to the customer’s results and it preserves the sanctity of your purpose that you get to choose how that purpose continues to live in the world. Absent profit, you don’t have the ability to do that.
[00:16:10] Jason Barnard: Oh wow, I just got goosebumps. Thank you very much. What’s the third P?
[00:16:15] Jonathan Cronstedt: Third P is Product. So product for me is what comes immediately after. And this is a bit of a damaging admission on my part because this is an area that for me was a blind spot that we as executives, entrepreneurs, I believe we all have an area that is our sirens call. It is the area of the business that we may be passionate about. And as a result, that passion becomes our purgatory or punishment. And for me, that was marketing, that I loved marketing. And so whenever the business had an issue, whether it was slowdown in growth or challenges with the bottom line, I would Immediately go to marketing. Oh, time for a new campaign, Time for new ads, time for a new promo, Time for a new something.
And what I learned was that was a distraction. And it was a distraction based on my personal proficiency in marketing, because it was easiest for me to go there. What I realized is product is the ultimate leverage point. Like, it’s one of those things where, you know, it’s almost the joke is your sales have to be difficult because you failed at marketing, and your marketing is difficult because you failed at product. But it all comes back to product. And if you are running the marketing or running the sales, you’re going to end up supplementing or surrogating an area of your business that’s failing. And most often it’s product. So that’s where I believe the ultimate leverage point.
So there’s a bit of an order of operations to the 7Ps of mastering that in a way that you gain the multiplicative effect throughout. That if I nail purpose, it’s going to make everything else easier. If I nail purpose and profit, it’s going to make everything else easier with cash flow. If I nail purpose, profit and product, I’m going to have everything be easier. Because if I’ve got purpose, profit and product nailed, well, guess what? Customer experience is going to be easier. Marketing is going to not require as much hype and craziness and acrobatics. Sales isn’t going to require hard closing and any trickery or craziness. And people are going to want to work at a company because the company is succeeding and able to do really cool things for the team members.
So that’s where that order of operations comes from. But to me, product and the transformative impact of it is one of the most overlooked areas of business. Because it’s hard. It’s much easier to be like, I came up with three new ad variations. Well, easy, probably not as effective. But when it’s like, I just figured out the largest friction point in our product today and I removed it, watch out. Just watch everything change.
[00:18:54] Jason Barnard: Oh, and that’s really, for me, that’s really exciting because I think we’ve just found the friction points and we’re in the process of getting rid of them. And it has already paid dividends and it’s been hugely successful in terms of keeping clients on board, keeping them happy. And I’ve just built out a technical part of the platform that’s going to make it even better. And I think by pure luck, then I should have talked to you six months ago. By pure luck looks like we thought we’re solving that problem right now and then there are three more before we get to people again. What are those?
[00:19:27] Jonathan Cronstedt: Correct. So we’re going to dive into Prestige, which is your customer service experience, all of the touch points that are going to impact every aspect of the business. Then your Promotion, which is all of the marketing campaigns you’re using to drive the attention and awareness. Your Persuasion, which is going to be the sales process. In some online businesses, promotion and persuasion are coexisting. That you know you’ve can the salesperson into a self service process. Others there’s going to be an actual salesperson taking those leads and closing that business. And then the people tab is the people that are going to be running all of those systems.
[00:20:00] Jason Barnard: And the prestige part, can you dig into that a little bit? I think that’s something that we’re in the process of improving and we’re not quite there yet.
[00:20:07] Jonathan Cronstedt: Prestige is one that I’ve got a lot of religion around. And it’s an area that again I feel is so often neglected that if you go to any company and you talk to the leaders of the customer experience, this is going to be support, success, whatever areas are customer touch points, they’re often relegated to an afterthought. They’re pencil whipped on budgets and tools. The hiring is always the worst. They’re viewed as a cost center basically. And to me the opposite could not be more true. That your customer support and success organization is a revenue driver. It is the keeper of your customer experience in a way that you can’t over invest in that area.
I would almost say that prestige is one of the only areas that I believe can actually supplement a product that needs some time to improve. So having a perfectly elegant product is hard. It takes time, it takes refinement, it takes investment. The best way to do that if you don’t have limitless resources is to wrap that product in an amazing experience. So Ryan Dice always said something that I really appreciated. He said, well, the definition of automated is if I don’t have to do it. Now you can do that within code and software, but you can also do that with people. And I think that this is an area that if you’re like man, I want an amazing product experience, but I don’t yet have the ability, resources or team to build the perfect product that’s in my brain.
I would say build the perfect customer experience utilizing the people that can be that supporter of the product as you build the product to then not require the people. So I think that that’s an area where if people ask me, what do the early days look like, it looks like having a spectacular customer experience because that will improve the profit, protect the purpose and improve the product as you go.
[00:22:03] Jason Barnard: That really speaks to me right now, the last six or seven months. That really speaks to me in terms of what we’ve been working on. We’re working with a lady called Aleasha Bahr who’s been a huge, huge help with that and brought that front and center for us. And the next one was Persuasion.
[00:22:16] Jonathan Cronstedt: People, I think just, I think they vastly underestimate the wow impact of if I send an email to a company and the expectation is I might need to follow up again to see where that email is or I’m not going to hear from anybody for 24 to 48 hours because that’s just how slow online is. And man, you get a response back right away which is just, hey, I’m Sally, got your email, see what you’re dealing with. Want to let you know that so and so handles that. They’ll be back in the office on Monday, but I’m here to handle anything you need. It just that touch of we care is so absent today. And I mean, case in point, like you can call the most luxurious hotel chains on the planet and you’re going to get the press one for reservations, press two for this, press three for that and then you’re going to sit on hold and you’re going to listen to an audio with them telling you how important you are to their business while they have have you on hold listening to an audio. And it’s like, that’s bullshit. If I was that important, why wouldn’t, why wouldn’t you just pick up the phone? Like a pizza restaurant with an average order value of 20 bucks for a pizza can figure out how to answer the phone and take orders and yet every other company can’t figure that out.
So to me, as we look at a universe where AI is going and going and going, the authenticity of being a service based company I think is irreplicable.
[00:23:33] Jason Barnard: Right? Yeah. And that, that puts me in a great position with Kalicube because that’s where we’re going. We’re working in AI, we’re working to manipulate or change the perception of AI and the way it represents you. But we’ve realized that the core of our business is actually the human services we give people like you. And we had that experience a couple of weeks ago where we were exchanging emails very quickly and we moved from nothing happening to everything being done in the space of a few days because the back and forth was very fast. And I can see how that could easily become long and slow and boring and make you very frustrated. So moving on to the next stage was Persuasion. Was it?
[00:24:12] Jonathan Cronstedt: Yes. So prestige promotion, then persuasion to people.
[00:24:16] Jason Barnard: Sorry.
[00:24:17] Jonathan Cronstedt: So Promotion is just going to be your marketing. You know, how are you out there aggregating attention and driving it towards the next step?
[00:24:23] Jason Barnard: Okay, marketing, which is your favorite thing in the entire universe. And then it’s persuasion, which is the actual act of selling.
[00:24:30] Jonathan Cronstedt: Well. And that’s. That’s the irony of it is marketing. And sales is where most people go to prop up bad products. That if you’ve got a great product that is answering a need in the marketplace and has a transformative impact, you’re 90% of the way there. Because then it makes marketing and sales the easiest thing in the world. If you’ve got a product that requires a complex explanation and you’ve got a product that doesn’t solve a real problem that you have to convince somebody is a problem man. No, thanks.
[00:24:59] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. No, no, absolutely. I’m with you all the way today. And two years ago I wasn’t. So I’ve really evolved and I wish I talked to you earlier. And I’m going to have to read the book as well. And then the last thing is people, because once you’re in that situation, you’ve got a profitable company with purpose that has a great customer service, a great product, great promotion and great persuasion, aka sales.
[00:25:23] Jonathan Cronstedt: You nail the six. You nail the six Ps. Recruiting will be the least of your concerns. You’ll have a company that everyone and their mother will want to tell their friends and family to work for it because the systems are all working. The company’s growing. It’s creating more and more opportunities for everybody. It’s a company that everybody wants to be a part of.
[00:25:40] Jason Barnard: Brilliant. Absolutely delightful end to the podcast episode. You’ve just explained how to run my business in less than 30 minutes. Thank you very much, JCron. Thank you, everyone.
[00:25:50] Jonathan Cronstedt: My pleasure, Jason.
[00:25:51] Jason Barnard: That was brilliant. And this is actually going to be a standard video. We’re going to get people who work on the team to watch because it really represents personally how I can see what we’re trying to do at Kalicube and what we can move forwards with. So thank you everyone for watching. You get the outro song as well, JCron. A quick goodbye to end the show, thank you, JCron.
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