Glen Carlson Wants to Help Business Owners Find Their Superpower

Who Is Glen Carlson? (2:00

Glen Carlson is the co-founder of Dent Global, an accelerator program that helps business owners become a Key Person of Influence (which also happens to be the title of a book written by Dent Global’s co-founder, Daniel Priestly).

Over the course of 12 months, established business owners with teams of up to 10 employees gain the assets they need to become an influencer in their space. Dent Global helps them with the following:

• Pitch: Send the right message.
• Publish: Create thought leadership content.
• Product: Develop scalable products, so they can stop selling their time.
• Profile: Raise their online profile.
• Partnership: Find existing ventures in their space to partner with.

But make no mistake. This isn’t just about making more money, this program helps business owners build a business that’s meaningful and able to make an impact on the world.

Why It’s Important for Businesses to Find Their Superpower (8:45)

Chances are good that you don’t really know what your business’s superpower is. And Glen should know. He came to that realisation… eight years after launching his first business.

It was called Triumphant Events and was something he and his co-founder started when they were 21. One thing led to another and the company shifted from promoting products to promoting people.

So, that’s what they started to do, to take the vision and values of the person behind the business and to transfer them onto the product or service they were trying to sell. And it worked well. It took only three years for the company to make $10 million in sales.

However, it was when they tried to sell the company that they realised there was a big problem:

“We were playing the wrong game. We had the wrong rules. We spent eight years building a business that wasn’t worth anything.”

So, rather than sell, they took some time to take a closer look at their company and find out what made it so unique. They were good at building influencers (before influencers were even a thing) and it was something they knew the growing small business sector was desperately in need of.

Why You Need to Focus on Outcomes (19:00)

One of the problems with Glen’s first company is that it focused on what the company did, how big its database was and the systems they’d created. But that’s not what clients care about and it’s why investors didn’t care either.

That’s why he says that business owners have to start disrupting how they think. Stop focusing on what you do today; start looking down the road and anticipate the change inevitably coming your way.

He suggests asking yourself:

“Let’s say that [the product you make] becomes obsolete. How will people still be able to get that outcome?”

In other words, what is the outcome your product actually creates? For a website, that might be lead generation or sales. For SEO, that might be a greater web presence. And so on.

Once you figure out what it is you’re actually selling (i.e. the outcome), you can more effectively communicate that to prospective clients. It’s also going to light a fire under you, which will help you to innovate.

The 4 Assets You Need to Be Successful (26:45)

As Glen explains in the podcast, business owners are guilty of throwing away a lot of their time on things like sales, marketing and delivery. And it’s not just their time either. It’s their team’s time, too.

“Time is one of the most expensive things you have to pay for. It’s not often apparent, though, since you don’t usually pay yourself for what your time is worth.”

This is where the idea of assets comes into play. There are four that Glen asks you to focus on:

Attention: In order to grow (and to scale that growth), you need to be able to capture the attention of the market. And you’ll do that through your products and content.

Trust: Normally, you’d build a relationship by giving your time to a prospect or client in meetings, discovery calls, etc.. But you can leverage your assets to cement this trust, too. Glen suggests things like writing a book, putting together a comprehensive report, or building a diagnostic tool. Something that enables your audience to diagnose their problems and self-reflect on their own time.

Revenue: With less time to spend on marketing and sales, you can put more of it towards generating revenue. When you focus on your outcomes, you can more effectively reverse-engineer the process and put together a system that enables this to happen more efficiently.

Predictable products: Finally, you need to create predictable products or recurring services. This will give you a reason to continue to provide your audience with value.

Wrap-Up

Although the word “influencer” has become somewhat synonymous with “attention-seeker” these days, that’s not what Dent Global is helping business owners work towards.

Instead, they’re teaching business owners to come out from the shadows and to create personal brands that people can trust. If you rely on your product or company to do the heavy lifting, it’s going to be really difficult to build your business.