If you want to grow your company, you may want to have a little bit of a discovery session with yourself or some trusted confidants, relatives, or employees. These discovery sessions have one goal and that is to have a conversation and see if you can extract an idea that resonates with everybody. A lot of companies do this with 50 to 100 people at a time. Learn what questions to ask your confidants to have an effective growth discovery session, and what questions to ask your customers after you’ve had those conversations with your confidants.

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Growth Discovery Session

This is the podcast where myself or my wife and I, Kerri Courtright, sit down and reflect for a minute. We live life about a week at a time. Travel a little bit here and there. Over the last 25 years, we have been able to accumulate some data from consulting 3,100 companies and growing what is now somewhere in the area of thousands of revenue generating websites. What we do for this podcast is if we are in a conversation or a setting where we can tell that we have said something that registered with an entrepreneur, business owner, manager, anybody, we write it down. We carry notebooks with us everywhere and we make sure to podcast on that. If it impacted that one person and helped them grow their business, then there is a statistical chance it can help somebody else. I want to cover something here on episode 328. It was actually a couple months ago that this happened. I just have not had the time to write it out, script it out, and do a podcast on it. This is called a Growth Discovery Session.

You want to grow your company, you want to have a little bit of a discovery session with yourself or maybe some trusted confidants, relatives, or employees. These discovery sessions have one goal. That is to have a conversation and see if you can extract an idea that resonates with everybody. The way this one works, I recommend you grab three people that are very close to you. I would prefer that one of them be in somewhat of a leadership capacity. I would like one of them do the meaningful work. They’re not a manager, they’re not an entrepreneur, they’re not a boss, but they’re a hard worker, they work. I would like one of the people to be a millennial, somebody 18 to 25.

I’m looking for maybe somebody with salt and pepper hair, maybe somebody right in the middle of their work years, and then somebody that is an up and comer. A lot of companies do this with actually 50 to 100 people at a time, but you need at least three. Here’s what you ask. You say, “If you guys could get a piece of paper,” or if you’re doing this on Skype you say, “Can you get a Word document out?”The first question is, “What ads do you respond to?” The 58 year old person is probably going to respond to very different types of ads than the 22 year old. I know that the last time I did this discovery session, somebody said, “I rip out a lot of the ads in Robb Report, Hemisphere Magazine,” that’s American Airlines or United Airlines magazine in the back of the seat. This person rips out a lot of magazine ads. On a monthly basis when they get some time, they pull out a chair on a Saturday morning with a coffee and then they go through these ads and see if anything strikes them.

It was neat because they do this to distance an impulse purchase. I never knew people would think that way and sure enough I found myself now at airports, I’ll get a boating magazine and I’ll rip out the ad and set it aside. The first question is, “What ads do you respond to?” It doesn’t say, “What ads do you rip out and set aside?” The question is, to these three different people, “What ads do you personally respond to?” You’re looking for things like radio, TV, print, text blasts, Facebook Ads, Pandora. You want to hear for things like,