How To Dial In Your Business Strategy For Explosive Growth In The AI Era With Simon Severino
Is your business strategy built for a world that no longer exists? Today, Simon Severino, CEO of Strategy Sprints, dives deep into how business growth has changed. As information becomes commoditized and AI reshapes the market, many entrepreneurs are experiencing a lull in market activity. Simon breaks down the crucial “fundamentals” of sales—positioning, messaging, and conversion mechanisms—and reveals how to leverage AI tools like “Claude code” to eliminate admin work and focus on strategic, higher-leverage tasks. Learn the exact process for refreshing your business model, asking the right questions, and even assembling your own AI-powered “dream strategy board” to stay ahead of the competition.
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How To Dial In Your Business Strategy For Explosive Growth In The AI Era With Simon Severino
My guest is Simon Severino, and Simon has had an interesting background. As with all of us, he’s an entrepreneur and he started out scaling his company, and boy, did he do a great job. In fact, he did such a great job that he made his life completely miserable, but his company was growing quickly. You know what? Sometimes we’re all in a position just like that. Sooner or later, you’re going to realize that the entire value of who you are is not what you do. It’s basically the life that you live. Simon’s here to help us understand that and maybe even provide some tools out of how to diagnose this problem and maybe even fix it. Welcome, Simon, to the show.
Thank you, Mitch, for having me.
Simon, it’s great to have you. Just so that readers know, we met in a mastermind called JVMM. It’s funny because I haven’t been a member of that mastermind for many years, but there are still so many people that I met in that mastermind that I end up connecting with on a regular basis, and you and I, I think this is our multiple connections. I think you and I have both been on each other’s shows once before this time, too. Let’s get going here. Now, I always like to start out with a simple question. How did all this start for you?
It started many years ago when I was a young strategy advisor in one of these global houses and I did fall in love with the go-to-market questions because when you would say go-to-market, CEOs would give you all their attention, all their resources, their top 40 people as long as you need them because if you don’t have a go-to-market strategy, they shouldn’t go back into their countries and do anything because they don’t have a plan. What should they execute on?
We would create those strategic initiatives. I loved it because it’s psychology, it’s numeric, it’s sociology. Everything comes together, so many disciplines. It’s hard, big problems, and if you solve them, I feel elevated. I feel energized. It became the go-to-market thing. How to enter a market, how to crush it in a market, how to stay in a market. I’m still in love with this many years later.
Now, of course, you’re the CEO of Strategy Sprints, and this business has been around probably for many years. Is that right?
Yeah.
As a global business advisor and strategist, why don’t you help us understand what some of the more common problems are with growth? How do people reading see their company and how can they see it differently? What are the levers that they should try and mess with first before getting into the more complex, esoteric ones?
Foundations Of Scaling And Sales Positioning
I was meeting my mastermind today. We meet every week and I said, “Guys, today let’s do fundamentals.” We do two things. Fundamentals and acceleration. Fundamentals is getting the basics right. It’s like if you’re a basketball player and you are doing legwork. Of course, they have legs, and they’re fine legs. You do leg day and you do the foundations. The foundations in sales are positioning. What makes you different from the others?
The foundation of sales is positioning—what makes you different from others? Share on XWhat are you here to do and what can you do better than others? Who are you here to serve and why are you the best serving them? Messaging. How do you get that across? How do you create fresh conversations rather than the slop that you see out there everywhere from there, okay, what’s the conversion mechanism? What makes them actually deepen that collaboration and buy from you?
After a first buy, what’s the activation? Activation prepares for the second buy. After a second buy, what’s the referral? Because each of those relationships you can actually grow over 15 years, 25 years, if you do it right. One of our members started a sprint, which is a one-on-one work, 90 days optimizing the sales process. They are a client for sixteen years. They went through different phases and right now they have to solve the AI problem and they said, “Simon, you are so advanced with AI, please bring us this Claude code thing because it’s needed,” after sixteen years of building the relationship.
Foundations. Positioning, messaging, conversion mechanisms. The acceleration. Which, of course, right now it’s Claude code. With Claude code, we build boards, strategy advisory boards, agents, and all the things that make just what you’re doing just much faster because it eliminates admin and it frees up your time for strategic, higher leverage tasks.
I think what I’m hearing and what I like about what you’re saying is you have a process that you take one after the other and you go in order. I’m going to guess that a lot of people reading the show have already done that. What they have probably been experiencing is really I would call it, maybe a lull in market activity right now. Maybe they’re spending a little bit more than they did or a lot more than they did before. They had a good conversion mechanism, it’s not working as well. They had a great story that they told that used to resonate and it’s not resonating as well now. How do people go about refreshing that if what they do basically hasn’t changed?
Adapting Offers To A Shifting Market Floor
If what they do hasn’t changed, then they are probably disconnected now to their audience because the life of the people they are here to serve has changed. What we are all experiencing is, we called it the floor is lava. Everything is moving under our feet. From geopolitical to the technical acceleration, the fact that Claude code can do most of what your softwares used to do. You don’t need most subscriptions.
It’s a very dynamic situation. We all have to adapt and some of us have are farther along than others, but we all need to change right now the fundamentals. Pricing, offer, the way we deliver, and the way we charge. What do we charge for? If you’re a software company, you have to start moving from charging per seat to charging per outcome. If you’re a coach, a consultant, you have to look at different ways of splitting the risk and splitting the upside.
Nobody will just pay for time anymore. Also, what is it since most people are the listening or consultants, coaches. What is it actually that Claude code cannot do for your people? That’s maybe 20%, 30%, 40% rest. You need to really understand this. That’s the fundamentals, and you need to go deeper into that and expand on that and ask yourself, “How can I make it safer to buy? How can I create even more value? What is actually the value that’s needed from me right now?” That is changing.
Yes, those are excellent tips, and of course, people need to stay focused on exactly what you’re describing. There’s another element of this that I have found recently in my own client work, and that is that the market has shifted right under their feet. Whereas before, and this isn’t new, if you’re reading, you probably know this. You used to sell information, and now information is basically free.
The content of just about every book out there is on the internet or at least in AI. I have published six business books, and you could pretty much go to ChatGPT and say, “Tell me exactly how Mitch Russo builds a Power Tribe certification program.” You don’t have to buy the book, you don’t have to hire me, just there it is, right there. Now the question is. Where do I add value?
To follow that up with my own way of saying it is. Now, what is the blood-spreading problem that a client is experiencing that they would do anything to solve right now? Most people have not asked that question in their own business for a long time. That’s a good question to jump-start a new discovery as to what your clients are experiencing.
The other part that I also wanted to bring up is that your market may have shifted upward, meaning you’ve already helped them, they’ve already paid you, and now they are really looking for other advisors or experts. That doesn’t mean you have to follow them. It may mean you just simply have to go back to basics and find other businesses that are experiencing what your customers used to experience that now you have even more experience fixing and solving. Does that make sense? What do you think of that?
Implementing Virtual Strategy Boards And AI Agents
Absolutely. You’re describing the exact process that we need to go through. Asking this question and staying on it. Now the answer will be different for everybody reading, but the process is what I can describe, how you get there to your answer. Let me give you an example because I certify coaches. It takes me 6 months to first 3 months show them our processes and then the next 3 months is actually customizing it with them depending on their niche. That process is changing radically because we can do this much faster right now. A while ago, a coach started, he’s in Miami and he’s a financial advisor. His world is changing. The trust is eroding. He’s asking himself exactly these questions. What is needed from a financial advisor right now? What is actually needed?
The process is, I asked him if he had a board. This is part of the of our method. If you had all the money in the world, which board would you assemble? Let’s say you can bring together Charlie Munger, Steve Jobs, Rick Rubin, David Ogilvy, all your heroes. Meister Eckhart, you name it, you name them. Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius. You can build literally the dream strategy board. Who would you pick and which job would you do them?
Ten minutes later, we pick them, we build them, we give them a job. The next day we set the cadence. They meet at 7.30 AM they report to you at 8.01 AM what they discussed. Next day we implement a chairman because they learn from each other that everybody’s optimizing for their part. Marcus Aurelius only optimizes for the Stoic perspective, so you need a chair who looks at the overall company and direction.
There is chair. Next thing you realize that they have just small permissions but they cannot really move, they cannot really move the needle. They can just tell you stuff. We introduce continuity which is a project management system. We introduce that they have more permissions. They can now actually go to your places of work and do the work for you. That used to take us months. With this particular guy in Miami, it’s two weeks and they are running. They will almost soon start sending emails in his name. From “I have to find out how to sharpen my offer,” to “I have my 8 dream people doing it with me and for me,” in 14 days.
One of the questions you could ask the board, and this would be virtually for anybody in any business, is to once you understand my business board of directors, I want you to go outside my business model and explore all the other business models that are adjacent to mine. Tell me what they are doing that I’m not doing that has worked for other businesses, even if it has nothing to do with my business or what I do. That discovery question for us has been explosive, particularly when it came to marketing and sales.
I had a client in Dallas who does roofing. Roofing is a big deal in Dallas with all the hailstorms and everything else. What we did with the client is we had him go through that exercise. The following week, this particular individual was so excited to report back that his AI had found three marketing systems that come from the plumbing business, the dental business, and a third business I don’t remember.
Immediately had AI map out implementation plans for all of them. He saw a 20% lift in response rate from just positioning them that way. Your AI board can do so much for you, but what I’ve discovered is that setting a board like that is easy. You just do it you said. The real difficulty is in understanding the right questions to ask and how to implement the answers. I think that’s probably where you spend a lot of time. Am I right?
Exactly. Level one, you assemble the board. Level two. The board gets more smart. For example, what you just said was implemented by Jay on our board, who was initially the actual Jay Abraham, who thinks like that. What can I learn from other industries? The robot board learned it, internalized and started doing it. They start giving me now better ideas and as soon as I trusted them, I let them run the business.
Solving The Blood Spurting Problem
We don’t know which answer I will give you in 2 weeks, in 4 weeks, in 8 weeks. I know that the process is what you just described. We have to go deeper into the things that our people need right now and we have to learn from a very broad set of opportunities. We have to go deeper and deeper because we are getting commoditized. 20%, 30%, 40% of what we did is getting commoditized and this is just the beginning.
We have to go deeper into what our people need right now, and we have to learn from a very broad set of opportunities. Share on XIt will accelerate. It will not calm down from here. What we can do is refine our processes, our sops. Sops is another great example. In the middle of the sprint, we have to write down the new processes. Sometimes they don’t even have written processes. If they’re coaches, consultants, they don’t have written processes. If you wonder what is a written process, for the people who are reading this, I’m sharing screen and you see our business processes.
This is how we do marketing, how we do sales, how we do client work and then there is leadership processes like the one we talked about where you strategize, refine the offer, etc., the pricing. For each of those, traditionally, it was painful and you would avoid it. I avoided it for years. Now you just talk to Claude code and it writes them down. This is a Notion page. You say, “Update my ICP page, update my pricing page,” and it’s updated.
You don’t need a CRM anymore. You say, “Update the pipeline,” and it’s updated. So much which was admin, which was dragging us down is you shouldn’t do it anymore and we will help you get rid of. Now your job is exactly what Mitch just said. Bigger questions. Attack bigger problems. I talked to a partner at McKinsey. He said, “We are used to being commoditized every 10 years. We started with a very small set of problems that we solve like optimizing a supply chain.”
“Ten years later, our clients knew how to do it on their own. We were commoditized. We just went to the next bigger question which was the go-to-market strategy. They knew how to do it on their own. Now we’re going to the next question. How can I help you double your market cap?” that’s the same process for every consultant, every coach reading right now. That’s why fundamentals work stays the same. Getting rid of the admin of all these small tasks, low leverage tasks, because your job will be to ask bigger questions and to embrace and attack bigger problems for your people. That’s the work.
I get it. That makes a lot of sense. Now, Simon, one of the things that I’ve discovered for myself, and this again is different for everybody, but for me what works best is testimonials. I’ve perfected a way of generating testimonials numerically. A lot of times people say, “Can you give me a testimonial?” Someone will say, “Yeah, sure,” and then they open up their phone and talk into it for 30 or 60 seconds and they’re done. To me, that’s not a testimonial. We have a very specific system for doing that. More importantly, we like to use numbers. In my software platform, clickcoach, one of the things that we do with all clients and all of many of my coaches do it too because it’s all there, is we encourage them to use the dashboard feature.
The dashboard allows clients to enter weekly what their stats are in any one of ten different parameters. If you’re tracking profits or revenue or click-through or lead flow or whatever the numbers you are tracking, the system does that for you and then creates graphs. We highly recommend that using testimonials alongside of the visual representation of the progress does a better job of selling in most cases than anything you can say. We like stats a lot and we get those stats by holding people accountable using accountability libraries and questions again built into the software. I’m assuming you do the same thing with your system. Is that right?
Visual Proof And Data-Driven Testimonials
We have to make it easier because it’s complicated enough for coaches and consultants out there, so we also have our simplification mechanisms. Ours are based on AI. We have prompts that excavate this from them and then make it easy and follow up, etc. Usually, between the second and the third ask, the first video testimonial comes in and then there is a way to automatically translate that video into a few ways that can be put directly on the website.
Yes, proof is so important because now that compute scales, now that everyone has so much firepower, who will you trust? You will trust the people like you. If you find those people on the website, then you’re going to buy. You don’t buy from salespeople, you buy from people like you that say, “Yeah, I did it and it was good for me. This is why I was skeptical. This is what came out of it.” if they’re similar to you, they’re going to buy. That’s why you need something that really puts them forward and ideally, your website starts understanding who is watching and puts those people forward that are similar to them.
Exactly. That’s a good tip, of course. That gets to another point. Websites seem to be getting less and less important. I don’t know what you think about that. We’ve maintained a website of course, as I’m sure you have for many years. What we’ve also started doing is we’re using different broadcast mechanisms now that we didn’t rely on much but at all before. We’re also seeding AI.
We have an agency we work with that helps us and so that when people ask questions of AI, the AI knows who we are and that’s one of the things that we believe has helped a lot in getting the name out. The other thing of course, is interviews like this. If you’re not on shows and doing interviews, then you’re missing out on a very important element of getting your name out there.
The final piece that I love to talk about, as you probably can realize, is I love to write books. I have just about to release my next business book which is I think maybe the last one. I’ve been writing a lot of business books over the years. This one is called Seen Not Sold. The Silence After the Click. It addresses something that you mentioned before and I’d like you to talk about. It addresses trust. Many people now might even see Mitch Russo or Simon Severino’s fantastic testimonials, but then the issue of trust comes in. Why will they get less clicks now than they did before? That is a trust issue and that’s what my book explores. What do you think about that?
Trust Building Through Community And Authority
Let’s start with the first one, the how to be found online by agents. If you look for Simon Severino or Strategy Sprints, the agent knows extremely well who we are and what we do. One is because we are on shows and we have our own show. That’s a very important mechanism. The other one is books. Like you said. Our books are now out in four language. The Strategy Sprints is now out in in English, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese.
That was 2022 when it came out in English. The new one, Time Freedom with Jay Abraham, will come out in English on April 20th for the first time but we already sold the licensing rights to Japan to this incredible publisher. Hiro is such an amazing publisher in Japan and he’s so good at finding opportunities. He created a huge tour for us in Japan. We had so much fun there and created a ton of value. Half an hour later, he bought the rights of the current book which was a manuscript at that stage, and he went back and bought the Japanese rights to the old book, to Strategy Sprints. That’s how cool he is. Yes, books help you. Being on podcasts helps you.
The other part is trust. Where did we meet years ago? In a mastermind. What you really need if you’re a coach, a consultant is a community. It doesn’t need to be large, but it must be of real people who care about each other, support each other, become partners in in cross-promotion, in referral, in pushing each other. Say, “Come on, use Claude directly in the terminal. Don’t be so shy,” because that moves the others forward. It’s like a sports team. I’m in the rowing team, so these eight people that are with me with me in the boat, we are important for each other.
The trainer too. Our trainer is important too. He pushes us across the comfort zone. We, the peers, we are also important because we pull each other forward in many ways. We go to the workout, to the training because the others are there. We show up when it’s cold, when it’s dark, because the others are there. This is what community does. As soon as you can, guys, switch on your paid community.
I started with a mastermind that would meet once a month years ago. That is still going on and it’s now a weekly thing. On top of that, we created our own app. Technology made it easier. Now we have our own app, so we are 24/7 connected. I have 256 members in the Sprint Club and they can tag me any time. It’s me, it’s not a robot. It’s Simon answering. Why? These are my favorite people. These are the people that I am here to serve. Whenever they ping me, I’m happy. How can I serve? How can I help? I love it because there is community.
Now, imagine a month from now you’re looking for a coach. There are so many business coaches. Which one will you pick? First of all, it helps if they have a YouTube channel or a podcast where you can get deeper because you can fake anything once but you cannot fake anything over 1,300 episodes. You run out of faking capacity. That’s one trust element. The other one is, if 256 people trust him, maybe he’s not a total idiot. Maybe he’s trustable. You have to look at the churn rate, etc. Maybe it’s always different 250 people, but there is something there that you can start your due diligence with.
You can talk to people and say, “Have you been there? What do you say? Do you trust him?” you’re starting to have some meat on the bones. The rest will be AI slop. You have to stand out by being that different space where it’s safe, where it’s true, where it’s about truth and beauty and people care about each other and elevate each other.
Simon, this has been a fantastic conversation. Whenever we get to talk, I always enjoy our call together. I think at this point I’d like to share with the audience a little bit more about your group. It’s a group of coaches, is that right? You stay specifically with coaches in your group?
Yes, the Sprint Club. Most of them, most of those 256 people are either financial advisors, management advisors, IT advisors, life coaches, health coaches, breath coaches, vitality coaches. This professional services people. Some of them are more B2B, some of them are more B2C, but it’s consultants, coaches, this kind of profession people like me. What we work on there is accelerating sales.
This means something different every year. Right now it means getting really, really good at AI before we’re too late and before it becomes sloppy, so we want to really be accurate with it. It’s working on the sales foundations. Positioning, messaging, and then also on accelerating it with all these beautiful accelerating opportunities that we have. That’s the Sprint Club. That’s our app, 24/7.
You can find it at StrategySprints.com. It’s free for seven days. You can you can hang out with us, have already a ton of value. The first seven days alone it’s an incredible seven interventions that you will experience there. Most people don’t leave after seven days because they feel the power of that group. Some of them even want to join the weekly group coaching. That’s called the 200k Club.
Some of them do even that and some of them, they even want to bring on their whole team, which is then one-on-one work. The easiest way to hang out with us is StrategySprints.com. There is this seven-day free trial and there is also a ton of tools like the things that I mentioned. The positioning process, the messaging process and 35 other of our core tools are for free on our website. People can try them out for size and see if it’s helpful.
Sounds great. Now readers, head over to StrategySprints.com and check it out. If I were you, I’d pop in for that seven-day free trial of the Strategy Sprints group as well. Simon, again, thanks so much for sharing your beautiful work with all of my readers. Really appreciate it. Looking forward to our next conversation.
Thank you, Mitch. Keep rolling.
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About Simon Severino
Simon Severino has created +2B in additional sales for his clients over the last 21 years. As an advisor who became CEO, he had to learn the importance of working ON the business more than IN it. Now, he shares his proven templates with high-ticket entrepreneurs. They reclaim 14 hours per week using the Strategy Sprints™ Method and enjoy sales that soar. Author of “Strategy Sprints”, Podcast Host, Ranking Top 2,5%, TEDx speaker, Forbes contributor, Triathlete. Has appeared on over 1300 podcasts. When he is not supercharging sales, you’ll find him swimming, biking, running, and tricking his 3 kids into outdoor activities so they can’t escape his annoying shrinky questions.
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