Business Coaching: Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System

If you want to run a business online, there is a coaching program you need to know about.

Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System.

In 2007 I joined Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System (BGS) coaching programme. My perspective comes through participating in BGS from Australia while starting up my own businesses.

About BGS

BGS is a business coaching programme with 12 modules, released to you 1 per month for a year. The modules cover strategy, planning, execution and monitoring for your business.

There are some sections that are relevant only for startups, and some that are only relevant for online businesses. But I think the programme will help you with any business, online or offline.

Conference Calls and Forums
Rich has regular conference calls, which are good if you are in range of Rich’s timezone. If you are in Australia (like me) you can forget about it. I tried for a while, but 3am/4am calls are simply not sustainable.

Rich also gives you access to his forum. Surprisingly, the forums are not very active, and there are far better forums elsewhere. Which sort of makes sense. If you are running a successful online business, you are out there doing it, not hanging in a forum.

So if you imagine you might participate in the conference calls from Australia or figure you’ll rely on the forums, forget about it. I seriously do hope one day Rich does something to fix his TZSS (Time Zone Selfishness Syndrome), often found in US companies that offer international products based on US time.

But in practice, BGS is still worth it without them, so don’t sweat the calls or forum. So there, I’ve probably ruined any chance we had of getting some calls scheduled at more humane times.

Rich Schefren

Rich Schefren runs Strategic Profits and markets a range of information products to owners of online businesses. He is based in Florida, and has extraordinary experience launching, marketing and running businesses on the Internet.

Rich promotes himself and his products aggressively. Personally I think his website doesn’t leave you a very good impression.

But heck, no matter what you or I might think of his sales letters or attention getting tactics, you can’t argue with how successful he has been at winning new business. What works is what works. Period.

My point is directed to you if his website doesn’t appeal to you. It is worth your while to look past it to the substance of what he is offering with BGS. It is unique.

If you are starting an online business, Rich has certainly got something for you. And don’t let the fact his sales letters and web offers are aggressive put you off. Under the surface is the real deal.

BGS Modules

A module consists of a powerpoint deck and an mp3 file, along with the audio transcript and workbooks. And there are additional materials depending on the module.

But mainly what you will experience is Rich talking. Fast and furious.

I’ve worked for large and small companies before starting up my own, and read widely.  I’ve been through some great (and not so great) training programmes with IBM and other major corporations.

If you asked me at the beginning whether I expected to learn a lot of new stuff, I would have said no, not a lot, but I was looking for a good system.

Was I wrong or what! I certainly found the system i was after. But the most surprising thing to me was that I learnt valuable lessons – … about new concepts I had never even known about, and also new ways of understanding things I already knew about!

Rich has material in each one of his modules that will blow your mind.  

The thoroughness with which he covers the ground is scary. Starting from the basics of what it takes to own and run a business, Rich covers the territory. The module titles (from my iTunes playlist) tell the story.

What I am trying to tell you is the material is powerful. Rich has synthesized a lot of the best thinking about business and added his own significant understanding of how online business works. The result is a thorough system for starting and running a business.

Thanks, I’ll just read it for free on the Internet

Now I am a fan of Internet resources for online marketing. We publish them ourselves, and there are innumerable blogs and resources to be had. And of course there are books in bookshops.

But can you get the information you get through BGS from business books or reading on the Internet? Nope.

Well at least not unless you dropped everything and went and read hugely/widely and worked on internet startups around the clock.

Rich cheerfully acknowledges his own ADD (and has strategies to deal with that), and also suggests that we can benefit from it. And he is right. He has accumulated a vast amount of business knowledge and converted it into a useful system for starting and running an online business.

New life into old concepts

Are you cynical about business coaches or business consultants who get on to a Mission, Vision and Values hobby horse? Having been around the business traps for many years, I had got to the point of being very cynical about people who lead with mission, vision and values. Nothing wrong with them (in fact, quite the oppositive, having clarity is important). But in my experience you don’t find clarity when a consultant or coach trots out a tired old story about how important mission (yawn), vision (zzzzz) and values (falls off chair and hits floor) really are – coz they read about it in Business 101 at business school (comatose).

Contrast that experience with talking to someone who really understands mission, vision and values. It is electrifying.

Rich consistently does this, he breathes new life into ‘old’ concepts. Like mission, vision and values.

Rich doesn’t repeat the mission, vision and values mantra you can find anywhere (.02 sec from Google if you want). He is focussed on what makes a business work, and how to put the pieces together into a system. You will want to sit down immediately and get your mission, vision and values clear.

Rich has the knack of cutting right to the core of a principle or technique, and injecting it with urgency and meaning.

New stuff. Totally new

He also introduces you to new concepts you have not even considered.

When you have read widely, you might think it would be hard to surprise you. I certainly thought that (yeah, you get to have a bit of a laugh at yourself along the way as well).

Each module Rich managed to come up with something that was really exciting. Not flashy tactics that glitter briefly. But bedrock principles for business online.

You can’t do that by repeating what others have already said.

It is worth pointing out here that Rich doesn’t waste time on making things terribly pretty. His Powerpoint slides would not win any awards. Any. But that doesn’t matter. Don’t focus on the surface, look and listen to what he is saying.

Maybe one day Rich will get an expert to format his material. That could well open it up to a new audience. And it will add 0% to what you get out of the programme. I’ll say it one last time, don’t focus on the surface.

Putting it Together

Rich has not only put all this together, he has used the system in his own business (and for others) and refined it.

If you spent enough time, you could read most of the concepts in books. You could eventually find out about new strategies and tactics from blogs or forum. But if you do this you are likely to wind up with a massive set of ‘resources’ – links, papers, books, knowledge.

What is missing? Sifting the wheat from the chaff. And turning all that information into knowledge, creating a system that you can follow to launch and run a business online.

Which is what Rich has done with BGS.

Roller Coaster

I found the programme a roller coaster ride. It is easy to lurch from wildly excited and optimistic to feeling I’ll-never-be-able-to-do-all-this.

The sheer volume of material can be overwhelming. I found that after month 4, I was distracted from the programme by my business. I lost touch with the conference calls (4am starts … not sustainable), and wasn’t doing the modules on a monthly basis. Looking back I can see that was a mistake. You need to have the deadlines in place to cover the modules month by month.

Anyway, I got back on the programme after a break of a few months, and because the material is essentially self contained (you get to hear Rich’s presentation and see the slides), it is still really useful.

Be prepared for the firehose issue, it is not trivial. You need to pay serious attention to Rich’s modules on time management.

Time management. This is just one example of a topic you think would be a bit me-too. You’ve probably read books on time management, understand the principles, been there, done that. But trust me, if you have an entrepreneurial inclination, be prepared for Rich’s uncanny ability to be inside your head. He knows what you are thinking, what the challenges are. And what you need to do. Time management takes on a very new perspective.

The secrets of online business

Rich has some insights and models that relate to online business that you just won’t find anywhere else. Powerful insights that will change the way you do business.

For me I got a huge amount of value from these concepts:

• Lifetime customer value.
• Cost per acquisition.
• Front end and back end products.
• Product launch.

Maybe you know all this stuff already, I didn’t. If you think you know what a product launch is, then you may change your mind after you do Rich’s programme.

Such powerful concepts.

I could go on. There are other models – such as the Theory of Constraints – that you sort-of know about, but have never really applied. Rich introduces them with clarity and weaves them into a practical, useful set of tools.

Even concepts and tools that you know well (for example, in my case I have experience with business process modelling and project management) Rich manages to nail down the practical, useful essence of the disciplines into a workable system for business.

To talk about project management in front of people who understand project management is tough. I’m glad to say that Rich really gets it, and he has pulled out the relevant aspects to apply to the task of starting and running an online business.

Market research appears deceptively simple as a topic. After all, we all know about market research when starting a business, right? Module 4 was an absolute knockout. It totally rewrote my conception of what is possible with market research.

You wouldn’t guess it by looking at Rich’s module summary here though. Maybe he doesn’t want to give too much away. Anyway, I am certain you will be blown away by Rich talking about market research as well.

The essence of BGS

Rich runs a really successful business online. And he has run successful businesses before that.

For me, the quality of Rich’s material is not so much his online chops (which are very good, don’t get me wrong). It is just that I think there are better copywriters, better email marketers, better bloggers, better search marketers than Rich. 

Where Rich really excels is in his understanding of how to pull together all the pieces into a cohesive business. This makes BGS worth doing whether you are running an online or an offline business.

And who knows, maybe his sales letters are the best way to do things after all. Hard to argue with someone when their business is so successful using them.

Other Products

Rich has other products. And once you are on his list, you will experience them via email blasts a plenty (I’m not sure Rich is the best person to learn about opt-in email marketing from – he doesn’t break them, but he sure pushes the boundaries).

His blog has some good material (for example, I first learned of Dan Ariely and Predictably Irrational through one of Rich’s blog posts), but it isn’t on my RSS list. Why not? I find the style puts me off, it is too hard sell for a blog. See note above about ‘heaps of sales’ though. And besides, he always promotes each of his blog posts with an email blast – you have to hand it to him.

I can’t recommend any of Rich’s other products because I haven’t used them. I did buy his Business Acceleration Programme, hoping that it would somehow continue in the vein of BGS. After briefly dipping in to it, my initial impression is that it is lightweight compared to BGS – lots of interviews with other people, papers from other people, without it being synthesized down to a system. Still, I need to allocate some time to go through it properly. For now, BGS is far more valuable to me than BAP, and I figure if I get to apply BGS fully then that is more than enough. Maybe I’ll kick myself one day for not going through it earlier. But you have to prioritise.

Summary

Going through the BGS has taught me more about business – online and offline – than I ever would have considered possible. That is a humbling experience I would add, because I thought I knew a lot. Rich is so thorough, so analytical, so energetic, that it is hard to measure up to. Particularly when you already have a business running.

Starting a new business online is bare-knuckle hard.

Unless you are one of the million-dollar-home-page folk who manage to make it seem easy. Just like lottery winners make it look easy too.

For the rest of us who have to put in the hard yards to start a business, if you learn and follow Rich’s BGS, you will not regret it.

So there you have it, my stream of consciousness recommendation for BGS. I’ve tried not to edit it too much (in some places it sounds borderline fanboy). But the programme really is that good, all I have tried to do in this article is tell you what I found.

I recommend you go on the journey like I did, you won’t regret it.