Cold Star Project

Working with European and North American SaaS firms, Stephen Lowisz of 21 LEAP provides the sales systems and personnel to ignite fast growth.    You should be looking to grow your revenue by at least $1.2 million to work with Stephen's organization.   The entire lead nurturing sequence to get the prospect ready to talk to a live human being is also in 21 LEAP's scope. Automation wi...

Crowlspace.com blogger and Space expert Adam Crowl is back on the Cold Star Project with Jason Kanigan, and this time we're digging into the Breakthrough Starshot initiative.    Many improvements and technologies are planned to result from this proof-of-concept project to send a fleet of lightsail vessels to Alpha Centauri.  Each of 100,000 tiny ships will require:   Cameras&nb...

Applicant Pro founder Ryan Kohler is on the Cold Star Project, and the way he scaled to $13.5 million ARR will surprise you.   Pushing back against the conventional wisdom of "finding pain points and solving a problem your target market admits to having," Ryan found success with his recruiting industry app in an unusual way. Instead of looking at the more obvious direct connections and what u...

We act (or fail to act) based on what we believe to be true.   Bruce Lee said, "Defeat is a state of mind; No one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as a reality.”   He's also quoted in a Bob Proctor training as having said to learn his martial arts knowledge, his students (that's you) first had to get rid of their own.  Jason Kanigan of Cold Star Technologies shares tw...

Whether the term is "Define," at the beginning of Attila's 'DOITS' process, or "Select," at the start of the 'SREDIM' problem solving methodology, the first thing you do in process improvement is critical. Your precise choice of what to work on is a factor more important than any other: what you choose to focus on will determine the impact, success or failure of your improvement project. Attila Do...

What does it take to charge a $50K setup fee for working with your firm? Jim Padilla of Gain The Edge is on the Cold Star Project to share his experience and the details of what it takes to do so.   * the value  * the mindset  * the sale you first have to make to yourself  * the credibility elements  * the process necessary to work with the buyer   are key and all exp...

"If you are not growing, if you are struggling to find clients or actually get something out of your partnerships and relationships, then you aren’t doing a good enough job making it clear what you do best."   TJ Gamble of Jamersan specializes in enterprise ecommerce development, but started in a geographic location nowhere near anything. In two decades of running his business, he's figured o...

Right Hook Digital partner Scott Seward is on the Cold Star Project to share what it took to build his agency to consistently well over $200K MRR. It's a story with mergers & acquisitions, realization that the internal processes were not up to further growth, contrarian thinking in lengthening rather than shortening the sales process, and a lot more.  Agency work is not just about sales,...

In the beginning you'll cobble together a solution for your customer's problem, using a patchwork of apps and systems. But if you're solving a genuinely important problem for your target market, you'll soon discover this is no longer good enough: it's inefficient, clumsy, and frankly unappealing. When you arrive at that moment, what will you do?   Jonathan Kiekbusch of SEO Butler knew he not...

Sure, you can go around identifying symptoms and taking actions to resolve them. But you're not identifying or reaching or handling the root problem. Jason Kanigan of Cold Star Technologies gives a clear example of how focusing on handling symptoms, and not digging to find the root cause problem, is not only a waste of resources...but may actually hurt people. The things we think are problems are...

 Attila Dobai is Manager of Strategy and Innovation at Avis, the vehicle rental company. I thought this would be an ossified industry--after all, it has been around forever--but was surprised at how interested they are in continuous improvement. There are about 50 six sigma improvement professionals there.   Attila is on the Cold Star Project to share details of an innovation he has rece...

Derek Schmidt lives in the same town I do, so we were able to meet in person! For the first time we have an on-location shoot for the Cold Star Project, and we're talking about Swell Systems. Swell is an integrated business management solution: marketing, sales, and customer relationships.   You'll learn how and why Derek created Swell, first as an internal system for solving problems his bus...

 TurnOnDynamics founder Peter Joeckel is on the Cold Star Project to share the disturbing truth about ERP sales processes and implementation projects: they're broken. And SaaS founders will recognize exactly the same problems occurring in their field.   No ERP implementation project ever had a bad demo...but that doesn't make the system a good match-up for solving the customer's problem....

FreeeUp co-founder Nathan Hirsch is on the Cold Star Project to share his challenges encountered during scaling his Virtual Assistants marketplace business. When the original back end systems can't keep with the front end user demand, what do you do? Nathan says: " I'm sure you have used the other marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr. I built my first company to over twenty million in sales using f...

Celene Hoag is the "glue" holding a fast-growing white label content creation business together. Like any other relatively young business, Anansi Content Solutions faced growing pains moving from being a small agency of a couple of people primarily working “in” the business to a larger team of five and working “on” the business. Figuring out who to hire next, going through periods of being super s...

The next step for humanity is to become a spacefaring society. What kinds of things should we expect to be necessary as we make that transformation? The author of blog Crowlspace.com joins us on the Cold Star Project to answer questions about the importance of space exploration, and what our first priority should be in Near Earth activity. Is it time for creative problem solving in your business?...

"Extruded Book Product" may be a bad-sounding phrase but it's great business! Ever heard of The Hardy Boys...Nancy Drew...The Bobsey Twins? These and many more were series produced according to a strict formula for an eager target market of children by an army of ghostwriters. Created by one man over a hundred years ago, the Stratemeyer Syndicate is a model for those wanting to create a scalable c...

Information used to be the core deliverable for a consulting company. Companies were paid simply to give advice and make suggestions. The traditional (billable hour) generalist consulting company is fundamentally inefficient. Too much competition and too many complex problems. You can’t just throw bodies at the problem and figure it out as you go. Consulting companies are now asked to be execution...

Marcel Petitpas, co-founder of Parakeeto, joins us on the Cold Star Project to talk about what happens as you grow your agency and realize the deeper level of tracking you need. You'll discover all the data you need to see critical agency KPIs are spread out between a bunch of different tools: - Timesheets in a time tracking tool (Toggl or Harvest) - Expenses, Payroll, OPEX in accounting (Quickboo...

Can't you just "hire a commission salesperson"? What happens when you try to scale your sales team? If it's been All-You so far, the founder acting as the sole salesperson for the business, what challenges will you run into when you try to change that? Jon Paramore is here to answer these questions and show you the missing steps in finding great salespeople. SCALING YOUR SALES TEAM Sourcing the ri...

The founder of the SaaS Growth Hacks group on Facebook, Aaron Krall, is here to share his definition of Onboarding...and how that process can be used to fuel the growth of your tech firm. Too many founders operate in isolation, creating a solution for a problem no one else acknowledges. Tech marketing also concentrates on features, which the majority of the buying marketplace does not understand....

"I love the mind mapping idea," is a comment I frequently hear when I'm explaining process mapping to a new audience. But they're not the same thing, and this is my attempt to explain the difference. To me, mind maps are subjective conceptualizing, creating space to fill in, and finding out what's important to you about a topic. Process mapping is a much more tactical, much more objective step-by-...

In this solo episode of the Cold Star Project, founder Jason Kanigan explores an example of perverse incentives. The Belgian Congo and atrocities committed there in the name of good accounting are today's topic. Also covered are modern examples of perverse incentives, and eight points from a Forbes article on how to develop good performance measures that result in behaviors you want. It's all too...

The guy who wrote the book on Infusionsoft, Sales Whisperer Wes Schaeffer, is my guest on the Cold Star Project. "What CRM Should I Get?" is a question we've both heard unrelentingly over the past half-decade. Wes has an answer, and it's not what you think. Demystifying the selection process is key to your success: don't get sucked in by feature-rich promises of an app you may never appropriately...

Mikaels Labs founder Harry Kanistik is here on the Cold Star Project to share how machine learning and AI are being used to grow businesses. "AI" in particular is a buzzword these days and frequently misapplied in the effort to make marketing sound cool. Harry's firm is on a mission to help companies scale with real machine learning and AI solutions, so listen in to hear what those terms really me...