On Business Insanity Talk Radio, we talked with one of the most successful entrepreneurs right now on the planet, Groupon director co-founder, Brad Keywell.  We discussed:

1. Where did the inspiration for Groupon come from?
2. What do they know that they wish they knew at the beginning and what surprised you?
3. How do they deal with imitators ?
4. What his investment firm, Lightbank looks for in companies.
5. How the role of the business plan is to talk you out of doing something!

Listen now!

My next guest was LinkedIn expert, Lewis Howes, who is a former professional football player turned online marketer and author.  He wrote two books on the topic of building your business and brand on LinkedIn, and is the creator of the LinkedIn training course Linked Influence. We discussed the importance of building a community for your success and how to balance self promotion and value.

Listen Now!

Check out what they had to say and actions you can take to help your business.

Making Your Business More Profitable.  What is your favorite tip?

So when the small business owner is finally able to get health insurance at a high cost, we expect the medical bills to be paid.  When we submit a claim, we expect to be covered after we have met our individual or family deductible.

Now here is the cruel hoax of how health insurance companies get you to pay high premiums with even higher deductibles.

For example, you have health insurance with a $5,000 family deductible.  You go to the doctor and they charge you $150 for the visit.  You immediately send this claim into your insurance company.  They reply by saying that even though the doctor is “in network”, their  customary fee is only to count $100 for this visit toward the deductible.  Now, you paid $150 to a medical provider, so why shouldn’t this count toward your out of pocket deductible expense?  Because the insurance company says it doesn’t and for the next 4 years, they still make the rules.  In many cases, you have prepaid the doctor so you can’t really challenge the bill and get a refund. Effectively, by not covering this extra cost and saying the service is only worth $100 when you paid $150, the deductible goes up. Multiply this annually, and your health care deductible may be twice what you think it is!

Has this happened to you?  Are there good strategies to avoid this?

1.  Daily, his blog still produces interesting, relevant and actionable content.  I learn something every day from Chris.  He always breaks it down in simple terms so I can understand it.  For those of you that write a daily blog, you know how hard it is to do that effectively.

2.  Chris always emails me back and is always willing to help.  When you get thousands of requests a day, this takes discipline and a good system to make it a reality.

3.  Along with Brian Clark, Sonia Simone, Darren Rowse, he created Third Tribe which is an excellent source I use for online marketing.  The webinars and chat exchange is well worth the fee.

4.  Chris is humble even after all his success.  I feel he still appreciates all the support he receives and how important his “fans” are to his success.

5.  Chris makes the conversation not about him but makes connections for you. If you ever talk to him IRL and he is with other people, he will first introduce the other people to you before he talks with you!  Now that’s social media!

See for yourself.  Chris is also coming to Chicago on September 21 for a New Marketing Lab seminar’s New Marketing Experience.  You are not going to want to miss this.

Why does Chris matter to you?

On this night, Brian talked about:

1. How the sheer number of posts and tweets are becoming unmanageable.  We need to understand the context of those bits of information we are communicating, and this probably means separate tweet streams for different people you are connected with.

2.  How your personal social network is becoming very key to your future value in business.  Brian suggested your Twitter “Klout score” is almost becoming like a FICO score for the web.

3. The importance of a businesses in “promoting the shit” out of their content and sharing it with the community.  The content needs to be passionate, human and consistent.

4. How company’s mission statements are running far behind what people are saying about them on the web.  Everyone now is an influencer in their own right.

Where you there last night?  Have you heard Brian speak in other cities?  What do you think about Engage?

Every working day in America, 26 million people are looking for ways to grow their organization, division, department, group or team.  Every day they re-discover that growth is tough.

For at least 150 years leaders and managers have struggled with growth, many of them with great success.

So why isn’t there a recognized pattern by now – a dependable dynamic for consistently and repeatedly achieving growth?  I get asked this question a lot.

Les McKeown believes he knows what those principles and patterns are, and he’s written a book about it published today. “Predictable Success: Getting Your Organization On the Growth Track – and Keeping It There” is based on his personal experience in launching over 40 businesses before he turned 35, then helping others launch hundreds more as the co-founder and CEO of a business incubation company.

McKeown says that having been intimately involved in the launch and growth of so many businesses, he couldn’t help but notice consistent growth patterns that successful companies followed.  “In most cases, it wasn’t that the successful business owners or managers had carved out a growth strategy that was highly unique to them, although of course some did,” says McKeown.  “What was noticeable was that successful growth in any company, however it was achieved, was always preceded by the same trace elements and left behind the same fingerprints.  It was like discovering that sustainable growth has a very distinct DNA, one which cannot be avoided.”

By unlocking that DNA, McKeown believes any manager or leader can accelerate, sustain, and scale growth in their organization far faster and more effectively than trying to do so by experiment or chance.  By positioning your organization on one of seven possible stages in the growth curve, McKeown says most managers and leaders will intuitively understand what they need to do to get to the next stage.  And just in case the answer isn’t completely obvious, he devotes one chapter to each of the seven stages, in which he details the most effective ways of getting from each stage to the next.

‘Predictable Success’ is a fun read too – It is filled with stories and characters from his own experiences (fictionalized, he says, to protect the innocent), and in the second half of the book he lays out a detailed, step-by-step guide to getting to the optimum stage – what he calls ‘Predictable Success’ – and staying there.

What have your predictable indicators of success been?

Want to learn more? Join a call today at Tuesday at 3pm ET with Les and panelists, Bob Burg and Andrea J Lee. The second call is Friday at 12pm ET with Les, Michael Bungay Stanier and Alexis Martin Neely

Randy Komisar

His book, The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (affiliate link) was written during the Internet Bubble and is on my must read books for entrepreneurs.  He wrote another book last year, Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model(affiliate link) that talks about the process of building a better business plan.

I interviewed Randy from his current position at the world famous venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins. On this podcast, we talked about:

1. No Soul? How “Carpetbagger entrepreneurs” need not apply if they want to be successful.

2. The value (or not) of failure in business.

3. The process of writing a better business plan through innovation: find the fundable benefit, your businesses uniqueness, what you can learn from what competitors are doing now, and how to take critical leaps of faith.

4. Putting together a business dashboard.

Given a listen! You will learn so much in 15 minutes.

Friedman describes that the only way out is through job creation.  In order to get more Americans working fast, we need to create new jobs. Good paying jobs only come from start ups, not bail outs.

Please let me know what you think.

I will be attending the interactive conference where they will feature the best of emerging technology, social media and a who’s who of the industry.

Being a noob, I hear that you don’t really attend this event. Rather, it is so big that it just happens to you. I look forward to the intro session : How Not to Be a Douchebag at SXSW

Follow me at the conference here or from Twitter @barrymoltz.

If you are at the conference, let me know. I would love to meet IRL (in real life).

We talked about the failure and what to do about it: