A Short Business Guide to High Growth

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Hi All,
Nick Knight here, founder of Diesel Consulting. The nature of this guide is to point you in the
right direction to destroy your competition. The tone of this guide is efficiency. One thing I have
grown to hate is fluff. Fluff is pointless crap that you learn to add to your work at a young age
because your History teacher said your paper needed to be two pages but you only wrote one.
The reality is, fluff devalues your work. I’m not going to provide you with any of that, simply
because it’s useless for everyone involved. This guide is going to be short and sweet.
Next, I am not making a penny from this and am not trying to sell you anything. My formal
business, Diesel Consulting, provides technology solutions that directly bring value. And no I’m
not talking about some of the BS that’s being sold on the internet nowadays like coaching,
courses & online seminars. Don’t get me wrong, there may be some worth your time, but I have
yet to see any.
I’ve spent an enormous amount of time learning about the relationship between business and
technology. I wish I could tell you that my degree in Computer Science and my time working for
a large firm as a technology consultant enabled me to learn all of this, but I would be lying.
Okay, it has taught me a little. For example, the key to success in a bureaucratic system (like
school or being an employee) is to suck up to people above you. But honestly almost everything
you need to know is out there, on the internet. Don’t be lazy and don’t be afraid to fail. I’ve
spent a lot of time failing, failing is learning. My belief is that the key to creating a successful
business is persistence, following that is openness and authenticity, lastly followed by a thirst
for knowledge and some luck. Yes, luck. Failing sucks, but the good thing is that you are far
from alone when it comes to failure. Thomas Edison failed 1,000 times before he invented the
lightbulb, Henry Ford failed and went BROKE five times before he succeeded, Sigmund Freud
was booed from the podium when he first presented his ideas to the scientific community. Life
is failure and failure is learning. I hope you find value over the next couple of pages and please
do not hesitate to reach out to me.
Yours Truly,
Nick Knight
Text or Call me at (201) 995-7608

(201) 995-7608 | DieselConsulting.io

 Contents

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Build A Brand

• Be Authentic
• Bring Value
• Let Them Ask
Pivot, Pivot, Pivot

• Why every business needs to pivot right now

• How you can start your transition into creating the right angle to lead to high sales
Digital Assets

• Websites – What’s the point?

• Sales Funnels – The driving force for your paid advertising

(201) 995-7608 | DieselConsulting.io

 Build a Brand

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Be Authentic
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about building a brand, it’s that the most successful brands are
built around authenticity. In fact, building a brand around authenticity is easier than building
one around a falsely constructed idea of what you think the brand should be. The perfect brand
is a brand that is purely authentic to who you are. A brand is ultimately molded by the culture
of the company, which is spearheaded by the leader of the company, that’s you. Your business
should be a reflection of yourself, anything different would be like swimming against a current.
We all know how difficult it is to swim against a current. This means that you should be
projecting your true self through social media posts, blogs, videos and ads. This is the very key
for a solid foundation to a successful company.
Hiring people who embody the values of your company is of upmost importance. There are a
lot of people looking for jobs out there and not everyone is going to be the right fit for your
company. The first thing I look for when screening candidates is transparency. It’s a core value
in any relationship and hiring an employee is just another form of a relationship. If a candidate
is obviously not being transparent, that is a red flag. You want to work with someone you can
trust and a person who is not transparent will not be trustworthy. To add to this, your
employees are not working for you. You should be working for your employees, if you have this
mindset you will achieve a lot in business. This is something I learned from the great Gary V, he
preaches this often.
Bring Value
Bring your clients/customers value, first and foremost. For free. If you’ve ever been to a BJs or
Costco food store then you know what I’m talking about. Those store workers that sit in front of
those little tables giving you samples of premade food? They are giving you value first &
foremost, for free. Large businesses use this tactic CONSTANTLY. The biggest deterrent a client
has when choosing to work with you is risk. The risk that they are expected to pay for a product
or service from someone they’ve never worked with or bought from before. This is also the
reason why it’s so difficult to build brand from scratch, you must build trust from nothing. This
is a commonly used strategy in MANY successful big businesses to bring in new clients. Going
back to the Cosco example, a lot of the people who take a sample of that freshly baked cookie
won’t be a customer right away. There will be one of three outcomes here.

• Outcome one – The potential customer who sampled a cookie will purchase a box. They
loved the sample so much they made the decision to buy (and may even be a recurring
customer). Boom, you made a sale by giving out one free sample, how about that?

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 • Outcome two – They liked the cookie but aren’t going to buy a box quit yet. Who knows,

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maybe they aren’t hungry, maybe they’re low on cash or maybe they just really like free
stuff. Either way you’re building your brand! This is still a potential future customer.
• Outcome three – They don’t like your cookies. Maybe they didn’t like that specific cookie
or maybe they were just in a bad mood. This is still a good outcome! No one is going to
hate a company for giving them something for free, that’s absurd. Maybe they will
remember your brand or remember how nice the lady was that gave them that free
sample and give it another shot in the future. This is still not a bad outcome.
This works because there is no risk to the customer. Customers and clients will see you as a
more approachable business and won’t avoid you like the plague. You just want to bring them
value and if they don’t like what you offer, you don’t want to work with them anyway!
This strategy is duplicatable in any line of business, this is not just a tactic for the food industry.
Bring them value first and foremost, for free!
Let Them Ask
The last little piece I want to touch on in this section is to let them ask. If you can get a client to
approach you, all the power is transferred into your hands. This is the reason a lot of companies
rely on referrals for most of their work. It’s SO much easier to close a sale when someone is
asking you for your product or service. This is compared to you reaching out to a prospect who
doesn’t even know they need or want what you’re trying to sell them yet.
1. You don’t have to create a need or a want when the customer asks you. They
approached you because they already know they need the service or product you are
offering.
2. It gives you a position to educate rather than sell. They already know they want what
you’re selling, now all you need to do is give them clarity over the process. How does
your service work? How are they going to pay for it? What kind of project timeline does
a job like this typically consist of? Price? When can you start?
Allowing the customer to ask takes the burden and pressure of pushing sales off your shoulders
as well as gives you more freedom over who you want to work with.

(201) 995-7608 | DieselConsulting.io

 Pivot, Pivot, Pivot

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Why every business needs to pivot right now
According to the book “The Lean Startup” (an essential book for all business owners) a Pivot is
"A structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the
product, strategy, and engine of growth”. An example of a pivot in a business is if you were to
shift from paper advertising to online advertising. It’s an experimental change in how you do
business. This is a key strategy leveraged by successful high growth startups. This is also a key
differentiator between a startup and a small business. I would consider a small business one
that sees linear growth in revenue over time, when compared to a startup which sees closer to
exponential growth in revenue over time.
Pivots should be an essential business strategy for every business and I strongly believe every
business should function as a startup, but that’s a conversation for another day. Pivots are
essential for scalability and sustainability. As Bob Dylan once said “The Times Are a-Changin”
and this will ring true forever. If your business does not change with the times your business
will not be around for a very long time.
How you can start your transition into creating the right angle to lead to high sales
Transitioning your business into high gear when it comes to sales involves A LOT of moving
parts. A combination of good branding, sales strategy, marketing, a good product or service to
list a few. To add to this there is no one size fits all. It takes a lot of an unwavering persistence
and experimentation (pivots) to achieve a winning business model. Therefore the customer
feedback loop is imperative to finding the correct pivot. To add to this, you need to execute as
quickly as possible. The most common mistake in business is the act of perfecting something
that has no consumer validation. Also known as perfecting something that no one wants. The
good news here is that you cannot know for sure how your market is going to react until you
launch your product or service. The reason why this is good news is because you now know that
the execution of your pivot does not need to be perfect. Execute quickly and pivot intelligently.
Once you pivot you want to be getting as much feedback as possible to ensure your target
market is reacting positively to the change and to learn what needs to be tweaked.

(201) 995-7608 | DieselConsulting.io

 Digital Assets

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Websites – What’s the point?
A website is an essential point of contact for most of your customers and clients. It provides a
singular touch point to learn anything and everything about your business. It builds confidence
in your target market by projecting integrity of your brand and providing a voice of authority in
your industry. Often, if a potential client or customer is looking for a company to work with,
they will choose a business with a website over one without one. In addition to this, they will
pick the business that has the most intuitively designed website, that projects the most
authority.
Your website is your chance to sell your business, it’s your internet real estate and is truly the
focal point for expansion when it comes to scaling your business. In addition to your website
selling your business for you, it is ground zero when it comes to running successful ads online.
Once you have an intuitively designed website setup you can run advertisements to your site
and setup singular web pages to direct traffic to which will adhere to your target market, this is
what they call a sales funnel.
Sales Funnels – The driving force for your paid advertising
There are two ways to advertise online. First, there’s the ‘moronic way’, where you run an ad
on Google or Facebook to ‘see what happens and try things out’ with no strategy behind it. This
is a good way to donate your hard-earned money to big tech. Then there’s the ‘way that works’,
this involves a broader strategy behind it. Yes, this will take more time and money but it will
also give you a much greater chance at closing on clients. This is where sales funnels come in
handy. A sales funnels is the process from initial contact of a prospect to closing the deal. Sales
funnels can be used on both paid and organic traffic. A typical sales funnel directs traffic to a
singular page on your website, called a landing page, where the potential client is funneled to
an eventual pitch point. This is where the product or service is conveyed, convincingly, to the
prospect. Then some contact information is collected from the prospect and an eventual call
with a salesperson is conducted to close the sale. In a good sales funnel the closing of the sale is
made easier for the salesperson since the lead is then considered to be warm by the time they
reach the salesperson.

(201) 995-7608 | DieselConsulting.io