1175 – The Key to Innovation is Persistence with Bryan Cassady

In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge speaks to the author of the book Cycles: The Simplest, Proven Method to Innovate Faster While Reducing Risks and serial entrepreneur, Bryan Cassady.

Bryan explains that he’s helped to build eleven different companies and sold eight of them successfully. He ultimately began dabbling with teaching, where he discovered his passion for helping others learn and improve themselves. He now helps companies innovate faster by reducing their business risks, which is what his book is all about.

Mistakes are frequent in the entrepreneurial world, and they’re going to happen no matter what. Bryan says that his book isn’t about avoiding mistakes altogether; it’s about reducing risks. The key to reducing risks is the daily grind. Don’t rely on your ‘next big idea’ as your one and only path; that’s the road with the most risks. Bryan says you should always have a set goal and revisit that goal often to make sure your day to day operations are going in the right direction. If you want to reduce the risks your business needs to take to succeed, dial in your daily grind.

Bryan’s book isn’t just what you should do, but it covers how you should do it. If you’re looking to transform your business and align it better with your vision, you have to build, measure, and learn.

The ABCs of innovation have been simplified, thanks to Bryan. He says to always start with your ultimate goal. Build a business framework off of that and test it out. The key is to constantly revisit what you’re doing and tweak and improve as you learn. Don’t blindly put a process in place and then walk away from it, assuming it’s working for you. Critically assess these processes in your day to day. Building and, in effect, testing a process should naturally lead into the next steps, which are to measure effectiveness and learn from those results.

Bryan explains that many entrepreneurs burn themselves out after doing this process only once. He explains that in order to set yourself apart from the ‘could be successes’ as an immense success, you have to continue this process consistently. Continue to go back and test your processes. Find what doesn’t work and find the hitches in your processes, then go back and innovate for improvement.

Most companies that see successful innovations will be the first to tell you that what worked for them isn’t what they started with. Innovations themselves should change over time in order to keep up with the needs of your company. You may not get it right the first, second, or even the third time. The key is not just believing in yourself, but being willing to continuously improve incrementally over time. This is how you build a successful business. Bryan shares that innovation isn’t really about creativity, it’s about persistence and constant improvement.

Want to learn more? Check out Bryan’s website at https://www.thecyclesbook.com/.

Check out Bryan Cassady on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryancassady/.

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1175 – The Key to Innovation is Persistence with Bryan Cassady

1569 – Picking up Your Blindspots with Paul Aucoin

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