The concept of a flywheel has commanded my attention lately. So much so that my wife considers it a cuss word. Personal flywheels … Fitness flywheels … Business flywheels … I see them everywhere.

You may be familiar with the flywheel concept from high school physics, usually shown with a hefty disc that is challenging to start moving, but spins with increasing ease with each rotation.

This idea can be applied to many areas of our life, where each additional ‘rep’ or ‘iteration’ becomes easier and more effective.

I’ve listed the ones I’m currently thinking about in the article below. For each I’ve included other links for you to dive deeper into. This article is a work in progress - my goal is to link you to other useful resources about flywheels and generate discussion on where this mental model can help us in our lives.

If any of these are of interest to you, or if you’ve seen others that you’d like to share, I would absolutely love to hear from you on Twitter.

🕴️The Business Flywheel🕴️

“Over time, a simple innovative idea becomes a well-oiled machine, which translates into a predictable and profitable business.”

Introduced by Jim Collins (excerpt from his site here)

“The Flywheel effect is a concept developed in the book Good to Great. No matter how dramatic the end result, good-to-great transformations never happen in one fell swoop. In building a great company or social sector enterprise, there is no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”

Hubspot makes this concept more applicable with this mic drop blog post. My big takeaway here was to ask the question: how can our customers at ZenMaid help our marketing?

If: Better marketing = more customers is TRUE
And: More customers = better marketing is TRUE
Then: As we add more customers we improve our marketing which gets us more customers which helps our marketing which gets us more clients

Get the idea?

Implementation: we may follow a similar system/process to @thepatwalls of Starter Story where I’ve been featured recently. The magic of this process is that I never spoke with Pat. He collected info from me via TypeForm and created awesome high-quality content that featured me (which I’ve now shared here and elsewhere) without talking to me, in a highly scalable way.

Why not do the same thing at ZenMaid and feature as many of our customers as possible on our blog and social media?

💰The Wealth Flywheel💰

There’s a great example in this article from Rob Berger about the investing flywheel:

You invest $100 per month with an 8% return. In 9 years your investment will be able to pay $100/mo (congrats!)

Here’s where it’s a flywheel - let’s look at how long it takes for you to make ANOTHER $100/mo by re-investing your returns. Here’s how long each $100 increment would take for you to start generating EVERY MONTH

9 years: $100 a month
5 more years: $200 a month
3.5 more years: $300 a month
2.7 more years: $400 a month
2.3 more years: $500 a month
1.9 more years: $600 a month
1.7 more years: $700 a month (26.1 years total)

Here’s the key point. The first $100 of income is the hardest. As the power of compounding grows, it gets easier and easier. It takes us nine years to generate $100/mo, but less than 2 years to go from $500/mo to $600/mo - also a $100 increase.

This very closely follows my personal wealth journey with ZenMaid. We re-invested into ZenMaid and paid ourselves peanuts in the early years. I didn’t take a dime for almost 2 years but now we’re compounding at a rate I could have never imagined when we first began.

🏋🏿 The Fitness/Health Flywheel🏋🏿

Took me quite awhile to find the health/fitness flywheel well verbalized - it’s beautiful:

I’ve experienced this first hand. Getting back into the gym and making initial progress is much harder than keeping with the habit once I’m seeing positive results and feeling good. Every time I try to restart my lifting journey I know I have to hit the tipping point or I won’t stick with it again. Maybe this next time it’ll happen ;-)

🤝🏾The Paid Marketing Flywheel🤝🏾

By selling info products ClickFunnels makes $40 for every $20 they spend they spend on marketing, and that’s before their new lead sees their software!

That’s business magic!

We spend $5k per month on ads for ZenMaid. 3-4 months later we’ll recoup our investment from software subscriptions. This is actually a good ROI for a SaaS like ours but we run into cash flow issues. I’d love to spend $50k a month but we can’t wait 4 months for that amount of money.

But what if we could recoup our investment immediately?

That’s why we added an info product to our funnel that shows when someone joins our email list. As of today we spend $5k and recover ~$500 with 1 quick ask. Not a huge amount but we’ve validated there is potential here. Next we’re going to try other products that are higher in value and could sell better in attempt to get to $2500 (meaning we recover 50% of our ad spend immediately).

In a perfect world, we’ll get to a 1:1 ratio and beyond.

Other flywheel concepts I’m thinking about:

The Social Flywheel

The more people you know the easier it is to meet new people. This is why it would be hard to break into a group of celebrities but once you’re in, you’ll be introduced to so many more.

It occurs to me often that I have access to people now that I couldn’t have dreamed of in my late teens. And making new high-quality connections these days is 1000x easier than it was when I first started trying to build my network.

The Twitter Flywheel

This is very similar to the Social flywheel. When you’re first on Twitter you’re shouting into the void. Few folks care, even when you share something brilliant. As you push harder and harder however it gets easier and easier. Over time people will engage because they know you and as your content generates more shares, more people will follow you. This higher engagement means more folks discover you and the cycle continues.

Reaching this level on Twitter is not easy (I’m working on it now!)

The best example I’ve seen of this is from David Perell, who breaks down his business flywheel, including Twitter, in this post.

https://www.perell.com/tweetstorms/my-business-model

The MVF - Minimum Viable Flywheel (tweetstorm)

Final thoughts (for now):

I’m constantly thinking about how the concept of flywheels can push ZenMaid further forward, and for personal benefits. Have you noticed anything that works well in your personal/professional life? Let me know!