Revenue Revolution: Strategies for Predictable Growth with Kyle Mealy

Freddy D: 00:01:54

Hey Superfan superstar Freddie D.

Here in this episode 88 of the Business Superfans Podcast, we're joined by Kyle Mealy, a dynamic leader, gifted teacher, and energized speaker who's on a mission to unlock the trapped potential in entrepreneurial businesses and their leaders. As the founder of Next Level Revenue, Kyle serves as a fractional chief revenue Officer, helping client service and reoccurring revenue.

Businesses scale from 1 million to 10 million and beyond with predictable, profitable growth.

With a track record that includes doubling revenue for a martial arts school and taking a digital marketing agency from 3 million to 7 million in under three years, Kyle brings both sharp strategy and infectious energy in every room he enters. His unique blend of humor, storytelling and heart makes his lessons stick.

Whether he's in the boardroom or teaching his kids karate, you're in for an episode packed with insight, inspiration, and maybe a few laughs, too. On this episode of the Business Superfans Podcast, we have Kyle Mealy with Next Level Revenue. Welcome, Kyle.

Klye Mealy: 00:03:10

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Freddy D: 00:03:14

So, Kyle, what is the backstory of how did Next Level Revenue come about?

Klye Mealy: 00:03:20

There's a lot of entry points into that story, but I think one that will sit well with your audience is it started with really tough customer experience in the digital marketing agency I was involved in.

I was sitting in the marketing and sales seat for a digital marketing agency and I noticed that if a marketer bought our tactical product, sometimes it would go well because a good strategy turned our tactics into reality and turned it into leads. But every once in a while that marketer might have good leads but sales couldn't close and we were thrown out the door because we were the problem.

Sometimes the opposite would happen. The sales leader over marketing and sales would be in charge.

They wouldn't know how to deploy the tactics, so they're VP of sales and kind of marketing and it wouldn't work. And we would be shown the door and the person sitting over top of how that ended up being.

All the relationships with me and I got tired of it and I just said there had to be a better way to do this. We can't keep having marketing conversations and then point at sales the problem. We can't have salespeople pointing at marketing the problem.

I spent about a year preparing and thinking through what this was going to be like.

I combined all of my experience because when I looked at all the success I had in raising top line and bottom line, never once was it pure marketing or pure sales. It was always this hybrid of them both. It's not just marketing and sales alignment.

I'm talking about something more, a true fusion where the lines have been completely erased.

And so I said, I'm going to start to solve marketing and sales problems with one attribution model, one measurement method and everybody in the same room. And it's been quite a ride.

Freddy D: 00:05:08

Well, sure, because they're really intertwined at the end of the day because they go hand in hand. The messaging is going to be the same and everybody's got to be on board with the messaging.

If you think of a rowboat where you're racing, you know those racing rowboats with four people, they have to be all in line, they have to be in synchronization, otherwise you ain't going anywhere fast.

Klye Mealy: 00:05:31

We saw that usually there was an expertise in the room, a marketing expertise or a sales expertise. And so it was like the robo captain was only yelling at two of the four people on the robo.

Freddy D: 00:05:42

Right.

Klye Mealy: 00:05:44

That's where I'm like, there's got to be a better way.

I spent a year developing the intellectual property, building on all my past experience, brought it out to the marketplace and we've seen some pretty amazing things since then.

Freddy D: 00:06:01

So what is it that you do? How do you step into a company and transform them?

Klye Mealy: 00:06:07

So what is our service called? Our service is fractional chief revenue officers for small business.

It's a part time executive to oversee the marketing and sales departments of your one to $15 million business. What we have found is that usually there's some sort of catalyst that starts this. Either it was a failed marketing agency relationship.

The classic is a bad sales hire, a bad VP of marketing and sales or a bad VP of sales and marketing. The owner is still running all the marketing and sales strategy and wants to escape that seat once and for all.

The problem the market has told them is you've got to choose path A or path B because you don't have money for both. You can't really solve marketing and sales at the same time because marketing is expensive and so are salespeople.

By having a fractional leader, you can get somebody who's done this before, who knows how to do it. And then we come in and we are not the expensive ones. I'm not trying to lower our value.

It's like, no, we're the right price for what we do, but we're duct tape and popsicle sticks. Because it's not like we need it to be pretty or perfect. We need to make progress. And so how do we transform companies?

We bring in this IP with this executive presence, to bring them together with duct tape and popsicle sticks and grow profitably and predictably.

Freddy D: 00:07:28

And the important part is really getting everybody onto the same page. And that's what you're doing, is you're bringing everybody in the company, the whole team, into the robo so that everybody's part of the equation.

They know where they're going, what they need to do, who needs to do what, and then you're the orchestrator or the coach that is propelling that company to go in that direction.

Klye Mealy: 00:07:53

Right when I was deciding, when I was. I knew I was leaving the agency, I knew I needed to do something different.

And I was looking at what my gifts were and what my knowledge was, I realized that it all starts with marketing and then sales. Everybody wants to have this beautiful mission. Everybody wants to do something great to solve their customer's problem.

Even in the nonprofit world, you do something special. Well, it's money that moves the machine. If I can influence that, we get to do some really fun stuff.

The part I loved creating was the money machine, because that's when we actually solve people's problems. That's when we get to make the hires. That's when we get to have the team events. That's when we get to celebrate our success. It starts over there.

And so I love being and our team loves to be that catalyst.

Freddy D: 00:08:38

It's important because years ago, I was in charge of global sales for a software company. Whenever we hit milestones, I invited everybody into the conference room, brought in lunch, and it was impromptu.

k meeting in the lunchroom at: 12:45

hem to be at the lunchroom at: 12:45

We just hit $50,000 in a month in net sales from a product that start from zero. And then, you know, we had 100,000. When we had 150,000, everybody was part of that. And that's what got the energy going into the company.

Klye Mealy: 00:09:31

Yes, that's exactly. That's exactly what I'm talking about, the energy in the company. Most people tell me I have a lot of energy and I'm very passionate.

And that's the part I love. I love seeing. When we talk about the fusion, we're not talking about teams coming together.

We're talking about Teams playing on the same team without a realization that they were in different departments.

Freddy D: 00:09:54

Correct.

Klye Mealy: 00:09:55

So again, I'm going to hit on this because I see it all the time. People will react to our content, be like, yeah, you do alignment. And I'm like, no, let's use the Bears we were talking about earlier.

Fred Casey audience I'm in Wisconsin and Freddie, you're in Chicago area. Spent a lot of time Chicago, classically, the Bears, the Packers have differing opinions on which team is better.

Freddy D: 00:10:16

That's a diplomatic way of putting it. I respect that.

Klye Mealy: 00:10:21

You're never going to get the packers, the offense and the defense to align on what they're doing. Like that doesn't work on the inside the team.

But if you stop thinking about it as offense and defense and we think about it, we are the packers in the off. Only thing that matters is that score. When the scoreboard says 0, 0, yes, we might have our special function, but we are one team, one score, period.

And everybody has to play a part.

And now we're not worried about, well, we'd make fun of the people in sports or cast them out as bad leaders when they blame the other half of their team that is in alignment. That's what I'm talking about when we talk about fusing marketing and sales because.

Freddy D: 00:11:04

You'Re getting everybody into the vision and now everybody is getting energized for division. And then just like I shared earlier, I share the W with everybody.

I would even bring in the software developers because they're the guys that wrote the code and so nobody ever thinks about them.

But when I would bring them in, they felt excited because it was their work that created the software that we sold, it's critical to get momentum because once you got everybody and you get.

Klye Mealy: 00:11:35

Momentum and when you have operations like the people making the product or whatever it is, if it's ass or just service company as excited and clear on what marketing and sales is selling. And it feels connected to the work the operations person is doing and it's actually what they're good at. You create the energy we were talking about.

And that moment is probably the thing I love the most.

I don't think I've ever talked about the energy created by not just the marketing and sales starting to row together, but the other people on the boat also being like, hey, we're actually all rowing together now. And the boat gets a lot bigger. We start to have it a lot more fun.

Freddy D: 00:12:14

That transcends to prospective customers, existing customers, suppliers, distributors, complementary businesses and everybody else. Because you Feel it. It's contagious.

When you deal with somebody on the phone or via email, you can still tell tonality in the emails because of the ch. Voices of words. You get that little feeling.

Klye Mealy: 00:12:38

Confidence. We're talking about confidence.

Freddy D: 00:12:40

Yeah. So share with us, Kyle, a story of a company that you stepped in and your organization transformed that company.

And what's the whole story behind that?

Klye Mealy: 00:12:51

It usually comes after massive change or some sort of brick wall. I'm thinking of one that's near to my heart. This was a business that had probably the best product that nobody knows about.

The creator of the product had started and ran a 40 million business, and this was the next project he was working on. There's this massive amount of success that follows him. When I came in, they're on their third leadership team in three or four years.

Our approach is very different, just open and honest. This marketing plus sales thing is not the traditional way of building businesses.

I was brought in because I say things that make a lot of sense to people and they've never thought about it that way. This was chance to take. This company that had never turned a profit in three years, had always had to do cash calls for the founders.

From what I understand, there's some history. I don't know, so I don't want to overspeak here, but I sat down at the leadership table.

The founders, the founder who had started the looked around the table, and there already was a marketing person, a salesperson in this executive team. And he looked at the marketer. You see a marketer, he looked at the salesperson.

You see a salesperson, he looked at me and he go, what are you doing here? Which was a fair question. I go, you know, all love and respect, open and honest. Here's my opinion on this.

The marketer's gonna do marketing things, and the salesperson is gonna do sales things. And those two rarely are aligned.

More than alignment, we need to have one source of truth, one leader, one scorecard, one set of measurables, and one way of serving the customers. That's my job. He goes, all right.

In that company, telling the story of more than alignment, we brought in our IP and said, this is what the scorecard says. This is. We know if we're winning or losing, we're going to unlock your special gifts, but we're going to always meet as one team.

So we, as one team, we have one voice, and we work together, and that team has turned a profit. It's actually a profitable business, and there's no cash calls that Happened in five months.

Freddy D: 00:14:47

Wow, that's an incredible story. So they're definitely super fans of what you did for that company.

If they were negative for three years, in five months you turned them around to profitable. I mean, that's how you create super fans.

Klye Mealy: 00:15:02

Well, and it's so funny because I think you're right. As best I can humbly sidestep, I was very lucky.

I've kind of poo pooed on marketers and salespeople a little bit here, but the people on the team are incredibly gifted. They're great marketers and salespeople, incredible at their craft, but they would have walked in two different directions in two different boats.

And so I don't think I get a lot of the credit for it.

I think it's just the method that we have, that's the part we spend a lot of time on is what creates that environment for the really great people to do really great work and make it clear what the right work is. I'll take credit for the method, but they did the work well.

Freddy D: 00:15:40

Going back to our friends the packers and the Bears, there's a coach, there's a coach. And a coach drives the whole energy of the team. The coach drives the mission, gets everybody to play on the same team, go in the same direction.

Each team has a coach for each department, right? You got the receivers, the quarterback, the punter, the return team, special teams. They've all got their own individual coaches.

However, all that comes together by the one main coach, which is where you come in and you guys come in.

Klye Mealy: 00:16:24

I sure would love that to be so easily. But yeah, yes, in the reality, we are part of a bigger team in those businesses because operations has succeed finance.

But yes, your point is well made that in our model there still is a marketing manager or sales manager. Like those roles still exist. But the marketing manager and the sales manager, at that level of structure, they're on the revenue team.

They're still on the revenue team.

Freddy D: 00:16:50

Right.

Klye Mealy: 00:16:50

We're the head coach of the offense. You're the head coach of the defense. The head coach is the one with the plan. Head coach says, this is how we know if we're winning or losing.

This is what good is, this is what not good is.

And I think that when you split marketing and sales, it's like trying to say there's the Green Bay packers offense team and the Green Bay packers defense team and then try and run those on Sundays. You'll lose. That's a good way of describing what we think about it. You let leaders Lead. You let the great people do the great work.

You just understand, you simplify.

Freddy D: 00:17:25

Correct. So how do you go about and analyze what's going on with the company?

Someone calls you up and says hey Kyle, we've heard from so and so company that you did some great work with them. We're struggling here. We've been struggling for the last couple of years. Come on in. And what do you do then?

Klye Mealy: 00:17:46

Yeah, I think this is where our model has the gifts of some really thoughtful tools. I joke about it being the ultimate diagnostic tool for marketing and sales. It's part of our core ip. It's called the revenue cascade.

And remember, whenever I say revenue, I'm saying marketing and sales like it's they are one. It's like chocolate and peanut butter into a Reese's. When I say revenue, I'm really talking about both at the same time.

rketing and salespeople, it's: 2025

The traditional marketing funnel usually has vanity metrics, they don't mean a lot. And then the sales pipeline is usually left to right, marketing funnel, top to bottom. Really we just need to stack these things.

So marketing funnel stacks on our sales pipeline. If you are a real geek like me, it's a vuvuzela from the old South African World Cup. That was annoying.

I remember watching that intimately and I had to look up what a vuvuzela was and it's just like a long skinny trumpet. I really thought about it from like a conversion rate optimization.

When you think about marketing funnel at the tippity top, the furthest outreach where someone just happens to see your name on a logo as they walked by an event space or you on a podcast. It's classic awareness marketing.

And if you can measure how many of those engagements you're having, how many people take a little step further and notice the drop off rate and do that for the next step in the marketing funnel. The next step, if you can measure all those fall offs, that's where the idea of a cascade or like a waterfall comes in.

And you can actually start to mathematically link those to your bottom line, which is what we do. That's what revenue cascade does. You can start to see the impact of top of the funnel marketing on your bottom line.

And the tighter you can draw those connections, the better. And so with the revenue cascade is it lays over all your marketing and sales Data. It looks for the cancers, the blockages, the tumors, the clots.

And then instead of trying to be like, we're going to come in with our strategy, we actually come in and look at the metrics and where the blockages are in your sales funnel. Marketing funnel. Sales pipeline.

We're going to grab a specific strategy to deal with that singular portion of your funnel and then see how the flow works. It's not me guessing what the strategy is for you. It's not me saying, this is our only strategy playbook.

It is us actually looking at the math, and you can't hide from the math. And that has been the biggest lesson that our customers have realized. I don't know what the answer is on the strategy until we look at the math.

Let's look at the math.

Freddy D: 00:20:27

Right. People always forget about good old math.

Klye Mealy: 00:20:31

know. Let's see if we can do: 2000

Well, if it does, then okay, keep doing it. You know, it's not like not doing anything crazy.

Freddy D: 00:20:45

If it goes from a thousand to 800 to 400.

Klye Mealy: 00:20:49

Well, it's time to have a conversation about that part and see what's stuck.

Freddy D: 00:20:52

Yeah, exactly. Because a lot of times people don't spend all the time on the metrics. And you can get caught up in metrics as well.

So you got to be able to have a defined to where, okay, this is it. And I'm not going to go beyond and become analysis paralysis.

Sometimes you get caught up in all the metrics and you ain't doing anything that you need to be doing because you're stuck in the metrics.

Klye Mealy: 00:21:18

Yeah. And when we talk about the great simplification, we don't get analysis paralysis.

I see this a lot with CEOs who are thinking about us or they just got that first report from a marketing agency and they see all these metrics and they're like, I don't know what this means. The agency's saying, it's great, it's great. Trust us, it's great. And I'm like, that isn't measuring the in between. It isn't measuring the drop off.

And what really matters is the drop off. I think that's what the revenue cascade does. It says the numbers are kind of moot. It's the rate of change between them.

And if we just focus on that and say, can we improve that? That's the only question. And then we go try something. Progress over perfection. If there is improvement, go improve something else.

And that's a simple process that just about anybody can get behind. It's like, go make a little progress. Great. Try something else.

Freddy D: 00:22:09

I'll share a story. To drive the point home, I was general manager of a software company for construction management.

Founder was funding it and we were making some sales, but we needed to grow. I put together a whole business plan to get investment money. The strategies to plan, what's in it for the investor, blah blah, blah, the whole thing.

He spent hours putting together a spreadsheet that mathematically added up, if we have this much money, we could hire this person. And it was just this monster sized spreadsheet. And I would go to him and say, Jeff, the investor doesn't care about this stuff.

It's going to be how much money you need, what are you going to do with my money and how much money am I going to make back? That's it. Doesn't care about where it all goes and all these little things.

But he was stuck in analysis paralysis and the company ran out of cash by the time he had his monster spreadsheet ready.

Klye Mealy: 00:23:14

Oops. Yep. Well, and that's another reason why we love.

I think chief revenue officer has these undertones of enterprise sales and we really want to be different because marketing doesn't talk about revenue and sales talks about sales. The thing that matters to business owners is revenue. Top line and bottom line.

That's the other half of our equation that I probably need to do more diligence on. Raising top line feels good, but it does not equate to bottom line.

That's something I take seriously because whenever I've been successful before I ran my own business, it was their mortgages that was behind that business. It wasn't somebody else's money that you can't lose.

And you can't lose money because they're putting it out of their pocket to put it back in the business. One of our clients last year had a month where the profit at the end was like $395 or something silly.

It's like you're not going to run a business for $395.

Freddy D: 00:24:16

No, because you bring up a really good point here, Kyle. And I want to reemphasize that.

And that is that a lot of business, especially small businesses, hit 1.5 million 2 million in sales and think they're really crushing it. But they don't look at the bottom line and the Net income and their actual net profit margin. And that's like what? But I got money in the bank.

But the reality is, just like you said, yeah, you ended up with 395 bucks. Go party. Good luck with that.

Klye Mealy: 00:24:52

And that I think is the danger of us calling it revenue. But that same client that was at 395 bucks, well, they ended up six months later profiting almost $37,000.

And they raised their top line by almost 100,000 monthly recurring. When we think about those numbers, I realized when I looked back at the end of the year, I think they spent outside of our fee, 30,000 in marketing.

It was pretty crazy. The amount we were able to drive in profitability, we were able to drive with the tools in front of us.

And I think that's one of the things that is probably under talked about in marketing and sales. It's like, well, if I had a million dollars, of course we could do all those things.

And it's like we have to come in sometimes when there's $1,000 a month marketing budget and figure it out. Some people call that impossible. I call that fun. Maybe I'm sick in the head.

Freddy D: 00:25:41

I think that's the challenge. You get fired up in those situations because you think out of the box, what's some of the low hanging fruit?

You can go back to existing customers and get additional revenue out of them. That's often overlooked because people focus on acquiring new customers and forget about the gold mine they have sitting in the back of their pocket.

Right.

Klye Mealy: 00:26:04

Sometimes that's an entrepreneurial approach. We gotta look wherever we need to look. That's why I love working with entrepreneurial businesses. They are great problem solvers.

The solution might be in our backyard and it's a bit messy. We might have to do digging and some hunting and some painful phone calls. But you know what? Probably they're all ready for us.

I couldn't agree more with that.

Freddy D: 00:26:26

And you probably got some superfans and they're ready to promote your business. You just need to ask them. You know, that's the other thing people forget to do in sales and marketing.

Asking their super fans for testimonials, referrals, recommendations, introductions, all that stuff. That's all the low hanging fruit right there. People say, well, we got to get new business, we got to get new business.

You got a whole army of salespeople right behind you that just needs to get fired up and know what to do.

Klye Mealy: 00:27:01

I think people undervalue the fans that they probably have in their business or underappreciate the importance of creating fans. I do think you make some really good points that there is some low hanging fruit there usually.

So I think a good steward of the marketing and sales programs has to look near before they look far.

Freddy D: 00:27:25

Look in the backyard and get everybody. Like we talked before, start creating super fans inside the team. Start off with the culture in the company, the employees.

So as we talked before, getting that energy going on because that's catchy and now it goes into the customers you're dealing with, suppliers, distributors, all that stuff starts to transform that business.

Klye Mealy: 00:27:52

I'm going to add another fine point to it.

If you're working with duct tape and popsicle sticks and you don't have a lot of money to do this stuff, there's probably your highest gain effort for your least amount of or your highest gain in cash for your least amount amount of effort sitting in one of those buckets. I think it's everything in balance.

But I think our method says let's look for the highest gain for the least amount of effort and let's do it mathematically right. If you're sitting on a pool of thousand old customers and you haven't connected with them in six years or five years, start there.

Maybe if you didn't listen to that customer's feedback six months ago, a year ago, there's probably some fruit there on how to fix it and bring go back to them, hey, we heard you, we fixed it.

So I think that's all part of a good modern way of thinking about marketing and sales leadership is measure or evaluate the impact before you decide that strategy. So I don't ever teach our fractional CROs. Come in and focus on customers first. I say, let's look at the math.

The math will tell us where the opportunity is. And I can't tell you how often it might be just sitting here in the customer database.

Freddy D: 00:29:09

I have a saying, the little things are the big things.

And sometimes doing the little things of staying in contact with the customers, recognizing a customer for their achievements, you know, all of a sudden they're going to go, wow, that's pretty cool.

And they're going to be out there with their buddies and all of a sudden they're going to say, oh, you need to talk to my friend Kyle, he's a great guy. And that's how it happens.

Klye Mealy: 00:29:40

Yeah. And it's funny you say that because in the B2B world, which is where we tend to spend a lot of our energy and time, this is extremely important.

In the B2C world. It's important in the B2B world. One of the things we work on in this balance is, yes, your referral network, your fan network is huge.

That's definitely making sure you have the best product available. But we see a lot of visionaries and CEOs get stuck when the referrals dry up.

Referrals are hard to predict unless you have a very clear referral program. And that's kind of back to this math game where at some point you may have to go beyond the pale of your referral network and create some new fans.

But if you think, if you start with the end in mind, that you're going to create this raving fan, that's really a flywheel. We can go get new, turn them into fans. They're going to push our referral engine a little bit harder too. So, again, everything in balance.

You got to know where the lowest effort, highest gain is.

Freddy D: 00:30:38

Oh, absolutely. And that's where your service comes in. It looks at all those components and says, how can we leverage with the least to get the most?

You analyze that and it may be that we need to tweak a little bit of the marketing strategy. We need to have our salespeople go back out to past existing customers and collectively all that starts to get everything to work together.

Klye Mealy: 00:31:04

Couldn't agree more. I ran into a company, had a negative NPS and they refused to really change how they sold their product and service.

Marketing sales gets really hard when nobody is impressed with your product or service.

Freddy D: 00:31:18

Yeah, go out of business.

Klye Mealy: 00:31:20

Yeah, it's called going out of business. That's just your indicator that you're on your way.

Freddy D: 00:31:24

Right.

Klye Mealy: 00:31:25

I think it's usually not very hard to get a gauge of your customer's experience. We launched an NPS program with one of our clients two weeks ago. They've already got tons of feedback back. It took very little effort.

Two or three meetings. Outlook has an ability to create an NPS form in like 10 clicks and you send it to your customer base, you'll know where you are today.

When I think about a real low effort, high gain, you'll know what truth is. And the root of all growth is truth.

Freddy D: 00:31:56

Kyle, as we come close to the end here, it's been a phenomenal conversation. We could probably talk for several hours on this stuff and great insights that you shared with our audience.

Really appreciate your time on the show today. So how can people find and connect with you?

Klye Mealy: 00:32:15

LinkedIn, I think it is the place to be. So definitely LinkedIn, our website.

If you have some of the pain points we've talked about and you're really ready for a different way of thinking about growth and you're serious. It's readyforthenextlevel.com okay, and you have something for our listeners? I do not believe in gated content.

I think that went away in the: 2000

If you go to ready for the next level.com and navigate to the revenue cascade just sitting there in one of the dropdowns, you can download a PDF on how to use the revenue cascade. There's no email gate. No gotcha. It is a tool for you to use in the diagnostic of your marketing and sales efforts.

Freddy D: 00:33:01

Thank you so much, Kyle. We'll make sure that all that stuff is in the show notes. And again, thank you for being a guest on the Business Superfans podcast show.

Klye Mealy: 00:33:10

I appreciate it. It was a pleasure.

Freddy D: 00:33:15

Hey Superfan superstar Freddie D. Here. Before we wrap, here's your three A playbook Attract, advocate and accelerate your business power move for today.

Here's this episode's top insight Marketing and sales don't need alignment. They need to be fused into one unstoppable revenue team with one leader, one goal and one scorecard. So here's your business growth action step.

Ditch the Silo Org chart. Appoint a single revenue leader to own both marketing and sales and start running one unified weekly meeting to drive momentum.

If today's conversation sparked an idea for you, share it with a fellow business leader who would benefit and grab the full breakdown in the show notes. Let's accelerate together and start creating business superfans who not only champion your brand but accelerate your growth.