Today we are going to talk about the roadmap to business growth. Specifically on this episode, I’m going to plant some seeds that are going to show you how to double your business in 2018. The topic today is going to be profit centers within your business and traffic channels, and how you find your customers. The pain point that I’m looking to solve is: if you’re not making enough money and you don’t know what to do to fix it, this episode was created for you. What we’re going to talk about today are three main points.
- I want to help you identify how you make money so that once you see it, you can improve it.
- I want to help you with is identifying where you find your customers and where to find more of them.
- I want to give you ideas on creating recurring revenue in your business.
Let’s start by identifying how you make money. There is a worksheet that is going to help you through this. On the top, the header row has the traffic channels for your business. For example, you could write down Facebook, networking events, your referrals, etc. On the left hand side, that first column will be your profit centers. For myself, a profit center would be custom web design, hosting, funnels, etc. What I want you to do is I want you to list on the left hand side all the different products or services that you are selling to bring in money, and along the top you’ll have the traffic channels that you’re using to find them.
Why is this important? When you create this worksheet, when you sit down to think about it, I want you to write down all of your profit centers, so for example, for me I write down web design. I want you to write down how much of your revenue comes from that one source in the boxes where the profit center and the traffic channel meet. On my sheet, where web design and Facebook come together, I write down what percentage of my business is that traffic channel bringing me. For example, for web design, Facebook would be about 30%, so I’d write 30 in that box on the spreadsheet. Referrals are more than 50% of my custom web design business, so I would write 50 in that box on my spreadsheet.
When you have figured out how you’re making money and where that money is coming from, now you can identify areas of growth. That is absolutely important for you to be able to figure out where that business is coming from and how you can increase it.
When you see this laid out you can immediately identify areas of growth. For example, for me there was a while where I wasn’t talking about social media management to my referrals that I was getting. I wasn’t mentioning it in my email marketing that I was doing. Just by writing this out and identifying where my business is coming from, I was able to quickly identify areas where I could grow my service offerings and bring in some more business from current clients. When I identified that I wasn’t using those traffic channels to grow my social media marketing business, I was able to find areas of growth.
Now we move on to point number two. We need to write down where you find your customers. The easiest way to grow your business is to sell to your current customers, but so often we spend our time and energy trying to find new customers.
I want to give you a visual picture. To get somebody to switch from going to McDonald’s on a regular basis to going to Arby’s on a regular basis requires a lot of things to happen. However, for the McDonald’s customer to increase their average spend at McDonald’s does not take that much persuasion. It could be as simple as asking, “Hey, do you want an apple pie today?” from the drive-through. What’s the point? The point is that person is already shopping at McDonald’s. You ask them for a couple more things within their lunch, and now you have increased their spend.
For you to grow your business, you need to get your current customers to buy more often, you need your current customers to spend more than they’re already spending with you, or you need to find new customers. Those are the only three ways to grow your business, and finding new customers is the hardest (and most expensive) way to find new customers… yet we spend so much time and energy on that.
As business owners, we spend so much time trying to get new customers when the reality is the easiest sales that we can make are to the people that already know us, trust us, like us, and spend money with us. You as the business owner, if you’re saying, “I want to double the profit in my business,” the answer is probably not in finding new customers (although that is a part of it). The low-hanging fruit for you to grow your business are going to be the people that are already spending money with you.
One of the things that I’m doing as a way to increase the amount of money that people spend with me is increasing my value in their business.
What that looks like is people are so used to working with me for their websites and the mobile apps, but they have not yet joined some of my coaching programs that I’m doing to help them with their marketing. They’re do-it-yourself marketers. They don’t want me to come in and take over their social media or run their Facebook ads, and that’s totally fine. I want to get in to companies where I fit in. I don’t want to push myself in. They don’t really know what they’re doing. They want to do it, but they don’t know exactly how to do it. One of the areas that I’m going to be increasing in 2018, and I’d love for you to join me, is I’m starting coaching programs. That’s how I am increasing my value.
When I approach my clients and I say, “Hey, guys, I’m doing something new and fun. It’s just going to cost you an extra 30 bucks a month to be a part of my level 10 or 100 bucks a month to be a part of my Double It coaching program,” I am pitching those products to people who already know me, trust me, like me, and are spending money with me. That’s a lot easier of a sale for me to make.
However, if I was to go out and start talking to somebody who has never met me before, I have to really climb that mountain. Number one, they have to figure out who the heck I am, why they should care about what I have to say, do I accomplish what I say I can accomplish within their business, and then they have to make the decision to open their wallet. Does that make sense? It’s a lot harder for me to make money from a new client than it is from an existing one.
If you are looking to double the amount of profit in your business in 2018, I want you to start thinking about ways that you can provide value to your clients and customers that you already have now in a way that increases the amount of money that they spend with you on a regular basis. That could be a coaching program. That could be a warranty. That could be identifying other areas where you can support them. That could be making money by connecting them with people who can help grow their business.
For example, if you are listening to this right now and you are in the mortgage business and you say, “Man, I want to make money, but all I do right now is loans,” ybe one of the things that you do is you and I work together. I can help support the real estate agents that are in your network, and you can join my affiliate program where you get a small amount of money for the real estate agents that you send my way. That could be a new profit center. I have people making hundreds of dollars a month from the Branning Group for people that they’ve sent me months ago. That’s one way to do it.
You could also look at providing other services, maybe putting together a coaching program for real estate agents where you provide accountability, you bring in experts so that you can help support those real estate agents. What I want to do is I want to plant some seeds for you so that you can think about ways to make money.
The third thing that you should think about doing is creating recurring revenue. If you’re looking to double the profit in your business, this is my third point and my last point, I want you to think about ways that you can create recurring revenue in your business. There’s a book by a guy named John Warrillow called The Automatic Customer. In that book, he drops a whole bunch of really good ideas on ways that you can create recurring revenue in your business. It’s an absolutely phenomenal book, and he goes over so many great ideas. You can read that book, go through it. You can even skim the table of contents if you want to. I highly recommend that you look at that book with an open mind and say, “Okay, what am I going to do here? What programs am I going to implement? What things could I consider starting?” Maybe it might be creating a new “business” that supports the people that already know you.
An idea for a subscription model or a recurring revenue model would be maybe creating a membership website or a private club, maybe creating a networking model, maybe coaching or mentoring, depending on what business you’re in, a monthly maintenance or service contracts. Monthly maintenance and service contracts take up about 40% of your revenue month after month. We have literally built our business on that. Creating a private club, just depending again on your industry, private clubs could be the way to go. It gives people that exclusivity. If you have a restaurant, creating a private club for your restaurant where those people get priority seating, you have special meals that maybe only they can order. These are just ways to think about creating value for your current customer base, driving revenue for people, and encouraging them to spend more money.
I’ll tell you what, the people that are on my maintenance contracts, because they’re already used to spending money with me, they spend more and more money with me as I launch new products. They’re always the first people that jump in. Why is that? Because they’re already used to spending money with me, and they already know that I do what I say and that I can provide the service.
If they’re looking at a new service that I’m doing, (example: when I launched my Facebook ads done-for-you service), they already knew that I did great work on the hosting and maintenance. Now that I’m providing this new service that they had thought about doing, they reached out to me to provide the new service because they know me.
I hope this inspired you!
- I want you to look at the different traffic channels that you’re using right now to bring people in to your business.
- I want you to think about identifying how you can support your customers,
- I want you to just really imagine scenarios and business models where you’re creating recurring revenue for yourself.
I have a book suggestion for you. I mentioned it already, The Automatic Customer by John Warrillow. It’s a phenomenal book where he talks all about different recurring revenue models. T
I also recommend a free toolkit, Affiliate Bootcamp over at ClickFunnels. In the Bootcamp they show you how to grow your affiliate revenue with ClickFunnels, but you can apply that knowledge to other areas as well.
I would love for you to join my Level 10 group. In the Level 10 group every single week we have weekly training , a live Ask Me Anything phone call so that you can ask questions as they come up. The ask me anything phone call does not necessarily have to be around the topic that I have on my podcast. It can be about anything you’re working on, I’m there to coach you and help you. Last week one of the students in the Level 10 started talking about the training that I had provided that week, and then we totally went off in another area talking about marketing ideas to bring people to her live events.
Level 10 is for you if you want that group coaching environment, and it’s only $1 per day. You’re not going to get a better value. Entrepreneurs from all over America are in there, and it’s just a phenomenal group of amazing and brilliant entrepreneurs. I’m so blessed to be able to lead that group.
Have a great day!
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