I GUARANTEE today’s podcast will grow your companies revenue. If your company if not growing you might as well be dying.
How to grow your company and revenue guaranteed!
With this disclaimer:
If this does not work, if you cannot grow your company with what I’m about to give you, then your company’s plateaued.
This is when you know that you peaked. Well, when you peak what comes next? You start going downhill. You look at every company, they start going downhill after they try every growth initiative and there is no potential for growth. Some companies do peak out. Their industry stales. It just becomes a stale industry where the industry has changed dramatically.
Let me tell you how you can grow. And I don’t think specifically small businesses don’t look at it the way I’m going to explain it right now. I’m going to explain it in such a way that you’ve probably not done, so there probably is tremendous growth potential. That’s why I think we’re going to grow your company if you do what I’m asking you to do.
Break Everything in Your Company Into Pieces
Start thinking like this, we’re going to take your company and we’re going to actually dismantle it. Let’s just assume that we take your company and we break it off into four-quadrants, so you just picture this block and we got one to the far left, to the far right, to the bottom left, and to the bottom right. We’re going to break it up.
What we want to do is if you have services that you offer, you need to break them up into sub-groups. If you have products, you may need to expand them into sub-groups, but you’ve got to get more things that you offer making you money in areas that are popular. If you were a roofing company, and this applies to any service company, but if you’re a roofing company, that’s great, you have roofing, but there are so many sub-sources of income underneath just roofing. Repairs, gutters, siding, facial gutter guards. I just added four to five sub-groups under it, but you’re probably marketing “roofing” and then you’re just kind of hoping you can get this ancillary business. Now I’m saying market these sub-groups.
If you’re a digital marketing company, great, well then yeah, you do website development, you can do consulting, you can develop the ads for them, you can do social media, but market each of these sub-groups and hold each of these sub-groups accountable for growth. What you’re going to find is, is that one of these may become a sub-company for you that you never saw coming.
I started a company over 20 years ago that has developed into eight companies out of that one company. Each has P-L statements. Many of them do a million dollars by themselves, half a million at a minimum. As a small business, I’ll take a 5 million dollar company at the profit margin that we generate, about 60%. You gotta start breaking things into sub-sources of income instead of looking at your business as “this” or “that”.
No, break it down in the pieces. How can you break it into sub-sources? Can you break your products down? You’re a menswear company that’s great. Look at ties, look at accessories, but don’t just look at like we offer “accessories”. No, hold the accessory lines, that is a business. You make them accountable. Let’s say your company does a million dollars. Where could you generate $200k of revenue over the next three years? That’s your goal. Your goal is to generate a 20% new income in the sub-sources every year. Within these sub-groups that we talked about, for roofing, I offered repairs and if I did $1M in roofing, I would want to have $200k in repairs. It would only be something that I’m really going to go after if I think there’s an additional 20% of revenue in it. I don’t want to offer 100 things all bringing in 1% or 2% growth. 20% Is the standard. We’re not putting any time or energy into anything that can’t bring us 20% or more growth.
Look at Advertising Differently
This is how I look at advertising:
Let’s say that I do a TV ad, and let’s say it brought in 15 new estimates. Maybe this is digital marketing and it brought you this many estimate requests, or maybe it brought this much traffic to your store. You should be tracking your traffic as best you can when you get a sale. I get a spreadsheet every day and every day from all my companies. It tells me where every lead came from. We can reverse engineer and find out where the revenue came from. What I’m trying to do is I want to have many advertising sources that are almost a company in it of themselves because they generate 20% of potential revenue.
Example
TV advertising accounts for 20% of revenue. I know if I put this much money in TV, I’m going to get this type of response for my business. I can count on that. Well then, can radio do the same? Can advertisements strategically put in certain magazines that fit our demographics produce a 20% return on our revenue? What I’m trying to say is, I’m trying to develop all these hooks that are so effective that I can guarantee revenue from them to the degree that they’re a profit stream. I want to have a lot of them that work. I have about seven streams now with my business that I knew these advertising mediums work. What worked 10 years ago doesn’t work today.
I’m always looking for new sources, that’s why digital marketing has been so great and so many little sub-sources within digital marketing, social media, etcetera.
See, when you break everything down into pieces and find what works for your advertising, you probably will say one or two things.
No, you need to have five things that work. You need five things that work instead of having one that provides 80% of your revenue. I don’t like that business model anyway, it’s very dependent, very easy to get knocked off. You gotta start bringing sub-sources of income,sub-sources of product lines, sub-sources within your retail, so you’re not totally dependent. That’s how you grow by challenging yourself to have multiple advertising vehicles that work for you that perform at 20% of your core revenue or better.
See, the problem with people in advertising is that they don’t want to spend any money on advertising. I think just opposite, I want to spend money on advertising because I’m trying to develop stand-alone streams of income through my advertising. I don’t want one or two things to work, I don’t want to just advertise in one thing. No, I like advertising in five to seven things that all generate a healthy matching return. I would love to have seven things that equally perform.
Increase Your Sales
How do you increase sales?
Generate Better Leads
That goes back to your advertising.
Do You Have Superstars Working for You?
Do you have average people working for you? We have a startup company that’s been in business for about a year and a half now and we had a very average salesperson there. It was new and it was a start-up, and I told my co-founder with me, that person’s not good enough. And he basically acknowledged how average this person was.
I go, but why are they here?
Oh, but they don’t cost as much
But they kill the culture! You’re acknowledging you have an extraordinarily average person sitting on desk number one in a startup. That can’t happen. That desk has to be filled by a super far. I said that person will not give any help to this company and you will end up getting rid of her, and she’s not going to help, and it’s a bad hire. Guess what? Three months later, it was a bad hire. I think that person generated no income for our company or not enough. That matters and my partner would admit it was a bad hire. Now we’re looking for superstars, so you gotta increase sales, you gotta have superstars, not just salespeople.
Are You Salespeople Properly Trained?
It shocks me how we just hire somebody and place them in sales, we give them a little introduction to the product and or service they’re offering, and we think they’re going to do good.
It’s funny, we had a competitor just come into our town competing with one of the big companies I have, and so I always have my staff try to get an estimate from our competitor. Yeah, I want to experience them.
And my partner sent me a text, he said, “We don’t have to worry, I just got an estimate from one of the Three Stooges…” The person was 18 or 19 years old and had no understanding of what they were selling. Didn’t understand the industry, couldn’t answer any rebuttals, had to call the manager on the phone multiple times during it. This is a start-up in my area and this is who they’re sending out to sell against my staff, my partners who are all seasoned veterans, 20 years experience. II have incredible salespeople who understand the industry, understand how to close, understand how to consult, and how to listen, and how to upsell. They don’t stand a chance.
Look at your sales. Are you getting enough leads? Do you have superstars? Are they properly trained or motivated? I betcha I can improve your company through one of those three right away. Are you getting better? Are you getting enough leads? Are you getting good leads from targeted customers? Is your advertising going to people that aren’t your target customer?
I tell all my partners, we have a sale waiting. Everybody who calls us wants to do business with us. Now, I believe that we’ve got a flawless brand in what we do. The question is just whether they can afford us.
Effortless Upsells
You got a customer that buys. Where is the next little 15% build up?
Example:
I go buy a suit, but then I leave and I bought a pocket square, and the pocket square also cleans glasses and this. That’s called an upsell. It increases every ticket.
That’s how you grow your company and if none of this works, you’re in trouble. You’ve plateaued. This is how I would step in and consult in all my companies and with you
